The Marriage of Aesthetics and Ethics 9789004298828, 9789004298811

Citation preview

The Marriage of Aesthetics and Ethics

Critical Studies in German Idealism Series Editor Paul G. Cobben Advisory Board Simon Critchley – Paul Cruysberghs – Rózsa Erzsébet – Garth Green – Vittorio Hösle – Francesca Menegoni – Martin Moors – Michael Quante – Ludwig Siep – Timo Slootweg – Klaus Vieweg

VOLUME 15

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/csgi

The Marriage of Aesthetics and Ethics Edited By

Stéphane Symons

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Symons, Stéphane (Philosopher)  The marriage of aesthetics and ethics / by Stephane Symons.   pages cm. — (Critical studies in German idealism, ISSN 1878-9986 ; volume 15)  Includes index.  ISBN 978-90-04-29882-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29881-1 (e-book) 1. Ethics. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Arts and morals. 4. Art—Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Idealism, German. 6. Marriage. 7. Friendship. I. Title.  BJ46.S96 2015  170—dc23

2015023725

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1878-9986 isbn 978-90-04-29882-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29881-1 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Contributors vii Introduction 1 Stéphane Symons

Part 1 Friendship and Love 1 “A Bushel of Salt”: On Aesthetics and Ethics in Friendship 9 Karl Verstrynge 2 Recapturing the Self: Montaigne on Friendship, Self-Knowledge, and the Art of Living 27 Vincent Caudron 3 The Singularity of Friendship: On Kierkegaard and Friends 46 Anne Christine Habbard 4 “A Garçon has the Whole World for a Bride” Or: On the Bliss of Marriage 63 Walter Jaeschke

Part 2 Aesthetics and Ethics in the Context of German Idealism 5 “Remember that All Poetry is to Be Regarded as a Work of Love”: Ethics and Aesthetics in Schleiermacher 81 Andreas Arndt 6 Hegel’s Concept of Pathos as the Keeper of the Marriage between Aesthetics and Ethics 95 Paul Cobben 7 In Search of a Second Ethics: From Kant to Kierkegaard 110 Paul Cruysberghs

vi

contents

8

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority? 151 Gerbert Faure

9

Kant’s Transcendental Reflection: An Indispensable Element of the Philosophy of Culture 169 Simon Truwant

10

Adorno’s Response to Kierkegaard: The Ethical Validity of the Aesthetic? 185 Margherita Tonon

Part 3 Post-Hegelian Thinkers on Art and Aesthetics 11

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis 203 Baldine Saint Girons

12

Leap into the Surface: Photography, Repetition, and Recollection 220 Stéphane Symons

13

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms: Alliances and Displacement in There Will Be Blood 234 Marlies De Munck

14

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics in the Writings of Robert Musil 251 Stijn De Cauwer

15

The Gnostic “Sur” in Surrealism: On Transcendence and Modern Art 276 Willem Styfhals Index 296

Contributors Andreas Arndt is Professor at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin and at the BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. His most recent book is the 2013 volume Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph. Vincent Caudron studied philosophy and international and comparative politics at KU Leuven. He is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy (Husserl Archives) at KU Leuven, where he also teaches a course on philosophical methodology. His research focuses on the concepts of human nature, autonomy, and self-knowledge in early modern French philosophy. Stijn De Cauwer is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Foundation Flanders. His book A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a Critical-Utopian Project was published in 2014 by Peter Lang. Paul Cobben is Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. His publications focus mainly on practical philosophy, combining a systematic and historical approach. Among his books are Das endliche Selbst (1999), Das Gesetz der multikulturellen Gesellschaft (2002), Hegel-Lexikon (ed.), (2006), The Nature of the Self: Recognition in the Form of Right and Morality (2009), Institutions of Education: Then and Today (ed.) (2010), and The Paradigm of Recognition: Freedom as Overcoming the Fear of Death (2012). Paul Cruysberghs is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven. He has published widely on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, as well as on aesthetics in general. He has also edited numerous volumes on Hegel for Akademie Verlag (Berlin). Marlies De Munck obtained her PhD in philosophy from KU Leuven and is currently a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp. Her main research interests are aesthetics and the philosophy of music.

viii

contributors

Gerbert Faure holds a PhD from the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven. His doctoral thesis investigated the relationship between the concept of morality and the concept of free will. Other research topics include the philosophical relevance of Richard Wagner’s operas and the experience of meaning in art. Anne Christine Habbard is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Maître de Conférences in philosophy at the University of Lille, France. She is currently visiting professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. She has worked extensively on Søren Kierkegaard, and her current focus is on political philosophy and the philosophy of space. Walter Jaeschke is the Director of the Hegel Archives at Ruhr University Bochum, and he is in charge of the publication of the collected works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. His most recent book publication is Die Klassische Deutsche Philosophie nach Kant: Systeme der reinen Vernunft und ihre Kritik 1785–1845 (2012, coauthored with Andreas Arndt). Baldine Saint Girons is Professor of Aesthetics and specialises in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury thought. She teaches at the Université de Paris X, Nanterre, and is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Willem Styfhals is a PhD student in philosophy at KU Leuven and is a member of the Institute of Philosophy’s Centre for Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Culture. Currently, he is also a research fellow at the Research Foundation Flanders. His doctoral research focuses on the notion of Gnosticism in postwar German theories of secularisation. He is interested in twentieth-century intellectual history and continental philosophy. More specific areas of interest include the philosophy of history, the philosophy of religion, the theory of secularisation, and modern Jewish thought. Stéphane Symons is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. He works mainly on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury continental thought. His book Walter Benjamin: Presence of Mind, Failure to Comprehend was published in 2013 by Brill.

contributors

ix

Margherita Tonon obtained her PhD in philosophy from KU Leuven. She is the author of “For the Sake of the Possible”: Negative Dialectics in Kierkegaard and Adorno (forthcoming 2015), is co-editor (with Alison Assiter) of Kierkegaard and the Political (2012), and has written numerous articles on German Idealism and critical theory, with specific reference to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Theodor Adorno. She currently lives and lectures in Limerick, Ireland. Simon Truwant is a doctoral researcher at KU Leuven and a research fellow at the Research Foundation Flanders. His research focuses on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and its influence on the thought of Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas. Karl Verstrynge is Professor of Philosophy and Applied Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences and the Department of Communication Studies at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). He is currently President of the Centre for Ethics and Humanism, Chairman of the editorial board of “Kierkegaard Werken,” and co-editor of the periodical Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (Walter De Gruyter). His publications focus mainly on existentialism (most notably Kierkegaard), existentialist themes, and media-related ethical issues.

Introduction Stéphane Symons In his essay Vermeer in Bosnia, the American writer and essayist Lawrence Weschler looks back on a short visit that he made, in the mid-1990s, to the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. After taking in the endless reports of witnesses, who recount the most horrible experiences one can(not) imagine, Weschler sits down with the president of the court, the Italian jurist Antonio Cassese. His foremost question is how one can possibly maintain one’s sanity if one is confronted on a daily basis with the greatest evil that can come as a result of human actions. “Ah,” Cassese answered with a smile, “you see, as often as possible I make my way over to the Mauritshuis Museum, in the center of the town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.”1 Cassese adds to this that Vermeer’s paintings radiate “a centeredness, a peacefulness, a serenity” and, in Weschler’s words, a “sufficiency, a sense of perfectly equipoised grace.”2 What is most intriguing to Weschler is that Vermeer painted his images of calm and peacefulness when all Europe had, in fact, become Bosnia, that is, when violence and destruction were wreaking havoc on an unprecedented scale throughout the entire continent. “It now seemed to me,” writes Weschler, “sitting among the Vermeers that afternoon at the Mauritshuis, that that was precisely what the Master of Delft had been about in his life’s work: At a tremendously turbulent juncture in the history of his continent, he had been finding—and yes, inventing—a zone filled with peace, a small room, an intimate vision [. . .] and then breathing it out.”3 Forty years earlier, in a text that is equally touching, the Ukraine-born author Vasily Grossman had already recounted a similar experience. Grossman is standing in front of Raphael’s The Sistine Madonna, which, having been looted from the Dresden Art Gallery during World War II, is now being exhibited in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum for one last time before being returned home to Germany. The year is 1955: 1945 is but a mere breath away, and none of the events that will ultimately lead to 1989 can already be anticipated. Grossman, who was among the first to write about the concentration camps (his text The Hell of Treblinka (late 1944) was one of the first articles in any language about 1  Lawrence Weschler, “Vermeer in Bosnia,” in Vermeer in Bosnia (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 14. 2  Ibid. 3  Ibid., 18.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_002

2

Symons

the Nazi death camps), cannot turn away from Raphael’s image. “My confusion of feeling,” he writes, was nothing like the days of tears and joy I had known when I first read War and Peace at the age of fifteen, nor did it resemble what I had felt when I listened to Beethoven during a particularly somber and difficult time of my life. And then I realized that the vision of a young mother with a child in her arms had taken me back not to a book, not to a piece of music, but to Treblinka [. . .] It was she, treading lightly on her little bare feet, who had walked over the swaying earth of Treblinka; it was she who had walked from the “station,” from where the transports were unloaded, to the gas chambers. I knew her by the expression on her face, by the look in her eyes. I saw her son and recognized him by the strange, un-childlike look on his own face. This was how mothers and children looked, this was how they were in their souls when they saw, against the dark green of the pine trees, the white walls of the Treblinka gas chambers.4 What is most moving in Grossman’s account is that this image of a child being held forward to meet his fate is described as a reminder that, even during the cruelest of times, what is human in man has not been allowed to perish. Indeed, for Grossman, The Sistine Madonna shares in the very darkest days of human history, but it emerges from them unscathed: Having set out to meet the most extreme form of violence, it has not succumbed to it. “The painting,” writes Grossman, “tells us how precious, how splendid life has to be, and that no force in the world can compel life to change into some other thing that, however it may resemble life, is no longer life. The power of life, the power of what is human in man, is very great, and even the mightiest and most perfect violence cannot enslave this power: it can only kill it. This is why the faces of mother and child are so calm: they are invincible. Life’s destruction, even in our iron age, is not its defeat.”5 The present volume is dedicated to this complex relationship between art and morality or, to put it differently, to the issue of whether and how the beautiful can relate to the good. These discussions are as old as Western thought in general, and, moreover, they have rarely disappeared from sight, usually holding on to the central position that Plato had bestowed on them long ago. It is, of course, hardly remarkable that the long history of these discussions has done 4  Vasily Grossman, “The Sistine Madonna,” in The Road, ed. Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review Books, 2010), 168–69. 5  Ibid., 172–73.

Introduction

3

nothing to take away the complexity of the issues that are at stake. Quite the contrary, it seems that the rare attempt to solve these problems once and for all has only amounted to ever new ones, opening up novel fields of inquiry. Leo Tolstoy, for instance, has famously argued that what is beautiful is not just irreducible to what is good, but, what is more, that both are to be sharply opposed to each other: While the good presupposes the capacity to set aside one’s personal interests and intimate longings, the beautiful indicates the very realm where these are being played out. Nevertheless, despite this strict separation between the beautiful and the good, almost no other author has gone so far in forging a connection between aesthetics and ethics (and religion), since, for Tolstoy, “[b]y calling up the feelings of brotherhood and love in people under imaginary conditions, religious art will accustom people to experiencing the same feelings in reality under the same conditions.”6 Artistic creation denotes a capacity to communicate and thus to bring together and unify or, in short, to build up an ethos or community. A century earlier, Kant’s use of the concept of the symbolic to indicate the complexity of the relationship between the beautiful and the good was therefore already a particularly apt one. Beauty, that is, cannot be said to represent the good in a direct manner, and art cannot for this reason be said to illustrate or exemplify the ethically “valuable,” as if what would ultimately count in a work of art is the moral lesson that we can draw from it. Indeed, if there is anything to be learnt from the specific power that, after all these centuries, still clings to the works of old masters such as Raphael and Vermeer, it is precisely that what is truly good does not survive the attempt to make it real in an immediate manner. That is to say, the serenity and grace of The Sistine Madonna and the calm splendour of the View of Delft do not grant a positive and direct view on what is good, and they do not give us any moral advice. Not even these images will ever be able to shake off the reference to the dark and troubled world in which they have continued to exist for hundreds of years. Still, images such as these have managed to carve out a (negative) space that cannot be reduced to the vicissitudes pertaining to the realm we have come to call history—even though they cannot be simply detached from them either. For this reason, the discussion about the beautiful and the good inevitably leads to the question of love. For, as we already know from Plato’s Symposium, on account of the complex and indirect nature of the relationship between the beautiful and the good, a midpoint is desperately longed for. Love is this midpoint: not a divine or supra-human love that has always remained remote from the realm in which we live our ordinary lives (in short, 6  Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Books, 1995 [1897]), 166.

4

Symons

not the love that Raphael and Vermeer are traditionally associated with), but a love that can only be called human because it continues to be experienced in a world that, in fact, does not seem to deserve it. Such a love is never simply a given, and it will never be regarded as evident: It is, on the contrary, always to a certain extent “in excess of itself,” since nowhere in this world does it seem to find a firm ground to justify its continued existence. Still, such love is human precisely because it can do away with any authority coming from elsewhere: It does not need the backing of anything supra-human or supra-historical to survive. Such love is a love “in spite of all,” and it manages to mediate between the beautiful and the good, between the world at hand and the universe we long for, precisely because it knows how to measure the distance between both. Raphael’s Sistine Madonna is indeed, as Grossman puts it, “a part of our life; she is our contemporary [. . .] She has walked alongside us; she has traveled for six weeks in a screeching train, picking lice out of her son’s soft, unwashed hair.”7 The present volume deals with these historical and complex debates in a threefold manner. The first part of the volume is dedicated to a discussion of the nature of love and friendship. Karl Verstrynge, Vincent Caudron, Anne Christine Habbard, and Walter Jaeschke deal with the many philosophical stakes that the concepts of friendship and love come together with, drawing from authors and philosophers from Aristotle to Derrida, from Montaigne to Kierkegaard, and from Hegel to Blanchot. The second part of the volume explores the crucial importance of the connection between aesthetics and ethics in the philosophy of German Idealism in the broad sense of that term. Andreas Arndt, Paul Cobben, Paul Cruysberghs, Gerbert Faure, Simon Truwant, and Margherita Tonon focus on the significance of this discussion in the works of, amongst others, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Cassirer, and Adorno. The third part of the volume is dedicated to analyses of specific works of art and artists. Baldine Saint Girons, Stéphane Symons, Marlies De Munck, Stijn De Cauwer, and Willem Styfhals explore the ethical relevance of artistic activity itself and the connection between ethical issues and aesthetic issues in such artistic genres as photography, film, music, literature, and the visual arts. A number of people have played a crucial role in realising this ambitious project, and so the final paragraph of this introduction has therefore been reserved for a word of thanks. First of all, thanks are due to Paul Cruysberghs, in whose honour these texts were written and brought together. During a career of more than forty years, Paul has taught thousands of students, introduced 7  Grossman, “The Sistine Madonna,” 170–71.

Introduction

5

the writings of Hegel and Kierkegaard to dozens of colleagues and scholars, commented on numerous works for the Dutch Kierkegaard edition, and helped organise the academic research on German Idealism in the Low Countries. What is more, Paul has successfully gone through all three of Kierkegaard’s stages (in both directions, it sometimes seems), all the while remaining a supportive and generous presence at the Institute of Philosophy of KU Leuven and KULAK (Kortrijk). I thank him for this and wish him all the best with his present and future endeavours. Many and sincere thanks are also due to Paul Cobben for his support of and confidence in this project from a very early stage onward; to Ryan Wines, Joris Spigt and Erica Harris for their translations; to Laura Smith and Samuel O’Connor Perks for their proofreading; and to Meghan Connolly, Michael Helfield and Michael J. Mozina for their professional assistance in preparing the manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank all the contributors for the texts they have written and their permission to include them in this volume.

part 1 Friendship and Love

∵

CHAPTER 1

“A Bushel of Salt”: On Aesthetics and Ethics in Friendship Karl Verstrynge Addressing philosophers or a philosophical public with an essay on friendship is a remarkable thing to do. It is remarkable for different and perhaps contradictory reasons. First of all, when one is elaborating on the nature of friendship in front of an audience or a reading public of philosophers, one may be doing something quite obvious, if not entirely self-evident. Along with Giorgio Agamben, one may claim that philosophers have a natural interest in the theme of friendship.1 According to the Italian philosopher, the intimacy between friendship and philosophy is such that the very activity of the philosopher (i.e., “the philos”), the love of and longing for wisdom, presupposes a loving friendship and thus situates friendship at the very heart of philosophy. Indeed, the relation between philosophers and the wisdom they aim to achieve can be described in terms of friendship: Like a friend, wisdom is cherished and looked forward to, but we must always keep in mind that it cannot be claimed or possessed, that it escapes us the very moment we claim it, and that we should be receptive to it and avoid trying to dominate it—just like a friend should be supported and welcomed, not controlled, manipulated, or taken for granted. Hence, from the very early roots of philosophy on, the privileged context for discussing the nature of philosophy, according to Agamben, is when one is “entre amis.” One may wonder, however, whether the professional and academic philosophers of our age still have the freedom and the uninhibited state of mind to carry out that task “among friends,” and with Agamben we may ask whether this consubstantiality of friendship and philosophy has not fallen apart. A second reason, however, that makes it remarkable to address a philosophically minded public with reflections on the nature of friendship is the very presence of friends (at least one friend, for whom this liber amicorum has been compiled) within the (reading) public. A certain philosophical tradition has strong reservations about the possibility of discussing the nature of and the 1  Giorgio Agamben, “Friendship,” Contretemps 5 (2004): 2–7. With regard to all other works cited in this paper, all translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_003

10

Verstrynge

grounds for friendship when friends are around. When casting a glance at the history of philosophy, it is striking that a returning theme in many reflections on friendship concerns how it is impossible for friends to make explicit what it is that turns one another into friends. “Among friends,” so that philosophical tradition claims, the reasons for friendship cannot be uttered or broached without harming the friendship itself. Talking with a friend about the reasons for one’s friendship—which, as we just saw, is in many ways a philosophical act—means putting one’s friendship at risk. All the “great canonical meditations on friendship,”2 as Jacques Derrida characterised them, find out that something unutterable, something that resists all explanation, is situated at the very heart of friendship—or should we write (at least preliminarily) the very heart of “true” friendship? What is it that makes a philosophical talk about friendship, in the midst of friends, wicked, harsh, and perhaps impossible? Can one discuss the theme of friendship; can one justifiably try to unravel the nature of friendship when friends are around? Is one able to utter words about friendship’s true, ambivalent, and perhaps unutterable nature when, in the presence of friends, the very existence of that friendship is (probably) at risk? And if the discussion of friendship is built on sandy ground, then how can friends avoid the abyss that, in spite of their friendship, will open up beneath them? 1

Lower and Perfect Friendships

The most influential chapters on the theme of friendship in philosophy’s long and storied history are no doubt those written by Aristotle. By distinguishing three basic kinds of friendship, the Greek philosopher set the tone for an understanding of friendship that has spread over several philosophical traditions and that still resonates, albeit at different pitches, in present-day debates about its nature. In Books VIII and IX of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle starts his meditation on friendship with a consideration of those friendships that are situated on a lower level and that are predominantly based on either “utility” or “pleasure.”3 The friends belonging to the former category, whose relationship is 2  Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 322. English translations are from G. Collins, trans., Politics of Friendship (London and New York: Verso, 2005). 3  Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1156a5ff. References to Aristotle’s works are from Immanuel Bekker, ed. Aristotelis Opera, Vols. I–V (Berlin: Academia Regia Borussica, 1831–70). English translations are from W.D. Ross, ed. The Works of Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

“ A Bushel Of Salt ”

11

based on utility, do not love each other in their own right, but only in so far as they can both profit from each other. The same goes for the friends belonging to the latter category, whose relationship is based on pleasure. They like each other and spend time together not for the excellence of each other’s character, but only for the pleasure they experience in each other’s company. According to Aristotle, it is obvious that both of these inferior and merely instrumental species of friendship are not likely to last a long time: If, by accident, their underlying conditions were to change—a friend might well lose his money, his power, his charm, or his wit—then the friendship would surely perish. These lower—one is inclined to say “improper”—forms of friendship stand in contrast to what the Nicomachean Ethics describes as “perfect friendships.” Perfect friends do not seek benefit from each other, nor do they rely on each other for an external or accidental matter; rather, they “wish well to their friends for their sake.”4 This qualitative difference—elsewhere Aristotle designates perfect friendship as “first friendship,”5 a friendship that comes “logically first,” because it serves as a criterion and a directive for all lesser forms of friendship—is also reflected in the amount of perfect friendships that can be found: Excellent friendship is not granted to everyone and appears to be a rare, almost exceptional phenomenon. It is reserved for people who are intrinsically good and for friends who resemble each other in their virtuous characters. And since virtue, as the basic condition for friendship’s highest stage, is not a capacity that is easily or naturally attained, but one that requires persistent exercise and habit, virtuous characters are hard to find. Hence, the engagement in perfect friendship equally turns out to be a difficult achievement. In addition, Aristotle also points out that other circumstances limit the number of perfect friendships. External and trivial conditions may lead to the impossibility of putting perfect friendship into practice. Some friends may be so lucky as to live in each other’s company, but those who are separated by a lasting physical distance and who are not able to perform activities typically associated with friendship risk forgetting and neglecting their friendship. Furthermore, before entering into perfect friendship, one has to ensure that the other party is virtuous and worthy of one’s friendship and one’s trust, all of which takes time, effort, and practice. For similar practical reasons, Aristotle warns the reader that complete friendship cannot be possible with many people. There is some sort of natural numerus clausus involved—a maximum enrollment, if you will—when it comes to the number of perfect friends,6 for it is hard to test and 4  Ibid., 1156b10. 5  Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1238a30. 6  Cf. Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 14ff.

12

Verstrynge

invest in many people at the same time, and—similar to being in love—the feeling of friendship is naturally directed toward a very limited number of persons at one time. But although perfect friendships are seldom seen and hard to achieve, perfect friends may be assured of a lasting and enduring friendship. Since virtue, the very basis for perfect friendship, proceeds from “a firm and unchangeable character,”7 perfect friends are guaranteed a stable foundation on which to build a lasting relationship. 2

“O My Friends, There is No Friend”

If we are to believe Aristotle, first and perfect friendship is rather difficult to obtain. It takes time, effort, and even good fortune, and once such a precious relationship is established, the constant care and devotion one needs to maintain it is staggering. However, those lesser forms of friendship, living on mutual utility or pleasure, are also difficult to maintain. Friendships of utility are weighed down by continuous calculation and pursuit of profit, and friends who rely on each other’s pleasure-seeking company experience all too often the short-lived nature of all worldly and vain relationships. According to Michel de Montaigne, these constant deliberations and worries were the reason why Aristotle was rather hesitant about the possibility of lower forms of friendship—if not about friendship altogether. In his famous Essays, the French humanist penned his influential treatise “On Friendship” as a memorial to and exposition of his remarkable friendship with the deceased painter Étienne de La Boétie. In line with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and inspired by Cicero’s De Amicitia, Montaigne makes a similar distinction between vulgar and valuable friendships and reflects upon their conditions. When describing the irreconcilable differences between perfect and imperfect friendships, he quotes Aristotle explicitly. It is striking, however, that when discussing the possibility of these friendships, he refers to a strange and puzzling remark that, according to Montaigne, the venerable Greek philosopher would have used repeatedly: “O my friends, there is no friend” (“O mes amis, il n’y a nul ami”).8 The utterance is strange and puzzling, since friendship seems to be both confirmed and denied in a single breath. How can one address one’s friends and deny their friendship in simultaneously? The statement is also questionable because it cannot be traced to any of Aristotle’s known works. 7  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1105a30. 8  Michel de Montaigne, Œuvres Complètes T.II (texte du manuscrit de Bordeaux) (Paris: L. Conard, 1924), 204.

“ A Bushel Of Salt ”

13

Montaigne gives no clear reference to a specific work and appears to have quoted this puzzling statement from memory. Still, this lack of reference is not surprising, since no expert has been able to find the quote verbatim in the works of the Stagirite. The closest anyone has come thus far is to locate a similar expression written by Aristotle in his Eudemian Ethics, which runs as follows: “The man who has many friends has no friend.”9 In fact, it was Diogenes Laertius who, in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, first connected a phrase similar to Montaigne’s “O my friends, there is no friend” to Aristotle: “The man who has friends has no friend [. . .] this sentiment is to be found also in the seventh book of the Ethics. These apophthegms, then, are attributed to him [Aristotle].”10 How are we to understand and interpret this puzzling quotation, “O my friends, there is no friend”? For reasons we’ve already discussed, Aristotle has pointed out that it is not possible to have numerous true friends. Therefore, it could very well be the case that Montaigne has quoted the Greek philosopher somewhat carelessly—even though he clearly managed to express the idea that perfect friendship has quantitative limitations. And yet, is this really what Montaigne had in mind when he quoted that enigmatic (so-called) Aristotelian phrase? Maybe he had something else in mind about the nature of friendship and was simply using Aristotle to lend a semblance of authority to his claim. Unfortunately, Montaigne’s own writings do not shed more light on Aristotle’s alleged words (“O, my friends, there is no friend”), leaving the reader puzzled by such a paradoxical note on the very essence of friendship. Taking the quotation to heart after having read his essay, one finds friendship’s possibility affirmed (“O, my friends”), while at the same time it is denied (“there is no friend”). In order to find some meaning in the quotation, the reader probably imagines an old and despairing sage (Aristotle), surrounded by his friends, looking back at the friendships that have accompanied him throughout his life—only to conclude desperately that in the end not a true friend among them can be found. Or, in a similar but less dramatic spirit, one could imagine Montaigne himself weeping among friends over his true friendship with Étienne de La Boétie (“O my friends”), a friendship that seems only to have gained strength and certainty from the moment the latter had died (“there is no friend”). On the occasion of Montaigne’s essay, quite a fascination with Aristotle’s (alleged) enigmatic words began to appear. Apparently, the quotation of the Stagirite cannot merely be attributed to an act of carelessness on Montaigne’s 9  Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1245b20. 10  Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C.D. Yonge (London: H.G. Bohn, 1853), 189 (= V, 21).

14

Verstrynge

part; rather, it seems to touch upon a susceptibility, an aporia, or even an ineffability situated at the very heart of friendship. Not by accident, a number of philosophers with considerable renown in the history of philosophy, such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Maurice Blanchot, have commented upon Aristotle’s alleged words, attempting to harmonise them with their own convictions about friendship’s very being. One of the most recent and extensive elaborations on Aristotle’s alleged lament is no doubt that of Jacques Derrida. In his Politics of Friendship (1994), he extensively dwells on what he calls Aristotle’s “performative contradiction”:11 “O my friends, there is no friend.” According to Derrida, Montaigne’s quotation is in line with a number of reflections on friendship that “belong to the experience of mourning, to the moment of loss of the friend or of friendship.”12 In one way or another, these authors— apart from Montaigne, Derrida explicitly names Cicero, Blanchot, and Georges Bataille—have focused on the disintegration and failure of friendship. Central to the understanding of Montaigne’s quotation, according to Derrida, is the thought that the very attempt to make the grounds and reasons for friendship explicit also threatens to kill it. Maybe this is, in the end, what Montaigne’s puzzling quotation teaches us: When addressing a friend about one’s friendship (“O, my friend”), the friendship becomes lost (“there is no friend”). In Derrida’s careful analysis of what it is that turns friends into friends, some kind of “silence” seems to play a crucial role in finding “the just name of friendship.”13 He thereby especially draws attention to the remarks of Nietzsche, who, in the form of parody, catches up with Montaigne’s aphorism, turning the second half of the quotation into the plural: “O my friends, there are no friends.”14 In Human All Too Human, Nietzsche quotes these words, which are equally attributed to Aristotle, on two occasions. But according to Nietzsche, these words, that deny friendship from the moment upon which friends are addressed, can only ring true when one fails to face an essential condition of friendship. When broaching the topic of friendship, so he claims, it is crucial to understand that “such human relationships rest on the fact that a certain few things are never said, indeed that they are never touched upon.”15 Hence, there are possible grounds for friendship, in opposition to what Aristotle’s alleged words suggest, but creating and preserving those grounds means that one is 11  Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 44. 12  Ibid., 322. 13  Ibid., 67. 14  Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, in Nietzsche Werke IV.2, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), 269 (= I, 376). 15  Ibid.

“ A Bushel Of Salt ”

15

conscious of the fact that there are things between friends that cannot and may not be spoken aloud. Nietzsche goes on to ask the rhetorical question: “Are there men who cannot be fatally wounded, were they to learn what their most intimate friends really know about them?”16 Some things cannot be spoken of without harming and eventually destroying the friendship at hand, for if friends were to find out, probably like Aristotle did when uttering his alleged words, that their friendship is based simply on trivialities and the illusion of deep mutual feelings and opinions, then the friendship gets lost. Nietzsche’s insights motivate Derrida to discuss the foundation of friendship as a “bottomless bottom.” He writes: Friendship does not keep silence, it is preserved by silence. From its first word to itself, friendship inverts itself [. . .] Friendship tells the truth— and this is always better left unknown. The protection of this custody guarantees the truth of friendship, its ambiguous truth, that by which friends protect themselves from the error or the illusion on which friendship is founded [. . .] So you had better keep silent about this truth of truth.17 Friendship, in other words, rests on the condition and the preservation of this paradox, on the assumption of remaining silent about the very things one cannot share as a friend. It is clear for Derrida that the discovery of this abyssal truth of friendship runs counter to our spontaneous and deep-rooted understandings and contradicts “our ontological assurances,”18 as he calls them, which conceive of friendship in terms of symbiosis or fusion, striving toward a fullness of being between friends. It is therefore not surprising that Montaigne expresses his friendship only after the death of his close friend de La Boétie and that the perfection of which he speaks can only be uttered when the friend is no longer around, when speaking out no longer threatens to harm the friendship. Montaigne reasons from that common and—in Derrida’s view— defective understanding of friendship when he clarifies that “in the friendship of which I speak, our souls mingle and blend with each other into such allencompassing togetherness that they efface the seam that joined them and cannot find it again.”19 Along with Derrida, one may wonder whether his rendition of Aristotle’s quotation, “O my friends, there is no friend,” did not spring 16  Ibid. 17  Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 71–2. 18  Ibid., 73. 19  Montaigne, Œuvres complètes, 199.

16

Verstrynge

from the disenchanting illusions typical of a friendship that rests on symbiosis or fusion: “From the day that I lost him, I have only led a sorrowful and languishing life. And the very pleasures that present themselves to me, instead of administering anything of consolation, double my affliction for his loss. We were halves throughout, and to that degree I think that by outliving him, I defraud him of his part.”20 Friends should keep silent about what constitutes their friendship. The very reasons that turn them into friends might be too trivial and destructive for their friendship that strives toward some kind of fullness. All a true friend has to do in order to be one is tacitly agree to remain silent on the reasons for the friendship. He “must have learned to be silent in order to remain your friend,”21 so the reader finds out in Human All Too Human. But is this Nietzschean device not also problematic? His words seem to break down, collapsing under their own weight to the extent that they cannot even be a device: Their utterance already raises the question it anxiously seeks to avoid. Friends know too much, too much for their friendship to endure, when they truthfully seek to answer the most fundamental questions about their friendship. It seems that some sort of forgetfulness, a certain blindness, and perhaps some kind of light-mindedness is needed in friendship in order to finally avoid Aristotle’s alleged lament from ringing true: “O my friends, there is no friend.” 3

The Unavowable Community of Friends

If silence is an essential feature of friendship, then, at the end of the day, is there anything essential left for friends to share apart from trivia and the simple enjoyment of each other’s company? The French writer, philosopher, and critic Maurice Blanchot acknowledges that defining what is at the heart of friendship resists the act of friendship itself and that it reveals a gap that friends, in seeking to overcome it, cannot overcome. In his essay The Unavowable Community (1983)—the title is a reference to his legendary friend Georges Bataille, in whose praise this piece of writing came about—Blanchot writes: “Friendship, it is true, is difficult to define: [. . .] friendship from one to another, as the passage and affirmation of a continuity starting from the necessary discontinuity.”22 Blanchot’s thoughts on friendship express a close affinity with Nietzsche’s remarks. Time and again, he opposes an interpretation of 20  Ibid., 205. 21  Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 269 (= I, 376). 22  Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1983), 42.

“ A Bushel Of Salt ”

17

friendship as a relationship in which friends spiritually fuse with one another and strive to share as much as possible. For Blanchot, it is crucial for friendship that a secret is kept, that friends resist their inclination to reveal the basis and function of their relationship. What is it that makes two individuals true friends? Can the precise reasons for—and the very beginning of—friendship be made explicit? In a beautiful little essay, “For Friendship” (1996), dedicated “to all his friends,”23 Blanchot claims that we might well be able to name the reasons for the ending of a friendship, but wonders whether we can really determine when it starts. Looking back at the friendships in his life, Blanchot testifies: “We were friends and we didn’t know it” (“On était amis et on le savait pas”).24 When reflecting on friendship’s beginnings, all one can conclude is that “there is no friendship at first sight” and that, instead, it is “rather a little by little, a slow work of time” (“Il n’y a pas de coup de foudre de l’amitié, plutôt un peu à peu, un lent travail du temps”).25 This inability to name the reasons for friendship, the hidden presence of something that cannot be uttered or explained at the very heart of friendship, turns true friendship into a remarkable kind of togetherness. Quoting Georges Bataille, Blanchot considers friendship to be paradoxically “a community of those who do not have a community,”26 an unavowable community, a community that may not and cannot speak its name. With this remarkable view, Blanchot equally contradicts our general and deep-rooted understandings of friendship, which describes it in terms of symbiosis, fusion, or spiritual entanglement—as Montaigne did. Their refusal to consider friendship in terms of symbiosis, fusion, or spiritual entanglement turns Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Derrida into natural allies. Blanchot’s paradoxical understanding of friendship as “the affirmation of a continuity starting from the necessary discontinuity,”27 Derrida’s praise of Nietzsche’s nerve “to recommend separation”28 as a basis for friendship—all these reflections shed a similar light on Aristotle’s alleged complaint and clarify it by claiming that, in talking about one’s friendship and in attempting to explain it, the friendship gets lost.

23  Maurice Blanchot, Pour l’amitié (Paris: Fourbis, 1996), 7. 24  Ibid., 9. 25  Ibid., 9. 26  Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, 45. 27  Ibid., 42. 28  Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 43.

18 4

Verstrynge

Friendship and Preferential Love

When dealing with those “great canonical meditations on friendship,” there is one author we probably should not leave out of the conversation, not in the least on the occasion of the theme of this book. In the works of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the theme of friendship somehow occupies a special place—special since Kierkegaard’s considerations of friendship tend to reflect, in a way, what is essentially at stake in his authorship and because he positions himself (on more than one occasion) in the line of those thinkers whom we have just commented upon. Even though there is no explicit reference to Kierkegaard’s account of friendship in Derrida’s or Blanchot’s meditations,29 the philosopher’s notion of friendship ties in with the idea that “true” friendship involves the existence of a contradictory kind of continuity or togetherness between the friends. Before hinting at those similarities, it needs to be mentioned that Kierkegaard’s account of friendship is firmly embedded in a theological framework that may not fit in with the views of Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Derrida. Kierkegaard’s most explicit views on friendship are translated as “Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses”30 and are published under the title Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger). This book, which is bereft of any pseudonymous cover and generally considered as a piece of writing offered to the reader “with [his] right hand,”31 contains the philosopher’s most elaborate reflections on the theme of friendship. Kierkegaard distinguishes—in no uncertain terms—friendship and all kinds of erotic love from the Christian conception of love as love for one’s neighbour. Above all, friendship boils down to a kind of “self-love” or a “preferential” kind of love: “Erotic love and friendship are preferential love and the passion of preferential love; Christian love is self-denial’s love.”32 In contrast with neighbour-love, which for Kierkegaard 29  Even though Blanchot hints at Kierkegaard when suggesting that the title for Marguerite Duras’s novel La maladie de la mort may be derived from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death (cf. Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, 58), no further visible traces of Kierkegaard are to be found in his book. 30  SKS, 9.7/WL, 1. References to Kierkegaard’s texts are first to the critical Danish edition, namely, Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter (SKS), ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (København: Gads Forlag, 1997–2012), and second to the Hong translation, that is, Kierkegaard’s Writings, 26 Vols. ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978–2000). The abbreviations for the English translations are derived from the titles of Kierkegaard’s works. 31  SKS, 16.21/POV, 36. 32  SKS, 9.59/WL, 52.

“ A Bushel Of Salt ”

19

is essentially directed at otherness, friendship has its roots in the ego, and its claims of uniqueness can only result in a false or defective form of relationship: Just as self-love selfishly embraces this one-and-only self that makes it self-love, so also erotic love’s passionate preference selfishly encircles this one-and-only beloved, and friendship’s passionate preference encircles this one-and-only friend. For this reason, the beloved and the friend are called, remarkably and profoundly, to be sure, the other self, the other I—since the neighbor is the other you, or, quite precisely, the third party of equality.33 Kierkegaard’s outspoken resistance to the idea of true friendship as a form of fusion has been brought up already at the very beginning of his authorship, albeit in a strictly pseudonymous setting. In Either/Or’s first, aesthetical part, the message is clear: “Guard, then, against friendship.”34 This warning advises one to avoid friendship on the grounds that one becomes absorbed in another person. For the aesthete, the signs and rituals of friendship all boil down to the same process: “One drinks dus, one opens an artery, mingles one’s blood,” and the friendship has not arrived at its highest form until Sallust’s definition “Idem velle, idem nolle, ea demum firma amicitia” (“Agreement in likes and dislikes, this and this only is what constitutes true friendship”) rings true.35 All this does not mean, however, that one should stay clear of amicable relations altogether. The aesthete’s unconditional advice to stay away from friendship is more refined: “Relationships can take a deeper turn now and then, provided that one always—even though keeping the same pace for a time—has enough reserve speed to run away from them.”36 At first sight, Kierkegaard’s dichotomy between friendship’s preferential love and the love of one’s neighbour has a different foundation when compared to the reasons for the aesthete’s disapproval of friendship. In Works of Love, the main remedy for self-centered human relationships is to reintroduce “the essentially Christian” without which “the intoxication of self-esteem” is said to be “at its peak.”37 The aesthete’s aversion to “deep” or “true” friendship has a different cause. His warnings are mainly directed at the perils of boredom, which he thinks all friendships ultimately suffer from. As “the root 33  Ibid., 9.60/53. 34  SKS, 2.284/EO, 1.295. 35  Ibid. 36  SKS, 2.285/EO, 1.295–96. 37  SKS, 9.62/WL, 56.

20

Verstrynge

of all evil,”38 boredom is a threat to life’s endless variety of possibilities— possibilities that the aesthetical life-view by all means aims to instil and preserve. Thus understood, the self-centered aesthetical life-view is nothing but a part of the position Kierkegaard criticises in Works of Love. All kinds of friendship or forms of erotic love can in the end be reduced to an aesthetically and selfishly motivated either/or: “Either I exist and am the highest, or I do not exist at all, either all or nothing.”39 Accordingly, Kierkegaard’s criticism in Works of Love even holds for the ethical position of Judge Vilhelm in Either/Or’s second part. In an attempt to open up the enclosed and self-centered sphere of the aesthete, Vilhelm discovers in the ethical “the essential point of departure for friendship.”40 Ethics, assuming “that it is the meaning of life and actuality that a person becomes open,”41 is a condition for friendship, since it enables the friends to unite (fuse) in a life-view. When openness results in a unified life-view, so the Judge assures us, “friendship lasts even if the friend dies, inasmuch as the transfigured friend lives on in the other.”42 But even though the ethical view on friendship corrects the aesthetical reservation and tendency to close oneself off, it equally ruins the otherness of the friend: That “new selfish self” Kierkegaard so ardently criticises in Works of Love is just as much a result of friendship in an ethical sense as it is in an aesthetical sense. Friends, united in their common life-view, not only close themselves off from otherness, thereby installing exclusion on their turn, they also tend to deny each other’s singularity as well as each other’s differences, which could possibly tear them apart. It is precisely this fear of fusion that turns both Kierkegaard and the aesthete into fellow critics of—at least—our general understandings of friendship. Both may have different, if not opposed, reasons for their objections against friendship, but they speak with one voice in arguing against preferential and exclusive kinds of relationships between human beings based on a deep unity shared between them.

38  SKS, 2.275/EO, 1.285. 39  SKS, 9.52/WL, 45. 40  SKS, 3.303/EO, 2.321. Vilhelm refers here explicitly to the “authority” of Aristotle, who “made friendship the point of departure for his entire ethical view of life” (SKS, 3.304/EO, 2.322). 41  Ibid., 3.304/2.322. 42  Ibid., 3.303–04/2.321–22.

“ A Bushel Of Salt ”

5

21

Aesthetics and Ethics in Friendship

Kierkegaard, so it seems, shrinks back from friendship when he intends to deliberate upon the “highest [form of] love”43 (neighbourly love), since basically in friendship the friends absorb each other and exclude all other persons. Out of “drive and inclination,” the self gets “intoxicated [beruset] in the other ‘I’,” upon which the friends are united in “a new selfish self.”44 This conception of friendship to which Kierkegaard is referring echoes an Aristotelian conception that sees in a friend nothing but the prolongation of a self-relation: “Friendly relations with one’s neighbors, and the marks by which friendships are defined, seem to have proceeded from a man’s relations to himself.”45 For Aristotle, as we have seen, friendship in its highest form develops between men (women do not seem to be a concern of his) of a virtuous character and reflects the good life. And just as perfect friendship reflects virtue, so too selflove—from an Aristotelian perspective—is a perfect and solid ground for any kind of virtuous relationship: “Therefore [. . .] the good man [. . .] is related to his friend as he is to himself, for his friend is another self [. . .] the extreme of friendship is likened to one’s love for oneself.”46 With his criticism of friendship understood as a form of self-love, Kierkegaard seems to be in agreement with Blanchot, who extends this criticism to the Greek conception of philia as such. When reflecting on friends and friendship, he declares, with reference to Emmanuel Levinas, that “the Greek philia is reciprocity, exchange of the Self with the Self, but never openness to the Other, [never a] discovery of the Other as being responsible for him, recognition of his pre-excellence [. . .] enjoyment of his Height, of what places him always closer to the Good than ‘Me’.”47 Kierkegaard and Blanchot, however different the traditions they embody, are basically of one mind with regard to the problematic structure of one kind of friendship, that is, the Greek understanding of it: In the name of friendship, friends always risk passing over the otherness of the other in search of a continuation or prolongation of one’s own self. But in line with the Aristotelian approach, they connect their analysis of friendship with a crucial dimension

43  SKS, 9.52/WL, 45. 44  Ibid., 9.62–3/56. 45  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a1–3. 46  Ibid., 1166a30–2. 47  Blanchot, Pour l’amitié, 35.

22

Verstrynge

of the human condition. If for Aristotle “primary and full friendship”48 contributes to an ethical achieving of actuality, and is for that reason also reflected in all other kinds of virtuous relationships (such as family life or politics), then for Kierkegaard and Blanchot as well friendship teaches us something about the ethical task of being human as such. Kierkegaard’s fear of fusion, such as the Greek conception has at its core, bears reference to an insight that touches upon one of the very central ideas that can be found in his authorship. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1844), his pseudonym Johannes Climacus deliberates upon the difference between an ethical and an aesthetical relation to otherness: “By not asking aesthetically [. . .] about actuality, but asking only ethically about actuality [. . .] every individual is ethically set apart by himself. [. . .] For existing ethically, it is an advantageous preliminary study to learn that the individual human being stands alone.”49 In Johannes Climacus’s view (and one may say in Kierkegaard’s own view as well), each ethical task refers ultimately to one’s own personal and actual being and to the individual, the concrete person, as the ultimate instance in which the ethical task and demand is rooted. Thus understood, intersubjective relations do not and cannot occasion or ground the ethical task, since they would infect the ethical meaning of the one carrying out that task: “[. . .] ethically there is no direct relation between subject and subject.”50 To put it differently, the only thing we share as ethical beings is that we cannot share our ethical and existential responsibility (and with this view, of course, the whole realm of Kierkegaard’s “indirect communication” is connected). This ethical task runs counter to each aesthetic approach or life-view, which leans on a mere disinterested relation to actuality or reducing the existential and ethical task to the realm of possibility, namely, that which “could and ought to have occurred.”51 This disinterestedness, this distance from the concreteness of being, inherent in all aesthetic ideality, equally separates individuals, inducing the aesthete in Either/Or to advise people (as mentioned above) to always keep enough reserve speed to run away from relationships. But ethical ideality starts from a fundamental interest in actuality; it is “an interiority infinitely interested in existing,”52 even if that interiority has singularity, and for that reason loneliness, at its core.

48  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1157a31 (translation altered). 49  SKS, 7.295/CUP, 1.323. 50  Ibid., 7.293/1.321. 51  Ibid., 7.290/1.318. 52  Ibid., 7.296/1.325.

“ A Bushel Of Salt ”

23

For Kierkegaard, an “optimal and normative”53 relationship between individuals has both distance and unity as its basic conditions. Only when people are “united on the basis of an ideal distance”54 can a truthful relationship between them come about. It is precisely this solitude in togetherness, this “unanimity of separation”55 (“being alone together,” as it were) that draws us from Kierkegaard to Blanchot. Also, in Blanchot’s writings one finds “solitude as the heart or the law for fraternity.”56 For him, as well, silence is the very basis for true communication, leading him to approve of Bataille’s “community of those who do not have a community” as a description for all essential togetherness. In (ethical) relation to otherness, the other is “what I cannot reach,”57 is what escapes me, “making me believe in an irreplaceable singularity.”58 In Blanchot’s view, the phenomenon of friendship expresses that essential solitariness in a remarkable, if not extreme, way. It is precisely in the practice of friendship that individuals seem to discover that irreducible singularity in their very attempt to overcome it: “Thus is and should friendship be, it discovers the unknown that we are, and it discovers the encounter of our own solitude that we cannot experience ourselves.”59 In a major work, which gets its title from the very concept itself, Blanchot probably gives his most explicit consideration of friendship. There, the relation between friends is qualified as a relation that does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to them; it does not allow us to make them the theme of our conversations (or articles), but it is the movement of the understanding in which, speaking to us, they keep, even in moments of greatest familiarity, their infinite distance, that fundamental separation from which that what separates becomes a relation.60 In line with Kierkegaard, Blanchot expresses a fear of fusion in friendship, inasmuch as it risks passing by that irrevocable moment of solitariness in subjectivity that is the very occasion for an ethical relation to the other. Friendship, 53  SKS, 8/TA, 62–3. 54  Ibid. 55  Ibid. 56  Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, 47. 57  Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 36. 58  Ibid., 28. 59  Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, 46. 60  Maurice Blanchot, L’amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 328.

24

Verstrynge

in its essential form, can and may only be an expression for that “common strangeness,”61 articulating the anarchical and primal ground of all human relationships. Hence, for both Kierkegaard and Blanchot friendship becomes an impossible relation, a relation that cannot and may not speak its name, since it no longer has that “ontological assurance” of a possible common ground.62 6

“A Bushel of Salt”

“O my friends, there is no friend.” When taking Kierkegaard’s and Blanchot’s insights into account, Aristotle’s alleged words seem to have expressed more than the dubious origin of the quotation leads one to suspect. Addressing our friends about our friendship, uttering just one word about our friendship—an act which makes it the object of reflection and consideration—is already one word too many, for it threatens the friendship the very moment it is expressed. It is here that the Kierkegaardian idea of reflection as the “angel of death”63 rings true: Reflecting upon friendship attempts to grasp the friend; it kills the friendship and its care-free immediacy through the act of reflection itself. In the words of one of my friends and colleagues: “Reflection indeed is the immediacy’s angel of death. It puts its content at a distance and turns it into an object.”64 Let me, however, for some final words return to Aristotle, whose ponderations on the theme of friendship have been the occasion for those “great canonical meditations on friendship” that we have discussed. As mentioned at the very beginning of this paper, the Stagirite considers the practice of friendship, especially first or perfect friendship, to be a difficult exercise. Virtuousness of character, being the ethical precondition for the highest friendship, is no doubt the most demanding test for perfect friendship. But Aristotle also lists other conditions that, even if they do not require a high standard for one’s character, are just as difficult to fulfill because they touch upon some sort of unavoidable arbitrariness: living in each other’s area, having time at one’s disposal, the presence of a kind of balance between partners (e.g., social status, 61  Ibid. 62  Cf. G.L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 120–21. 63  SKS, 2.49/EO, 1.41. 64  P. Cruysberghs, “Must Reflection be Stopped? Can It be Stopped?” in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. P. Cruysberghs, J. Taels, and K. Verstrynge (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 18.

“ A Bushel Of Salt ”

25

merit, beauty).65 One of those contingent conditions is what Aristotle metaphorically characterises as eating a “bushel of salt” together. Perfect friends are rare, so he writes in his Eudemian Ethics, “for a friend is not to be had without trial or in a single day, but there is need of time and so ‘the bushel of salt’ has become proverbial.”66 Friends, in order to become perfect friends, need to have gone through difficult times and circumstances, need to learn to know each other not only in prosperous times but also throughout times of misfortune and adversity that have provoked and will provoke their friendship. One only wonders what undertone this “bushel of salt” will have when the alleged words “O my friends, there is no friend” are taken into consideration. Perhaps the ultimate “bushel of salt” friends should eat with each other is the mutual, silent and difficult agreement not to turn their friendship into an object of reflection and ponderation. For philosophers, who have their very being in the practice of reflexivity and abstraction, this task might be all the more difficult and salty. Conversely, their wisdom and natural relation to the theme of friendship, taken as our point of departure, might just as well bring them some kind of blissful forgetfulness, a frivolity or light-heartedness toward each other that knows how to disguise what may not be uttered and that succeeds in keeping those reflective “angels of death” at a distance. Here, perhaps, the essential task of aesthetics for friendship comes to light: finding and safeguarding that difficult balance between reflection and fusion; installing a forgetful (perhaps “second”) immediacy in the company of friends; and bearing lightly the infinite, lonely ideality of the ethical task that puts any friendly relation to the test. References Agamben, Giorgio. “Friendship.” Contretemps 5 (2004): 2–7. Bekker, Immanuel, ed. Aristotelis Opera. Vols. I–V. Berlin: Academia Regia Borussica, 1831–70. Blanchot, Maurice. L’amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. ———. L’écriture du désastre Paris: Gallimard, 1980. ———. La communauté inavouable. Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1983. ———. Pour l’amitié. Paris: Fourbis, 1996.

65  Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1157b 25ff. 66  Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1238a. See also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1156b 25–6: “Such friendship requires time and familiarity; as the proverb says, men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’.”

26

Verstrynge

Bruns, G.L. Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Collins, G. trans. Politics of Friendship. London and New York: Verso, 2005. Cruysberghs, P. “Must Reflection be Stopped? Can It be Stopped?” In Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, edited by P. Cruysberghs, J. Taels, and K. Verstrynge, 11–24. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994. Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard’s Writings. 26 Vols. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978–2000. ———. Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997–2012. Laertius, Diogenes. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, translated by C.D. Yonge. London: H.G. Bohn, 1853. Montaigne, Michel de. Œuvres Complètes T.II (texte du manuscrit de Bordeaux). Paris: L. Conard, 1924. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. In Nietzsche Werke IV.2, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967. Ross, W.D., ed. The Works of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

CHAPTER 2

Recapturing the Self: Montaigne on Friendship, Self-Knowledge, and the Art of Living Vincent Caudron 1

Introduction: An Exceptional Friendship

From both a historical—anthropological and an autobiographical point of view, Montaigne’s travel journal that recounts his journey to Italy between October 1580 and November 1581 is a very interesting document.1 Not only does it contain detailed and accurate descriptions of the enormous variety of local customs and habits that he encountered, it also—due to the fact that Montaigne never intended to publish his journal—gives a valuable, even voyeuristic glimpse into the life and personality of its author. Montaigne draws a disarming picture of his impressions, physical ailments, and bad habits; the way he relates his agony from kidney stones is unusually outspoken and unreserved. His surprisingly graphic and explicit descriptions inform the reader of how “clear” or “cloudy” his urine is, how much “gravel” he releases, and how “windy” he feels. Amidst these jarring descriptions, however, Montaigne also somewhat unexpectedly expresses intense grief over the loss of his best friend, Étienne de La Boétie, who most likely died of the plague eighteen years earlier.2 His sadness does not appear to have been a single instance of loss and sorrow, but rather a red thread that ran throughout his entire life. One touching passage in which Montaigne describes his life after the death of La Boétie as “smoke and ashes, a night dark and dreary” is particularly telling: For in truth if I compare all the rest of my life—although by the grace of God I have lived it sweetly and easily, exempt (save for the death of such a friend) of grievous affliction in full tranquility of mind, contenting 1  Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy: In Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581, ed. William George Waters (London: BiblioLife, 2009), 252. 2  Étienne de La Boétie worked as a magistrate at the court of Bordeaux, where he met Montaigne in 1557. Besides his famous Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, he wrote a couple of sonnets.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_004

28

Caudron

myself with the natural endowments which I was born with and not going about looking for others—if I compare it, I say, to those four years which it was vouchsafed to me to enjoy in the sweet companionship and fellowship of a man like that, it is but smoke and ashes, a night dark and dreary. Since the day when I lost him [. . .] I merely drag wearily on. The very pleasures which are proffered me do not console me: they redouble my sorrow at his loss.3 Obviously, there is nothing strange about grief for a deceased friend, yet the scope and intensity of Montaigne’s affliction seem to reveal something important about the impact that the brief, intense friendship with La Boétie had on him. Given that Montaigne never expressed a comparable state of sorrow over the loss of his brother, father, or five deceased daughters, one cannot help but wonder what it was that made his relationship with La Boétie so unique and existentially far-reaching. This issue has sparked a vivid debate in the extensive literature on Montaigne. Based on the rather explicit language that the two friends tended to use to describe each other and their relationship, one may speculate that their mutual affection was sexual in nature. Yet, seeing as Montaigne consistently differentiates between sensual relationships and friendships, this hypothesis is implausible.4 Rather, the terms that they use to characterise their relationship are meant to refer to the Renaissance ideal of ancient friendship, by which both Montaigne and La Boétie were fascinated. In one of his sonnets, for instance, La Boétie compares Montaigne with Alcibiades, while Montaigne, in his turn, alludes to La Boétie’s Socratic features.5

3  Michel de Montaigne, On Affectionate Relationships, in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 217. Hereafter referred to as “Essays.” 4  Cf. S. Frampton, When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing with Me? Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life (London: Faber & Faber, 2011) and S. Bakewell, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010). 5  Alcibiades was an aristocratic rhetorician and lived in Athens in the first half of the fifth century BC. He was part of the inner circle of Socrates, the famous Greek philosopher, and he was known for his interest in bodily beauty and pleasure. At the end of Plato’s Symposium, he declares his love for his friend Socrates, a declaration that has generally been seen by philosophers as an example of a relationship that focuses on the person as the object of love and does not instead seek to transcend the object and strive towards the Platonic idea (or form) of love.

Recapturing The Self

29

A more philosophically rewarding approach to the matter, then, is in order—one which would start from Montaigne’s apparent reluctance to philosophically account for his friendship with La Boétie. It is quite an intriguing observation that Montaigne, when asked to explain his friendship with La Boétie, responded somewhat evasively: “because it was him: because it was me.” “Mediating this union there was,” Montaigne writes, “beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say specifically about it, some inexplicable force of destiny.”6 Struck by the exceptional force of their bond and mutual affection, he admittedly wonders what made their friendship so extraordinary in comparison to other, more superficial friendships and human relationships that he had. At no time, however, does he give a rational explanation for it.7 In his famous essay on friendship, for example, he ponders over the beginning of their friendship and its spontaneity and intensity, yet he never attempts to break it down or analyse it in terms of reasons and motivations. Why not? Given the striking comparison between his life before and after La Boétie’s death, I shall try to determine the existential meaning that this friendship may have had for Montaigne both during La Boétie’s lifetime and after La Boétie’s demise. This approach will allow me to understand Montaigne’s apparent unwillingness to explain this friendship while also enabling me to shed some light on the influence it had on him, particularly on his “art of living,” which he developed in the Essays. In the first part of this paper, I will explore Montaigne’s conception of friendship as a pure, harmonious, and exclusive relationship between two souls as a way of accounting for his unexpected refusal to explain the amity between them. The second part builds on the first and consists in a phenomenological exploration of the interpersonal and intrapersonal meaning of friendship. More specifically, I will show that friendship is a highly personal experience for Montaigne, which consists in a pure and immediate relation between the subject and himself. Accordingly, I argue that the Essays are Montaigne’s imposing endeavour to recapture something of this relation that he had lost with the demise of his soul mate. Therefore, I conclude that the influence of La Boétie and Montaigne’s friendship on the Essays is much greater than the standard readings of the text have allowed and that the friendship between these two men should be understood as a seminal experience that stimulated Montaigne into pursuing a form of authentic self-involvement that is at the core of his famous art of living.

6  Essays, 212. 7  Essays, 207: “So many fortuitous circumstances are needed to make it, that it is already something if Fortune can achieve it once in three centuries.”

30 2

Caudron

Montaigne’s Concept of Friendship

In the famous essay on friendship that he wrote around 1576, Montaigne explores the unique nature of true friendship by distinguishing it from other human relationships such as those based on natural kinship, family ties, and sensual desire. As a starting point, Montaigne notices that all of these relationships observe certain pre-established patterns or even templates that inevitably reduce the other to a role or aspect rather than see the other as a total person. Montaigne refers to the fact that most human relationships are symbolic relationships in which all participants embody a pre-defined role that determines not only their actions but their self-understanding as well. Family ties are a good example of relations that happen according to rather strict patterns and roles. They are indeed highly symbolic relationships. A mother– daughter relationship, for instance, implies a pattern that is essential in order for a real mother–daughter relationship to exist. Of course, one cannot deny that there is an indelible natural bond between both, yet it is just as clear that this natural bond is not a sufficient condition for a symbolically meaningful mother–daughter relationship to come into being. When the relation between mother and daughter is not symbolically installed and acted upon, their relationship cannot transcend the natural facticity that links them. In fact, this natural dependency is not even a necessary condition for a mother– daughter relationship to exist; one only need look at adoptive relationships or African multi-mother relationships between a child and a community of women to illustrate this point. One can play different roles depending on what relation one is involved in—I can be both a father to my son and a son to my father—yet within a given relationship my role is defined by the pattern of that particular relationship. The pattern of a father–son relationship, for example, requires a form of respect that is crucial for this type of relationship and that cannot be suspended without also vitiating or even terminating the relationship altogether. A father who takes his son for a close friend and shares his most intimate thoughts with him breaks through the pattern of their relationship and creates unease; in a way, he steps out of character and asks for the relationship to be reassessed. What’s more, the fact that one can play very different roles according to different relationships may well be the reason why some people fall prey to great anxiety when patterns that are not easily reconciled begin to intersect. For instance, social events bring together individuals who play considerably different and possibly conflicting roles among one another. In these settings, it may be challenging for the individual to assume the “right” role.

Recapturing The Self

31

These roles are essential for the existence and dynamics of a relationship. My expectations and conduct toward another as well as her expectations and conduct toward me are determined by the pattern of the relationship. It provides stability, perhaps even certainty, but it also determines what is morally permitted and prohibited without inferring these norms from an objective state of affairs. For instance, it goes without saying that a teacher should not seduce one of her students, since the pattern of their relation essentially excludes this type of behaviour. However, when the same two persons meet each other under different circumstances, a new relation with a different pattern may permit such behaviour. Hence, the pattern, as it were, “shatters” the unity of a person by determining which aspects of that person matter and which do not. A family tie, for example, not only reduces the other to a role (father, mother, son, daughter, etc.), but by doing so, it unavoidably fragments that individual’s totality as a person. When one appears in the fixed capacity of one’s role, it becomes impossible to relate to that individual as a whole person. In conclusion, relationships that materialise along symbolic patterns (i.e., most human relationships) by definition exclude a mutual connection between two persons as persons, given that the role that is implied in these relationships inevitably reduces them to a certain aspect or quality of themselves. Montaigne, then, considers friendship to be an outstanding relationship compared to other human relationships. First and foremost, true friendship is marked by an absence of these patterns and ensuing reductions that are found in other human relationships. According to Montaigne, in fact, true friendship has no pattern at all; it does not reduce the other to certain aspects of her personality, but consists in the exclusive relation between the singular totalities of two persons. Rather than fixing someone in a pre-established role, a true friendship allows a person to break loose from all her symbolic determinations, transcend all given patterns, and signify herself as a person, that is, as a singular totality. Thus, Montaigne’s decision to not explain the origins of or motives behind his friendship with La Boétie is much more a principled refusal than an epistemological or philosophical inability, since every attempt to rationalise their friendship would damage his pure commitment to the singularity of La Boétie. If Montaigne had indeed attempted to confer a certain rationale to their friendship by breaking it down into concrete motives or designating some of La Boétie’s specific traits that moved him to friendship, he would have caused irrevocable damage to their friendship. By indicating specific character traits, Montaigne would not only have fragmented the totality of La Boétie’s personality (hence degrading and even ending their friendship), but would have also unavoidably weakened their bond by subjugating it to

32

Caudron

identifiable requirements that could just as easily be met by other people. By subjecting friendship—as an exclusive relationship between two persons—to identifiable conditions, there is nothing that can stop it from languishing or even coming to an end when a third person that embodies the valued properties to an even higher degree appears. Conditionalising friendly bonds may even subjugate them to the laws of competition; one may feel compelled to desperately express those qualities which one thinks the friendship depends on. In short, true friendship as an unconditional commitment to the singularity of the other as a person is radically incompatible with a rationalisation of it in terms of motives and reasons. Montaigne’s famous “because he was, because I was” ought to preserve the pureness of their extraordinary amity: “This friendship,” Montaigne explains, “has no ideal to follow other than itself; no comparison but with itself. There is no one particular consideration—nor two nor three nor four nor a thousand of them—but rather some inexplicable quintessence of them all mixed up together.”8 However, Montaigne’s refusal to rationalise his friendship with La Boétie in order to express his unconditional commitment to the singularity and unique wholeness of his friend seems to unexpectedly open up the possibility for their friendship to be reduced to a radically contingent, even superficial, connection. By absolutising true friendship—that is, by denying it any kind of rationalisation—Montaigne may very well want to prevent his friendship from becoming susceptible to the aforementioned risks of conditionalisation. Quite paradoxically, however, by doing so he seems to dissociate his friendly affection for La Boétie from his friend’s very personality. Montaigne’s refusal to rationally explain the nature of true friendship to preserve its extraordinariness and fortuity contaminates their bond with a contingency that contradicts the extraordinary importance he attaches to it. If one’s friendship with person X is immune to every attempt at rationalisation, there seems to be nothing that can prevent one from befriending any random person instead of a true friend. If a bond of friendship with X is such that it cannot be accounted for by reasons and that it can only be accounted for on the basis of X’s unique singularity, why would one befriend X and not Y? Given the fact that Montaigne seems to consider La Boétie’s being a unique singularity as a sufficient condition for their friendship, there may literally be no reason whatsoever for a friendship between two particular persons to come about. Since every person has a singularity of his own by virtue of his unique individuality, one may be led to think that Montaigne’s account of friendship allows for a radical contingency. 8  Essays, 212.

Recapturing The Self

33

Put differently, Montaigne’s absolutisation of true friendship, that is, his refusal to rationalise it, has the side effect of reducing friendship to a contingent and elusive relationship. Under these circumstances, the process of genuinely befriending someone as well as the dynamics and form of a genuine, true friendship are highly elusive. However, it may be valuable to keep this thought in mind: The most meaningful experiences in a person’s life are characterised by a contingency, even a heteronomy, that is not easily expressed through the all-transcending significance we confer on them. For instance, religious belief is highly significant yet can be thought of as highly arbitrary, in so far as it depends on contingent factors like culture, time, and space. Likewise, the love for our children is characterised by an uncontrollable contingency; even though the love in itself is as unconditional as it is endless, the object of it is given to us rather than autonomously chosen. In that sense, Montaigne’s “refusal” to explain his friendship with La Boétie should be understood as the acknowledgement of the elusiveness and vulnerability of his bond with La Boétie and thus as his grateful acceptance of the gift of friendship. He willingly subordinates their friendship to inexplicable and uncontrollable powers, even fate, and accepts it as a gracious gift that he shouldn’t try to control or appropriate himself. Put another way, the singularity of the other is both a sufficient and a necessary condition for friendship, and it is precisely this necessity that makes true friendship as meaningful as it is vulnerable. 3

Friendship as a Relation to the Self: A Phenomenological Approach

Montaigne’s refusal to rationally explain his friendship with La Boétie does not prevent him from carefully examining the meaning of this bond and impact that it had on him. Fully in line with his scepticism and its attentive emphasis on personal experience, the way he experienced his friendship with La Boétie serves as a starting point for his philosophical explorations on the topic. First, Montaigne focuses his attention on the friendship bond as a relationship, that is, as a mutual and pure involvement with the singular self of the other. At the core of this experience, he finds a seamless connection of two selves brought together into one simple unit: Since the day when I lost him [. . .] I merely drag wearily on. The very pleasures which are proffered me do not console me: they redouble my sorrow at his loss. In everything we were halves: I feel I am stealing his share from him: [. . .] I was already so accustomed to being, in everything, one of two, that I now feel I am no more than a half.

34

Caudron

In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. There is no one particular consideration—nor two nor three nor four nor a thousand of them—but rather some inexplicable quintessence of them all mixed up together which, having captured my will, brought it to plunge into his and lose itself and which, having captured his will, brought it to plunge and lose itself in mine with an equal hunger and emulation. I say “lose itself” in very truth; we kept nothing back for ourselves: nothing was his or mine.9 Montaigne doesn’t refer to an incorporation or dissolution of the other into himself that one would expect to find in a sexual relationship between lovers or a loving (or mystic) relationship with God. Such a disappearance of the other would be in contradiction with the notion of friendship as an involvement with the singularity of the other and would even terminate the friendship bond altogether. Rather, by talking about a seamless connection between two persons, Montaigne means that a true friendship is experienced as a relationship that remains undisturbed by external elements, that is, elements or factors that as such do not pertain to the selves of both friends. Every element that does not belong to the singularity of the individual herself stays at the fringes of the friendship bond. Women and children, for example, don’t play significant roles in the friendship bond that links Montaigne to La Boétie, since they remain external to the selves of both friends. It’s obviously an important feature of someone’s life to be a father or a husband, yet according to Montaigne, as far as the friendship bond in itself is concerned, it doesn’t really matter who these children concretely are (their names, characters, ages, genders, etc.) for the self of the father. They remain external to the self in the sense that they do not significantly modify its unique singularity. In this respect, the only aspect that counts is the fact that one is a father or husband; whom of is secondary. Phenomenologically, the complete absence of externality manifests itself as the experience of an intuitive certainty about the self of the other. Since friendship consists in an involvement with the naked self of the other—external obstacles like family commitments, sexual desires, and material interests are excluded from the friendship bond—there are no hindrances left that can come in the way of one’s intimate conviction about the authenticity of the other. Put differently, friendship is experienced as an immediate and authentic certainty regarding the self of the other: 9  Essays, 217, 211–12, and 212. (My emphasis).

Recapturing The Self

35

All the arguments in the world have no power to dislodge me from the certainty which I have of the intentions and decisions of my friend. Not one of his actions could be set before me—no matter what it looked like—without my immediately discovering its motive. Our souls were yoked together in such unity, and contemplated each other with so ardent an affection, and with the same affection revealed each to each other right down to the very entrails, that not only did I know his mind as well as I knew my own but I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself.10 True friends, for example, do not fall prey to the gnawing fear of offending each other, nor do they have any doubt about each other’s intentions and impressions. Needless to say, Montaigne does not construe this certainty as a kind of rational knowledge that one can acquire post-factum, seeing as such rationalisation is fallible and, moreover, inherently liable to be coloured by surges of self-deception, self-love, or wishful thinking. More accurately, Montaigne has some sort of “intimate understanding” in mind that is formal in nature and that could be compared to what Blaise Pascal famously called “l’esprit du coeur.”11 Rather than really knowing what my friend’s intentions are, I can be certain, thanks to my intuitive certainty about his intentions, that, whatever intentions he has, they are pure and sincere: “But for our kind, in which we are dealing with the innermost recesses of our minds with no reservations, it is certain that all of our motives must be pure and sure to perfection.”12 He takes me for who I am and by doing so he provides a setting of trust and security in which I can be myself. Second, Montaigne shifts his focus to an aspect of the friendship bond that has been (comparatively) little discussed. After having explored the phenomenological dimension of friendship as an extraordinary relationship between two persons (see above), he concentrates on the impact that friendship has on each individual as a constitutive and essential part of the bond. Central to this aspect of Montaigne’s phenomenological exploration of friendship is the idea that friendship generates a setting or constellation in which an individual 10  Essays, 213. (My emphasis). 11  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963), n. 101 and n. 424: “C’est le coeur qui sent Dieu et non la raison. Voilà ce que c’est que la foi. Dieu sensible au coeur, non à la raison.” In his Pensées, Pascal distinguishes between l’esprit de géometrie and l’esprit de finesse, in which context l’esprit de finesse refers to “une connaissance du coeur et de l’instinct” as a capacity of the heart that consists in man’s unique capacity to grasp things not only rationally (l’esprit de géométrie) but intuitively as well. 12  Essays, 216.

36

Caudron

relates to himself in a direct and unmediated way. Similar to the manner in which a friendship bond consists of a pure and open relationship between the selves of two different people, friendship similarly enables each individual to engage himself in an unmediated relationship. Thus, while Montaigne identifies the direct and pure commitment to the other’s self as a necessary condition of true friendship, this is accompanied by each individual having a direct and pure relationship with himself as well. Evidently, one cannot sincerely relate to the other without also opening up to himself, since sincerity and honesty toward another person presuppose the same attitude of openness toward oneself. For instance, I cannot share how I really feel about a given political issue with you without first knowing myself what I actually feel about it. However, one has to be careful not to construe the connection between friendship and self-knowledge as a temporal connection. Montaigne does not mean that one starts with a certain type of self-knowledge and self-understanding that one subsequently decides to share with someone he deems worthy of his friendship. Such a relationship would be no friendship at all, at least not if the beginning of the relationship was constituted by this decision. Rather, Montaigne considers the link between true friendship and pure selfinvolvement to be a dynamic process without an assignable ending or beginning. Much more than a temporal connection or an active decision, a form of self-understanding organically grows as the friendship bond comes to the fore. As a matter of fact, a bond can only become true friendship when both friends open up to each other. For this generous and unconditional opening-up to develop, it is necessary for each individual to open up to himself, although one should keep in mind that the coming about of such a transparent relation of the individual to himself is more a necessary side-effect of the friendship bond than it is an active decision on which the friendship bond hinges. Much more than demanding one to disclose himself, the friendship bond creates a setting in which one feels comfortable about engaging in a direct relationship with oneself. In that sense, the friend enables one to liberate oneself, to gain insight and establish a direct connection with one’s deepest, innermost reality. My deeper and otherwise concealed self is, as it were, reflected in the eyes of my friend, who stimulates me into self-discovery and personal development. It is clear that such a relationship by no means reduces the other to a mirror that merely reflects the information he is given. A friendship is not a narcissistic but a hermeneutical relationship; trying to get to know oneself (“se connaître”) requires a genuine effort not to try to recognise oneself (“se reconnaître”), or so Montaigne says.13 The dynamic that constitutes a real friendship bond 13  L. Brunschvicg, Descartes et Pascal: Lecteurs de Montaigne (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1945), 14.

Recapturing The Self

37

allows me to get to know myself because of the fact that it requires all veils to come down, including those behind which I consciously or unconsciously hide my self. Since the reciprocity of friendship imperatively demands that both friends no longer be veiled behind mists of self-love or apparent virtue, the same openness with which I reveal myself to the other also reveals me to myself. On account of the fact that I am one of the two constituting parts of our friendship, my self will inevitably be disclosed to me if I allow our friendship to develop and flourish. Accordingly, in this intimate disclosure, one experiences a growing intuitive certainty about one’s self that is impossible to attain autonomously. In that sense, Montaigne understands friendship not only to be a form of communication that enables the self to relate to itself and gain self-knowledge—a discussion with a friend does not only enrich me as an individual, but it is also liable to allow me to develop a much more nuanced form of self-understanding by daring to, say, open up or answer his questions—but also a relation that is characterised by an accrued form of certainty and reassurance about one’s self. The absolute sincerity that characterises our friendship and thus our discussion provides a setting in which all barriers can disappear and in which a deeper self-understanding can be fostered. This also has a therapeutic dimension. Since friendship consists in a mutual commitment and dynamic of self-development and self-understanding, it provides a form of self-assurance that Montaigne considers to be the highest good of morality. Consequently, as I will show in the next paragraph, La Boétie’s influence on Montaigne should first and foremost be considered along the lines of Montaigne’s desire to regain such a dynamic of self-understanding and such a (subsequent) form of self-assurance that he had when his friend was still alive. 4

La Boétie’s Influence on Montaigne

Armed with this brief phenomenological exploration of Montaigne’s experience of self-knowledge and self-assurance, it is now possible to understand the significance of his friendship with La Boétie for the art of living developed in the Essays. At first sight, the very existence of the Essays seems to be closely linked to La Boétie. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that Montaigne, who initially didn’t intend to write the Essays, sought solace and distraction from his intense grief by reading the ancient authors and by writing his essays. Moreover, La Boétie has had a manifest influence on Montaigne as far as his philosophical ideas are concerned. Both in form and in content there is a remarkable resemblance between De la servitude volontaire, La Boétie’s politico–philosophical treatise dealing with political power in general

38

Caudron

and the mystery of tyrannical rule in particular, and the Essays. Not only does La Boétie deal with topics one finds at the heart of the Essays (i.e., habit, nature, friendship, and inner freedom), but he also anticipates, as far as form is concerned, in his De la servitude volontaire the loose and disorderly arrangement of Montaigne’s magnum opus. In addition, one can see how the stoic– humanistic philosophy that La Boétie practiced throughout his life echoes throughout the earlier Essays: The influence on Montaigne is clear. In fact, the Essays could even be considered to be the written record of Montaigne’s attempt to develop a personal philosophy of life inspired by La Boétie’s ideal of ancient wisdom and to adopt a modified type of stoicism as a cure for his paralysing fear of death.14 Montaigne seems to confirm this last interpretation himself in a letter he wrote to his father in 1572. In this letter, in which he recounts the last days and death of La Boétie, Montaigne describes his friend as a soul filled with “tranquility, peace and security” (“une âme pleine de repos, de tranquillité et d’assurance”).15 Above all, Montaigne admits, he admires La Boétie’s great strength of mind (“grandeur de courage”) and the generosity (“magnanimité”) with which La Boétie not only led his life but also faced his destiny on his deathbed; Montaigne’s admiration for La Boétie is clearly inspired by the stoic determination the latter shows while facing his approaching death. However, there is more to the link between La Boétie and the Essays than the above suggests, and that is Montaigne’s self-orientated experience of their mutual friendship (see above). It is indeed impossible to grasp La Boétie’s influence on Montaigne’s art of living when one only takes into account Montaigne’s admiration for his friend’s strength of mind toward death. Admittedly, Montaigne sought a remedy for his fear of death in Stoicism. Yet, one would overlook a crucial aspect of La Boétie’s influence on Montaigne by reducing his impact on the Essays to the adoption of a stoic attitude toward mortality, seeing as the essays of the third book in particular contain a moral teaching that exalts the good life as the highest moral good. Instead of reading the Essays as Montaigne’s personal approach to Stoicism inspired by his friend 14  Cf. P. Villey, Montaigne. Textes choisis et commentés par Pierre Villey (Paris: Plon, 1912), 23: “Or l’effort principal de Montaigne en méditant ses Essais sera précisément de s’assimiler les doctrines de la sagesse antique et de les faire passer dans sa pratique quotidienne.” (“The most important effort Montaigne makes in the Essays consists in an attempt to assimilate ancient doctrines of wisdom and to put them into practice in his daily life”). (My translation). 15  Michel de Montaigne, Hommage à La Boétie, in Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres Complètes. Préface d’André Maurois. Texte établi et annoté par Robert Barral en collaboration avec Pierre Michel (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 546–48.

Recapturing The Self

39

La Boétie, one should focus on Montaigne’s art of living as being opposed to an art of dying. The fact that Montaigne continues to be inspired by the memory of his friendship with La Boétie, even while shifting away from Stoicism toward a more vitalistic philosophy of life, should make us broaden the question of the meaning of their friendship for the Essays. In order to understand La Boétie’s influence on the Essays, one must first take into account the experience of self-knowledge and the ensuing self-assurance that I described above. In this vein, let us look at Montaigne’s intense awareness of the instability and volatility of his own mind. Montaigne’s fixation on the uncontrollable spontaneity of the mind indeed runs as a red thread throughout the Essays. For instance, he finds that his best ideas pop into his head at the most inappropriate moments, or he remarks that he is invariably moved by the book he is reading, no matter how strong this book contradicts his own ideas or ideas that were expressed in books that he had read before.16 It is particularly when his mind is thrown back on itself that Montaigne notices that he inevitably risks falling prey to a relentless maelstrom of capricious whims and crazed fantasies that are beyond his control. One could link the way Montaigne describes his mind to the way the imagination may disrupt one’s rationality, yet Montaigne’s concept of the uncontrollable mind seems to be all-encompassing. No effort at reasonable and critical thinking is immune to the disruptive potential of l’esprit. Both in his search for truth as well as in his endeavours to live a morally good life, his mind is liable to subvert his every effort and intention. For instance, in the Essays Montaigne hints at the emotion of remorse (“le repentir”); even when one deploys all of his faculties to try to make the best decision possible in a given situation, there’s nothing that can prevent one from falling prey to gnawing doubt and even remorse at having made the wrong choice. Above all in moral and religious issues, Montaigne perceives the unlimited variety of mental twists and turns that constantly flood and disrupt his mind as a source of annoyance, uncertainty, and even impotence. In stark contrast to this uncertainty and anxiety stands La Boétie’s noble attitude of peace of mind and stability on the one hand and the experience of self-knowledge and self-assurance on the other. As far as La Boétie as a moral model is concerned, the fact that Montaigne uses the term “magnanimous” (“magnanimité”) to describe his friend’s attitude is revealing. Not only does it denote a kind of noble-mindedness toward someone in a weak or inferior position, but in Montaigne’s French it also refers to a way of being of the soul that is 16  For example, ideas he has expressed in On Idleness and ideas expressed by the Roman poet Virgil in one of his works.

40

Caudron

characterised by an attitude of certainty or even greatness in difficult circumstances. The fact that La Boétie manages to keep as courageous and steadfast on his deathbed as he had during his life proves to Montaigne what the human soul is capable of. By training and self-improvement, Montaigne notices, it becomes possible for the human soul to increase its resilience and perfection so that no occasion is able to disturb or discompose it any longer. Accordingly, the key to understanding the full range of La Boétie’s influence on the Essays lies in the fact that La Boétie’s life and death convince Montaigne of what the soul is capable of, that is, developing an art of living that is characterised by peace of mind and steadfastness. In this sense, the touching passage in which Montaigne promises a dying La Boétie that he will follow his way of life can be understood as Montaigne’s commitment to perfecting his soul through an art of living. Unlike La Boétie’s philosophy of life, though not in opposition to it, Montaigne’s art of living is fuelled by the desire to live appropriately (“à propos”), meaning that one should learn to live correctly in all circumstances by training and perfecting one’s judgement. Given Montaigne’s all-encompassing scepticism and hence the absolute unknowability of moral truths, one’s intention to judge and consequently act as well as one can is the only moral support one can rely on. Whenever one judges and acts accordingly, however, one exposes oneself nolens volens to doubt, remorse, and even anxiety, since there is no objective standard of truth that one can refer to. Montaigne therefore defends the concept of self-development as a moral obligation; indeed, given the absence of objective moral standards on the one hand and the unquestionable moral imperative to perfect oneself (to be as good a human being as one can be) on the other, it is a logically valid deduction to claim that the development and understanding of the self is a necessary component of the morally good life. This is especially true because the individual’s being singularised as a unique self serves as the only possible moral support. In the absence of objective moral laws, the only thing that one can do is act according to what one really is. Thus, Montaigne’s art of living consists of installing an authentic and therefore morally valuable relation of the individual to himself; not only is such an authentic relation morally speaking the only possible option, it is also the sole way out of the relentless doubt and anxiety by which one is disturbed.17 La Boétie’s influence on the Essays then is twofold. First, as I have 17  Note that this conclusion presupposes two premises that Montaigne accepts without systematically arguing for. First, he accepts the intrinsic goodness of nature as a whole and of human nature in particular. Relating to one’s self and following it in good faith means relating to your own nature and hence experiencing what is morally good. Second,

Recapturing The Self

41

shown above, a strong case can be made for saying that Montaigne was struck by La Boétie’s magnanimity both during his life and when facing death. And second, the content of Montaigne’s art of living is characterised by a desire for the assurance and peace of mind he already experienced in his friendship with La Boétie and therefore can be linked to an authentic relation to himself. Noteworthy is the fact that this second way in which La Boétie influenced the Essays is not only in line with the first, but also deepens and enriches it. Thus, by searching for the self that he lost when La Boétie died, Montaigne attempts to recapture something of himself, and this attempt contains a double moral statement. First, it is clear that Montaigne situates the core of the moral experience in the intentions or will of the individual. As far as the inner experiences of the individual are concerned, perfecting one’s judgement based on authentic self-knowledge is a moral obligation. Every quest for an authentic realisation of one’s singular self, however, is destined to fall short in comparison to the experience of pure self-involvement that one can have in a true friendship. This logically implies that perfect involvement with one’s self is inevitably dependent on the other as a friend. The friend’s irreplaceable singularity is characterised by something that resists every attempt at rationalisation and instrumentalisation, yet, paradoxically, I am dependent on that friend in order to perfect the moral imperative of sincere and authentic selfinvolvement. With regard to the relationship between friendship and morality, we must therefore conclude that Montaigne considers friendship to be a moral ideal that escapes the grasp of the individual. The power of friendship indicates a moral direction: the pure commitment both to oneself and to the other that characterises friendship as a regulative, moral ideal that one should pursue indefinitely. The realisation of the morally good life presupposes a never-ending effort to pursue a pure relationship to one’s self, yet for the final completion of this relationship, one inevitably remains radically dependent on the gift of the other. Second, Montaigne clearly differentiates between individual morality and social and political ethics. Whereas one must continue to search for selfknowledge as far as one’s intentions and moral and practical judgements are concerned, one should conform and rely on the existing social customs and political laws as far as daily life is concerned. In that sense, Montaigne subscribes to a long philosophical tradition that exalts the moral worth of Montaigne situates the core of the moral experience in the intentions or the will of the individual. Perfecting one’s judgement, therefore, is a moral obligation as far as the inner experiences of the individual are concerned. Regarding social and political ethics, one should rely on customs and human laws as they are.

42

Caudron

true friendship above laws and customs based on convention. In contrast to Aristotle and Cicero, Montaigne even foresees the possibility of a collision between morality and friendship, since according to him, a friendly engagement void of hypocrisy and secret agendas creates commitments that may conflict with the existing political morality. Obviously, this does not mean that Montaigne simply has no concern for moral norms, laws, and manners—from a pragmatic approach, they are both useful and necessary—rather, given their contingency and their vulnerability to window-dressing and appearances, he excludes them from being at the core of true virtue and morality: “Rare is the life which remains ordinate even in privacy. Anyone can take part in a farce and act the honest man on the trestles: but to be right-ruled within, in your bosom, where anything is licit, where everything is hidden—that’s what matters.”18 5

Conclusion: Recapturing the Self as the Essence of Montaigne’s Art of Living

As we have seen in the phenomenological exploration of the friendship experience, Montaigne experiences his mutual and sincere affection for La Boétie as a feeling of absolute certainty about the will and intentions of both his friend and himself. Although one shouldn’t construe this type of certainty as a form of certainty about the content of these intentions, there is at least an intuitive certainty that these intentions are sincere. Concerning one’s own self, the fact that a true friendship bond presupposes the absence of all veils and camouflages toward one’s own self implies that one can also experience an intense and comfortable degree of certainty concerning one’s own self. My involvement with a friend is accompanied by a form of self-involvement that is characterised by a high degree of certainty and conviction about myself. In his friendship with La Boétie, Montaigne stood in a direct and pure relation to himself that had a comforting and soothing impact on his mental unrest and anxiety. Given his high sensibility to his own doubts and uncertainties, we can now understand the art of living that he developed in the Essays as an attempt to re-establish this kind of authentic self-involvement. With La Boétie’s death, Montaigne not only lost his best friend, but also lost himself. In that sense, the art of living that Montaigne develops in the Essays takes the form of a search for his true self as self-knowledge and self-understanding; they form a never-ending attempt to recapture something of the singular self that La Boétie loved and that eluded Montaigne with the latter’s death. Accordingly, 18  Essays, 911.

Recapturing The Self

43

in On Vanity—the essay par excellence in which he dwells on the project of the Essays—Montaigne explicitly describes the project of self-discovery that underpins the Essays as the search for his true self as La Boétie had known it: “Only he [La Boétie] knew the true image of myself, but he took it with him. That is the reason why I subject myself to such an intense scrutiny.”19 When Montaigne opens the Essays with the warning that the self-portrait it contains is only for personal and private purposes, one should take him literally.20 At least at their core, the Essays are both a moral treatise and an attempt by Montaigne to recover the self that he once experienced in his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie. La Boétie not only serves as an example of greatness and fortitude, but he also, more profoundly, was someone through whom Montaigne experienced a pure commitment to himself that he would continually try to reconstitute in his search for peace of mind and mental ease. In this sense, there is a moral absoluteness to friendship that results in an ideal of self-development, a concept that Montaigne will pursue throughout the Essays. What’s more, the experience of a true and pure self as revealed in friendship is at the literal beginning and ending of the Essays: As a point de depart, Montaigne experiences a commitment to his true self in his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie that he will tirelessly pursue as le point d’arrivé of the morally good life. More concretely, in the absence of his friend and therefore in the absence of his pure self, Montaigne depends on the various manifestations through which his self reveals itself to him as the hidden substrate of his consciousness and mental life. Accordingly, the process of self-understanding that Montaigne undertakes in the Essays consists in the endless observation of an infinite variety of what one could call Abschattungen (“reflections”) of the self. In a way, Montaigne seeks to understand who he really is by observing the everchanging manifestations of himself in the most diverse situations—not a as treasure hunter who continues digging until he has found what he’s looking for, but rather as an artist who constantly tries to capture new impressions and snapshots of his object. As if they were a laboratory, the Essays constitute a setting in which Montaigne literally puts himself to the test (essayer) in order to observe which aspects of his self come to the fore. Accordingly, his method is radically subjective and even egocentric; Montaigne approaches all of reality from his own, strictly individual perspective: “For many years now the target of 19  The quote appears in the manuscript of the 1588 edition of On Vanity. (My translation). However, it is mentioned in Essays, 1112, n. 106. 20  Essays, lxiii: “You have here, Reader, a book whose faith can be trusted, a book which warns you from the start that I have set myself no other end but a private family one.”

44

Caudron

my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing but me; and if I do study myself, it is so as to apply it once to myself, or more correctly, within myself.”21 One shouldn’t therefore be surprised that Montaigne worked on the Essays for over twenty years without ever regarding them as completed. Realising that the vibrant versatility of his self would inevitably exceed his existing writings, Montaigne never stopped adding passages and making changes as more and more aspects of his self came to be revealed along the course of his life. He firmly opposed a concept of the self as a deeper reality that would eventually be fully uncovered; rather, as we can deduce from his take on things in the Essays, Montaigne construes the self as an active construct, that is, a reality that takes the form of an autonomously shaped and hence always retractable contraction of the multitude of experiences through which it timidly and incompletely reveals itself. In that sense, the Essays conceived of as a set of experiments on the self or as a search for self-knowledge are manifestly linked to Montaigne’s seminal experience of his self that characterised his friendship with La Boétie. They are both a firm acknowledgement of the self’s elusiveness and a sincere attempt to recapture something of its morally valuable dimension. References Bakewell, S. How to Live or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. London: Chatto & Windus, 2010. Boétie, Étienne de La. The Politics of Obedience: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Edited by Murray N. Rothbard. New York: Free Life Editions, 1975. Brunschvicg, L. Descartes et Pascal: Lecteurs de Montaigne. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1945. Frampton, S. When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing with Me? Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life. London: Faber & Faber, 2011. Montaigne, Michel de. Hommage à La Boétie. In Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres Complètes. Préface d’André Maurois. Texte établi et annoté par Robert Barral en collaboration avec Pierre Michel. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. ———. On Affectionate Relationships. In Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays. Edited and Translated by M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2003. ———. On Idleness. In Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays. Edited and Translated by M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

21  Essays, 424.

Recapturing The Self

45

———. On Vanity. In Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays. Edited and Translated by M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2003. ———. The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy: In Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581. Edited by William George Waters. London: BiblioLife, 2009. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Edited by Louis Lafuma. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963. Plato. Symposium. Edited by Benjamin Jowett. New York: The Modern Library, 1996. Villey, P. Montaigne. Textes choisis et commentés par Pierre Villey. Paris: Plon, 1912.

CHAPTER 3

The Singularity of Friendship: On Kierkegaard and Friends Anne Christine Habbard 1 Introduction Søren Kierkegaard appears as a most unlikely candidate for a philosophical investigation of the notion of friendship. Friendship? Aristotle, Cicero, and Michel de Montaigne all come to mind, but Kierkegaard? Personal relationships in his work revolve mainly around amorous games, heart-wrenching breakups, unrequited love, and high-pitched eroticism, or, on the contrary, around placid and immensely boring marriages. In contradistinction to such misguided dealings, Kierkegaard also presents us with the sublime and agonisingly perfect normative ideal of neighbourly love, agapè. In comparison, good old friendship is roundly disregarded either as a cynical manipulation of the other, or, in the Works of Love, as an injudicious preferential treatment amounting to self-love, whose credentials are even shakier than those of erotic love, eros. Yet, friendship appears everywhere in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Most of the pseudonymous works are addressed to, or narrate stories about, friends, while the non-pseudonymous authorship is always dedicated to a friend (besides everything else she or he may be). In effect, the authorship abounds with friends whose task is to talk about their friends (Constantin Constantius, Judge Vilhelm, the narrator of Fear and Trembling, among others); there can be little doubt that friendship as a theme figures prominently in Kierkegaard’s work, which may even be described as a cartography of friendship. My contention on this theme is threefold. First, Kierkegaard allows us to think about friendship with renewed vigour. More specifically, his formulation of friendship as a dialectics of vision helps us understand something fundamental about friendship and its gift. Second, Kierkegaard’s theory of the self is uniquely suited to explore the paradoxes and possibilities of friendship. Conversely, friendship opens unique * To Paul, of course.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_005

The Singularity Of Friendship

47

possibilities for the self; for instance, it may save the individual from anxiety and despair, besides being a step in the process of singularisation of the self. I become a self, or I become who I am called to become, through the friendships I build. Finally, Kierkegaard’s exploration of friendship and personal relationships sheds an interesting light on the question of special obligations. While it has been rejuvenated by thinkers such as Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, the issue is already broached by Kierkegaard, who was deeply aware of the tensions and moral paradoxes associated with special obligations: As a matter of fact, a central moral question throughout his authorship deals with the dilemma created by the impartiality and impersonality demanded of ethics, on the one hand, and obligations born out of a specific, singular relationship on the other. Kierkegaard’s thorough analysis of the issue is linked to his broader attempt to reconcile ethics and singularity, and perhaps even to ground ethics on singularity. 2

A Dialectics of Vision

The topic of friendship emerges, interestingly, in the contradistinction to Kierkegaard’s analysis of the demonic. In some famous pages of The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard analyses the concept of the demonic (anxiety before the good) as the deepest level of despair. Morally, the sinner is not the worst of all possible moral options; he still belongs to the sphere of the good, in so far as evil remains for him a disquieting temptation which he might never manage to resist, but which still stands before him on the other side of the moral divide. Hence, “viewed from a higher standpoint, this formation is in the good, and for this reason it is an anxiety about the evil. The other formation is the demonic. The individual is in the evil and is in anxiety about the good.”1 The demonic has switched sides: He is both tempted and threatened by goodness, just as the sinner is tempted and threatened by evil. Goodness, generosity, and freedom are all external to him: In other words, he is locked in a self-imposed seclusion, since every communication is a form of the good and might bring him back to freedom. The demonic is an “unfreedom that wants to close itself 1  Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 8, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 119. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Kierkegaard’s work are to Kierkegaard’s Writings, 26 Vols., ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978–2000).

48

Habbard

off,”2 that wants to caulk all cracks and seal off his prison. “Leave me alone in my wretchedness,”3 says the demonic. For Kierkegaard, the demonic, that ultimate stage of despair and spiritual misery, is the rejection of any meaningful relationship, particularly friendship. The demonic does not want to associate with, or relate to, anyone, since every relationship would endanger its seclusion. In other words, crossing over from the sphere of the good to the sphere of evil is to be unable or unwilling to have friends. Actually, the problem of the demonic is not so much that he doesn’t want to have friends as it is the fact that he genuinely believes that no one can be a friend at all, to anyone, ever. This is why the demonic is devilish—it is because he is fundamentally mistrustful, and he believes that everyone is doomed like he himself. Evil is about mistrust: Mistrust, however, has a preference for evil [. . .] To believe nothing is the very border where believing evil begins; in other words, the good is the object of belief, and therefore someone who believes nothing at all begins to believe evil. To believe nothing at all is the beginning of being evil because it shows that one has no good in oneself, since belief is the good in a person [. . .] Mistrust cannot maintain knowledge in equilibrium; it defiles its knowledge and therefore verges on envy, malice, and corruption, which believes all evil.4 The friendless demonic’s self-enclosure is a self-imposed prison; he is both prisoner and watchman, keeping watch in front of his own prison door and trying to prevent others from giving. It is not just that he is simultaneously prisoner and watchman, and that he has thrown away the key; he also patrols around to ensure that no one befriends anyone and that everyone else is locked up as well. Having no friends and wanting none is the beginning of evil. Kierkegaard thus agrees with Aristotle that friendship is a virtue. Having friends certainly is pleasant and makes life both more significant and more enjoyable; more fundamentally, however, it is also ethically essential, as it makes me grow as a person. Kierkegaard seems to go as far as to claim that friends may act as saviours who may lift one from a state of demonic despair. Why is that? What is so special about friendly relationships that makes us grow and become more ourselves?

2  The Concept of Anxiety, 123. 3  Ibid., 137. 4  Ibid., 233ff.

The Singularity Of Friendship

49

Friendship, like all strong relationships (and perhaps all strong relationships are strong because they contain a core element of friendship), conveys a strong sense of identity. The other, the friend, underwrites the fact that I am the one I am, in my singularity. While the solitary demonic loses himself in abstraction—he is “shadowboxing,” says Kierkegaard—the friend loves me as an irreplaceable, singular, and unique self. Friendship is a life-enhancing experience; it heightens the experience of being alive and of existing. I get to know myself through the mediation of, and discussions with, my friends. For René Descartes, the transparency of the ego is achieved through the mediation of God’s veracity; it is because I know God does not lie and is veracious that I can be absolutely certain of the truth of my ideas. In a strangely similar pattern, the transparency of the (certainly very differently conceived) self is achieved through the mediation of my friend’s veracity. It is because I trust him not to lie that I can be certain of where I stand—and of who I am. How my friend achieves this remarkable result has to do with a certain mode of seeing. There is in Kierkegaard a transposition of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectics of recognition,5 whereby I need to be recognised as a free subject by another free subject in order to achieve objective certainty about it; recognition implies the reciprocity of the acknowledgement of subjective freedom (even though the Master and the Slave fail to see it at first). Similarly, in friendship, I am who I am when the one I recognise as my friend recognises me as his friend and recognises me as the one I am. I am more myself thanks to my friends, while the demonic tries to define himself by himself alone. Such a dialectics of recognition is, in Kierkegaard, transposed into a dialectics of vision; friendship is the education of vision, as there are distinctly friendly and unfriendly ways of seeing.6 Being a friend is a mode of seeing others—and of seeing them in a benevolent manner. Kierkegaard analyses friendly dispositions as uplifting ways of seeing the other. The example of forgiveness, which Kierkegaard uses again and again, is telling. It is a way of seeing—or rather, of not seeing, of disregarding—what you see: “The unseen is that forgiveness takes away that which does indeed exist; the unseen is that what is seen is nevertheless not seen [. . .] The one who loves sees the sin he forgives, but he believes that forgiveness takes it away.”7 To forgive is not to forget—I remember what 5  See Arne Grøn, “Amour et reconnaissance dans Les Œuvres de l’Amour,” in Søren Kierkegaard: Pensée et Problèmes de l’Éthique, ed. Anne-Christine Habbard and Jacques Message (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2009), 97–115. 6  The dialectics of vision appear most clearly in The Works of Love, but it is also expressed in The Concept of Anxiety, The Book on Adler, and The Sickness unto Death. 7  Works of Love, 294–95.

50

Habbard

happened, I see what happened, and yet I do not see it—I see it away, I disregard it, acting as if it had not happened; I look away as if I had not seen it. This ethical Als Ob is trust. The core of friendship lies in this very trust: “The one who loves forgives in this way: He forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin.”8 Friendship is about seeing away what I see (forgiveness blotting away the sin), just as it is about seeing what I cannot see (goodness, generosity, possibilities). Friends teach me how to see—how to see the good and the positive where the mistrustful or the lonely sees only dejection and misery. Love, or friendship, is indeed blind, says Kierkegaard, as it deliberately disregards shortcomings and faults. But the friend does not only disregard—he also clairvoyantly sees new possibilities which were invisible to his friend. When we are down and desperate, we often fail to see different perspectives and other options, says Kierkegaard. The future appears foreclosed and doesn’t seems like anything but a perpetual erasure of any possibility—“I am doomed!” This form of despair sees only dry, gloomy necessity and fatality—nothing seems possible. Now, this is when friendship matters: The friend shows me that there is still a possibility there where I see my future as blocked and hopeless. This reopening of new spaces of possibility is what saves me: “When someone faints, we call for water, eau de Cologne, smelling salts; but when someone wants to despair, then the word is: get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation. A possibility—then the person in despair breathes again, he revives again, for without a possibility a person seems unable to breathe.”9 The opposite of benevolent vision is not seeing the other at all, which is how Kierkegaard views arrogance. The arrogant looks at others without seeing them, or rather, by acting as if he didn’t see them; he sees himself as superior to the one he doesn’t see, just as he signals to the others that they should see themselves as inferior. Jealousy works in a similar fashion: The jealous see the other in a way that both aggrandises and belittles him. According to Kierkegaard, “envy is secret admiration.” That which you see as superior you will strive to see as inferior. And so “admiration is happy self-surrender; envy is unhappy self-assertion.”10 In jealousy, or envy, I see the other as that which he is not, just as I see myself as eternally striving to reach that which I secretly admire. Jealousy is thus a form of self-hatred.

8  Ibid., 296. 9  The Sickness unto Death, 38–9. 10  Ibid., 86.

The Singularity Of Friendship

51

Kierkegaard thus writes that it is harder to accept being forgiven than to forgive: “Accepting the forgiveness of the one we have offended, now that is an unbearable humiliation. That is why the offender never forgives.”11 The culprit has something to forgive just as much as the victim; in a way, it is harder to be the culprit than it is to be the victim. It is difficult not to hate the one we have harmed, and it is easier to avoid the often condescending gaze of the forgiver. Kierkegaard was very prescient of the formidable potential self-righteousness of victims and was well aware of “the joys and perils of victimhood,” to use Ian Buruma’s words.12 Friendship creates space, just as it creates and opens time. Desperation always believes that it is “too late”—too late to change, too late to make amends, too late to make a difference, too late to act; indeed, desperation is nothing but the assertion that it is “too late.” Friendship is virtuous in that the friend “can always reach even the most desperate of all men and tell him: ‘the instant is still there’.”13 My friend tells me that the last minute is not the last one, but always only the penultimate one; that the future still holds something in store for me; and that it is not over yet. Kierkegaard writes that “the most dreadful reply imaginable” is “at that time, I could probably have been saved”14—but now it is too late. And the friend is the one to say that it is still possible to be saved now. Friends save you. And they save you because you believe them to be already saved. This is how the mysterious reciprocity of friendship operates: Friendship means believing in salvation—at the very least that of our friends, even if we were to drown in despair. As Alain Cugno poetically writes, “contrary to all those I do not love, and to my own self, [the friend] appears to me as saved, as evading despair [. . .] Whether she is despairing or not, she teaches me that, at least in her case, salvation exists.”15 I know salvation is possible because my friend is already saved; conversely, to believe he is saved is itself to be saved from the temptation of the enclosing reserve of the demonic.

11  Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. P.A. Heiberg et al. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909–1948; 1968–1970; 1975–1978), Pap. X 3 10. (My translation). 12  Ian Buruma, “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood,” New York Review, April 8, 1999, 4–8. 13  The Book on Adler, 165. 14  The Concept of Anxiety, 137. 15  Alain Cugno, “A quelles conditions peut-on fonder l’éthique sur la singularité?” (paper presented at the conference SørenKierkegaard, Pensée et Problèmes de l’éthique, Université de Lille 3, November 2005).

52 3

Habbard

The Double Gift of Friendship

But what exactly is given in friendship? Why is it that no one is able to precisely define love or friendship, but can only describe its actions? The reason, according to Kierkegaard, is precisely that love is “nothing”—nothing but the presupposition of itself in the other. The fundamental action of love is to do nothing—nothing but to suppose that the other is loving: A teacher presupposes that the pupil is ignorant. A disciplinarian presupposes that the other person is corrupted—but someone who loves and builds up has only one course of action, to presuppose love [. . .] Love can and will be treated in only one way, by being loved forth [. . .] The one who loves has done nothing but presuppose that love was present in the ground [. . .] The more perfect the loving one presupposes the love to be, the more perfect a love he loves forth.16 What I, as a friend, give is merely to suppose my friend as giving, and this, in turn, is precisely what makes him give. By acting as if the other was a friend, I entice him to be one. While God can create love and instil it in someone’s heart, all we humans can do (but this is already quite a task!) is to suppose it as already there. By the mysterious retroactivity of the gift of friendship, I thereby develop that which I already supposed to be present. To be a friend is to believe my friend to be one and thereby make him one: To give is to believe others give and thus lead them to give. The gift of friendship thus appears to be a repetition, or a redoubling, of a gift: What I give to my friend is the capacity for him to give in turn. More precisely, the gift is the redoubling: However destitute, wretched, miserable, or poor, I can always give the ability to give by supposing love in the other. To be a friend is to create the space for the other to be a friend in earnest. Socrates is a good friend to his disciples because, as Kierkegaard stresses in both The Concept of Irony and The Dialectics of Communication, his greatness lies not just in attempting to find truth and/or the good, but also in bringing others to follow the same path of their own volition. For Kierkegaard, all important things in existence are doubled or repeated—as is the case with friendship: What I give is the ability for the other to give, this, is what I myself acquire while giving. Kierkegaard writes: “Note the redoubling here: The one who loves is or becomes what he does. He has or rather acquires what he gives [. . .] By giving one acquires and receives just the same as one gives, so that this 16  Works of Love, 217ff.

The Singularity Of Friendship

53

giving and this receiving are one and the same [. . .] In this way love is always redoubled in itself.”17 Friendship reveals itself as a form of redoubling: To be a friend is to suppose the other is one. In a famous passage from the Works of Love, Kierkegaard analyses Peter’s betrayal of Christ. Christ is a friend to Peter because when the latter betrays, Christ knows that he himself is in danger of betraying, by judging, condemning, refusing to forgive, abandoning his friend in his betrayal. When I think my friend betrays, it is actually me who betrays, as I do not see that the apparent traitor is the one in jeopardy. The real danger is for Peter, not for Christ—while Peter is in danger of losing himself and losing his friendship with Christ, Christ saves him by seeing away the sin of betrayal, which he would have committed had he seen it. Herein lie the duplication and the reversibility of friendship: When he betrays, I am the one who betrays. You betray when you think the other betrays you—that is because you failed at the fundamental test of friendship, namely, to believe the other was actually a friend and thus to help him be one. The amazing thing about friendship, therefore, is that it makes you who you are—a good friend. Everything about friendship is duplicated—you give a double gift, the gift of the ability to give, which gives you the possibility to receive, as a friend. Like all powerful meditations on personal relationships, Kierkegaard’s reflection gives an important place to suffering; suffering is an essential element of personal relationships because while everyone can respect me, in a Kantian sense, and while colleagues, relatives, and acquaintances might rejoice with me in good times, only my friends will be at my side when I suffer. Not that others would not want to help me, but the choice of whom I would want by my side in times of distress is the very discriminant: It is exactly what makes the person a friend. Suffering should not here be understood merely as physical pain, or even as mental pain, but as a disempowerment—it is the decrease, or even the destruction, of the capacity to act, of the ability to effectuate or be part of the world. Kierkegaard shows that solicitude, if it is to be more than a mawkish affability where the self secretly relishes in having been spared (“suave mari magno [. . .]”), cannot be limited to a unilateral gift by the friend to the passively receiving sufferer: Relief and equality arise from the fact that, in a way, the capacity to care was opened by the sufferer, who becomes the locus of initiative. The letters Kierkegaard wrote to his cousin Hans Peter and his sister-in-law Henriette,18 both bedridden, are significant in this regard: Suffering does not mean passivity. On the contrary, the sufferer allows others 17  Ibid., 281ff. 18  See, for example, Letters 167 and 196 in Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 25, 2009.

54

Habbard

to care and show concern, and thus turns out to be the one who gives them the opportunity to give; the sympathiser is the one who needs the sympathy of the sufferer—not the other way around. This is why sharing pain is ethically more significant than sharing pleasure. Paul Ricoeur is very Kierkegaardian when he states that “a self brought back to the vulnerability of the mortal condition can receive from a friend’s weakness more than he gives of his own strength.”19 Being a friend means giving up something of myself, if only through accepting that something in me is being changed by what I have opened up in the other. 4

Friendship at the Self

This cartography of friendship illustrates what is now widely agreed upon, namely, that Kierkegaard’s thought is not about the odyssey of a solitary ego locked in a vertical relation to God; rather, it is a deep reflection on what it means to relate to others in truthfulness and veracity. In this regard, Kierkegaard appears to be a deep and original thinker on alterity and intersubjectivity. Now it is interesting to note that this analysis of friendship as a double and simultaneous move of receptivity from the other and a gesture toward him— as a double gift—relies on a dialectic of activity and receptivity. This allows Kierkegaard to avoid both the pitfalls of the work of Edmund Husserl, where the genesis of intersubjectivity lies within the self, and that of Emmanuel Levinas, where I am taken hostage by the other. In both cases, the unilaterality of the move precludes the possibility of the redoubling, as we have described it, or of a dialectics of vision. Friendship understood as a relationship that actively transforms the way the self relates to itself presupposes a self that is defined as a relation from the outset, rather than as a substantially closed ego which would, as in an afterthought, connect to others; it cannot be a substantial, fat, circular, self-contained ego. There must be a break in the self for the occurrence of friendship to arise. It means that the self will be defined as openness, that is, a being constitutively open to break-ins and essentially, not accidentally, vulnerable. In other words, as Ricoeur would phrase it, friendship requires a theory of the self which would allow for the possibility of selfhood (ipse), rather than sameness (idem): a theory in which the self is both a given and a task that requires commitment and fortitude. Or, as Kierkegaard puts it in the opening lines of The Sickness unto Death, a self that is defined 19  “Un soi rappelé à la vulnérabilité de la condition mortelle peut reçevoir de la faiblesse de l’ami plus qu’il ne lui donne en puisant dans ses propres réserves de force.” [Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), 224]. (My translation).

The Singularity Of Friendship

55

as “a relation that relates itself to itself, or it is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”20 However, the self’s relationality leads to a deep paradox of existence: If becoming myself requires commitment and a receptivity to what others give me, then it means that I depend on exteriority in order to become me. In other words, if I fail to receive, I may lose out on being me! I cannot not be me, and yet I can miss out on being me. I may end up missing the mark. The gift of friendship is the very route to becoming a self. I become what I am not simply by my own volition, but I do so also thanks to what I receive from others; it is this relation to others, this “election,” so to speak, that makes me the singular self that I am. This is the reason why friendship has a strong ethical component—why, it is a virtue, as Aristotle said. The journey of the self is a process of singularisation which includes the life-transforming event of friendship, a receptivity initiated by the other, who releases in me the possibility of giving. Becoming a self therefore involves the contingent event of being loved as a friend; contingent because there is no certainty of it ever happening. What is necessary to become a self is actually contingent. In friendship, I care about you, but I also care about our relationship and about myself insofar as I am your friend; we are thrice entwined (a relation relating to itself). Nothing is as devastating as the loss of a friend, as John Stuart Mill aptly remarked. Losing a friend is thus a triple loss and goes to the heart of what I am and what I value—not just you, but us, and thus me. This means that identity is perhaps not what matters to the self. The aesthete, the player, and the philosopher all consider the self to be a metaphysical issue, says Kierkegaard. They all view singularity as a question of identity revolving around the identification of the specific properties of that substance. What makes me me amounts to certain properties that I have and which you don’t: my special talents, my unique look, and my exasperating faults. The issue pertains to classic metaphysics: Identity and specific properties distinguish one being from another. Kierkegaard, however, disputes this view: What is so special about me is not my actually not-so-unique and (in any case) insignificant qualities or faults. What makes me the singular self that I am are the unique ethical obligations that I incur due to the friendships and other personal relationships I have built. Kierkegaard, who could foresee the pitfalls of the identity debate, would in a way agree with Derek Parfit that “personal identity is not what matters.”21 Kierkegaard shows that ethical concern for the self sidesteps the issue of identity—in the sense either of a metaphysical 20  The Sickness unto Death, 13. 21  Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 255.

56

Habbard

permanence of substance, or of a psychologically enduring sameness. What matters, therefore, is not identity per se, but the selfhood that arises out of my commitment and my response to others, or the repetition of my commitment to become who I have been called by others to become. 5

Special Obligations and Moral Dilemmas

Kierkegaard’s approach to the issue of friendship therefore sheds light on an eminently contemporary problem: that of special obligations. How does one ground and account for the special ethical duties that arise from these personal, unique relationships which seem to preclude the impartial, agentneutral moral point of view? On the issue of the foundation of special obligations, Kierkegaard unsurprisingly refutes the common view that friendship’s special obligations would arise from the nature of the obligee, that is, that friendship would only be due to virtuous friends.22 This is untenable in Kierkegaard’s eyes—if only because time spent evaluating whether or not your friend deserves to be your friend, indicates, ipso facto, that you are not his friend. More generally, it seems difficult to posit that friendship’s moral obligation would stem from the particular characteristics of the person to whom one is obliged. In other words, the foundation cannot be the same as an impartial, agent-neutral obligation such as moral respect, for example, which is owed to any rational being on the grounds of his humanity or dignity. Others claim that friendship is merely a particular application of the value judgement:23 I have reasons to value this relationship, hence I am obligated to promote this value—in particular, my friendship to you. The claim is that the very act of valuing certain types of relationships involves seeing ourselves as having special obligations, or, more broadly, as being bound by an implicit contract, such as John Locke’s “tacit consent.” But this leaves it entirely up to the self to determine whether or not a relationship creates an obligation. This is a problem, since in friendship, as noted earlier, something is initiated by the other: I am neither the sole initiator of the relationship nor that of the value of the relationship. Kierkegaard repeatedly uses the paradigm of the promise to show how each pole of the relationship releases and creates new ethical and existential possibilities in the other. In other words, Kierkegaard’s reflection on 22  See, for example, Jennifer Whiting, “Impersonal Friends,” The Monist 74 (1991): 3–29. 23  See, for example, Samuel Scheffler, “Relationships and Responsibilities,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997): 189–209.

The Singularity Of Friendship

57

the relationality of the self allows us to better understand how an obligation may be founded on a relationship, rather than on either the nature of the obligee or the goodwill or value-setting initiative of the obliged. The relationship itself grounds the special obligation;24 in so doing it pins me down like a butterfly and makes me the irreplaceable, unique self that I am. Kierkegaard sees the importance of special obligations in determining the self; yet, evidently special obligations cannot obviate general duties. Kierkegaard’s challenge is hence to formulate an ethics which reconciles the universality and impartiality of Kantian-style ethics with the personal attachment of the double gift of friendship. Now, can ethics address the special duties that arise from the individual’s personal relationships? Or is it destined to remain in the realm of the impartial, agent-neutral duties, and therefore, in Michael Stocker’s words, potentially end up in a “moral schizophrenia”?25 It appears that Kierkegaard’s interest in and thorough analysis of the nature of moral dilemmas is due to this very concern for the schizophrenic possibilities of friendship. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s problem with Kantian ethics is not only a religious problem with autonomy and the source of obligation: More fundamentally, he finds that Kantian ethics cannot accommodate the concrete singularity of ethical life—as manifested in the special obligations arising out of a relationship. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard raises the stakes (as he often does) by sharpening the dilemma: Is it possible for an action to transgress the moral law and yet be justifiable? Can ethics not be predicated on impartiality and still be defensible? What should I do if and when special obligations come to contradict the natural duties to which I am otherwise committed? Can we reconcile agapè with the particularity of the personal relationships we have built? Moral life is essentially, not accidentally, about moral dilemmas, and they constitute the greatest challenge to the moral will. Take Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous example, in Existentialism is a Humanism, of the young man torn between his patriotism and his duty to his bedridden mother: moral life and ethical decisions are primarily about dilemmas. One may view Fear and Trembling as an elucidation of moral dilemmas and, more specifically, of the moral dilemmas associated with special obligations. More generally, moral dilemmas abound in Kierkegaard’s authorship: for the young man in The Repetition, whether to marry the young lady or leave her; for Agamemnon, whether to sacrifice his daughter to appease the Gods or keep 24  Although arguably in Kierkegaard’s case the mediation of a third term—God or divine love—is the ultimate guarantee of the foundation. 25   Michael Stocker, “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,” The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 453–66.

58

Habbard

her alive and doom the city; for Abraham, whether to sacrifice his son in obedience to God’s command or disobey it; for the Delphi fiancé to whom the augurs had predicted a tragedy following his wedding, whether to celebrate the marriage nonetheless or break his promise; for the king in love with the young lady, whether to elevate her to him or go to her level; for the merman in love with Agnes, whether to choose hiddenness or disclosure; in the Two Ethico-Religious Treatises, for the beholder of truth, whether to die for it or refuse to let his fellow human beings become guilty of murder; and for Christ’s contemporary, whether to choose scandal or choose faith. A moral dilemma is never answered satisfactorily—which is why Kierkegaard adds that ethics inevitably ends up in repentance: You cannot but repent, since you are doomed to fail at least one of your duties. I have reasons to abide by one duty, but I have just as many reasons to abide by the other—and I cannot give satisfactory reasons as to why I should choose this duty over the other. To do what anyone could do is excellent, no doubt, but what do I do when I am in a position where only I can do this—and at the expense of another duty? Special obligations do not carry their own reasons as to why we choose them. And it is for this reason that we have the risk, the dilemma, and the heart wrenching debates with ourselves; this is why we inevitably have repentance. Should I have acted otherwise? Am I guilty or not guilty? (This last question is a title of another of Kierkegaard’s famous works). Whatever I do, I will fail one of my duties. Herein lies the fabric of the self and of the moral life: in the divergence of allegiances. I cannot be only a friend and accept only special obligations (in which case I wouldn’t be a friend anymore); but neither can I accept only universal, agent-neutral duties, where no one in particular matters to me. So Kierkegaard’s question becomes the following: How can we salvage friendship from the harsh hammer of the universal jurisdiction of morality—or, conversely, how can we save impartial duties from the tightening vise of special, private allegiances? A classical dilemma supposes two duties of equal weight, whereas the special obligations dilemma posits one duty which is unexplainable—and yet one is obliged. None of these choices carries moral necessity— it is, strictly speaking, an unjustifiable decision. I cannot justify why I choose this duty over that one, and the one who has been left behind will very rightly reproach me for having forsaken him. This is the undecidability of ethical life: Acting morally entails always being wrong because the multiplicity of my obligations, personal or impersonal, can never be fully satisfied. It seems like the demands of impartiality and the personal point of view cannot be systematically reconciled: A self cannot always stand in a non-alienated relationship to itself. Kierkegaard does not want to abandon universality, yet he is aware of its difficulty in the chain of reasoning. This is the real tragedy: However good my

The Singularity Of Friendship

59

will, I will fail because I cannot, in my finitude, accommodate both personal and impersonal obligations, and I will never be able to justify myself. (God, on the other hand, can satisfy both his impersonal duties and his special obligations because divinity is exempt from dilemmas). This, Kierkegaard would argue, is where the fragility, or rather the tragedy, of goodness lies. And there is no satisfactory solution. I can always rightfully be blamed, as I can always rightfully be praised. In the experience of the dilemma, the ultimate reason for my action cannot be made universal, nor can it be made intelligible and transparent: It calls for a singular, archetypal choice made by a singular conscience which will endorse the responsibility for its decision. Here lies the true meaning of responsibility, according to Kierkegaard: Responsibility arises in a decision that appears to the outsider as nothing but an arbitrary, subjective, 50/50, roll of the dice. Indeed, “the moment of decision becomes folly.”26 Kierkegaard’s ethics is concurrent: It is not experienced in the luminous Kantian aura of selfevidence; much to the contrary, it is lived as a conflict, as the tragic discord of values and norms. Now, enclosing myself at this stage is a real possibility. Kierkegaard finds that in this conflict lies the possible validity of the demonic’s position since any decision between the universal jurisdiction of morality and special obligations becomes unjustifiable, which cancels out duty. And this is where friendship resurfaces. It might be the source of the moral conflict, but it also offers its solution. Friendship is ever resourceful. The tragedy of moral conscience leads to the repentance of having failed one or the other of my moral obligations. Now this is the specificity of friendship: The friend is the one who will somehow accept my decision as being moral, however severely it might be judged by those who are not my friends. Kierkegaard mentions the mercifulness of love: Your friend will believe, without requiring reasons or evidence, that your failing was not due to moral weakness or to indecisiveness, but to the existence of an unseen moral dilemma, which you tried to solve as best you could, but which entailed a betrayal either way. He welcomes you in the very vulnerability of your choices, with the ever-present risk of misunderstanding. This is perhaps why the mediation of the other is so important and why friendship is so decisive: A friend, ultimately, will find the unjustifiability of one’s decision not only justifiable, but acceptable, and he will see, in the apparent immorality of the decision, the possibility of an effort at morality. The aporia of ethics is that it is anything but universally communicable and transparent; but remarkably enough, Kierkegaard also presents 26  Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 7 (1985), 52.

60

Habbard

us with the means of regenerating the torn consciousness: If the unity of consciousness is still to be made possible, if “becoming one” can still be held to be a real existential possibility, it is thanks to the presence of the other, friendly subject. The agent torn in the dilemma may be blocked by the lack of intelligibility of his own action, and may therefore be condemned to silence, but his friend can testify to what he has been through—not in the material aspect of the case, but in the ethical posture, or the uprightness, of his friend: “Abraham keeps silent—but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anguish. For if when I speak I am unable to make myself intelligible, then I am not speaking—even though I were to talk uninterruptedly day and night. Such is the case with Abraham. He is able to utter everything, but one thing he cannot say, i.e. say it in such a way that another understands it, and so he is not speaking.”27 I may not be able to make myself intelligible, because I am not able to speak in my own defence; but my friend can, and he can do so with a power of conviction that I will never have. My friend is my witness. Herein perhaps lies the difference between Fear and Trembling and Repetition: not just in the nature of the ordeal, of course, but also in the nature of the observer and the status of the discourse on the ordeal. Constantin Constantius claims to understand the young man’s inner turmoil, but condemns it and remains “cold and impassive”; meanwhile, the narrator of Abraham’s story consistently refuses to judge or criticise Abraham’s decision, however shocking it may appear to the moral observer (and let us not forget Abraham is ready to kill his son); and yet he talks about it rather abundantly. One of the Three Edifying Discourses published the same day as both Fear and Trembling and Repetition emphasises how observing does not merely consist in discovering, but, just as much, in producing or activating something. Friendship is like quantum physics; the nature of the observer is decisive, and “the more the object of observation belongs to the world of spirit, the more important is the way [the observer] is constituted in his innermost nature.”28 The friend’s observation brings forth his failing friend’s turmoil through his act of witnessing and thus appeases it—or, at the very least, lays out a possible future reunification of the moral consciousness through his narrative. Coinciding with oneself, becoming contemporary with oneself, is only possible through the mediation of a friend. A friend might mishear or misunderstand me, but he can perhaps also, at times, bear witness to my moral fortitude and tell my story. Friendship opens the possibility of repetition by allowing the individual to recover the integrity of a being previously frayed in the moral 27  Fear and Trembling, 130. 28  Eighteen Edifying Discourses, 60.

The Singularity Of Friendship

61

dilemma: The friend “opens, for the self, a way to himself,” according to Jean Nabert.29 The friend produces his own route for his friend to recover his lost unity through his own appropriation and interpretation of his friend’s story. This is why the notions of communication and contemporaneity are tightly correlated in Kierkegaard’s mind: Ethical and ethico-religious communication is not an accidental footnote in the process of my becoming a self; I become a self by becoming contemporaneous with, or finding the same temporality as, my friend, to whom I communicate and who in turn is able to communicate about me—more than, and better than, I myself can. Abraham may not speak, but he does communicate; and as The Concept of Anxiety notes, freedom is always in—and an—open communication. I learn what it means to be free through communicating—to a friend. It might not be the type of communication that is intelligible and transparent to all, but this is precisely the specific ability of the friend: He can see, and hear, what others cannot. It is a communication to which my friend will be able to bear witness. In his diary, Kierkegaard notes that “the instant occurs when the person is here, the person needed”;30 and who is more needed than the friend? Becoming myself depends on the possibility of the “person needed” to be there, to be co-present, and to hear me. I am not the proprietor of my existence: My life’s narrative is the work of my friends. Perhaps Kierkegaard’s crucial category of singularity can be read in a new light: The singularity that truly matters is not so much that of the individual (which would lead us straight back to a problematic metaphysics of identity), but to that of the ethical decision as exemplified in the moral dilemma opened by special obligations. Friendship creates its own ethical problems—the special obligations—but it also has resources not only to overcome these problems, but to reunify the self wounded in the process. If repetition is to be made possible, it can, in the end, only occur through the mediation of another voice, a friendly voice, telling one’s story: The redoubling of friendship allows for a repetition of the self. Repetition is possible because friendship is the redoubling, it is the repetition. This is the difference between the knight of resignation and the knight of faith mentioned in Fear and Trembling: While the knight of resignation is resigned to the misunderstanding—no one will ever be able to understand the monstrous dilemma to which he is subjected—the knight of faith trusts that someone will listen to him, be able to tell his story, and bear witness to the fact that he did not act by a lack of ethics, but by an “excess”;

29  Jean Nabert, Eléments pour une éthique (Paris: Aubier, 1992), 178. 30  Pap. XI 2 A 405. (My translation).

62

Habbard

he will bear witness to the reasons for the knight’s actions which the knight himself could not give. Herein lies the luminous beauty and the tragic insecurity of friendship. References Buruma, Ian. “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood.” New York Review. April 8, 1999. Cugno, Alain. “A quelles conditions peut-on fonder l’éthique sur la singularité?” Paper presented at the conference Søren Kierkegaard, Pensée et Problèmes de l’éthique, Université de Lille 3, November 2005. Grøn, Arne. “Amour et reconnaissance dans Les Œuvres de l’Amour.” In Søren Kierkegaard: Pensée et Problèmes de l’Éthique. Edited by Anne-Christine Habbard and Jacques Message. 97–115. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2009. Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard’s Writings. 26 Vols. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978–2000. ———. Soren Kierkegaards Papirer. Edited by P.A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr et al. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909–1948; 1968–1970; 1975–1978. Nabert, Jean. Eléments pour une éthique. Paris: Aubier, 1992. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990. Scheffler, Samuel. “Relationships and Responsibilities.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997): 189–209. Stocker, Michael. “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories.” The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 453–66. Whiting, Jenifer. “Impersonal Friends.” The Monist 74 (1991): 3–29.

CHAPTER 4

“A Garçon has the Whole World for a Bride” Or: On the Bliss of Marriage Walter Jaeschke 1 “How can fire help that it’s burning?”1 Who would hesitate to answer such a question? Of course: it can’t. After all, gone are the days when a Persian king could order the sea to be lashed when its strong waves prevent his fleet from sailing to Greece, delaying his intended conquest by a couple of days.2 Fire cannot help that it burns, and its innocence also unquestionably applies to more than simply burning. After all, fire does not only burn something, it incinerates it or at least melts it: like a waxen house god that is forgotten next to a fire that was lit for the annealing of precious vessels3 or perhaps only for cooking food. Fire lends constancy, it warms, it renders palatable, but it also disturbs—and who would reproach it for that? If it could speak, it would even advance an important apology in its favour: Whether it warms or disturbs, it always remains true to its nature—the fire is not to blame, but to blame are those who come too close to it, whether it’s beneficent or whether its disturbing potencies become actuality. A century later, in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, this game of question and answer is acted out once more in a literary way:4 How can the strong help that they are strong? They can’t. And therefore it would not only be foolish, but also completely absurd, to ask that the strong disavow their strength—that the eagles pose as lambs, or, indeed, that fire not burn altogether. The fire that we are discussing here—as you may have already surmised—is not the physical phenomenon, but rather the fire of love. Perhaps this erotic fire is but a physical fire, if only a very special kind. However that may be, to repeat the question more specifically: How can the fire of love help that it burns? The answer here is analogical: It can’t. It burns where and as long as it desires; often * Translated from the German by Joris Spigt. 1  He, 382. 2  See Herodotus, The Histories, VII.35. 3  He, 6. 4  Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), Sec. 1, §13. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_006

64

Jaeschke

it burns especially intensely where it receives no nourishment, and perhaps it may ultimately consume itself. And when the fire burns, it does not ask about social convention and it certainly does not ask about the teachings of the philosophising upholder of moral standards, who wants to subject human beings to their self-fabricated “tyrannical disciplinarian,” to “reason,” and, from his philosophical chair, with his categorical imperatives, to command everyone to be something that they have never been.5 But why should one be tyrannised by those teachings—or: “Why do we have to be so bound and pay for every drip of lust with doleful outcry!”6 This is indeed not evident at all. And thus, then, the fire of love speaks (and I quote, of course, still from the same book): “Am I culpable, for wanting to be united with beauty, where I find it? Is this not the noblest drive of our spirit? Is he not wretched, god forsaken, who does not have this drive, does not exercise it? In what kind of world do I live in which this would be a natural vice? It is the mere civil order, spoiling people!” And, against this restrictive civil order, the one burning in love appeals to the “divine Plato” and prays to him to realise his republic, “where at least man and wife are holy and free with their love.”7 It is of course questionable whether it is so obvious that Plato’s state should be thought of as a more attractive option than modernity’s civil order. In one respect, this view has a good grounds (or perhaps nothing but the appearance of a good ground): Plato’s “state” is unfamiliar with the restriction of sexuality to civic marriage—and even such civic marriage is, for the “free spirit” of the one burning in love, “the living death.” “Death”: This is most certainly not the least, but rather the most definitive form of disruption. The fire therefore is not that which disrupts, but the “civil order” itself that human beings have established to domesticate multiple forms of fire, including the fire of love: In truth, the civil order is that which disrupts. And other than fire, one can very well ask whether this civil order can refrain from causing disruption. Of course, it is guilty of that disruption, since it is a “mere civil order” and therefore an “artificial” order and not “nature.” However, once this mechanism of disruption is seen as contradictory to nature, there is actually no grounds at all for letting marriage, as “living death,” continue to actualise its disruptive effects. The way out of this “prison” would then be wide open; when the object—and I consciously say “the object”—of love finds himself trapped in such captivity, then that would, should the need arise, give him cause to swing himself over the wall of this prison, with an 5  Ibid., 121. 6  Ibid., 108. 7  Ibid., 111.

“ A Garçon Has The Whole World For A Bride ”

65

inspired “meglio ancora” and a sneering laugh, like Don Giovanni in the eponymous opera. And only once that is achieved can the later—at first only sounding rebelliously triumphant—statement of the Protestant pastor Friedrich Schleiermacher that a “garçon” has “the whole world for a bride”8 prove itself to be an exclamation that is already restricted, broken, and even castrated by the “mere” civil juridical and moral order. Leaving this point to one side, we can see that this exclamation does not just contain a beacon of libertinism: It is in truth a somewhat helpless attempt to console oneself in an uncomfortable situation and give oneself the assurance that there will one day be freedom from the unfortunate situation of having the world for a bride and that the bliss of marriage will one day be enjoyed. Nevertheless, why would only the “garçon” have “the whole world for a bride”? It is only possible under the artificial, unnatural conditions of the reign of the civil order that the privilege to have “the whole world for a bride” would be restricted to the “garçon”—but why? Where on the other side one, following one’s nature, asserts one’s natural “right to everything”—where the “power to enjoy” “gives right to every thing,” the unnatural character of this fatal restriction is perspicuous. Insisting on this (higher?) right of nature, the one “entirely subjected and overwhelmed by irresistible love,” who has approached his beloved—finely named “Lucinde”—via an illicit path, seeks to set aside her scruples—by means of an “argumentation, that is not foreign to seducers” (as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would later put it):9 “Why can two people like us not be together without sin! Why must there always be a wall of bricks and clothes and mechanical society between us?” And he implores her: “Imagine how the blessed are in heaven, and how our first parents were. All of this”— walls, clothes, and civil morality as such—“only functions when one belongs to the crowd.”10 Due to its repression, the unnatural civil order may always reveal itself as the natural order. And so the fire burns, innocent by nature, and, just as naturally, it leaves behind a trail—of destruction. Who would want to painstakingly sum up and list, like a bookkeeper, all who lose their lives due to the fire of love throughout the course of this book—whether it be by their own fire or by someone else’s that crosses their path! In the overall balance of the human race, their lives 8  Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (hereinafter “KGA”), Sec. V, Vol. 8: Briefwechsel 1804–1806 (Briefe 1831–2172), ed. Andreas Arndt and Simon Gerber (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 7. 9  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §164, Addition. 10  He, 117.

66

Jaeschke

are by no means worth mentioning further—since for every murdered one, at least one new human being comes into existence, and nature furthermore has no problems with the fact that among most of the new citizens of earth, very few, among their family and friends, know who their real father is. The fire burns, destroys, and creates new things—until it is carried onto the “blissful islands,” on which the fire, under the conditions of a new environment, a new religion, and a new climate, loses none of its heat but all of its disturbing power because it now burns beyond the “mere civil order” and, free from its restrictions, only blazes all the more brightly. But in fact, it blazes not entirely without restriction: One—figuring as “civil”—restriction remains intact. The fire can burn to one’s heart’s content wherever it so desires, yet it may not forge its path with force—but actually there is no reason at all now for it to do so. And so, then, the fiery streams of love, coming from so many regions, finally flow together in this place, where they form, to adopt a catchy phrase dating from the early years of Romanticism, “an interesting scrambled egg.”11 However, it is then not really interesting anymore, equally not surprising, and least of all a pity that the book ends with serving these “scrambled eggs.” One could assume that the author in this way spoke his only and last word about love—and that would not be wrong, but it would also not be completely right. Because one ingredient does not let itself—contrary to the course of the book’s narrative—be mixed into the “scrambled eggs”: the episode with Lucinde. Lucinde is, to a high degree, lucky enough to be such that “many have caught on fire due to her, and are lustful up to the point of infatuation for her Ambrosia and Nectar.”12 Yet such lustfulness and infatuation barely affect her: Lucinde’s love is of a different kind. She refuses to partake in the game of catching on fire, getting scorched, and being incinerated, the process of ever-increasing ignition and equally rapid extinguishing. She also loves, but her love is of such a type and strength that even the fire, which otherwise does not bother to care about the object that it disturbs, experiences its own limits with respect to it—the fire retreats powerlessly in the face of this love in both moments of the narrative, separated by a long interval, where the fire could have seized the object for which it so ardently burned. Later on, Lucinde’s love—so entirely different—leads her to an “extremely blissful” marriage.13 The bliss of love— which is at the same time the bliss of marriage—is thus also found on this side of the “blissful islands,” and hence—who would have still expected it?—even under the conditions of the civil order. 11  Friedrich Schlegel to Friedrich Schleiermacher (after 20 July 1798) [KGA, Sec. V, Vol. 2, 363]. 12  He, 108. 13  Ibid., 391.

“ A Garçon Has The Whole World For A Bride ”

67

2 A good decade before Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello and the Blissful Islands14— we have up until now spoken of the plot of this book, as you have undoubtedly recognized—when the “Sturm und Drang” period was at its peak and when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Werther came out, another book was published. It was not quite as “stormy” as—and even less “stressful” than—Heinse’s work, but in its time it was just as influential, despite the fact that we have almost forgotten about it today. It went by the succinct title On Marriage.15 The opposition between the two books could not have been greater. Nevertheless, surprising similarities can be noted, albeit all on a formal level: Both books were published anonymously, and, another curiosity, both authors appear to have learned their subject matter from hearsay rather than from experiences in their personal lives. It was in each case a “garçon” who, in the first case, wrote about love, and in the second case, about marriage. In addition, what makes the matter philosophically juicy, is that in the first case, the author was a “garçon” from the circle of friends of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who was anything but happy about Heinse’s literary libertinism, and in the second case, the author was part of the circle of friends of an even more famous thinker, Immanuel Kant. It turns out, then, that the author of On Marriage was Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, who was a criminal counselor when his book had first been published and who was later the mayor of Königsberg in Prussia. So much for the similarities; the “fabulae docent” of both works are strictly opposed each other: While the first sings the song of love, the second sings the song of marriage. Nevertheless, much is said about love in the second book, just as in the first book much is said about marriage. In Ardinghello and the Blissful Islands, there are ephemeral tangencies, even if they only serve to show the phenomenon of mutual repulsion. In On Marriage, “love” has “pleasure as its highest end”—a point which Heinse would not contest; the difference between the two authors concerns the question of whether or not such pleasure is actually a legitimate “highest end.” For Heinse, the answer to that question is self-evident; for Hippel, however, precisely because love targets “pleasure,” love is “a transient need, a stroll to get some exercise.”16 And against putting love on a pedestal, Hippel stresses that “the real joy of living on earth is the true philosopher’s 14  Wilhelm Heinse, Ardinghello and the Blissful Islands: An Italian Story from the Sixteenth Century (Lemgo: Meyer, 1787). (Referred to in this paper as “He”). 15  Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, Collected Works. Vol. 5. On Marriage (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1828). (Referred to in this paper as “Hi”). 16  Hi, 108.

68

Jaeschke

stone that one cannot find except in marriage.”17 This comment notwithstanding, Hippel, too, does not bluntly deny that marriage entails a certain “moment of enforcement”—a concept that for instance finds expression in the question he asks an adulterer: “Who forced you to join the monastery of marriage? Were you not long enough in the novitiate?” The “monastery of marriage”—for Heinse, it is “the living death;” for Hippel, it is the presupposition for a “real joy of living on earth.” And what is more: Heinse ships his genius society, hungry for love if not outright love-crazed, to the “blissful islands,” to the Aegean shores, where they, far from the civil order of enforcement, can live the escapist life of which they dreamed. Hippel, by contrast, leaves the partners of marriage to the shores of the Baltic Sea (or wherever they are staying) because “marriage brings everything out of the region of genius into the railway of common life, and those who walk there are the truly blessed (beati), since only by staying on the middle path can one practice to bear life with all of its points and clauses and stay the same throughout spring, summer, autumn and winter.”18 The “blissful islands” of the “truly blessed” are, as it were, everywhere where marriage is taken seriously and is recognised as the decisive moment that structures human life. And whoever is not able to recognise that fact and act accordingly can just as well save himself the trip to Naxos and Paros, as he would find yonder nothing other than that from which he flees. 3 Denouncing the pretenses of geniuses, the praise of the “middle path” of “common life”—or, to speak with a sharp tongue, the praise of mediocrity—all of this does not exactly make the hearts and senses of contemporary readers beat faster. Does the advocate of love, enthused and hungry for love, not appear all the more “attractive,” all the more “modern” in the eyes of the boring, indeed even sulky advocate of marriage? There is no doubt as to what choice the Homeric Paris would have made with respect to this dual constellation, at the crossroads of love and marriage, although he would presumably have met with the same disastrous consequences that resulted from his decision in favour of Aphrodite. Even a more intensive study of Hippel’s On Marriage would probably not have changed the Trojan’s decision, not merely due to the (still relevant) reason that Hippel mentions, namely, that “even stupid eyes, by means of the magnifying glass of hermeneutics, tend to find all that ought to 17  Ibid., 114. 18  Ibid., 191.

“ A Garçon Has The Whole World For A Bride ”

69

be found.”19 In that case, it would still have been demonstrated that, for Hippel, marriage—despite all the hymns of praise that he sings for it—is in fact not the highest end, but rather a means: a means to people states, “populate” them as they said back then, in view of the interest to promote common prosperity by means of civil labour—and one can additionally suspect another goal: to fill the ranks of the regiments again that were thinned out by numerous wars. Yet, the decision at hand is perhaps not as easily made as it has been suggested. The strict code of morals to which Hippel binds the couples once they, upon expiration of their novitiate, finally commit to entering the “monastery of marriage,” cannot be easily relativised or wholly ignored. Above all, the Biblical tradition constitutes the background of such morals, both the command “be fruitful and multiply” as well as “you shall not commit adultery”—Hippel altogether equates adultery with “perjury.”20 But here, it is not only the Biblical tradition that speaks: Some of his phrases are reminiscent of the philosopher to which the later mayor of Königsberg had listened to as a student and with whom he would later have close social contact: Kant, who had a strict conception of morality. A Kantian spirit inhabits Hippel’s “monastery of marriage.” One does not have to find apt or even attractive that which Kant elaborated on marriage in his Metaphysics of Morals.21 That, however, would not relativise the strict demand of the moral law. And that this demand, made from the heights of a chair in philosophy, does not accept how man is by nature—but how man should be as a moral being, even if he has never been so and perhaps never will be so—is ultimately the entire meaning of a normative ethics, even if Heinse contests this, alleges that “nature” suffices, and seeks to detract nature from the demands of moral reason. There is another aspect that precedes the parting of the ways of love and marriage, or more precisely, love à la Heinse and marriage à la Hippel: the image that they respectively draw up of the relation between man and woman. The fact that this relation is not symmetrical for both authors—as they are both men from the late eighteenth century(!)—does not call for long confessions and apologies. From our current perspective, this can offend someone, but that is how it was back then, and it was moreover based on a conviction that dates back to prehistoric times—and how much that has really changed 19  Ibid., 106–07. 20  Ibid., 104. 21  Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VI, ed. The Prussian Academy of Sciences (Berlin. G. Reimer, 1797), 277 (= §24). Marriage is a contract concerning “the conjunction of two persons of different sexes to ensure [lebenswierig] mutual possession of the properties of each other’s gender.”

70

Jaeschke

since that time is, as it is generally known, a topic of discussions that do not seem to want to end and perhaps cannot end in principle. Despite the common basis for both authors’ ideas, which lies not simply in the fact that both of them allocate roles specific to each gender, but also in their asymmetrical evaluation of these roles, there are still some striking differences between their accounts. Hippel’s image of the woman is a mixture of some of his own observations and assessments with traditional beliefs. He founds his plea for marriage among other things on the belief that, for the woman, entering into marriage is an act of liberation from the slavery in the house of her parents.22 “Slavery in the house of the parents”—this unquestionably sounds quite harsh, and it is surely in many cases disproportionately harsh. Yet overall, this phrase might describe the state of affairs back then quite realistically. The fate of the unmarried woman—and in fact she would, back then, not really count as a “woman,” but rather as a strange genderless hermaphrodite between girl and woman(!)— in the house of her parents was, back in the day, indeed undesirable. And when that role would finally come to its natural end with the death of the parents, then that which would follow it would in most cases be a further step in the direction of “slavery.”23 For this reason, Hippel also speaks of a “liberation” that, by virtue of the step of marriage, woman’s “nature”—according to his conception thereof—becomes realised: her “nature” which makes her destined for marriage and raising children. Here lies the core of the asymmetry between man and woman: The step into marriage is a step into the “monastery of marriage” for the man, whereas that step is an act of “liberation” for the woman by virtue of the fact that she becomes that which she is by her very nature. Out of this different assessment of “nature” follow asymmetries concerning how both sexes comport themselves toward each other. Even when the “garçon” can have “the whole world for a bride,” there is still one practical restriction in effect for him (at least insofar as he deduces far reaching concessions from his not yet restricted legal status): “Polygyny is not advisable; polyandry, however, is one of the darkest vices in the world.”24 And this asymmetry still remains after entering into marriage: Man’s word, according to Hippel, binds him, whereas

22  Hi, 120–21. 23  This can be surmised from the biography of Christiane Hegel, even though she undoubtedly was extolled from the normal course of events. See Alexandra Birkert, Hegels Schwester: Auf den Spuren einer ungewöhnlichen Frau um 1800 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2008). 24  Hi, 120.

“ A Garçon Has The Whole World For A Bride ”

71

the woman binds her nature.25 The man, one could continue to elaborate, follows his nature when he commits adultery, yet breaches his oath—but that is also highly punishable in the eyes of Hippel (who was, after all, a criminal counselor). The prohibition of adultery therefore applies to both sexes with full severity, but it applies for different reasons and therefore also in different moral respects: in the former case as a breach of oath and in the latter case as an infringement of nature. Whether or to what extent a woman’s “nature” itself could have been shaped by historical allotment of gender roles is not yet an issue for Hippel; however, as we noted above, it was not yet an issue for his contemporaries and for thinkers for a long time to come. Notwithstanding this fact, a more characteristic and very sympathetic feature of Hippel is that in the later and more comprehensive editions of his book—from 1790 onward—he no longer conceives of the presumed difference of the roles that are bound to a specific sex as implying asymmetry in the legal status of the sexes. Nature may have allotted them different roles, but in their unnatural, moral lives, they hold the same rank. Before this turn, though, apropos of Hippel’s earlier presentations on the “reign of man”—which were readily read by the man’s world of that time and, in terms of content, widely shared—at the end of the eighteenth century, for the woman, the fatal question arises: Should she emigrate from Königsberg (and its broader Central European environment) to the South, to Heinse’s “blissful islands,” in order to live a life under the protection of “Love and Beauty.” Yet what awaits her there? According to Heinse, educated in the constitutions of Ancient Greece as well as of various modern states, the situation is decisively less complex over there than in Europe during early modernity: “Good order was taken care of; men and women lived separate from each other. To the women and children we assigned the whole of Naxos, the most beautiful pearl of all the islands [. . .] It appeared that all was already set up by nature for us. Naxos did not have a harbor for ships”—and this is not, as one might suppose, a disadvantage, but a warranty provided by precautious nature so as to prevent other sailors from suddenly undertaking an extended land excursion: “Only the barques of the lovers can disembark.”26 Now such an organisation of nature, allotting different islands to different sexes as places to live, is perhaps not wholly to every man’s—or woman’s—taste. And the same goes for the specification that, if it is not possible to “attain” sexual satisfaction “in a peaceful way,” one has “to do whatever it takes thereto”—because without satisfaction, one ultimately neither preserves oneself nor the human species 25  Ibid., 122. 26  He, 392.

72

Jaeschke

as a whole.27 But Heinse also makes his case with political arguments in favour of the order that is both desired by and in service to nature: “The women also have a voice concerning common affairs, and are not treated as mere slaves.” Yet with respect to this manifestly far-reaching magnanimous condescension, to not treat women as mere slaves, Heinse, to appease the male islanders— who are already a tad beset by this remark—adds that the women admittedly have “only ten percent” of the votes—such that this should not cause a profound anxiety on the part of the male world of the “blissful islands.” And he confirms this excellent measure by the following assurance: “Such is the way that love spread her wings with utmost freedom.”28 4 “Love”: If further proof had to be provided, it is now given. In his entire work, Heinse does not speak of “love,” despite the fact that it is dedicated to love and beauty—save for the episode with Lucinde. This episode can be summarised by the proposition familiar from the Emblematics: “perfectus amor non est nisi ad unum.” And yet Heinse relegates this conception of love to a truly marginal second rank; he ultimately shows a lack of interest in and understanding of it. (The charm and imperishable worth of his book consequently lies, mentioned here for completeness’s and justness’s sake, in his eminent descriptions of paintings and not in the utterly problematic—partly historically motivated to be sure—plot in which he incorporates them.) Out of the confusing pursuit of burning and being burned, no picture of love arises; only the putrid smell of metaphorically burned and actually decayed flesh lingers in the air. And in retrospect, that cannot come as a complete surprise: Whoever conceives of love—like Heinse—as something merely natural, that is, as the natural fire that, despite its disruptive effects, innocently burns, will experience the greatest difficulty in ever catching sight of love. But that does not mean that the marriage between beauty and love, at which Heinse’s book indeed aims, has disintegrated—the marriage between beauty and love, on the contrary, has never been formalised and has already failed before it has even begun.29

27  Ibid., 395. 28  Ibid., 393. 29  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with respect to Heinse’s Ardinghello: “I strongly disliked it [Ardinghello] because it sought to ennoble and extol sensibility and abstruse ways of thinking by means of the plastic arts.” [Zur Naturwissenschaft: Allgemeine Naturlehre, in

“ A Garçon Has The Whole World For A Bride ”

73

On the other hand, in Hippel one does not make a discovery in the search for love either. This could have to do with some personal disappointments in matters of love about which we are comparatively well informed—at least better than in the case of Heinse. However, regardless of what has ultimately given us this disappointing result, in Hippel’s eyes, it discredits love such that it—as I have already noted—“merely [has] enjoyment as its end goal”; for him, love is “a transient need, a stroll to get some exercise”30 and therefore a type of stroll to digest. The best that can be said about love is that it can function as a kind of preamble to marriage and, in that case, receive its justification from marriage. Of marriage, on the other hand, Hippel talks in superlatives—for the length of the entire book. It is certainly hard to get rid of the impression that these superlatives do not really hit the target that they praise, or, to be more accurate, resonate with the notions that we nowadays associate with the word “marriage”—and this for the reasons stated above: Hippel ultimately sees marriage—in all the words of praise that he can find for it(!)—only within a framework that is structured on practical considerations concerning everyday life and concerning the discovery of what is useful (i.e., as a means to survive). The woman enters into marriage because she thereby escapes “the slavery in the house of the parents” and because it conforms to her nature;31 marriage is the path of “common life,” the “middle path,” on which one practices “to bear life with all of its points and clauses and stay the same throughout spring, summer, autumn and winter.”32 This may have been, generally speaking, an apt assessment back then, and it is certainly not nothing, but it is nevertheless not enough—substantially not enough. 5 And still, amidst the lengthy discussions concerning the virtues of the man and the virtues of the woman, as well as the domination of the man and all the other things that one can associate with “marriage,” there is one place—mentioned in passing and not further elaborated on—where one finds a thought for which one searches in vain in Heinse: the husband and the wife constitute, so

Goethes Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1893), Sec. II, Vol. 11]. 30  Hi, 108. 31  Ibid., 120–21. 32  Ibid., 191.

74

Jaeschke

it is said, “one person.”33 How does one arrive at this specification—and what does it mean? The prospect that husband and wife will become “one flesh” has been well known since the Creation (Gen. 2:24). If one does not—anachronistically—interpret this in terms of Paul’s complex notion of “flesh,” but rather takes it as naturalistic, as it is unquestionably intended, then it does not, as is well known, take two spouses for one flesh to come into being, but merely a man and one, but not his, woman. Indisputably, then, something completely different from the predication that spouses constitute “one person” is thereby envisioned by this expression. Yet, exactly what is being said with the phrase “one person”? This phrase could be understood in purely juridical terms—an assumption that is easily made with this author, considering that the law was his field. In that case, the phrase would mean that the husband and wife form a common will that legally acts as an undifferentiated unity, jointly takes responsibility for their actions, and has to carry that responsibility jointly, if necessary. It seems to me, however, that the point of the passage in which we find this phrase betrays something more than a mere juridical personality—all the more so as it is not at all clear whether one can find this idea in the juridical texts of that time. While it is not fully clear as to when and in what context the idea that the partners in a marriage constitute one person was introduced and anchored in our thinking, it appears to me that transitioning from the formula “one flesh” to the formula “one person” was a decisive step in this process. It presupposes the formation of the modern conception of personhood—found both in Thomas Hobbes and in John Locke, as well as in Samuel Pufendorf (who was part of the modern tradition of natural law that followed in the English philosophers’ footsteps)—but the formula “one person” is incongruent with Hobbes’s and Locke’s conception of personhood. If I am correct, it is also incongruent with Pufendorf’s view. With Pufendorf’s conceptual tools, it is obviously easy to proceed from the idea of the “persona moralis” to the more complex idea of “persona moralis composita”—and every formal fusion of singular, natural human beings is the formation of such a “persona moralis composita.” But, it is precisely for this reason that the expression that the marriage partners constitute “one person” claims something principally different than the concept of the “persona moralis composita.” If one were to adapt this terminology, one would have to phrase it such that the partners in a marriage constitute “one person” and indeed not a “composite person”—otherwise, it would be barely worth mentioning, as there are “composite persons” everywhere. Yet, it is exactly this specification that the partners in a marriage constitute one person is something I do not find in Pufendorf’s discussion of spousal 33  Ibid., 116.

“ A Garçon Has The Whole World For A Bride ”

75

duties. Just as it was a century later in Hippel, in Pufendorf, the main biblically coloured emphasis concerning marriage lies on procreation, even if it is always—although it may sound paradoxical to our ears—supplemented by the specification that it is man’s duty to “love his wife, guarantee her livelihood, and to guide and defend her,” whereas it is the woman’s duty “to love her husband, to take care of him, have children with him, and to stand by his side when it comes to teaching them discipline.” In the expression “the duty to love,” it would be virtually impossible to make the change in meaning of the word “love” at around 1800 any more intuitive. This is, however, not first and foremost the achievement of Romanticism—even if that is claimed time and again. Indeed, Mozart’s Constanze points Bassa Selim—as is well known, not the most ignorant person(!)—to his misapprehension: “As if one could command someone to love!” During the entire “Sturm und Drang” period and in the sentimentality genre, an understanding of “love” is to be presupposed which we nowadays mostly and unjustly call “romantic”—an understanding that dates back to the last third of the eighteenth century. For Pufendorf, however, “the close character of the union [that] requires the spouses to be partners in good and bad fortune alike” follows out of nature34—but they do not constitute one person. And even a century after Pufendorf, in the time of Hippel and Kant, it appears that the frequently found expression of the “one person” can still not be given any special meaning. “One person” appears to me to be the expression in which love—and I say “love” and not Ardinghello-Heinse’s fire(!)—and marriage were thought together. “One person”: that does not only mean the natural, earthly-realistic instance in which two human beings become “one flesh”; it also does not merely mean, with Pufendorf, “to be partners in good and bad fortune alike,” just as much as it does not mean, with Hippel, that one practices “on the middle path” of life, “bearing life with all of its points and clauses and to stay the same throughout spring, summer, autumn and winter,”35 since the latter case entails the premise for the common formation of a character fit to live a Stoic or even Cynic lifestyle—and yet, the mutual relation of the partners in a marriage is left entirely untouched. Finally, it also does not merely mean to externally appear as a unity by virtue of a common declaration of the will. Rather, it means that the previously separated persons overcome their natural duality and conjoin with one another in such a way that they become an integral part

34  Samuel von Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law, ed. J. Tully and trans. M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 123 (= §10). 35  Hi, 191.

76

Jaeschke

of the otherwise different person—each person’s personality fuses with the other’s personality and finds itself in the other’s personality. “Perfectus amor non est nisi ad unum”! In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel explicates the condition for the person to become one in his discussion of marriage and the family as follows: Marriage is essentially monogamy, because it is personality or immediate exclusive singularity [Einzelheit] which enters into and surrenders itself to this relationship, whose truth and inwardness [. . .] consequently arise only out of the mutual and undivided surrender of this personality. The latter attains its right of being conscious of itself in the other only in so far as the other is present in this identity as a person, i.e. as atomic individuality.36 One could capture the same thought in an abbreviated manner by means of the colloquial expression “fully giving oneself”—and that expression can already be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (Ch. 6). Yet it makes “all the difference in the world” whether, in marital love, both partners give themselves “fully” or whether the expression “fully giving oneself” refers to the civil, “full externalization of every member with all their rights to the polity as a whole”—like it does in Rousseau. And for sure, no one would expect a “mutual and undivided surrender this personality with respect to” society (to modify the Hegelian phrase we just cited above). “Mutual and undivided surrender of personality” is an expression that does not merely concern love and marriage, but marital love, and an expression that makes two persons into “one person” and presupposes a long history of thinking rather than social development. Only at around 1800, specific concepts were formed—especially the concepts of self-consciousness and personhood—such that this expression became possible and could be given concrete meaning. In that case, one can surmise from Hegel’s expression why it is to no avail that the “garçon” has “the whole world for a bride.” One could indeed reply to the theological bachelors with the biblical expression: “to what aid would it be for him, to win the ‘whole world’ [for a bride]?” He would surely not be able to bring love as the “mutual undivided surrender of personality” to realisation. Hegel’s expression, however, also makes clear that the marital partners are not brought to the “bliss of marriage” when and in so far as they keep walking on the “middle path” of enduring the toils of everyday life and 36  Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §167. On Hegel’s position, see Eva Bockenheimer, Hegels Familien- und Geschlechtertheorie (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2013).

“ A Garçon Has The Whole World For A Bride ”

77

the propagation of utility, as per Hippel’s strict instructions—even if they doggedly cultivate the biblical commandment of procreation. Furthermore, one can surmise from Hegel’s expression that even the inhabitants of the “blessed islands,” in spite of or perhaps even due to their eager studies of the ancient constitutions and their (alleged) orientation toward them instead of the modern concept of subject or person, follow the misleading path toward love, by living on different islands, allegedly for the sake of love. But more importantly, they follow the misleading path toward love by taking the path to the “commonly shared surrender of bodies” instead of taking the path of “undivided surrender of personality.” And finally, Hegel’s expression has—and this should not be downplayed nowadays—another merit, which unquestionably did not cross Hegel’s own mind, but which has become relevant in our times: Differing from other assertions made by Hegel, this particular expression does not refer to the idea that there is a natural difference between the sexes. And this, I think, is the position that is attained in the development of the Spirit—again to use a Hegelian phrase—“for now.”37 We can wait with greater ease for the answer to the questions of if and when the Spirit will take its next step—or whether it will better suit it to at least take a rest here before moving on. And yet, resting does not seem to be its elixir of life. References Birkert, Alexandra. Hegels Schwester: Auf den Spuren einer ungewöhnlichen Frau um 1800. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2008. Bockenheimer, Eva. Hegels Familien- und Geschlechtertheorie. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2013 (= Hegel-Studien. Beiheft 59). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Zur Naturwissenschaft: Allgemeine Naturlehre. In Goethes Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe. Sec. II, Vol. 11. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1893. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. In Sämtliche Werke. Vol. XV. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1836. ———. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen Wood and translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Heinse, Wilhelm. Ardinghello and the Blissful Islands: An Italian Story from the Sixteenth Century. Lemgo: Meyer, 1787. Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Josef Feix. Wiesbaden: Emil Vollmer, 1980. 37  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in Sämtliche Werke, Vol. XV (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1836), 690.

78

Jaeschke

Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von. Collected Works. 8 Vols. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1828–1839. Kant, Immanuel. Metaphysics of Morals. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 6. Edited by The Prussian Academy of Sciences. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1914. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Zur Genealogie der Moral. Edited by William David Williams. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. Pufendorf, Samuel von. On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law. Edited by J. Tully and translated by M. Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Sec. V, Vol. 8: Briefwechsel 1804– 1806 (Briefe 1831–2172). Edited by Andreas Arndt and Simon Gerber. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.

part 2 Aesthetics and Ethics in the Context of German Idealism

∵

CHAPTER 5

“Remember that All Poetry is to Be Regarded as a Work of Love”: Ethics and Aesthetics in Schleiermacher Andreas Arndt 1 Philosophers are not usually written up in tabloid newspapers. It might come, then, as quite a surprise to see an author like Friedrich Schleiermacher mentioned in an article bearing the intriguing title “The Desire for the Forbidden: Sex Completely Differently—As Described by Women.”1 This text, published in the beginning of 1993 in Munich’s AZ newspaper, was not, by the way, the product of male fantasy; the article, from a series entitled “Women Tell of Love,” was actually written by a woman. But what does Schleiermacher have to do with this topic? First, we know that Schleiermacher himself adhered to the early Romantic notion of androgyny and that he held his own feminine in high esteem, and second, we know that his friends jokingly referred to him as the “feminine partner” in reference to his relationship to Friedrich Schlegel, with whom he shared an apartment in Berlin.2 These details, however, are unlikely to have been in the author’s mind when writing the article. Rather, she referred to Schleiermacher—more precisely to his anonymously published Intimate Letters on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde3 from 1800—in order to reclaim, as she puts it, a “human right” to sexual fantasy. * Translated from the German by Ryan Wines. This paper was previously published as “Bedenke, dass alle Poesie schlechthin als Werk der Liebe anzusehen ist: Ethik und Ästhetik bei Schleiermacher,” in Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 336–47. 1  A Z 16–17, January 1993, 3. 2  Schleiermacher to his sister Charlotte, December 31, 1797, in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Günter Meckenstock et al. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980–2005), Sec. V, Vol. 2, 220 (hereinafter “KGA”). Cf. Andreas Arndt, “Eine literarische Ehe: Schleiermachers Wohngemeinschaft mit Friedrich Schlegel,” in Wissenschaft und Geselligkeit: Friedrich Schleiermacher in Berlin 1796–1802, ed. Andreas Arndt (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 3–14. 3  KGA, Sec. I, Vol. 3, 143–216.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_007

82

Arndt

I need not repeat at length here the ways in which Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde, published in 1799, scandalised and was misunderstood by most of his contemporaries: It was the key novel about the relationship between the author and the divorced daughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Brendel (Dorothea) Veit. The moral outrage was probably—as is usually the case—inversely proportional to the actual knowledge of the allegedly shameless text. Such outrage is usually an attempt by people to defend their own fantasies, which become inflamed by rumours of alleged immodesty. In his “Essay on Modesty,” which is found in the third part of his Intimate Letters, Schleiermacher characterises such moral apostles so very aptly: “Their own crude desires always lie in wait, and leap out as soon as something appears in the distance that it can appropriate, and that they gladly shift the guilt to that which was the most innocent occasion for it.”4 The author of the newspaper article cites this passage as well, and she attaches her own observations to it. However, she misses the fact that in the subsequent text, Schleiermacher ascribes to women a special role in overcoming this bigotry: The first thing that is necessary [. . .] is the help of women [. . .] since the proof that it is not as terrible as most fear with this forbidden intercourse of ideas and senses must proceed from them; they are the ones who, in their actions, must sanctify everything that has been proscribed up to now by false delusions. Only when they show that this does not injure them can the beautiful and the understanding be set free.5 Besides women, however, it is art that unifies love and beauty for Schleiermacher and that can thereby eliminate false modesty.6 This unification of poetry and love stands, without a doubt, within the horizon of “aesthetic Platonism,”7 a concept that the early Romantics thought had been best formulated by Friedrich Schlegel and with whose most essential aspects Schleiermacher had affiliated himself.8 4  Ibid., 176. 5  Ibid., 177. 6  Cf. Ibid., 178. 7  Cf. Klaus Düsing: “Ästhetischer Platonismus bei Hölderlin und Hegel,” in Homburg vor der Höhe in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte: Studien zum Freundeskreis um Hegel und Hölderlin, ed. C. Jamme and O. Pöggeler (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 101–17. 8  Cf. Wo das philosophische Gespräch ganz in Dichtung übergeht: Platons Symposion und seine Wirkung in der Renaissance, Romantik und Moderne, ed. S. Matuschek (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002). For Schleiermacher, see 163–73 (= Andreas Arndt, “ ‘Das Unsterbliche mit dem Sterblichen verbinden’: Friedrich Schleiermacher und Platons ‘Symposion’ ”).

Ethics and Aesthetics in Schleiermacher

83

Thus the true, the beautiful, and the good converge in love because love, like the beautiful, is thought to have its end in itself. Schlegel says as much in Lucinde: The ecstatic Diotima revealed only half of love to her Socrates. Love is not only the quiet longing for the infinite, it is the holy pleasure of a beautiful present. It is not merely a mixture, a transition from the mortal to the immortal, but rather it is a complete unity of both. There is a pure love, an indivisible and simple feeling without the slightest disturbance of restless striving. Each gives just what he takes, one as the other; everything is completed equally and completely and in itself like the eternal kiss of God’s children.9 In Schlegel’s view, love is the point of indifference, as it were, in which everything melts into the hen kai pan (literally, “one and all”), but at the same time it also disperses into the richness and distinctiveness of the world: “Love separates beings and forms the world, and only in its light can one discover and behold the latter. Only in the answer of its ‘Thou’ can each ‘I’ completely feel its infinite unity.”10 What is at issue for Schlegel is not an undifferentiated fusion with the whole, but rather the individuation of the infinite from the individual subject—the figure of the “individual universality.” This individualisation is the work of education (or “cultivation”) and, in this respect, poetry: “In the mysteries of education (Bildung), the spirit beholds the play and the laws of the will and of life. Pygmalion moves, and the astonished artist is gripped by a joyous shudder in the consciousness of his own immortality.”11 Schleiermacher’s proposition in the Intimate Letters, that all poetry should be regarded as a work of love,12 appeals to the same ideas; even the conclusion of his review of Lucinde in the Berlinische Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmacks (1800) reads as a paraphrase of the Schlegelian conception, the only difference being that religion is now introduced into the equation: Precisely through love, the work [Lucinde] becomes not only poetic, but religious and moral as well. Religious, in that it is always directed to the standpoint from which it looks beyond life into the infinite; moral, in that 9  Friedrich Schlegel, Werke. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Paderborn and Zürich: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 1958–1979) (hereinafter “KFSA”), Vol. 5, 60. 10  Ibid., 61. 11  Ibid., 61. 12  KGA, Sec. I, Vol. 3, 214.

84

Arndt

it spreads itself out from the beloved over the whole world, and demands freedom from all unreasonable limits and prejudices for all and for itself.13 The imagination and its product, the beautiful, actually stand here, in the Intimate Letters, as a third faculty between cognition (the theoretical perspective) and desire (the practical perspective) and is thereby what religion, as the intuition and feeling of the universe, was in the Discourses on Religion (1799): the third faculty alongside cognition and action.14 Schleiermacher never came as close to the concept of an aesthetic religion and a god-like artist and artistgod as he did in the Intimate Letters. One must certainly add, though, that this remains but a brief moment of philosophical convergence of positions. As we shall soon see, although Schleiermacher indeed allows art and religion to be adjacent concepts, he nevertheless clearly separates them in his thought. And herein lies the real tension between Schleiermacher and Schlegel, a tension that was also apparent in the latter’s collection of fragments entitled Ideas (1800), which, in contrast to Schleiermacher’s Discourses, emphasised a poetic understanding of religion.15 Meanwhile, Hans Dierkes attempted with great interpretive effort to find an essential difference between Schlegel and Schleiermacher in their treatments of corporeality.16 Whereas Schlegel regards love, as mentioned above, as the “complete unity” of the mortal (which Dierkes equates with corporeality) and the immortal, Schleiermacher thinks of love as determined and refined by the spirit.17 Dierkes’s argument, however, is unconvincing because the unity of the mortal and the immortal (or the infinite) is the result of a process of education (Bildungsprozess) for Schlegel as well: something that is evident in, for example, the following passage from the “Allegory of Insolence” (from Lucinde): You should not want to share the immortal fire pure and raw. [. . .] Compose, invent, transform, and preserve the world and its eternal forms in the constant change of new separations and marriages. Veil and bind the spirit in the letter. The genuine letter is omnipotent and the real 13  Ibid., 223. 14  Cf. Ibid., 174 for the Discourses. Cf. KGA, Sec. I, Vol. 2, 211. 15  Cf. KFSA, Vol. 2, 256–72. 16  Hans Dierkes: “Die problematische Poesie: Schleiermachers Beitrag zur Frühromantik,” in Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß Berlin 1984, ed. K.V. Selge (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), Vol. 1, 61–98. 17  Cf. Ibid., 71.

Ethics and Aesthetics in Schleiermacher

85

magic wand. It is that with which the irresistible will of the high sorceress Imagination touches the sublime chaos of full nature, and calls the infinite word to the light, which is an image and a mirror of the divine spirit.18 Dierkes understands this passage as if the “genuine letter” were the “sensuality qua natural drive,”19 but it is in fact most likely the poetic composition of the spirit, with which the imagination first touches nature in order to portray it as a mirror of the divine spirit. Both Schlegel and Schleiermacher understand love and poetry within and from a broad ethical horizon which is not morally tinctured by prudishness or, as Schleiermacher characterised it in the Intimate Letters, by “Englishism”—the prudery he ascribed to English ladies. Take, for example, a certain “Mistress B.” who was agitated “in a genuinely English way” by how in the presence of girls one could only discuss garters.20 On the contrary, Schlegel’s and Schleiermacher’s ethical horizon corresponds much more to that of morality as a historical process of education of humanity in the infinite reformation and advancement (Nach- und Fortbildung) of the “world,” according to the former,21 or in the “ensouling of human nature by means of reason,” according to the latter.22 2 This broad understanding of ethics, which, in that epoch, probably comes closest to Georg Hegel’s concept of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), carries the relationship between ethics and aesthetics defined in Schleiermacher beyond the early Romantic view of his review of Schlegel’s Lucinde. For Schleiermacher, art—in the sense of “fine arts”—is a component of the ethical process and is therefore a component of the process of the ensouling of human nature 18  KFSA, Vol. 5, 20. 19  Dierkes, “Problematische Poesie,” 71, n. 16. 20  Cf. KGA, Sec. I, Vol. 3, 158. Cf. Andreas Arndt, “Schleiermacher und die englische Aufklärung,” in 200 Jahre “Reden über die Religion,” ed. U. Barth and C.D. Osthövener (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 181–93. 21  Cf. Andreas Arndt, “Naturgesetze der menschlichen Bildung. Zum geschichtsphilosophischen Programm der Frühromantik,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 48 (2000): 97–105. 22  Friedrich Schleiermacher, Werke. Vol. 2: Entwürfe zu einem System der Sittenlehre, ed. Otto Braun (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1913), 87.

86

Arndt

by reason. Accordingly, this process is identical to the historical process, and ethics is therefore the “science of history” or “intelligence as appearance.”23 This science concerns the “natural laws” (as they are explicitly called) of human action.24 Two consequences follow from this with regard to aesthetics. First, aesthetics concerns objects that undergo this process of natural education (Naturbildung); second, aesthetics is historically constituted. Its exact location emerges when one looks more closely at how Schleiermacher distinguishes it from reason. The two fundamental forms are, on the one hand, organisation as the forming of nature into an organ of reason, and, on the other, the cognising and representing or symbolising as the use of the organ—thus of the reformed nature—for reason’s acting. Both activities—organising and cognising (symbolising)—are now defined more closely from the point of view of excessive individuality or excessive universality (community), by means of which a “quadruplicity” emerges as a categorisation schema that is absolutely fundamental to Schleiermacher’s constructions. The organising activity, which is thus directed toward nature, produces, when under the predominance of community, the social-natural relation (labour, division of labour, and exchange); along with predominant individuality, it produces private property and the private sphere. The excessive communal symbolising activity characterises the sphere of knowing (Wissen), and the excessive individual symbolising activity characterises the sphere of feeling, which is located in art and religion. These four spheres—the private, the feeling, the knowing, and the community—correspond to four institutional “spaces”: the state (which organises the socialnatural relation), free sociability, the academy, and the church.25 With this, the location of the aesthetic within the ethical is clearly determined. Art belongs to individual symbolising qua feeling and thereby stands in the greatest possible proximity to religion. Here, the configuration that he had already laid out in the Intimate Letters essentially repeats itself. Even in the notes for his Halle ethics lectures of 1805–1806, Schleiermacher speaks of identifying art with religion: “Now the proper sphere of feeling in ethical being is religion. [. . .] Thus religion and art must coincide, and the moral visage of

23  Ibid., 80. 24  Ibid., 80. 25  For Schleiermacher’s aesthetics within the context of his system, see Gunter Scholtz: Die Philosophie Schleiermachers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 140ff.; and Thomas Lehnerer, Die Kunsttheorie Friedrich Schleiermachers (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1987).

Ethics and Aesthetics in Schleiermacher

87

art consists precisely in its identity with religion. The true exercise of art is religious.”26 Now, feeling is not simply only feeling in the senses, as we mean when we say that we feel something (e.g. happiness, sadness, anger) or when we are in a given mood. Schleiermacher clearly distinguishes between feeling as a mere affection, which refers to momentary sensation, and feeling as the organ of an immediate awareness of the Absolute or—as he defined it in 1799 in the Discourses on Religion—of the universe. In the Monologues (1800), for example, Schleiermacher wrote of him who “gives himself over to the feeling that he shares with the animal: How can he know whether he has fallen down into crude animality?”27 Religious feeling and, if one consults the position of art in the Intimate Letters, aesthetic feeling elevate themselves over momentary affection in that they continually accompany thinking and acting and thereby produce something like a relation to the whole. According to the Discourses, religion consists in “accepting everything individual as a part of the whole, and everything limited as a representation of the infinite,” where we cannot ourselves penetrate “into the nature and substance of the whole.”28 It is precisely here that religion is connected to art, for if the nature and substance of the whole is greater than that which we can represent to ourselves in thought, then it is, in Kantian terminology, something sublime which we can only symbolise. And with this, we have characterised the function of both religion and art in the ethical: symbolising it in the individual thing. In his 1805–1806 lectures (mentioned above), Schleiermacher speaks in this context (i.e., feeling and its role in morality) of a “thoroughgoing morality (Sittlichkeit) of feeling,” which would exist when a unity of consciousness would obtain; this “would be cognized as the product of the higher faculty and thus everything that appears to it” and would be “related to the identity of reason and of organization.”29 If subjective cognising were only based on pleasure and pain—thus to momentary affections—then “evil” would be “the sensual way of thinking, egoism and, in reflection [. . .], eudaimonism,” and “good” would be, by contrast, that subjective cognition based “on the identity of reason and organization,” by means of which feeling would be “elevated to the potentiality of morality (Sittlichkeit).” And this process of elevation, according to Schleiermacher, is “nothing other than that which we call

26  Schleiermacher, Sittenlehre, 99–100, n. 22. 27  KGA, Sec. I, Vol. 3, 16. 28  KGA, Sec. I, Vol. 2, 214. 29  Schleiermacher, Sittenlehre, 176–77, n. 22.

88

Arndt

religion.”30 The cultivation or potentialisation of feeling does not take place as it was traditionally thought, namely, on the basis of a rational control of the affects and passions; rather, it takes place by means of the continuous presence of feeling as a higher faculty in the unity of subjective consciousness. And it is the cognition of this feeling, according to Schleiermacher, that changes the affective economy as a whole, since “feeling is elevated to the potentiality of morality (Sittlichkeit), the succession of individual feelings gets another law, instead of the merely organic law of stimulus and counter-stimulus, the higher law of free individual combination.”31 With this free individual combination, we have reached the realm of imagination and art. Art is consequently a product of the moral cultivation or potentialising of feeling. The problem consists of course in how this cultivation can succeed when it itself is based on a feeling—more precisely, based on a feeling to be apostrophised as religious that is fundamentally distinct from mere affect—even if at the same time it holds for Schleiermacher that “my feeling is absolutely mine and therefore cannot be an Other.”32 Here, Schleiermacher presupposes that feeling can come “in itself to clarity” without being able to say how this could happen, for here there is an aporia that Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) understood very well: “Feeling cannot feel itself.”33 The “mineness” of the feeling hinders its communicability as feeling. Feeling itself cannot therefore be represented in order to evoke it in others. According to Schleiermacher, this would be impossible: “But rather it [the feeling] can only be made to appear as the object of the relation, so that his feeling will thereby be excited in the Other.”34 The representation is therefore the representation of something that forms the objective foundation of feeling, and therefore of the whole (of the totality or of the universe), as the content of the feeling that has (in whatever way) come to clarity about itself, from which the “higher” feeling takes its source. Here, in Schleiermacher’s words, “the representation (work of art)” is related “to the original (feeling) as a real object to the smell.”35 The work of art arouses the feeling of the recipient by representing the object by which the feeling of the producer had been aroused. 30  Ibid., 177. 31  Ibid., 180. 32  Ibid., 180ff. 33  Novalis, Schriften, Vol. 2, ed. R. Samuel with H.J. Mähl and G. Schulz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), 114. 34  Schleiermacher, Sittenlehre, 181, n. 22. 35  Ibid.

Ethics and Aesthetics in Schleiermacher

89

It is not the identity of the feelings of both of them that matters—the feelings themselves will remain essentially incommunicable—but it is rather the identity of the content of the feelings that are important, regardless of how the feelings for this content might become clear. Now, the work of art is not at all objective in the sense that it abstracts from the subjectivity of the representer. The feeling, the content of which the artist wants to bring to representation, is rather the subjective reaction to something that is not “to be had” outside that feeling, thus only in subjective refraction and only with the latter is it even representable: “Thus in this sense the pure Objective is not the object of art, but rather the reflection of individuality in the objective.”36 The object of art is thus, in short, the reaction of feeling to something objective, not something that is in itself incomprehensible, but rather—something sublime—that supersedes the comprehensive and representational powers of the individual. With regard to the possibilities of representation, Schleiermacher distinguishes, on the one hand, the so-called “mobile arts,” that is, mime and music, that represent the reaction of feeling “as action,” from, on the other hand, “images,” which like “symbolic forms” contain “the individual aspect of a feeling objectified in itself” and thereby are in the position “to affect the feeling of the observer as images of the universe.”37 According to Schleiermacher, the objectification of feeling is synonymous with its moralisation, which consists in “every feeling passing over into representation: All human beings are artists.”38 This not only anticipates Joseph Beuys’s program “Every Human Being is an Artist,” which underlies his concept of social sculpture (where art is then shifted into a comparable ethical dimension, as it is with Schleiermacher),39 it is also picked up from the early Romantic program of “Universal Poetry,” as Friedrich Schlegel had formulated it in Athenaeum Fragment 116, which expanded the boundaries of poetry as poiesis40 and that regards even apparently artless representations as poetry.41 36  Ibid., 182. 37  Ibid., 183. 38  Ibid., 184. 39  Joseph Beuys, “ ‘Jeder Mensch ein Künstler:’ Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus.” Lecture at the Internationales Kulturzentrum Achberg, March 23, 1978. Cassette. (Wangen: FIU-Verlag, 1991). 40  Cf. Andreas Arndt, “Poesie und Poiesis. Anmerkungen zu Hölderlin, Schlegel und Hegel,” in Sprache – Dichtung – Philosophie. Heidegger und der Deutsche Idealismus, ed. Bärbel Frischmann (Freiburg: Alber, 2010), 61–75. 41  Cf. KFSA, 2, 182–83.

90

Arndt

So far, I have looked at the Halle ethics lectures of 1805–1806; in the notes from the Berlin lecture of 1812–1813, art is associated mainly with the characteristic of particularity (or “peculiarity”—Eigentümlichkeit): “There is as much beauty and art in all areas of culture as particularity manifests itself in it.”42 Art brings particularity to intuition and is the emergence of the image of the imagination or the expression of feeling. However, now it not only has its rational content in common with religion, but rather—and this is at first glance only a minor shift, but is in truth far-reaching—it also has its rational content through and from religion: “If [. . .] the composition of the imagination, in and with its emergence, is art, and the rational content in the particular cognition is religion, then art is related to religion as language is related to knowledge.”43 Art is the language of religion, but it does not for that reason have to speak religiously itself, for its products can be accomplished in a religious or in a profane style.44 However, beyond such questions of style, Schleiermacher has taken the step of clearly separating aesthetics and religion from each other on the common ground of individual symbolisation and cognition. The moralisation of feeling—and thereby the dignity of art—obviously depends on how closely art stands to religion with respect to its content,45 where religion of course does not signify a specific confession, but rather counts as “all real feeling and synthesis, which lies as spirit on the physical domain and as heart in the ethical domain, inasmuch as both are related to unity and totality beyond personality.”46 3 How is the relation between ethics and aesthetics to be represented from the side of aesthetics? At the University of Berlin, Schleiermacher lectured on aesthetics as a separate discipline three times (1819, 1825, 1832–1833); for him, it is a critical discipline based on ethics, which mediates between experience and speculation in that it deduces the “cycle of the arts” and presents “the essence

42  Schleiermacher, Sittenlehre, 288, n. 22. 43  Ibid., 314ff. 44  Ibid., 368. 45  Cf. Ibid., 315: “Since particular cognition is only nascent religion, the representation can only characterize the internally given gradation of the rational content.” 46  Ibid.

Ethics and Aesthetics in Schleiermacher

91

of the various forms of art.”47 However, aesthetics stands in a close relationship not only with ethics, but with psychology as well, which coordinates aesthetic feeling with religious feeling and treats the theme of artistic production in the theory of self-manifestation. This, is of fundamental significance for Schleiermacher’s aesthetics. However, in aesthetics itself, the concept of feeling no longer plays the central role that it did in the Halle lectures on ethics; one must, according to the lecture manuscript of 1819, “ignore the excessively limited expression ‘feeling’ from common parlance and pay more attention to the characters themselves,”48 where “characters” refers to the characters of the particular cognition as the foundation of artistic production. With this, just as with the ethics lecture of 1812–1813, the representation of the particular, which is imagined here as self-manifestation, stands as the terminological focus. The content of art is now defined as the “archetype,” which is conceived of as an “inner characteristic” that “precedes the execution and steps in between it and the excitation.”49 Excitement (feeling) and representation are thus directly mediated in art in that feeling receives an objective content through the archetype. “As soon as reflection steps positively in between, excitement and representation are divided as moments. Thus in the domain of art, one must say that this identity is not only not necessary, but rather that it is essentially abolished in it, and the representation is immediately related only to the archetype.”50 In this mediated relation, there is now an asymmetry, which differentiates the equation of artwork with discourse in the ethics lecture of 1812–1813. Discourse in relation to thought is, as Schleiermacher now writes, a “natural exteriorization, to fix thought for oneself or for others.” Discourse and thought are thus essentially identical; however, art and archetype are not, since the work of art is “not the archetype itself, but rather the latter is always more indeterminate than the former.”51 What is communicated by the archetype is not feeling, and thus not excitement, “but rather the archetype itself.” Another explanation that distinguished the artistic from the religious realm to a greater degree than the lecture of 1812–1813, consists of Schleiermacher’s 47  Ibid., 366. Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, ed. R. Odebrecht (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1931). However, a critical edition is still needed. For the deficiencies of all previous editions, see Andreas Arndt and Wolfgang Virmond, “Review of F.D.E. Schleiermacher. Ästhetik: Über den Begriff der Kunst, ed. Th. Lehnerer, (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1984),” New Athenaeum 2 (1991): 190–96. 48  Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, 16, n. 47. 49  Ibid., 11. 50  Ibid. 51  Ibid., 20ff.

92

Arndt

recasting of the character of knowledge. Here, his theory of dialectic stands in the background. A theory in which thinking wants to become knowing refers to two ideas: the idea of God as the point of departure (terminus a quo) of knowledge and the idea of the world as the goal (terminus ad quem) of the process of knowledge. The former, the idea of God, is a relationless identity, while the latter, the idea of the world, is totality as unity distinguished within itself.52 These ideas are realised when thought directs itself both toward the universal as the idea of God as well as toward the particular in order to bring it to unity in the idea of the world. This is also true of particular knowledge, to which art belongs: “All art has, on the one hand, a religious tendency, and on the other hand it loses itself in the free play with the particular. In both together the particular world manifests itself.”53 Art as the self-manifestation of the individual is thus more than the mere objectifying of a religious content, even if the religious is taken in a very wide sense. It is at the same time a free play with the particular, which of course remains bound to the extent that this play in turn presupposes the relation to a ground of unity—the idea of God. However, the archetypical itself, which is what is at issue in art, obviously emerges from the relation of both ideas—the idea of God and idea of the world—that are equally present in the process of particular knowledge formation. For Schleiermacher, the permanence of religious feeling in abstraction from the idea of the world is now “mood,”54 which can appear as an explicitly religious work of art or as a foundation for profane art. The conflict with “the religious tendency” appears “mostly in the erotic, which one accuses of exciting desire and then takes this as grounds to blame religious art for still clinging to the sensible.”55 Note that this is a discussion of erotic representation in religious art, and this means as well that even the religious work of art is more than merely religious. Thus, conversely, “erotic art” has its place as well for Schleiermacher in his conception of art; it is, however, not immediate unity of excitement and representation, but rather representation of an archetype that is influenced by a quasi-religious “mood,” namely, “the joy in the drive to preservation and unification, and in how it forms human beings into organs.”56

52  Cf. Heinz Kimmerle, “Schleiermachers Dialektik als Grundlegung philosophisch-theologischer systematik und als Ausgangspunkt offener Wechselseitigkeit,” in Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß Berlin 1984, ed. K.V. Selge (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 49ff. 53  Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, 21, n. 47. 54  Ibid., 22. 55  Ibid., 23. 56  Ibid., 24.

Ethics and Aesthetics in Schleiermacher

93

If one takes a look from here back once again to Schleiermacher’s position in the Intimate Letters on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde from around two decades earlier, the following becomes clear: Even the Schleiermacher of the lectures on aesthetics from 1819 would have to make no compromises for the sake of consistency. The “Essay on Modesty,” as a treatise on erotic art, would still be capable of being integrated into the context of justification of ethical–aesthetic discourse. Furthermore, it would even be true that “all poetry is to be regarded simply as a work of love,” since the moralising religious element in artistic representation depends on a love of knowledge, which can be described as an amor dei intellectualis—in the sense of a genitivus obiectivus—to the extent that, for Schleiermacher, the idea of God is an indispensable presupposition of the cognitive process. And herein lies the very crux of Schleiermacherian aesthetics and the context for its justification. In one place in the manuscripts of the 1819 aesthetics lectures, Schleiermacher speaks of the “modern art world” and says that according to it (and with it presumably the entirety of modernity), “the relation to the idea of divinity” dominates, and this relation is “an absolutely immediate one” and can “depart from every particular point.”57 This immediate relationship is the achievement of Christianity, and Schleiermacher finally equates Christianity with modernity. He does not speak of the fissures, dislocations, and abysses of modernity, and in this respect the ethical framework of his aesthetic project is—from the present point of view—precisely that which, according to Schleiermacher, it ought not to be: in the position of a mere “ought” against reality. References Arndt, Andreas. “Schleiermacher und die englische Aufklärung.” In 200 Jahre “Reden über die Religion.” Edited by U. Barth and C.D. Osthövener, 181–93. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000. ———. “Naturgesetze der menschlichen Bildung: Zum geschichtsphilosophischen Programm der Frühromantik.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 48 (2000): 97–105. ———. “ ‘Das Unsterbliche mit dem Sterblichen verbinden’: Friedrich Schleiermacher und Platons ‘Symposion’.” In Wo das philosophische Gespräch ganz in Dichtung übergeht: Platons Symposion und seine Wirkung in der Renaissance, Romantik und Moderne. Edited by S. Matuschek, 163–73. Heidelberg: Winter, 2002.

57  Ibid., 49.

94

Arndt

———. “Eine literarische Ehe: Schleiermachers Wohngemeinschaft mit Friedrich Schlegel.” In Wissenschaft und Geselligkeit: Friedrich Schleiermacher in Berlin 1796– 1802. Edited by Andreas Arndt, 3–14. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. ———. “Poesie und Poiesis. Anmerkungen zu Hölderlin, Schlegel und Hegel.” In Sprache – Dichtung – Philosophie: Heidegger und der Deutsche Idealismus. Edited by Bärbel Frischmann, 61–75. Freiburg: Alber, 2010. ———. “Bedenke, dass alle Poesie schlechthin als Werk der Liebe anzusehen ist: Ethik und Ästhetikbei Schleiermacher.” In Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph, 336–47. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013. Arndt, Andreas and Wolfgang Virmond. “Review of F.D.E. Schleiermacher: Ästhetik. Über den Begriff der Kunst. Edited by T. Lehnerer. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1984,” New Athenaeum 2 (1991): 190–96. Beuys, Joseph. “ ‘Jeder Mensch ein Künstler’: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus.” Lecture at the Internationales Kulturzentrum Achberg, March 23, 1978. Cassette. Wangen: FIU-Verlag, 1991. Dierkes, Hans. “Die problematische Poesie: Schleiermachers Beitrag zur Frühromantik.” In Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß Berlin 1984. Vol. I. Edited by K.V. Selge, 61–98. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985. Düsing, Klaus. “Ästhetischer Platonismus bei Hölderlin und Hegel.” In Homburg vor der Höhe in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte: Studien zum Freundeskreis um Hegel und Hölderlin. Edited by C. Jamme and O. Pöggeler, 101–17. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. Kimmerle, Heinz. “Schleiermachers Dialektik als Grundlegung philosophisch-theologischer systematik und als Ausgangspunkt offener Wechselseitigkeit.” In Inter­ nationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß Berlin 1984. Edited by K.V. Selge, 39–59. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985. Lehnerer, Thomas. Die Kunsttheorie Friedrich Schleiermachers. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987. Novalis: Schriften. Vol. 2. Edited by R. Samuel with H.J. Mähl and G. Schulz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981. Schlegel, Friedrich. Werke. Kritische Ausgabe. Edited by Ernst Behler et al. Paderborn and Zürich: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 1958–1979. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Werke. Vol. 2: Entwürfe zu einem System der Sittenlehre. Edited Otto Braun. Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1913. ———. Ästhetik. Edited by R. Odebrecht. Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1931. ———. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Günter Meckenstock et al. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980–2005. Scholtz, Gunter. Die Philosophie Schleiermachers. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984.

CHAPTER 6

Hegel’s Concept of Pathos as the Keeper of the Marriage between Aesthetics and Ethics Paul Cobben 1 Introduction In the tradition of German Idealism, it is not a remarkable thesis that there exists an internal bond between aesthetics and ethics. When Immanuel Kant tries to systematically think through the unity of reason in his three Critiques (Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgement), this is at the same time a project in which the internal coherence between the truth, the good, and the beautiful is thematised. In his Philosophy of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel discusses the same coherence in his own way. However, the internal coherence between the good and the beautiful does not itself legitimate talk about a marriage between ethics and aesthetics. The relations of a marriage seem to be more direct and corporeal than the abstract considerations in which the unity of reason is expressed. For this reason, we have to further investigate my claim to a “marriage” between aesthetics and ethics. If it is meaningful at all to speak about a marriage between aesthetics and ethics, do we not have to look to the ancient world instead of the modern one? In modern times, the true, the good, and the beautiful have been differentiated, such that their coherence calls for mediating steps which have too great a distance from the love-relation of the marriage. This differentiation did not already take place in the Greek world, although this world had nevertheless developed the freedom which is presupposed by the meaningful distinction between aesthetics and ethics. Therefore, is the conclusion that their marriage relation can be found in the Greek world not justified? In this paper, I will show that this is indeed the case. I will analyse the meaning of the concept of pathos, which plays an important role in Hegel’s reception of the Greek world. The concept of pathos expresses the immediacy of love which is appropriate in the relation of the marriage. But at the same time, it is the love which forms the bridge between the aesthetic and the ethical modes of existence.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_008

96 2

Cobben

The Essential Determination of the Concept of Pathos

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes, with respect to the Greek world, as well about the pathos of the divine and the human law,1 and about the pathos of the artist.2 In this sense, pathos is something which either prompts the individual to an ethical (or rather to a moral) action or something which prompts him to an aesthetical action (i.e. prompts him as an artist to produce a work of art). Since in both cases there is talk of pathos, there is obviously a still more general, abstract meaning of pathos in which the differentiation between aesthetical and ethical action has not yet been made—no more so than the differentiation between actions in terms of the divine or the human law. The concept of pathos, however, does not appear in the Phenomenology of Spirit in this general sense.3 And yet, I think that it is possible to reconstruct 1  “Die Substanz erscheint zwar an der Individualität, als das Pathos derselben, und die Individualität als das, was sie belebt, und daher über ihr steht; aber sie ist ein Pathos, das zugleich sein Charakter ist; die sittliche Individualität ist unmittelbar, und an sich eins mit diesem seinem Allgemeinen, sie hat ihre Existenz nur in ihm, und vermag den Untergang, den diese sittliche Macht durch die entgegengesetzte leidet, nicht zu überleben.” [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hereinafter referred to as “PhdG”) (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1980), 256]. 2  PhdG, 378. 3  In the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik Vol. 13 [(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 301], Hegel makes some general remarks with regard to pathos worth quoting at length: “γ) Die allgemeinen Mächte nun endlich, welche nicht nur für sich in ihrer Selbständigkeit auftreten, sondern ebensosehr in der Menschenbrust lebendig sind und das menschliche Gemüt in seinem Innersten bewegen, kann man nach den Alten mit dem Ausdruck πάϑος bezeichnen. Übersetzen läßt dies Wort sich schwer, denn ‘Leidenschaft’ führt immer den Nebenbegriff des Geringen, Niedrigen mit sich, indem wir fordern, der Mensch solle nicht in Leidenschaftlichkeit geraten. Pathos nehmen wir deshalb hier in einem höheren und allgemeineren Sinne ohne diesen Beiklang des Tadelnswerten, Eigensinnigen usf. So ist z. B. die heilige Geschwisterliebe der Antigone ein Pathos in jener griechischen Bedeutung des Worts. Das Pathos in diesem Sinne ist eine in sich selbst berechtigte Macht des Gemüts, ein wesentlicher Gehalt der Vernünftigkeit und des freien Willens. Orest z. B. tötet seine Mutter nicht etwa aus einer inneren Bewegung des Gemüts, welche wir Leidenschaft nennen würden, sondern das Pathos, das ihn zur Tat antreibt, ist wohlerwogen und ganz besonnen. In dieser Rücksicht können wir auch nicht sagen, daß die Götter Pathos haben. Sie sind nur der allgemeine Gehalt dessen, was in der menschlichen Individualität zu Entschlüssen und Handlungen treibt. Die Götter als solche aber bleiben in ihrer Ruhe und Leidenschaftslosigkeit, und kommt es unter ihnen auch zum Hader und Streit, so wird es ihnen eigentlich nicht Ernst damit, oder ihr Streit hat eine allgemeine symbolische Beziehung als ein allgemeiner Krieg der Götter. Pathos müssen wir daher auf die Handlung des Menschen beschränken und darunter den wesentlichen

Hegel ’ s Concept Of Pathos

97

this general understanding of pathos. This reconstruction can help us understand what Hegel ultimately means by this term. Pathos that prompts one to action is distinguished from instinct that prompts animals to action. Instinctual action is not free and therefore cannot be differentiated into aesthetical or ethical action. For this reason, it makes sense to investigate how Hegel, in the chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit on self-consciousness, principally distinguishes between animal action and free (human) action. The point of departure is the concept of natural reality, which Hegel determines to be an interplay of forces acting on one another. This interplay of forces can also be found at the level of living organisms with respect to their interaction with the earth.4 As long as the organism lives, it knows to maintain the balance between itself and the earth, that is, the outside world. The organism acts upon the environment and succeeds in satisfying its needs, so that it reproduces itself as an organism. At the level of animal life, this “acting upon itself” is part of instinctual action. If the organism dies, the interplay of forces between the organism and the earth is annihilated. The organism no longer has the ability to resist the outside world and, as it said in Genesis, “returns unto dust”: It disappears as a particular identity.5 When experiencing the fear of death, the animal organism can have a specific experience of a threatening death. Hegel describes the organism fearing death as the force which is forced back into itself in its relation to the absolute lord, namely, death.6 During this experience of fearing death, the dynamics of the interplay of forces comes to a standstill. The external world has become an invincible, absolute force which throws the organism totally back into itself.7 The animal organism can react to this fear of death in various ways. It can be paralysed with fright, it can try to fly, or it can attempt to fight itself to death. vernünftigen Gehalt verstehen, der im menschlichen Selbst gegenwärtig ist und das ganze Gemüt erfüllt und durchdringt.” 4  “Unterscheiden wir die hierin enthaltenen Momente näher, so sehen wir, daß wir zum ersten Momente das Bestehen der selbständigen Gestalten oder die Unterdrückung dessen haben, was das Unterscheiden an sich ist, nämlich nicht an sich zu sein und kein Bestehen zu haben. Das zweite Moment aber ist die Unterwerfung jenes Bestehens unter die Unendlichkeit des Unterschiedes. Im ersten Momente ist die bestehende Gestalt; als fürsichseiend oder in ihrer Bestimmtheit unendliche Substanz tritt sie gegen die allgemeine Substanz auf, verleugnet diese Flüssigkeit und Kontinuität mit ihr und behauptet sich als nicht in diesem Allgemeinen aufgelöst, sondern vielmehr als durch die Absonderung von dieser ihrer unorganischen Natur und durch das Aufzehren derselben sich erhaltend.” [PhdG, 106]. 5  Genesis 3:19: “Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” [KJV]. 6  “Denn es hat die Furcht des Todes, des absoluten Herrn, empfunden.” [PhdG, 114]. 7  “Sie wird als in sich zurückgedrängtes Bewusstsein in sich gehen.” [Ibid.].

98

Cobben

For a self-conscious organism like the human being, however, the fear of death is an experience of a different kind.8 Many philosophers claim that humans are the only beings who have knowledge of their death. Hegel was one of them. However, the real question is what exactly “having knowledge of one’s own death” means. Hegel’s point of departure is the physical experience of the fear of death as it is described above. While experiencing the fear of death, the organism is forced back into itself. In this sense, the fear of death is a kind of physical self-identification. The mode of existence of the organism is no longer dispersed in a series of actions in which it tries to reproduce itself; rather, the course of time in which these actions normally occur is, as it were, suspended. The actions are taken back in the single experience of the organism, namely, that it is in itself, that it has an identity. Experiencing the fear of death is a physical experience of being-initself, of self-relation. Therefore, experiencing the fear of death is also the condition under which the reality of pure self-consciousness can be conceived of. This last point is made clear in the chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit on self-consciousness mentioned above. In it, self-consciousness is first of all determined to be pure autonomy, pure self-relation. This raises the question of how the reality of pure self-consciousness can be conceived: How can the autonomous self be conceived of as being unified with the natural reality in which the heteronomous laws, the laws of nature, have their validity? At first glance, this problem seems to have no solution. Although selfconsciousness can only realise itself in natural reality, it seems at the same time to have to exclude this reality because it threatens its pureness. This problem, however, can be solved if nature, to which pure self-consciousness is related, is understood as an organism which experiences the fear of death, that is, as an organism which is forced back into itself. Under this condition, pure selfconsciousness can recognise itself in nature: The force which is forced back into itself is the pure self-relation of self-consciousness in the form of otherness. Only under this condition can the existence of self-consciousness be understood without contradiction. The structure of self-relation which characterises the organism which is forced back into itself by the fear of death is expressed as such in the pure self-relation of self-consciousness. Therefore, it is in this way that Hegel justifies the argument that in this relation pure selfconsciousness is in otherness as otherness with itself.

8  See Paul Cobben, The Nature of the Self: Recognition in the Form of Right and Morality (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 37ff.

Hegel ’ s Concept Of Pathos

99

We can draw the conclusion that in the relation of the fear of death selfconsciousness has transformed the heteronomy of nature into the immediate expression of autonomy. The organism which is subjected to external instinctual laws can, as soon as it appears as the force which is forced back into itself during the experience of fearing death, truly becomes valid as the immediate expression of an autonomous self-relation. I think that in this relation the elementary version of what Hegel calls “pathos” comes to the fore. Pathos is the nature which the self feels to be its own nature. 3

The Lord–Bondsman Relation: Second Nature as the Immediate Appearance of Nature as Pathos

As long as the awareness of nature as the self’s own pathos remains an internal experience, it could be a subjective illusion. It is only if internal pathos is also objectively expressed as the realisation of one’s own self that it can become clear that pathos is not merely a subjective illusion. This means that pathos, which is experienced as the force that is forced back into itself, has to manifest itself as an objective law—an objective law which therefore no longer expresses itself as the instinctual actions of the organism, but rather expresses the freedom of the self. This objective law is a “second nature”, in which the autonomous laws of a self-posited nature are expressed—not the heteronomous laws of a given nature. This second nature can be conceived of as a social organism which observes the laws of a man-made tradition. In the form of tradition, pathos has obtained an objective meaning: It has become the second nature in which the free self has given objective shape to natural content which it has identified as its own nature. Hegel understands the transition of the social organism into the law as the lord–bondsman relation. The “bondsman” is the free self who serves tradition. It does not serve the tradition as an external power to which it has to submit itself as slave, but because it understands tradition as the expression of its “lord”, that is, as its own essence. The lord, who initially appeared as death, as the absolute superior power of nature, was internalised during the experience of the fear of death because the free self felt itself to be the lord of its body. In the lord–bondsman relation, this internal lord is represented as an external, objective lord, as the free being which underlies the law of the social organism. The lord, who after all stands for pure freedom, is practically expressed in the law of the social organism. Since the social organism is only a contingent form of an appearance of pure freedom, the lord is also represented in a special way, namely, as the essence of the contingent social organism.

100 4

Cobben

The Content of the Human Law and the Divine Law as More Specific Forms of Pathos

At the level of the lord–bondsman relation, pathos is determined to be the content of the law of the social organism. This makes it clear that pathos is expressed in the laws (the norms and values) of a traditional society. However, it remains undetermined what exactly the content of the social organism is. In the chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit on reason, Hegel investigates whether a more precise determination is even possible. But this investigation only yields a negative result. It becomes explicitly clear that as soon as the content of the law of the social organism (the “good life”) is positively determined, the freedom of the individual is immediately annihilated. Therefore, the only necessary determination which applies to this law is that it may not contradict itself.9 The conclusion seems to be that a more specific determination of pathos is only a matter of contingency: It has no necessary content and can only be determined for a contingent, historical society. Nevertheless, this conclusion is drawn too fast. After all, we have already observed that all contingent social organisms are characterised by a fundamental internal tension. Individuals who have submitted themselves to a contingent tradition have experienced the fear of death and are therefore internally free. Sooner or later, this internal freedom has to clash with the prevailing tradition leading to the development of this tradition. At the level of religion (especially the religion of nature), Hegel discusses this process. Tradition which is served (by humans as “servants”) is represented by a god (the “lord”). In the end, this god stands for the absolute essence of man (namely, his pure freedom); this absolute essence, however, appears in a specific historical form. This specific form corresponds to the specific law of the social organism, that is, to the form in which the lord is served. As long as the lord is represented in a religious form, the bondsman cannot bring his subjective certitude to truth, namely, that the lord is his absolute essence. This results in a process of development in which the absolute content of the lord is more and more adequately expressed. The lord is the absolute substance which has to be adequately expressed as substance (which will finally succeed at the level of absolute spirit). And, since the form of the lord

9  “Es müsste auch sonderbar zugehen, wenn die Tavtologie, der Satz des Widerspruchs, der für die Erkenntniss theoretischer Wahrheit nur als ein formelles Kriterium zugestanden wird, das heisst, als etwas, das gegen Wahrheit und Unwahrheit ganz gleichgültig sey, für die Erkenntnis praktischer Wahrheit mehr seyn sollte.” [PhdG, 234].

Hegel ’ s Concept Of Pathos

101

corresponds to the form of the social law in accordance with which the lord is served, the social organism itself also has to appear as absolute substance. The process of development that we have just mentioned seems to finish at the moment that the human as bondsman has discovered that he is his own lord. Then, the human has understood that by observing the law of the social organism he does not serve a strange lord; instead, he realises his own freedom by observing the law. Now the social organism can be understood as a substance in which the human realises his freedom in and through his actions. Hegel thinks that this form of relation can historically be found in the Greek world. The citizen of the Greek polis is the bondsman who has recognised himself in his lord. What his actions express is nothing other than his internal essence.10 Therefore, it may seem that the pathos has become self-conscious. It is the citizen himself who feels through this second nature that he is his own essence. Nevertheless, a further step has to be made in order to establish the way in which his pathos has truly become self-conscious. The relation in which the citizen observes the law of the social organism (the law which now has been transformed into an autonomous, human law) is initially only a purely practical relation. The citizen only practically transforms the content which he finds in his inner self into an objective content by realising this internal content by means of his actions. He is not aware that this content is his absolute essence. This is only possible if the citizen makes this given (traditional) content self-conscious through mediation of the fear of death which has become self-conscious. Hence, not only is this content his absolute essence, but he has also developed the awareness that this is in fact the case. Under the conditions of the polis, the process in which the pathos becomes self-conscious falls into two forms which correspond to the two forms in which the power of death can be experienced. The experience of death can as well concern the second nature—that is, the “death” of the social organism—and the death of the individual (human) organism. In the first case, the process of becoming self-conscious leads to the pathos of the human law, and in the second case, it leads to the pathos of the divine law.

10  “Um dieser Einheit willen ist die Individualität reine Form der Substanz, die der Inhalt ist, und das Thun ist das Uebergehen aus dem Gedanken in die Wirklichkeit, nur als die Bewegung eines wesenlosen Gegensatzes, dessen Momente keinen besondern von einander verschiedenen Inhalt und Wesenheit haben.” [Ibid., 253].

102

Cobben

The substance of the polis is an “immediate” substance:11 a substance with traditionally given norms and values. As given and historical, the substance of the polis does not yet have an adequate form, for it is related to the outside— and more specifically to the substance of another polis. The interplay of forces of lifeless nature can be continued at the level of culture as the interplay of forces between two poleis. The polis whose existence is threatened by the other polis is the force which is forced back into itself. Under this condition, the content of the social law can be brought to self-consciousness as the pathos of the human law. The citizens of the polis experience the fact that their existence as citizens is dependent on the realisation of the human law of the polis to which they belong.12 Only under the condition of the polis can the death of the individual be experienced as an absolute loss. After all, the law of the social organism is now for the first time identified as a human law. Not only is the reality of the human being dependent on the social organism, but conversely, the social organism is also dependent on the human being. Nevertheless, in some way a distinction between the individual and the community becomes valid. The death of the individual does not automatically lead to the “death” of the community. Individuals continuously die. Each of these individuals contributes in a certain way to the community. If he dies, he can be replaced by others without the survival of the community being threatened. If it is stated that the death of the individual is an absolute loss, this absolute loss does not concern the finite contribution which an individual can deliver to the community, but rather the individual as a free individual. After all, the freedom of the individual is the absolute (i.e., not being retraceable to something else) ground for the social organism’s existence, especially of the polis. However, from the point of view of the human law, this absolute loss is not visible as such. After all, with the death of the individual, it is only his finite contribution to the polis that disappears. In the polis, the freedom of the individual

11  “Der Geist ist das sittliche Leben eines Volks, insofern er die unmittelbare Wahrheit ist.” [Ibid., 240]. 12  “Um sie nicht in dieses Isoliren einwurzeln und festwerden, hierdurch das Ganze auseinanderfallen und den Geist verfliegen zu lassen, hat die Regierung sie in ihrem Innern von Zeit zu Zeit durch Kriege zu erschüttern, ihre sich zurechtgemachte Ordnung und Recht der Selbstständigkeit dadurch zu verletzen und zu verwirren, den Individuen aber, sich darin vertieffend vom Ganzen losreißen und dem unverletzbaren Fürsichseyn und die Sicherheit der Person zustreben, in jener auferlegten Arbeit ihren Herrn, den Tod, zu fühlen zu geben.” [Ibid., 246].

Hegel ’ s Concept Of Pathos

103

only manifests itself in the positivity of his actions. It must be said, however, that the freedom of the individual always transcends his positive actions. If the death of the individual cannot be experienced from the point of view of the human law as an absolute loss, then the question can be raised as to where this absolute loss can be situated. Hegel’s answer is that it can only be experienced in a social organism located alongside the polis, namely, the social organism of the family. The relations of the family are in some sense the reverse of the relations of the polis. While the actions of the individual in the polis serve the community, in the family it is the community that serves the individual, that is, the family member. One might then ask: Why should there exist, besides the polis, a second social organism, namely, the family? Obviously, the family is not introduced by Hegel as a deus ex machina in order to solve a certain problem. Rather, he can only account for the introduction of the family if it is clear that the social organism of the family must necessarily be presupposed in a free society like that of the polis (the “true substance”). It is clear that the freedom of the individual is not expressed in the activities which the individual performs on behalf of the human law: In these activities, the individual is functional for the community. The freedom of the individual, however, is only expressed if it is institutionally guaranteed that his activities do not coincide with the human law and that they can be understood as the (contingent) expression of his freedom. After all, freedom cannot be onesidedly expressed as a positive series of actions.13 Nevertheless, Hegel thinks that the introduction of the social organism of the family offers the beginnings of a solution. Ultimately, a positive series of actions can only be understood as the expression of the free self if there exists a free self which is aware that this series of actions is a finite expression of itself. Such a free individual who is aware of his freedom seems to be something that is lacking in the polis. Therefore, the assumption of a social 13  “Der Inhalt der sittlichen Handlung muß substantiell oder ganz und allgemein seyn; sie kann sich daher nur auf den ganzen Einzelnen oder auf ihn als allgemeinen beziehen. Auch diß wieder nicht etwa so, daß sich nur vorgestellt wäre, eine Dienstleistung fördere sein ganzes Glück, während sie so, wie sie unmittelbare und wirkliche Handlung ist, nur etwas Einzelnes an ihm thut, – noch daß sie auch wirklich als Erziehung, in einer Reihe von Bemühungen, ihn als Ganzes zum Gegenstand hat und als Werk hervorbringt; wo außer dem gegen die Familie negativen Zwecke die wirkliche Handlung nur einen beschränkten Inhalt hat; – ebensowenig endlich, daß sie eine Nothülffe ist, wodurch in Wahrheit der ganze Einzelne errettet wird; denn sie ist selbst eine völlig zufällige That, deren Gelegenheit eine gemeine Wirklichkeit ist, welche seyn und auch nicht seyn kann.” [PhdG, 243–04].

104

Cobben

organism in the form of the family seems to be rather problematic. In what sense exactly does it appear to be the case that the actions of the family are in the service of the family member? Does this not rather presuppose an explicit self-consciousness which knows that the actions in the family express the freedom of the family member in a finite way? How exactly does the qualification of the family as a social organism in the service of the individual become institutionally expressed? To answer this question, Hegel again appeals to the experience of the fear of death. In so far as the family members participate in the social organism of the family, they observe as bondsmen the norms and values of the family. We again find these norms and values of the family as the pathos of family life. As in the case of the human law, we now have to ask ourselves how it is that this pathos of the family member becomes self-conscious. Moreover, we have to answer the question of how we can understand that the pathos of the family has a different status than the pathos of the state. The key for answering these questions is the experience of the fear of death which is characteristic of the family and which is, consequently, distinct from the experience of the fear of death which we observed as being characteristic of the citizens of the state. The experience of the fear of death within the family (under the conditions of the polis) does not concern the death of an individual per se, but rather the death of one of his family members. Only with the death of the family member can the very essence of the positive actions of the family domain truly be experienced. In the loss of the family member, we see not only the negation of the finite actions performed in service of the family member, but the experience of an absolute loss, namely, the loss of the self on behalf of which these actions were performed. In the absolute loss of the family member, what is experienced is precisely what had already constituted the essence of the actions of the family: the free, pure self which can manifest itself in a multitude of actions.14 This pure self is retained by the family members as 14  “Die Handlung also, welche die ganze Existenz des Blutsverwandten umfaßt und ihn – nicht den Bürger, denn dieser gehört nicht der Familie an, noch den, der Bürger werden und aufhören soll, als dieser Einzelne zu gelten, sondern ihn, diesen der Familie angehörigen Einzelnen, als ein allgemeines, der sinnlichen, d. i. einzelnen Wirklichkeit enthobenes Wesen zu ihrem Gegenstande und Inhalt hat, betrifft nicht mehr den Lebenden, sondern den Todten, der aus der langen Reihe seines zerstreuten Daseyns sich in die vollendete eine Gestaltung zusammengefaßt und aus der Unruhe des zufälligen Lebens sich in die Ruhe der einfachen Allgemeinheit erhoben hat. – Weil er nur als Bürger wirklich und substantiell ist, so ist der Einzelne, wie er nicht Bürger ist und der Familie angehört, nur der Unwirkliche marklose Schatten.” [Ibid., 244].

Hegel ’ s Concept Of Pathos

105

the shade of the deceased.15 Therefore, just as in the initial experience of the fear of death described by Hegel in the lord–bondsman relation—the pure self experiences itself as the “lord” of its body—so too in this case the pure self of the deceased, the shade, is experienced as the lord of the second nature, namely, the social organism of the family. Once again, the experience of the fear of death is caused by an external absolute lord: death. In the experience of the family members, however, the absolute lord is internalised: the experience that the shade of the deceased is the absolute essence of the deceased family member. This experience is in contrast with what they (the family members) observe externally: The deceased family member has become a corpse which is destroyed through the external powers of nature. The family members take over the work which is performed through external nature and thus realise what they have felt internally: They posit themselves as the lord of the real self of the deceased family member.16 In this manner, the demand of the divine law to bury the deceased family member and to honour the memory of his shade can be understood. In the realisation of the demand of the divine law, the pathos of the divine law receives objective shape. In the immediate freedom that characterised the Greek world, the pathos of the human law and the divine law falls into two categories. The distinction between the two immediately presents itself as a natural one, namely, as one between the law of the woman and the law of the man. Since natural distinctions are fully contingent, they cannot have moral meaning. Nevertheless, the question can be raised as to why the woman is linked to the divine law 15  “Der Unwirkliche marklose Schatten” [Ibid., 244]. 16  “Die Blutsverwandtschafft ergänzt also die abstracte natürliche Bewegung dadurch, daß sie die Bewegung des Bewußtseyns hinzufügt, das Werk der Natur unterbricht, und den Blutsverwandten der Zerstörung entreißt, oder besser, weil die Zerstörung, sein Werden zum reinen Seyn, notwendig ist, selbst die That der Zerstörung über sich nimmt. – Es kömmt hierdurch zustande, daß auch das todte, das allgemeine Seyn ein in sich Zurückgekehrtes, ein Fürsichseyn oder die krafftlose reine einzelne Einzelnheit zur allgemeinen Individualität erhoben wird. Der Todte, da er sein Seyn von seinem Thun oder negativen Eins frey gelassen, ist die leere Einzelnheit, nur ein passives Seyn für Anderes, aller niedrigen vernunftlosen Individualität und den Kräfften abstrakter Stoffe preisgegeben, wovon jene um des Lebens willen, das sie hat, diese um ihrer negativen Natur willen itzt mächtiger sind, als er. Diß ihn entehrende Thun bewußtloser Begierde und abstracter Wesen hält die Familie von ihm ab, setzt das ihrige an die Stelle, und vermählt den Verwandten dem Schoße der Erde, der elementarischen unvergänglichen Individualität; sie macht ihn hierdurch zum Genossen eines Gemeinwesens, welches vielmehr die Kräffte der einzelnen Stoffe und die niedrigen Lebendigkeiten, die gegen ihn frey werden und ihn zerstören wollten, überwältigt und gebunden hält.” [Ibid., 244–45].

106

Cobben

and not to the human law and vice versa. Why should the logical distinction between the human law and the divine law correspond to a biological distinction between men and women? From a modern point of view, it is, after all, an injustice that only males can be citizens. However, the “injustice” of the Greek world cannot be meaningfully formulated in terms of discrimination against women. From the viewpoint of the modern, free individual, it is accidental whether one is a man or a woman, just as it is accidental to be assigned to a specific law. But the freedom of the Greek world is characterised by its immediacy, which implies that all individuals are immediately assigned to a specific law. The injustice we have just mentioned therefore concerns the immediacy of the assigning of individuals to a specific law and not the correspondence between, on the one hand, man and the human law and, on the other hand, woman and the divine law. The question now becomes whether the logical relation between the human law and the divine law at all corresponds to the relation between being male and being female. In Hegel’s analysis, such a correspondence does indeed exist. In biological reproduction, the female individual stands for the care of the individual in so far as she bears new individuals. The male individual stands for the species in so far as it is only in relation to the male individual that female reproduction appears as a reproduction of the species (and not as a spontaneous self-reproduction). 5

The Pathos of the Artist: The Attempt to Synthesise the Pathos of the Divine Law and the Human Law

We have observed that a society in which the law of the social organism has developed itself into a human law necessarily presupposes a family domain which is in service of the divine law. On behalf of the divine law, the individual freedom takes institutional shape. However, this individual freedom concerns the deceased family member, not the living citizen. It is obvious that in this kind of society the individual’s freedom is not adequately realised. Moreover, the separation between the divine law and the human law, as well as that between dead and living individuals, has to be overcome. A closer thinking through of the relation between the divine and the human law shows what first steps have to be made in order for individual freedom to become adequately realised. The point of view of the divine law is diametrically opposed to that of the human law: The individual does not serve the community, but the community serves the individual. Therefore, the divine law and the human law can

Hegel ’ s Concept Of Pathos

107

only exist beside one another. The divine law concerns the realm of the dead, and the human law concerns the realm of the living. Finally, the separation between both realms cannot be maintained. After all, the dead have their way of appearing in the realm of the living, namely, in their graves. Under normal circumstances, the grave does not threaten the human law. This changes, however, if it concerns the grave of an individual who intended to appropriate the human law. Then, the grave symbolises the most extreme undermining of the human law: the citizen who does not conform to the human law, but who, conversely, tries to make the human law conform to himself. Therefore, from the viewpoint of the human law, there cannot be any place for the grave. Consequently, the human law and the divine law no longer exist beside one another: they exist at opposite extremes. From the viewpoint of the divine law, however, the prohibition of the grave is an absolute injustice: It appears as a power which goes against the absolute demand to bury deceased family members. Because of this, for the divine law the human law appears as a contingent law which ultimately threatens the stability of the polis. The threat to the human law is the beginning of the genesis of the artist’s pathos. First, the artist is a citizen of the polis and participates in the general pathos of the human law. The divine law’s threatening of the human law is experienced by the artist as the absolute negation of his internal essence, namely, the pathos of the human law. The power of this absolute negation is the power of individuality, the pure self. This absolute power again causes the experience of the fear of death. Because the artist experiences this external power as such, he can internalise this power and experience himself to be the essence of the fear of death. Since the artist is already a self-conscious being and participates in the pathos of the human law, the internalised divine law here takes the form of a synthesis between the human law and the divine law. The pathos of the artist is the pathos of the human law which is individually experienced (and is not only experienced by the citizen).17 17  “Die Existenz des reinen Begriffs, in den Geist aus seinen Körper geflohen, ist ein Individuum, das er sich zum Gefässe seines Schmerzens erwählt. Er ist an diesem, als sein Allgemeines und seine Macht, von welcher es Gewalt leidet, – als sein Pathos, dem hingegeben sein Selbstbewußtseyn die Freyheit verliert. Aber jene positive Macht der Allgemeinheit wird vom reinen Selbst des Individuums, als der negativen Macht, bezwungen. Diese reine Thätigkeit, ihrer unverlierbaren Krafft bewußt, ringt mit dem ungestalteten Wesen; Meister darüber werden hat sie das Pathos zu ihrem Stoff gemacht und sich ihren Gestalt gegeben, und diese Einheit tritt als Werk heraus, der allgemeine Geist individualisirt und vorgestellt.” [PhdG, 378].

108

Cobben

The enriched pathos of the artist is again objectively expressed in the service (as “bondsman”) of the law. The service of the law again results in a “work.” This time, however, the work does not consist of the collective work of the citizens (the polis), but is rather an individual work: a work of art in which the pathos of the human law is individually expressed. The work of art of the artist firstly consists of the statue of the god and the temple.18 The statue of the god and the temple are the idealised representations of the citizen and the polis. The statue of the god is the idealised free man, and the temple is the idealised free representation of the second nature. The artist can give them, as representations of the citizen and the polis, his own individual form. In these works of art, however, the synthesis between the pathos of the divine law and the human law is not adequately expressed. It is true that in the work of art the ethical substance is represented as the work of a free individual (the artist), but this free individual remains tied to a contingent tradition. His freedom is not explicitly represented as pure freedom. In the development of the religion of art, Hegel discusses many forms of art which increasingly express the emancipation of the individual from the contingent tradition. Finally, however, it must become clear that the work of art cannot be the adequate expression of the pure self. It is only at the level of the Roman Empire that the pure self is expressed as the free and equal person of Roman law. 6 Conclusion Pathos is the immediate synthesis between self and nature. Pathos is nature which the self feels to be its own nature. The ethical version appears as an immediate practical relation, as the immediate ethical law (i.e., the human law and the divine law) which is observed on the basis of one’s own nature. In the aesthetic version of the pathos, the ethical version is reflected in itself by unifying the pathos of the human law and the divine law in their representation as a work of art. In the work of art, however, the pure self still remains embedded in representation. Finally, the pure self emancipates itself from the form of representation in a work of art and appears in the legal order of the Roman Empire. 18  “Die erste Weise, in welcher der künstlerische Geist seine Gestalt und sein thätiges Bewußtseyn am weitesten voneinander entfernt, ist die unmittelbare, daß jene als Ding überhaupt da ist. – Sie zerfällt an ihr in den Unterschied der Einzelnheit, welche die Gestalt des Selbsts an ihr hat, – und der Allgemeinheit, welche das unorganische Wesen in Bezug auf die Gestalt, als seine Umgebung und Behausung darstellt.” [Ibid.].

Hegel ’ s Concept Of Pathos

109

For Hegel, pathos is not the domain in which ethics is at home thanks to its close relation to nature. In the end, ethics is only adequately expressed in the autonomy of the free self as it was already formulated in Kant’s practical philosophy.19 Pathos, rather, is the domain in which aesthetics is at home. After all, according to Hegel, the Greek world is the world of pathos and art par excellence. In this world, it is only the pathos of the artist which can express free individuality. References Cobben, Paul. The Nature of the Self: Recognition in the Form of Right and Morality. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1980. ———. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Vol. 13. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. The Holy Bible, King James Version. Cambridge Edition: 1769; King James Bible Online, 2015. http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/.

19  However, since Hegel argues that modern freedom is realised in the modern state, pathos in some sense returns as patriotism, which the citizen has felt as second nature through the modern state (or more precisely, the modern ethical world).

CHAPTER 7

In Search of a Second Ethics: From Kant to Kierkegaard Paul Cruysberghs In the preface to his Critique of Pure Reason,1 Immanuel Kant claims that he performed a Copernican revolution on the level of theoretical philosophy. What he did on the level of practical philosophy was no less revolutionary. He replaced an ethics based on the Aristotelian ideal of a good life by an ethics based on the concept of a good will. In traditional ethics, the good is connected with the completion and the perfection of the human being as a whole, whereas in Kant the good does not refer to the whole of the human being, but only to one single dimension—to the will in so far as it is obedient to the lawgiving of practical reason. What is more, if we would introduce the notion of perfection into ethics, according to Kant it would ruin the very essence of ethics itself. Kant divided the human being into a rational part and into a sensuous part, connecting the ethical imperative to reason and subjecting the sensuous part to it. The cultivation of the sensuous part remains a work to be done, to be sure, but it has no intrinsic ethical value. For Kant, cultivation of the senses is not a practical, but a pragmatic imperative. As a consequence, a certain dualism was introduced inside the ethical discourse itself. Since reason was the only determining ground for ethical behaviour, or at least for morality, ethics seemed to split up the human being into two different parts, which, as such, did not have any relevance for each other besides that of domination on the one hand and subjection on the other. * This text is based on a seminar organised by Prof. Dr. Poul Luebke at Copenhagen University in February 2004; a short version of it was presented on the Stephaneum Campus of the Pázmány Péter University in Piliscsaba (Hungary) in September 2006; and finally, it was the subject of a series of lectures at Christ University in Bangalore (India) in January 2014. 1  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Zweite Auflage 1787, in Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 3, 12 (Berlin: Akademieausgabe: 1911); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 110 (B XVI). In the following Kant quotes, I first refer to the German Akademie edition [“GS”] (first the volume, then the page). After a semicolon, I refer to the English Cambridge edition [“CE”].

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_009

In Search Of A Second Ethics

111

A lot of philosophers were quite impressed by the Kantian renewal of ethics. At the same time, they felt that this modern kind of ethics was rather harsh as compared to traditional ethics. While imposing its imperatives, ethics was not supposed to take into account any motive stemming from sensuousness. Only the principle of universality, being the form of reason itself, was allowed to intervene. One of the first Kant readers to react was Friedrich Schiller, not by rejecting Kantian ethics, but by supplementing it with an ideal of aesthetic perfection that was supposed to complete ethics in a conduct that would be superior to what Kant’s ethics was able to offer. A young Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was looking as well for an alternative, for an ethics that replaced the lawgiving of reason by a religion of love. Although Hegel dropped this somewhat romantic perspective quite soon, he never gave up the endeavour of freeing the lawgiving of reason from its harshness. That very same harshness of Kantian ethics was recognised by Søren Kierkegaard as well. In an essay on the tragic, in the first part of Either-Or, the author called “A” by Hilarius Bogbinder, the editor of the book—“A” representing an aesthetical view of life—says explicitly: “Det Ethiske, det er strængt og haardt” (“The Ethical, it is severe and hard”).2 And we might consider Judge William’s ethical life-view in the second part of Either-Or as a recasting of Schiller’s concept of aesthetic education.3 Still, according to Kierkegaard, Judge William’s perspective on ethics, not taking human finiteness and, most of all, sinfulness into account, must be considered naïve. Therefore, Kierkegaard takes up the problem again in the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety. Here, the ethical reappears with all of its severity and harshness. Nevertheless, Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety, opens up new perspectives by suggesting a second ethics,4 which should be based on religious presuppositions. What I want to do in this paper is to make clear that the problems that Kierkegaard is dealing with are not completely new; rather, they have to be placed in the broader context of classical German philosophy. 2  Søren Kierkegaard, Enten-Eller 1, in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter [“SKS”], ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al (Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 1997), Vol. 2, 145; Either/Or 1, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong [“HH”], Vol. 4, 145 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). In the following Kierkegaard quotes, I refer to the Danish Gad edition (first the volume, then the page); then, after a semicolon, I refer to the English Princeton edition. 3  Cf. Smail Rapic, Selbstverständigung: Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der Ethik Kants und der Rechtsphilosophie Hegels (Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007). 4  Søren Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest, SKS, 4, 323ff.; The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. R. Thomte in collaboration with A.B. Anderson, HH, 8, 20ff.

112 1

Cruysberghs

The Harshness of Kantian Ethics

With a bit of exaggeration, one might argue that Kant replaced traditional virtue ethics by a kind of heroic ethics. This does not mean that virtue is absent in Kant. Of course it isn’t: After all, we just have to remember that the second part of the Metaphysics of Morals most definitely consists of a theory of virtue. But it is not by accident that Kant defines virtue in terms of “moral disposition in conflict,” (“moralische Gesinnung im Kampfe”).5 I have no problems with the idea of virtue as a moral disposition, but what makes me suspicious of this definition is that Kantian virtue is operating “im Kampfe” (“in conflict”). This is quite a different context than the quieter, day-to-day context of the virtuous life espoused by the traditional conception of virtue (maybe with the exception of the virtue of courage, and even that may have been rather “day-today” in Aristotle’s Greece). Sure, in the passage I refer to above, Kant opposes virtue to holiness, which he defines in terms of “einer völligen Reinigkeit der Gesinnungen des Willens” (“a complete purity of dispositions of the will”).6 According to Kant, however, holiness appears to be beyond our human capacities, and that is the reason why we have to learn and live with Kampf.7 In Kant’s perception of life, duty is usually not something that is done spontaneously or easily, let alone with pleasure. While virtue, for Aristotle, had the character of a spontaneous hexis of a second nature, for Kant duty is never evident: It is something to fight for against all kinds of sensuous inclinations. Sure, moral disposition is more than taking decisions in the moment; it is an attitude that pervades one’s whole life in all circumstances. But still, Kant needs the notion of Kampf to clarify what virtue really means. And it is im Kampfe that the eminence and the superiority of practical reason shows up. Kant seems to ignore that in everyday life most human beings, if they are virtuous, do not need to fight against their inclinations. And even when he accepts the

5  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, GS, 5, 84; Critique of Practical Reason, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, CE, 208. See also Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, GS, 7, 277; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, CE, 377. 6  Ibid. 7  Here, we can recall Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript characterising Judge William’s ethics as it is presented in Stages on Life’s Way as “Kamp og Seier” (“struggle and victory”) [Afsluttende uvidenskabeligt Efterskrift, SKS, 7, 263; HH, 12, 288]. In Kant, however, otherwise than in Judge William, there is no prospect of victory.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

113

possibility of virtue as “a joyous frame of mind” ( fröhliche Gemüthsstimmung), the joyfulness appears to be the effect of the “courageous” character of virtue.8 As a matter of fact, when dealing with the lawgiving of practical reason, Kant makes use of a very specific kind of language borrowed from either the military or the political sphere. Both types of language suggest an asymmetric relationship between reason and sensuousness, the two faculties in man that are involved in a continuous conflict with each other on the battlefield of ethics. It is as if the Hobbesian natural state of war was transferred from the external, social world into the inner, psychological world of human faculties. And when, in the end, a state of law must be established, we seem to need a harsh regime in which the subjects (the natural impulses and inclinations) are constrained to obey the ruler (i.e., reason) unconditionally. Thus, if we do not want to live in a permanent state of war within ourselves, we are forced to live under the extremely oppressive regime of reason. Though Kant admits that this state of oppression does not need to be felt as such the whole time, he is quite pessimistic about what is needed most of the time. Since there is a continuous risk of rebellion from the side of the subjects, the ruler has to be on his guard against his inner enemies at all times. Let me give a few examples of the typically military and political metaphors Kant makes use of when dealing with virtue. They all refer to situations of subjection and domination. A good place to start is in the Metaphysics of Morals, where virtue is said to borrow its “arms from the arsenal of metaphysics” (“ihre Waffen aus der Rüstkammer der Metaphysik”).9 Kant further talks about the capacity “to master one’s inclinations when they rebel against the law” (“über seine dem Gesetz widerspenstige Neigungen Meister zu werden”).10 Vices are “monsters” (“Ungeheuer”) one has “to combat” (“bekämpfen”).11 In sum, “moral 8  This quote from a footnote in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, GS, 6, 24n; Religion within the Limits of mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. A. Wood and G. di Giovanni (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49n is an answer to Schiller’s Über Anmuth und Würde (On Grace and Dignity), where Schiller is complaining about the harshness of Kant’s ethics as if it were the expression of “eine kartäuserartige Gemüthsstimmung” (“the frame of mind of a Carthusian”) (thus Kant himself: Ibid., GW, 6, 23; CE, 48). As for Schiller’s criticism and Kant’s answer to it, see below. 9  Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, GS, 6, 376; The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, CE, 509. 10  Ibid., GS, 6, 383; CE, 515 (See also Ibid., GS, 6, 485; CE, 598; Die Religion, GS, 6, 59n; Religion, CE, 102; Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, GS, 4, 411; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, CE, 65). 11  Ibid, GS, 6, 405; CE, 533–34.

114

Cruysberghs

strength” is a question of “courage” (“fortitudo moralis”) that “constitutes the greatest and the only true honor that man can win in war” (“die größte und einzige wahre Kriegsehre des Menschen”).12 As a true soldier indeed, the virtuous man obeys the positive command “to rule over himself” (“Herrschaft über sich selbst”),13 “to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control” (“alle seine Vermögen und Neigungen unter seine (der Vernuft) Gewalt zu bringen”).14 And when, indeed, the military language does not show up, it is only to make room for another language of subjection, that of a ruler over against his subjects. Just as in the case of the political state of law, so it is in the case of the moral law that it is thought of in terms of “solemn Majesty” (“feierlichen Majestät”).15 We stand under a “discipline of reason” (“Disziplin der Vernunft”) and we should never forget “our subjection to it” (“Unterwürfigkeit unter derselben”).16 The respect for the moral law is described as “intimidating” (“abschreckend”), and with great “severity” (“strenge”) it shows us our own “unworthiness” (“Unwürdigkeit”).17 Sure, we are supposed to be freely obedient to the moral law (just like men gave up freely their own liberty in the state of nature in order to subject themselves to the sovereign ruler in the state of law), but the result is as plain as day: Being confronted with our “frail nature” (“gebrechliche Natur”),18 we have to restrict our inclinations and even, if necessary, our self-esteem. This restriction has an unpleasant effect on feeling. It restrains the opinion of our personal worth, “which, in the absence of agreement with the moral law, is reduced to nothing.”19 Hence, its effect on feeling is one of mere “humiliation” (“Demüthigung”).20 Kant admits that “we are indeed lawgiving members of a kingdom of morals possible through freedom and represented to us by practical reason for our respect.”21 But we always have to keep in mind that “we are at the same time

12  Ibid., GS, 6, 405; CE, 534. 13  Ibid., GS, 6, 408; CE, 536. 14  Ibid., GS, 6, 408; CE, 536. 15  Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, GS, 5, 77; Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, CE, 202. 16  Ibid., GS, 5, 82; CE, 206. 17  Ibid., GS, 5, 77; CE, 203. 18  Ibid., GS, 5, 77; CE, 203. 19  “der ohne Einstimmung mit dem moralischen Gesetze auf nichts herabgesetzt wird.” [Ibid., GS, 5, 78; CE, 203]. 20  Ibid., GS, 5, 77–8; 202–03. [See also GS, 5, 75; CE, 201]. 21  “Wir sind zwar gesetzgebende Glieder eines durch Freiheit möglichen, durch praktische Vernunft uns zur Achtung vorgestellten Reichs der Sitten.” [Ibid., GS, 5, 83; CE, 206].

In Search Of A Second Ethics

115

subjects in it, not its sovereign.”22 As subjects, we have to accept “our inferior position as creatures” and we should never presumptuously “deny from selfconceit the authority of the holy law.”23 The respect for the authority of the law always has the character of a “yoke” (“Joch”)24 we have to bear, whether we like it or not; and, as a matter of fact, it always humiliates us. Obeying the law always implies a subjection of the mind. Motives other than just this subjection risk making ethics dependent on pathological, non-moral motives. Pathological motives have their seat in sympathy and self-love, not in the law. People inspired by pathological motives develop “a frivolous, high-flown, fantastic cast of mind, flattering themselves with a spontaneous goodness of heart that needs neither spur nor bridle and for which not even a command is necessary and thereby forgetting their obligation, which they ought to think of rather than merit.”25 Thus, it must be clear that we need to set the boundaries of humility to self-conceit and self-love, which are both ready to mistake their limits. That is the reason why traditional virtues such as nobility, sublimity, and magnanimity must be considered as being extremely dangerous: They threaten the purity of practical reason. It is no wonder that man, as belonging to both the sensuous and the rational worlds, must regard his own rational nature only with reverence and regard its laws with the highest respect. However, reverence and respect do not seem to be good enough if one wants a human life to be in harmony with itself. More is required. And we will now have to turn to Friedrich Schiller, who, according to a famous distich of his, spent ten years trying to understand Kant and an additional ten years trying to get rid of him.26

22  “aber doch zugleich Unterthanen, nicht das Oberhaupt desselben.” [Ibid., GS, 5, 83; CE, 206]. 23  “Verkennung unserer niederen Stufe als Geschöpfe und Weigerung des Eigendünkels gegen das Ansehen des heiligen Gesetzes.” [Ibid., GS, 5, 83; CE, 206]. 24  Ibid., GS, 5, 85; CE, 208. 25  “so bringen sie auf diese Art eine windige, überfliegende, phantastische Denkungsart hervor, sich mit einer freiwilligen Gutartigkeit ihres Gemüths, das weder Sporns noch Zügel bedürfe, für welches gar nicht einmal ein Gebot nöthig sei, zu schmeicheln und darüber ihrer Schuldigkeit, an welche sie doch eher denken sollten als an Verdienst, zu vergessen” [Ibid., GS, 5, 85; CE, 208]. 26  “Zwei Jahrzehende kostest du mir: zehn Jahre verlor ich / Dich zu begreifen, und zehn, mich zu befreien von dir” [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe & Friedrich Schiller, Xenien und Votivtafeln aus dem Nachlaß, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Poetische Werke (Berlin: Berliner Ausgabe, 1960), Vol. 2, 501].

116 2

Cruysberghs

Schiller: Grace as a Complement of Virtue

Schiller’s main endeavour as a philosopher consisted of stressing the autonomy of aesthetics and art over against ethics. Though he knew quite well that works of art (e.g., his own dramas) might have an ethical effect, the latter should never be confounded with the purpose of art, which is enjoyment, subjectively speaking, and representation (of the super-sensible), objectively speaking.27 Still, what Schiller had in mind as well was what we might qualify as an aesthetisation of human behaviour. This should not be considered as an alternative to, but rather as a complement of ethical behaviour. Though dedicated to Kantianism, Schiller opened the perspective of a new ethos that was no longer dominated by the opposition of sensuousness (inclinations and impulses), on the one hand, and ethics (duty and virtue), on the other. That new ethos can be defined as “moral beauty” (“moralische Schönheit”).28 It is introduced in a text called Kallias oder über die Schönheit (Kallias, or on the Beautiful) and further developed in the famous text Über Anmuth und Würde (On Grace and Dignity).29 It is tempting to characterise Schiller’s project of an aesthetisation of the human ethos as a second level ethics. As such, it seems to go beyond the Kantian position—still shared by Schiller, to be sure—that the moral law does not allow any other instance above or beyond itself. If this is the case, the question then becomes as follows: How can one combine this new kind of (aesthetic) ethics with the absolute superiority of the moral law? 27  See Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen, in Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert Göpfert [“SW”] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), Vol. 5, 358–72; Friedrich Schiller, On the Reason Why We Take Pleasure in Tragic Subjects, in Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom, [“PF”] Vol. 4 (Washington: Schiller Institute, 2003), 267–70. When quoting Schiller, I normally refer to the fifth volume of Sämtliche Werke (first the volume, followed by the page). After a semicolon, I refer to the English translations included in one of the four volumes of Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom, unless a different edition is mentioned (first the volume, then the page). 28  Kallias oder über die Schönheit, SW, 5, 404; Kallias, or On the Beautiful, PF, 2, 496. 29  That there are some dangers connected with this aesthetic perspective is the theme of an article, Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen (On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beautiful Forms), a revision of Von den notwendigen Grenzen des Schönen (On the Necessary Limits of the Beautiful) and Über die Gefahr ästhetischer Sitten (On the Danger of an Aesthetic Ethos). That the danger should not be overemphasised is made clear in Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten (On the Moral Utility of Aesthetic Manners).

In Search Of A Second Ethics

117

2.1 Kallias (1793): Beauty as Freedom in the Appearance Let us start with some perspectives offered by Kallias oder über die Schönheit, which consists of a series of letters written by Schiller to Gottfried Körner. What we are interested in here is not the notion of beauty in general, but a particular type of beauty that we have already termed moral beauty. Somehow, Schiller seems to be thinking of a modern recasting of the (neo)classical ideal of kalokagathia as defended by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, that is, of an ethics that combines the good and the beautiful. We take up Schiller’s argument when, in his letter of February 18, 1793, he explains his definition of beauty in terms of “freedom in the appearance.”30 The definition itself was introduced already at the end of his letter of February 8, 1793.31 What shows up immediately is that the definition suggests an intrinsic link between beauty on the one hand and freedom, one of the Kantian postulates of practical reason, on the other. Phenomena which appear as if they were free or autonomous, that is, natural in the sense of spontaneous and not as the result of a moral constraint, can be considered to be beautiful. This can relate to natural phenomena, to works of art, and, to human behaviour. Essential in this context is that, when behaviour is concerned, moral beauty be an analogue of freedom: It must appear to be free, that is, natural in the sense of spontaneous and not determined by any external natural cause or by free will. Moral beauty is a matter of taste: It can be understood neither as the complement of scientific understanding nor as the result of a moral imperative. Moral behaviour that is not connected with taste will always appear to be heteronymous precisely because it is the product of the autonomy of the will.32 Moral beauty, however, is connected with one doing one’s duty in such an easy way that it is as if it were done instinctively: “Therefore, were a moral action then first a beautiful action, if it appears as an effect of nature arising from itself. In a word: a free action is a beautiful action, when the autonomy of the disposition and autonomy in the appearance coincide.”33 What Schiller shows is that the violence (Gewalt) exercised by practical reason on our drives 30  “Freiheit in der Erscheinung.” [Kallias, SW, 5, 401; PF, 2, 489]. 31  Ibid., SW, 5, 400; PF, 2, 489. 32  Ibid., SW, 5, 403–04; PF, 2, 491. 33  “Also wäre eine moralische Handlung alsdann erst eine schöne Handlung, wenn sie aussieht wie eine sich von selbst ergebende Wirkung der Natur. Mit einem Worte: eine freie Handlung ist eine schöne Handlung, wenn die Autonomie des Gemüts und Autonomie in der Erscheinung koinzidieren.” [Ibid., SW, 5, 407; PF, 2, 498].

118

Cruysberghs

(Trieben), when moral determinations of the will are at stake, is a form of coercion (Zwang) over and against our sensory nature. Therefore, it has an offending (“etwas Beleidigendes”) and distressing character (“etwas Peinliches”).34 That is exactly what Kant had in mind when explaining the effects of the ethical law. The problem is that we do not appreciate coercion, even when it has its origin in reason. We want the freedom of nature to be respected as well, at least in the case of aesthetic judgements. We wish to consider any being (not just a moral person) as an aim in itself (Selbstzweck). For that very reason, it is not just practical reason that needs to be free; our sensory nature must appear to be free as well—also when moral behaviour is at stake—even when it is not actually free. It must seem as if we have satisfied our drives, when, in fact, we have subjected them to the domination of the pure will. 2.2 On Grace and Dignity (1793) In On Grace and Dignity (Über Anmuth und Würde), Schiller further develops the theme of moral beauty, but now with the help of the notion of grace (“Anmuth”), whereas moral dignity (“Würde”) must be connected with the aesthetics of the sublime. Schiller takes up beauty and grace on the one hand, and grace and dignity on the other. In the first discussion, we remain within the sphere of aesthetics; in the second, we dwell on the borderline of the aesthetic and the ethical. First, we will deal briefly with the distinction between beauty and grace; then, we will focus more extensively on the distinction between grace and dignity. 2.2.1 Grace As compared to beauty in general, grace is to be termed changeable beauty, more specifically in connection with human beings.35 As such, it must be contrasted with fixed beauty. Changeable beauty refers to accidental changes of behaviour, whereas fixed beauty is attached to a subject’s appearance as such. The condition for motion to be graceful is that it be unintentional. On many occasions, however, grace appears to be a kind of side effect of intentional acts. Hence, we have to look for what, in the case of intentional acts, is unintentional but at the same time in accordance with a moral state of mind (i.e., the intentional side). Grace must express a certain moral perfection (and in that sense, grace is also termed speaking or expressive movement). It is the super-sensible ground in the mind which makes grace speaking or expressive, whereas it is the sensuous ground in nature that makes it simply beautiful. 34  Ibid., SW, 5, 407–08; PF, 2, 499. 35  Über Anmuth und Würde, SW, 5, 434; On Grace and Dignity, PF, 2, 338.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

119

The easiness of movement when fulfilling one’s moral duty will be its most typical characteristic. Hence, gracious beauty must be located in between dignity as the expression of the ruling of spirit on the one hand and wantonness or lust as the expression of the ruling of instinct or drive (“Trieb”) on the other.36 Grace, however, is not possible when reason rules or controls sensuousness or when sensuousness rules reason. It is only when reason and sensuousness, duty and drive, correspond that we meet a playful beauty that we term grace. Grace is only possible if obedience to reason becomes the immediate object of our drive; and this is only possible if it offers us room for pleasure (“Vergnügen”), since “instinct is only set into motion by pleasure and pain.”37 It nevertheless remains problematic that inclinations are the companions of moral sentiment (“des Sittengefühls”). Pleasure, indeed, is quite a dubious bonus to moral determinations. Inclination joining together with duty might be advantageous for the legality of our actions, but it is not relevant for their morality, which depends exclusively on the good will. In that sense, Schiller remains a dedicated Kantian.38 Still, he tries to do justice to the claims of sensuousness: again not with respect to the moral law—there it must be rejected resolutely—but with respect to the appearance and the actual execution of moral duty. Whereas Schiller considers the contribution of inclinations as irrelevant when considering the dutifulness of an act, he concludes that the ethical perfection of a human being, his humanity (“Humanität”), must be related to his inclination toward moral action.39 In an objective sense, actions out of inclination and actions out of duty are opposed to each other; in a subjective sense, however, this does not need to be the case. And that is Schiller’s point. His position is that, when considering the human being not from the point of view of the moral law, but in a more integrating way, from the viewpoint of Humanität, of moral perfection, not only is it permissible to link pleasure with duty, but one has to do so. Since a human being as such is both a rational and a sensuous being, one should not “divide asunder what she [nature] brought together,”40 and therefore the one part should not be suppressed by the other. The fact that the union of pleasure and duty has the character of a human task to be accomplished suggests a new kind of ethics that links reason and inclination in the concrete action of the human being. What Schiller cares for 36  Ibid., SW, 5, 463; PF, 2, 363. 37  Ibid. 38  Ibid., SW, 5, 463–64; PF, 2, 363–64. 39  Ibid., SW, 5, 470; PF, 2, 370. 40  Ibid., SW, 5, 465; PF, 2, 365.

120

Cruysberghs

is indeed not only that we obey reason, but that we do so with joy. A welleducated human being can allow himself to trust the voice of inclination and is not forced to have it tested time and again by the principle of morality. Respectable is precisely he who, with some confidence, can commit himself to his inclinations. This proves indeed that both principles do correspond in his mind. If that is the case, we can speak of a “perfected humanity”;41 and the person who is able to reach that point can be considered as a “beautiful soul.”42 “We call it a beautiful soul,” Schiller says, “when moral sentiment has assured itself of all emotions of a person ultimately to that degree, that it may abandon the guidance of the will to emotions, and never run danger of being in contradiction with its own decisions.”43 For that reason, the whole character is moral in a beautiful soul, not just in this or that act. Even the most painful obligations are fulfilled easily. The beautiful soul is not even conscious of the beauty of its acting, and it cannot even imagine that it could eventually act or feel differently: “It is thus in a beautiful soul, that sensuousness and reason, duty and inclination harmonize, and grace Is its epiphany.”44 2.2.2 Dignity If grace corresponds with a beautiful soul, then dignity corresponds with a sublime disposition (“einer erhabenen Gesinnung”).45 In this context, the sublime (“Erhabenheit”) is to be understood in two ways. First, in an elementary sense, in contrast with sensuousness, one can consider one’s will as such—that is, even when it is not acting morally—to be sublime. The will alone rises already beyond the merely animal status. In that sense, the sublime is not necessarily associated with morality (“Sittlichkeit”). Second, however, the sublime character of morality should be considered to be a higher level that presupposes the sublimity of the will as such. Schiller identifies it with divinity. If the human being is not able to free himself from the necessity of nature, than he is not capable of moral action either. As such, the will stands in between two laws: that of nature and that of reason.46 As a natural force, it is free over against 41  Ibid., SW, 5, 468; PF, 2, 368. 42  Ibid. It should be clear that Schiller’s definition of a beautiful soul is far away from the beautiful soul which refuses to have dirty hands that Hegel has in mind when dealing with morality in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Cf. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 9 (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1980), 355ff.; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 383ff. 43  “Anmuth und Würde,” Ibid. 44  Ibid., SW, 5, 468–69; PF, 2, 368. 45  Ibid., SW, 5, 470; PF, 2, 370. 46  Ibid., SW, 5, 471–72; PF, 2, 371.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

121

both: It is bound neither by the laws of nature nor by those of reason. But it is not free as a moral force: The will should be (“soll”) reasonable. It is not bound (“gebunden”) to either, but it is obliged (“verbunden”) to the law of reason. Schiller is convinced that impulse can be disarmed (“entwaffnen”) by moral means, but that soothing it (“besänftigen”) is only possible by natural means. When an impulse has a tendency of pushing aside the will in a violent way, the moral character has to resist by restricting it.47 In that case, there is no correspondence (“Übereinstimmung”)—no harmony of inclination and duty—between sensuousness and reason. Since the specific contribution of inclination is lacking here, the human being cannot act in a morally beautiful way. Now, the human being has to act in a morally great way. This means that in such a situation, the beautiful soul has to turn into a sublime, a great, a heroic, or a noble soul.48 That is the touchstone by which the beautiful soul must be distinguished from a good heart or from a kind of virtue that would rest only on temperament. The latter is just a product of nature. The sublime soul will no longer be guided by inclination, but by reason alone. Thus, the soul acquires freedom of mind by mastering its impulses, just appealing to its moral strength. Dignity is the external expression of this freedom in the world of appearances.49 The ideal of a perfected humanity, however, does not ask for struggling, but rather for harmony. Therefore, virtue consists in grace, not in dignity.50 Humanity as such finds it hard to come to terms with dignity because the latter is the expression of an internal struggle within the human being. But in case duty cannot be brought into harmony with the demands of nature without annihilating human nature itself (its reasonableness), resistance against inclination is absolutely necessary. In that case, we expect dignity: the expression of the struggle in the world of appearances. And then there is no longer place for playful beauty either: There is only room for bitter earnestness. By way of conclusion, I would like to quote Schiller’s suggestion for a new moral law in the following terms: “The person must do with grace everything which he can accomplish within his humanity, and with dignity everything that he has to transcend his humanity to accomplish.”51 By connecting grace with the notion of the beautiful, and dignity with that of the sublime, Schiller clears the way for an aesthetic view of human behaviour not just in case there 47  Ibid., SW, 5, 474; PF, 2, 373–74. 48  Ibid., SW, 5, 474–75; PF, 2, 374. 49  Ibid., SW, 5, 475; PF, 2, 374. 50  Ibid., SW, 5, 478; PF, 2, 377. 51  Ibid., SW, 5, 479; PF, 2, 378.

122

Cruysberghs

is a harmony of moral duty and sensuous inclinations, but also in case they struggle with each other (as in most of Schiller’s dramas). In both cases, an aesthetic conception of our behaviour offers a reconciliation with ourselves that is absent in Kantian ethics as such. 2.3 The Limits of Grace (1795) In spite of his warm plea for grace, Schiller felt the need to put some limits on moral beauty. Even though one is a beautiful soul indeed, it might happen that one may be forced to leave room for dignity. Aesthetics indeed can never replace (Kantian) ethics. Ethics preserves its autonomy, and in certain circumstances it would be simply inappropriate to want to—and be—gracious. It is precisely because his plea for grace was misunderstood that Schiller took up the topic again in an article entitled “Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen” (On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beautiful Forms).52 One should not mix up ethical and aesthetic judgements, he argues in this article. The aesthetic indeed can be misused. That is the message now. Misuse is finding a place where aesthetics forgets its place. While the latter normally belongs to “the executive force,” it might consider itself as being “the lawgiving force.”53 However, lawgiving is not a question of aesthetics but of ethics. Therefore, the use of beautiful forms must be kept within clear-cut limits. In what circumstances is this keeping apart of aesthetics and ethics necessary? Schiller refers to two essentially spiritual activities in man: knowing, on the one hand, and acting, on the other. In both cases, limits have to be put on aesthetics. I will not go into Schiller’s endeavour of putting limits on beautiful forms on the level of science (as a matter of fact, by so doing he is defending himself against Johann Gottlieb Fichte). Rather, I will concentrate on the ethical context.

52  As a matter of fact, this text is the result of Schiller bringing together two different texts when he published his Kleine prosaische Schriften in 1800. The first text is an article entitled “Von den notwendigen Grenzen des Schönen, besonders im Vortrag philosophischer Wahrheiten,” which was published in Die Horen (9th issue) in 1795; the second was an article entitled “Über die Gefahr ästhetischer Sitten,” which was written earlier (1793), but published in Die Horen (11th issue) as well in the same year as a continuation of the first text. 53  Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen [SW, 5, 670; On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beautiful Forms, PF, 3, 281].

In Search Of A Second Ethics

123

Danger is imminent as soon as the human being commits himself exclusively to the sense of beauty and taste, and makes taste into the unlimited lawgiver of his will. Aesthetic refinement is then far from being an advantage. The reason is clear: The moral destination of man asks for the radical independence of the will over and against any influence of sensuous motives. The problem with taste is that its intention is precisely to strengthen the ties of reason with the senses. As such, this seems to be innocent or even praiseworthy. The drive of aesthetics indeed offers the possibility of ennobling our desires and of bringing them in line with reason. But there is a great danger connected with it, according to Schiller. In exchange for services rendered, taste indeed seems to expect something done in return. Anyway, there is a very real danger that the accidental accordance of duty with inclination that we meet in grace is made into a necessary condition. Thus, ethics already risks being poisoned at its very source. The point is this: The more moral and aesthetic judgements are in accordance with each other, the more reason will have the tendency to consider a sensuous inclination that is spiritualised—thanks to what we have termed aesthetisation—as its own and to grant the latter unlimited force to steer the will. This is no problem as long as inclination and duty desire the same thing. But the situation is completely different when reason and feeling have a different interest and the one wants something that is against the desire of the other. Then the right instance—in this case the moral law—must be in power. But that is no longer evident, since in the meantime inclination may have acquired so much respect that it can turn against duty. Whereas respect is only due toward the moral law—since only the moral law can claim the unconditionality connected with respect—it now might be claimed by an ennobled inclination. In that case, the latter is no longer ready to subordinate itself (“untergeordnet”) to reason; rather, it wants to be co-ordinate (“beigeordnet”) with it. If both instances are considered as equal, it may very well be that, when making choices, the interest of inclination will be decisive (cf. the example of love).54 As compared to the earlier Schiller, who made a plea for a harmony (“Zusammenstimmung”) of impulse and duty, we meet a Schiller who is now scrambling backward. The unity of sensuous and moral impulses appears to be just an ideal, something that never finds place in reality. “An excessively intimate partnership” (“eine zu innige Gemeinschaft”)55 of both appears to be 54  Ibid., SW, 5, 690; PF, 3, 302. 55  Ibid., SW, 5, 693; PF, 3, 305.

124

Cruysberghs

extremely dangerous for morality. In this situation, indeed, sensuousness has nothing to lose, since in the case of a conflict it would fare worse. But reason is exposed to much greater dangers “if she allows herself to be granted by the inclination that which she could demand from it.”56 The feeling of Verbindlichkeit, the obligatory character of the moral law, might be lost too easily. For that very reason, Schiller returns to what he had developed in the section on dignity in his text On Grace and Dignity: True morality only maintains itself in the school of adversity, and a situation of continuous happiness turns too easily into an obstacle for duty.57 Kant’s severe and harsh ethics is back, so it seems. 2.4 But Still . . . On the Moral Use of Aesthetic Manners (1796) In On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beautiful Forms, Schiller pointed to the danger connected with a morality which is guided exclusively by taste. In On the Moral Use of Aesthetic Manners (Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten), a text published in Die Horen in 1796, but written in almost the same period as On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beautiful Forms (1793), he recalls that a lively and pure feeling of beauty has a salutary effect on moral behaviour—if not on morality as well. Here, we return to the moral effect of aesthetics—not so much, however, to that of the fine arts (as is the case, for example, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man), as to that of an aesthetic ethos, of aesthetic manners (“Sitten”). Schiller’s point of departure is that the ethical has no other foundation than itself. Therefore, taste can promote (“begünstigen”) moral behaviour, but it can never give birth (“erzeugen”) to anything moral.58 The reasoning goes as follows: Though practical reason is autonomous, the possibility of moral action might be co-determined by external factors. In proportion to the strength of our sensuous inclinations, we will find it more or less hard to do our duties. Therefore, morality can be promoted (and hindered) in two ways.59 Either the power of reason and of the good will must be strengthened in such a way such that we can resist temptation more easily, or we must break the power of the temptation itself. The latter can be done thanks to aesthetics. A good taste indeed always rests on a certain refinement of manners; it demands moderation (“Mäßigung”) and decency (“Anstand”).60 56  Ibid. 57  Ibid. 58  Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten, SW, 5, 781; On the Moral Use of Aesthetic Manners, PF, 3, 399. 59  Ibid., SW, 5, 783; PF, 3, 401. 60  Ibid., SW, 5, 784; PF, 3, 402.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

125

Now, when aesthetics moderates our sensuous impulses and makes us sensitive to order and harmony, neither reason nor the good will need to be extremely strong in order to master said sensuous impulses. Seemingly, morality does not win anything with such an operation. Morality indeed is exclusively determined by the good will; and the use of good taste does not really alter this.61 However, that is not necessary either. The issue, indeed, is not that the bad will change into a good will. Rather, we are confronted with a good will that might be just a little bit too weak to withstand the urges of our sensuous impulses. Thanks to good taste, this weak good will may result in being effective, something that might not have happened, had stronger impulses hindered it. Thus, Schiller defends the position that an instance which is capable of destroying the opposition of the impulses to the good effectively promotes morality. And that is precisely what an aesthetic ethos does: It breaks the opposition of our primitive sensuousness to the good. As a matter of fact, there are two types of people. There are people, who, when acting, are simply steered by sensuous impulses. These are the raw minds. In the case of moral minds, the second type, reason imposes its law immediately: And, in the third place, there are the “aesthetically refined souls” in which “there is still one more instance which not seldom replaces virtue when it is lacking and makes it easier when it is present. This instance is taste.”62 Thanks to taste, the human being at least acquires the capacity to suspend the merely passive situation of the soul by an act of auto-activity and to stop through reflection the far too easy transition of feelings into actions. Thus, it makes room for the will to turn effectively toward virtue. This victory of taste over the raw affect is not a moral action at all, and the freedom that the will acquires thanks to taste is not yet moral freedom. But “taste liberates the soul from the yoke of the instinct, only insofar as it guides it in its fetters.”63 Even though we did not become better moral beings by this intervention of taste, something great has been won. All these material inclinations and raw wishes that oppose doing good have been replaced by “nobler and softer inclinations [. . .] which relate to order, harmony and perfection.”64 Before being judged by reason, our wishes must pass severe inspection by the sense of beauty. After that inspection, reason no longer merely counters any opposition

61  Ibid., SW, 5, 783; PF, 3, 401. 62  Ibid., SW, 5, 784; PF, 3, 402. 63  Ibid., SW, 5, 785; PF, 3, 403. 64  Ibid.

126

Cruysberghs

it may encounter, it actually wins approval from the side of the aesthetised inclination. Even though the question might arise as to whether our actions have kept their moral character when taste has such an influence on them, Schiller defends the position that taste as such does not at all harm true morality; as a matter of fact, he goes even further, arguing that it is positively useful.65 On many occasions, aesthetically formed people will not even reach the level of moral judgement because their taste is that well developed that they will instinctively omit certain actions. Their behaviour is morally indifferent; it is “a merely beautiful effect of nature.”66 In other cases, aesthetic taste will care that what duty is imposing is done with inclination as well. Then, we perform a morally perfect action which is even more perfect from a physical point of view, since we are inclined to perform it. The least we can say is that if taste does not promote the morality of our behaviour, it furthers its legality. It makes us capable of acting without any moral disposition in the same way as we would have acted with it. From the viewpoint of a physical world order, assuring legality is of the utmost importance, especially when we take into consideration the fact that we can never count on the morality of people. For that very reason, we are compelled to bind ourselves through religion and aesthetic laws in order to avoid our passions from harming the physical order.67 It is probably not by accident that in this relatively late text Schiller returns to what he had already written in “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?,” an early pre-Kantian text about the possible effects of a well-established theatre.68 There, he suggested that religion and aesthetics were the two strongest pillars of the state. In the early article, aesthetics is represented by the theatre, but here (as we have seen), it is represented by by taste. Both religion and aesthetics are present in “The Moral Use of Aesthetic Manners” because of their common merits in respect of their effects: They both “serve as a surrogate for true virtue and to protect legality where there is 65  Ibid., SW, 5, 787; PF, 3, 406. 66  Ibid., SW, 5, 786; PF, 3, 405. 67  Ibid., SW, 5, 789; PF, 3, 407. 68  The article, published in 1785, was presented on June 26, 1784 at a conference for the Kurfürstliche deutsche Gesellschaft in Mannheim. In Volume 4 of his Kleinere prosaische Schriften (1802), Schiller deleted the initial introduction and changed the title to “Die Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet.” For an English translation of the latter version, see Schiller’s aesthetical essays, which are available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/6798.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

127

no hope of morality.”69 Both remain beneath the level of morality, which only acts out of duty; nevertheless, both the stimulus of beauty as a complement of taste and that of immortality promised by religion, will function as “strong anchors”70 upon which to fasten the welfare of humanity. Thus, the circle is closed. The proper character of aesthetics has been saved. We learned that the ethical functions not only as an aesthetic instrument— something Schiller developed in Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen (On the Reason Why We Take Pleasure in Tragic Subjects) (1792)71—but also as an effect of the aesthetical. And finally, we learned that there is room for an aesthetic ethos, though we should not underestimate its danger. 3

Kant’s Book on Religion and His Anthropology

Now, I return to Kant for a moment, in order to have a look at his reaction to Schiller’s notions of grace and dignity and in order to see how he dealt with the notion of humanity (Humanität, Menschlichkeit) within the context of his anthropology. 3.1 A Reaction to Schiller in Kant’s Book on Religion (1794) After having read Schiller’s On Grace and Dignity, Kant added a footnote in the second edition (1794) of his Religion within the Limits of mere Reason, in which, instead of criticising Schiller, he appears to agree with Schiller as far as the latter’s basic ethical conceptions are concerned.72 He does not see any fundamental opposition between Schiller’s position and his own. On the contrary, as long as dignity and grace are sufficiently distinguished, Kant is ready to go along with Schiller. For that very reason, he does not accept Schiller’s reproach of moral rigourism that represents “obligation” (“Verbindlichkeit”) as carrying with 69  Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten, SW, 5, 789; On the Moral Use of Aesthetic Manners, PF, 3, 408. 70  Ibid. 71  I do not go deeper into this perspective, but Schiller refers in this text to the importance of ethical themes in drama, more specifically in tragedy. He argues that the ethical should never be the goal of aesthetics (its goal should be pleasure), but that nevertheless it can function as its effect. See SW, 5, 358ff; PF, 4, 267ff. 72  Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, GS, 4, 669–70, n. 2; Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. and trans. A. Wood and G. di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72–3, n. 2.

128

Cruysberghs

it the “frame of mind of a Carthusian” (“kartäuserartige Gemüthsstimmung”). Still, Kant is not ready to associate grace with duty precisely because the idea of duty involves an “unconditional necessitation” (“unbedingte Nöthigung”), which, as such, is incompatible with grace. He prefers to stress the majesty of the moral law (cf. the law on Mount Sinai) which instils awe (“Ehrfurcht”), not dread (“Scheu”) or fascination (“Reiz”). This majesty inspires respect to be compared to the respect of a subject (“Untergegebenen”) toward his master (“Gebieter”), with the proviso that since the master resides within ourselves, “it rouses a feeling of the sublimity of our own vocation.”73 This feeling of sublimity, Kant argues, enraptures us more than any beauty (read: grace). This means that Kant has more confidence in the sublimity of our ethical vocation than in the attractiveness of grace. Sure, virtue does allow the attendance (“Begleitung”) of grace, but when duty alone is the theme, grace has to keep a respectful distance. However, while taking into consideration the sublime character of moral duty, Kant refuses to consider it as being “weighed down by fear” (“ängstlich-gebeugt”) and “dejected” (“niedergeschlagen”). If that were the case, it would indeed result in a “slavish frame of mind” that would involve “a hidden hatred of the law” instead of the joyful state of mind that is connected with virtue. 3.2 Kant’s Anthropology (1798) Now, I turn to Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View),74 which is not a critical or a transcendental work—it is based on common knowledge derived from reading novels and travel stories, going to the theatre, and having contact with fellow countrymen. My assumption is that Kant’s anthropology offers some suggestions on combining ethics and aesthetics that are in line with Schiller’s concept of grace. What we learned from Kant up to now is that man belongs to two worlds and that the hierarchical relationship of both requires submission of the lower, natural world to the higher, spiritual one—at least as long as we consider these worlds from the point of view of ethics. This point of view I have characterised as being heroic, albeit not in the proper sense in which Kant himself considered heroism. According his perspective, heroism risks being a heroism of romance, which is inspired by sentimental—that is, pathological—motives. I qualify Kant’s own ethics as heroic in so far as it constrains us to a continuous 73  Ibid. 74  Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, GS, 7, 117ff.; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, CE, 227ff.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

129

struggle against our sensuous inclinations, or at least to a definite humiliation of them. Still, Kant leaves room for a different viewpoint, a viewpoint of worldly wisdom (“Weltkenntniß”) which he develops in his Anthropology. Here, Kant does not any longer consider human life from the point of view of the ethical law alone. Now, the perspective of humanity as presented by Schiller—or that of human perfection, as it used to be the ultimate telos of ancient ethics—comes explicitly to the forefront. In order to contrast this teleological viewpoint with the ethical one, I suggest turning to that part of the book which deals with the faculty of desire. After having dealt with the highest physical good, the good that offers the greatest sensuous pleasure—which, nota bene, can be found in “resting after work”75 and which, of course, is not to be confounded with laziness—Kant reflects somewhat on the highest moral–physical good, a combination of the highest physical and the highest moral good. First of all, and this is in line with what has been said before, he stresses that both goods, the physical and the moral, should not be mixed up. If that were the case, they would neutralise each other and would not work at all toward the goal of true happiness (“der wahren Glückseligkeit”). Again, Kant stresses that inclination to a pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other. Therefore, the principle of the physical good must be restricted by the principle of the moral good. Kant repeats that this restriction involves a conflict of both principles, but instead of complaining, he turns it into something highly desirable by stating that through their very conflict the principles constitute “the entire end of the well-behaved (wohlgearteten) human being, a being who is partly sensible but partly moral and intellectual.”76 Thus, instead of mixing up both principles, Kant rather seems to favour their conflicting with each other. But—and this seems to be something new as compared to what was expressed in the Critique of Practical Reason—if properly combined, the two principles provide us with “the enjoyment of a moral happiness” (“den Genuss einer gesitteten Glückseligkeit”), not in the life hereafter as promised in the Critique, but here on earth.77 This union of good living (“Wohlleben”) and virtue (“Tugend”) in social intercourse (“im Umgang”) Kant terms “humanity” (“Humanität”).78

75  Ibid., §87; GW, 7, 276, 376. 76  Ibid., §88; GW, 7, 277, 377. 77  Ibid. 78  Ibid.; GW, 7, 378.

130

Cruysberghs

When asking for the right proportion between both principles, Kant does not really care about the degree of good living, because that is merely subjective. What counts is the kind of relationship whereby the inclination of good living is to be limited (“eingeschränkt”) by the law of virtue. When trying to make more explicit what such humanity, such an enjoyment of moral happiness, might consist of, Kant first tries out the perspective of social life in general. Sociality can be considered to be a virtue. But here, Kant just reminds his readers that social enjoyment can easily result in a passion which, boastfully heightened by extravagance (“Verschwendung”), is rather the contrary of virtue: It is a form of good living which is rather detrimental to humanity. Keeping this warning in mind, Kant turns to three forms of social life that might claim the price of humanity: music, dance, and games. However, these rather innocent forms of social life promising “the enjoyment of moral happiness” have the disadvantage of establishing a “speechless social gathering” (“sprachlose Gesellschaft”), Kant remarks.79 Since the mutual exchange of thought is not encouraged when making music, dancing, or gaming, it seems that these combinations of good living and virtue are not in the right proportion. Gaming (playing cards) after a meal is especially defective, since then “a certain convention of self-interest is established, so that the players can plunder each other with the greatest politeness.”80 Despite the fact that music, dance, and games exhibit quite a high level of culture, the kinds of conversations that pertain to these activities (or what there remains of them) do not seem to further the union of good living and virtue. After all, they are and remain inferior ways of establishing true humanity. “The good living that still seems to harmonize best with true humanity is a good meal in good company (and if possible, also alternating company).”81 That is the final solution brought forward by Kant in his endeavour to make clear what moral happiness (“gesittete Glückseligkeit”) here on earth might consist of. It is worthwhile examining Kant’s explorations of how a good meal in good company should be organised (there is still something to be learned from it—I just mention the suggestion that, especially for a philosopher, eating alone is considered by Kant to be unhealthy, in particular when it becomes solitary feasting (“ein einsames Schwelgen”)).82 Although Kant considers all this to be completely unimportant when compared with the pure moral laws (“mit 79  Ibid. 80  Ibid., GW, 7, 278, 378. 81  Ibid. 82  Ibid., §88; GW, 7, 279–80, 380.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

131

dem reinmoralischen”), he nevertheless gives himself the time to insist on the rules of refined humanity to be observed by the organiser of a good dinner for “men of taste (aesthetically united).”83 The rules must be considered at least as “a garment that dresses virtue to advantage” (“ein die Tugend vorteilhaft kleidendes Gewand”),84 also when more earnest questions are at stake. Thus, Kant pleas for an intervention of the Graces, the goddesses of beauty that Schiller was in love with, after all. 4

Young Hegel’s Complaints: Love as a Complement of Virtue

There is no direct evidence that Hegel read Schiller’s Über Anmuth und Würde. Still, we know that he had a full subscription to Die Horen, which appeared from 1795 to 1797 and which contains the text on grace and dignity. So, there is some probability that Hegel did in fact read Schiller’s text. And, as for Kant, there is some substantial evidence that he read Die Religion innerhalb der bloßen Vernunft shortly after the appearance of the first edition in 1793.85 But I am not interested in direct influences for the moment. What does interest me, however, is that young Hegel, especially in his Frankfurt period from 1796 to 1801—after having shown himself to have been quite a good Kantian during his Bern period—appeared to have developed an explicit aversion for Kantian ethics, an aversion that led him, remarkably enough, at least for a while, toward a conception of religion that, in its motives, appears to be quite similar to that of Kierkegaard’s second ethics. That is what I want to show in what follows. Schiller’s second ethics, if I may refer to it that way, was a complement to Kantian ethics, an aesthetisation of it, akin, I suggested above, not to the second ethics we meet in the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety, but to the ethics fostered by Judge William in Either-Or, an ethics in harmony with aesthetics. Young Hegel’s endeavour to understand the spirit of Christianity in 83  Ibid., §88; GW, 7, 278, 378. 84  Ibid., §88; GW, 7, 282, 381. 85  Cf. “Editorischer Bericht,” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Frühe Schriften I, ed. F. Nicolin and G. Schüler, Gesammelte Werke [“GW”], Vol. 1 (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1989), 474–78. In what follows, I will refer to this edition as well as to Frühe Schriften II, ed. W. Jaeschke, Vol. 2 (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2014). As for the English translations, I will refer to Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel, Three Essays, 1793–1795: The Tübingen Essay, Berne Fragments, The Life of Jesus, ed. and trans. P. Fuss and J. Dobbins (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) and to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological Writings [“ETW”], trans. T.M. Knox (New York: Harper, 1961).

132

Cruysberghs

terms of love, in contrast with the Jewish (and Kantian) law, brings us closer to the second ethics that Vigilius Haufniensis had in mind. Initially, Hegel still shared Kant’s basic insights. He referred to the limits of human reason; he distinguished carefully between morality and legality; and he wanted religion to be a religion within the limits of mere reason, at the service of morality, the latter being the highest and ultimate destination of mankind—at least here on earth. But already in the Bern fragment beginning with “Religion ist eine der wichtigsten Angelegenheiten” (“Religion is one of the most important matters”), which probably dates from the summer of 1793, we hear a different voice, a voice which is close to Schiller’s perspective or to that of Kant himself in his later texts on religion and on anthropology. Hegel indeed, although remaining within the Kantian framework, appears to be quite polemical against too strong a separation of morality and sensuousness. In a moral system, abstractly, he argues, one must separate both, and the latter must be “humiliated” (“erniedrigt”) by the first. However, in reality, we must take into account man’s sensuousness, as well as his dependency on external and internal nature. If morality is the highest aim of mankind, the issue is not so much that of negating human sensuousness as it is of impregnating it (“geschwängert”) with the lawgiving of practical reason.86 The impregnation must be compared to the salt in a wellprepared meal penetrating the whole without showing itself. The ideas of reason must penetrate and animate the whole tissue of human sensation, feeling, and inclination because in any acting and striving sensuousness is the main element anyway.87 And religion has to interest not just reason, but sensuousness, the heart, as well: Religion is “Sache des Herzens.”88 It is the whole human being, not just reason that acts, and therefore religion should not just touch reason, but heart and fantasy as well.89 In the “Frankfurter Manuskripte über Vereinigung und Liebe” (“Frankfurt Manuscripts on Union and Love”), traditionally referred to as “Entwürfe über Religion und Liebe” (“Drafts on Religion and Love”) (1797), and the “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion” (“Frankfurt Manuscripts on the Chris­ tian Religion”), traditionally known as “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal” (“The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate”) (1798–1799), Hegel dissociates himself definitively from Kant’s principle of morality. Since morality 86  Hegel, “Studien 1792/1793–1794, Text 16: Religion ist eine der wichtigsten Angelegenheiten,” GW, 1, 84–5. 87  Ibid. 88  Ibid., GW, 1, 90, 92, 96. 89  Ibid., GW, 1, 107.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

133

asks for a subjection to the lawgiving of practical reason, Hegel argues now, it is still dominated by an opposition. Even though the moral law is given by the human being himself, morality is and remains a form of subjection. For the particularity, the inclinations, of the human being—in short, for his sensuousness—the universality of moral norms remains something alien, objective, and opposite.90 Jesus is no longer a moralist or a Kantian “Tugendlehrer,” as he still was in the 1795 text The Life of Jesus: “To complete subjection under the law of an alien Lord, Jesus opposed not a partial subjection under a law of one’s own, the self-coercion of Kantian virtue, but virtues without lordship and without submission, i.e., virtues as modifications of love.”91 The lesson to be learned here is that morality must be replaced by love. An ethics of duty must be replaced by a new kind of ethics, a second ethics we might term, a virtue ethics that should not be read in a Kantian or in an Aristotelian sense, but from a Christian perspective: an ethics of love. The Frankfurt Manuscripts on Union and Love (Drafts on Religion and Love) (1796) In the “Frankfurter Manuskripte über Vereinigung und Liebe,” Hegel links ethics to love, but also to religion—and life. Unity is the keyword. Life is the unifying element. When dealing with the relationship between subject and object, between nature and spirit, Hegel rejects indeed any kind of opposition or one-sidedness. Over and against the Fichtean overstressing of subjectivity and of practical reason, he argues in a fragment, written on paper, still dating from the Bern period, but at least partly dating from 1796, that “the practical activity annihilates the object, and is fully subjective—in love alone one is one with the object, it does not dominate and is not dominated.”92 4.1

90  “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion, Text 54: Jesus trat nicht lange,” GW, 2, 152–53, col. 2; ETW, 211–12. This text dates from 1798–1799. 91  “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion, Text 55: Der Tugend ist nicht nur Positivität,” GW, 2, 224, col. 2 (comp. col. 1); ETW, 244. This text dates from 1798–1799. 92  “Berner Manuskripte mit Frankfurter Überarbeitungen zum Glauben und zur Religion, Text 41: Religion,” GW, 2, 9. (My translation). In the “Frankfurter Manuskripte über Vereinigung und Liebe, Text 49: Welchem Zwekke,” GW, 2, 84–6, Hegel argues that in love as a feeling (not a single feeling, but a general one) no distinction is made between the feeling and the felt. Both dimensions coincide in life. In life, all the oppositions are unified. Love is both feeling and felt life. And as living beings, the lovers are one. One year later, however, Hegel rewrote this text, stressing that love is more than just a mere feeling of oneness: “In it [love] life finds itself as a duplication and oneness of itself.” [Ibid., 85, col. 2]. Cf. “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion, Text 59: Das Wesen des

134

Cruysberghs

Identifying love and the deity, Hegel further connects love and religion: “This love, made into a being [“Wesen”] by imagination, is the deity; the [internally] divided human being then has reverence, respect for it—the human being who is united in himself (“in sich einige”) loves it.”93 In love, Hegel suggests in Frankfurt fragment 50, the subject and the object, freedom and nature, actuality and possibility, are united: “Religion is one with love: the beloved is not opposed to us, he is one with our being; we see only ourselves in him, and still he is not us—a miracle (“ein Wunder”) we cannot understand.”94 In love, all the oppositions, including the one that still dominates morality, are sublated. Love appears to be the complement of morality, just as grace was for Schiller. Whereas Kantian virtue still rested on the opposition between the universality of the moral law and the particularity of the senses, in love this opposition disappears. In love, both dimensions are in perfect harmony with each other in such a way that we cannot even speak anymore in terms of “having to” (“Sollen”) or of duty. Thanks to love, the power of the objective, external order, typical of the reign of legality and still present in morality, is broken. Frankfurt Fragments on the Christian Religion (The Spirit of Christianity) (1798–1799) In that perspective, the Kantian notion of morality does not any longer come up to the mark. In Frankfurt fragment 52, beginning with “Zu der Zeit da Jesus,” Hegel definitely questions the status of Kantian morality. “According to Kant,” he says, “morality is the subjection [“Unterjochung”] of the singular under the universal, the victory [“Sieg”] of the universal over the singular that is opposed to it.”95 But then he adds, just in the form of keywords: “—rather elevation [“Erhebung”] of the singular to the universal, union [“Vereinigung”]—sublation of both opposites through union.”96 These elementary remarks are an apparent indication that Hegel is in search of a different conception of morality, one that escapes the implicit opposition of the singular and the universal 4.2

Jesu,” GW, 2, 282–83; ETW, 278–79: “Life develops and differentiates in living beings. In this development and differentiation, reflection produces oppositions, but in love the opposites are united again in their difference. Separation and reflection are no longer external, but moments of life itself.” 93  “Berner Manuskripte mit Frankfurter Überarbeitungen zum Glauben und zur Religion, Text 41: Religion,” GW, 2, 9. (My translation). 94  “Frankfurter Manuskripte über Vereinigung und Liebe, Text 50: So wie sie mehrere Gattungen,” GW 2, 97 (1798). (My translation). 95  “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion, Text 52: Zu der Zeit da Jesus,” GW, 2, 116 (1798). (My translation). 96  Ibid.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

135

as it is still present in the Kantian conception. What Hegel is looking for is not the subjection, but rather the elevation of the singular. And indeed, further on Hegel confirms this perspective: “Morality is sublation of a separation in life,” and, as such, “the principle of morality is love.”97 Kant’s practical reason as the capacity of universality must be considered to be “the capacity of excluding.”98 Instead of being a principle of union, it is a principle of separation. Instead of uniting the universal and the singular, it excludes the latter. Only a morality that is based on love is capable of sublating the opposition of both. The universality inherent in Kantian morality remains a dead one as long as it is opposed to the singular, whereas life is precisely the union (“Vereinigung”) of both. Morality thus remains a “dependency of myself, a division (“Entzweiung”) in one self.”99 And as for the moral law (“Moralgesetz”), it is said that it “sublates [. . .] the purely positive commandments, since it does not recognize any law except its own,” to be sure, but it still appears to be subject to “an alien power,” that is, under universality as opposed to the singular.100 The logic of the moral law contains an unavoidable opposition between the determining act of reason (“ein Bestimmendes”) and the determinability of the sensuous (“ein Bestimmbares”). I cannot go here into the full content of Hegel’s considerations on the specific character of Christianity, which he qualifies as a religion of love and which he opposes to the Jewish religion, which he considers to be a religion under the rule of the law. While the law speaks in terms of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” Jesus advises his disciples “to surrender their rights, to lift themselves up above the whole sphere of justice or injustice by love, for in love there vanish not only rights, but also the feeling of inequality and the hatred of enemies which this feeling’s imperative demand (“das Soll”) for equality implies.”101 The unifying capacities of love are pushed up to a paroxysm in Hegel’s considerations on love, crime, and punishment. In its content, crime is opposed to love: It precludes love, yet it is, that is, it is something that happens, something that is real. Crime is a violation of the law. As an answer to that violation, the law appeals to penal justice in the form of punishment. The law cannot forego the punishment, it cannot be merciful. In that sense, law and punishment can never be reconciled. But Hegel suggests that they can be sublated 97  Ibid., GW, 2, 118. (My translation). 98  Ibid. 99  Ibid., GW, 2, 124. (My translation). 100  Ibid. 101  “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion, Text 54: Jesus trat nicht lange,” GW, 2, 167–68, col. 2; ETW, 218 (1798–1799).

136

Cruysberghs

(“aufgehoben”) in the reconciliation of fate.102 Hegel’s basic idea is that in so far as crime is a violation (“Zerstörung”) of nature, which should be thought of as one, there is as much violation in the criminal (the violator) as there is in the victim (the violated): The criminal intended to have to do with another’s life, but he has only violated his own, for life is not different from life, since life dwells in the single Godhead. In his arrogance he has violated indeed, but only the friendliness of life; he has perverted life into an enemy. It is the deed itself which has created a law whose domination now comes on the scene; this law is the unification, in the concept, of the equality between the injured, apparently alien, life and the criminal’s own forfeited life. It is now for the first time that the injured life appears as a hostile power against the criminal and maltreats him as he has maltreated the other. Hence punishment as fate is the equal reaction of the criminal’s own deed, of a power which he himself has armed, of an enemy made an enemy by himself.103 Reconciliation with the law appears to be impossible; one with fate seems to be even more difficult. But there is a way out: Fate, indeed, is a part of life that unifies everything. And then it comes: “Life can heal its wounds again; the severed, hostile life can return into itself again and annul the bungling achievement of a trespass, can annul the law and punishment.”104 From now on, the criminal can feel life as disrupted and experience (in punishment and bad conscience) the longing (“Sehnsucht”) for what was lost. The fear of fate, according to Hegel, is completely different from the fear of punishment: The latter is fear of something alien, whereas fear of fate is fear of a separation, fear of being separated from life, and therefore also fear of being separated from one’s own self: “In fate [. . .] man recognizes his own life, and his supplication to it is not supplication to a lord but a reversion (“Wiederkehren”) and an approach (“Nahen”) to himself.”105 Reconciliation is possible now because the hostile is also experienced (felt) as life.106 This sensing of life, a sensing that finds itself once again, must be

102  “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion, Text 55: Die Tugend ist nicht nur Positivität,” GW, 2, 188, col. 2 (compare col. 1); ETW, 228 (1798–1799). 103  Ibid., GW, 2, 191, col. 2; ETW, 229–30. 104  Ibid., GW, 2, 193; ETW, 230. 105  Ibid., GW, 2, 194; ETW, 231. 106  Ibid., GW, 2, 196; ETW, 231.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

137

called “love,” and in this “amor fati” fate is reconciled.107 That seems to be the basic meaning of Jesus’s remission of sins. Basically, it is a reconciliation of fate: “In love, life has found life once more. Between sin and its forgiveness there is as little place for an alien thing as there is between sin and punishment. Life has severed itself from itself and united itself again.”108 The message of Jesus is a message of love, not just for the just and the virtuous, but for the sinners as well. “Thy sins,” Jesus said when talking to Maria Magdalena, “are forgiven thee.”109 It is love that was Jesus’s motive when insisting on forgiving the sins of those who had faith. But love does not just reconcile us with fate and forgive our sins. It is also the sole principle of virtue. Otherwise, every virtue risks turning into vice. In contrast with the self-coercion of Kantian virtue that replaced the subjection under the law of an alien lord by a partial subjection under a law of one’s own, Jesus thought in terms of “virtues without lordship and without submission, i.e. virtues as modifications of love,” of one living spirit:110 “Just as virtue is the complement of obedience to law, so love is the complement of the virtues.”111 Therefore, Jesus demanded that love be the soul of his friends: “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another; thereby will men know that ye are my friends.”112 It is precisely as a commandment, however, that love seems to be contradictory: Love cannot be commanded.113 Hegel solves the contradiction by affirming that it is only as a name that love can be commanded; love itself does not tolerate any command. Therefore, somehow love should not be called by name: Speaking introduces a universality which is opposed to the particular. In love, however, in the feeling of harmony with the “all” of life, the universal and the particular are no longer opposed to each other: “In this feeling of harmony there is no universality, since in harmony the particular is not in discord but in concord, or otherwise there would be no harmony.”114 But love is not enough, Hegel suggests. Love as such is too subjective a feeling. It requires religion. And as such, it requires a “Gestalt,” that of a god.115

107  Ibid.; ETW, 232. 108  Ibid., GW, 2, 211, col. 2; ETW, 239. 109  Ibid., GW, 2, 217; ETW, 240. 110  Ibid., GW, 2, 224, col. 2 (compare col. 1); ETW, 244. 111  Ibid., GW, 2, 229, col. 2; ETW, 246. 112  Ibid.; ETW, 246. 113  Ibid., GW, 2, 230, col. 2 (compare col. 1); ETW, 247. 114  Ibid., GW, 2, 231, col. 2; ETW, 247. 115  Ibid., GW, 2, 232, col. 2 (compare col. 1); ETW, 248.

138

Cruysberghs

With the help of imagination, the unification of love must be objectified in the form of a god: This love is a divine spirit, but it still falls short of religion. To become religion, it must manifest itself in an objective form. A feeling, something subjective, it must be fused with the universal, with something represented in idea, and thereby acquire the form of a being to whom prayer is both possible and due. The need to unite subject with object, to unite feeling, and feeling’s demand for objects, with the intellect, to unite them in something beautiful, in a god, by means of fancy, is the supreme need of the human spirit and the urge to religion.116 To sum up Hegel’s early conception of ethics and of religion, it is clear that he was looking for an alternative to the harshness of Kantian ethics. This alternative, he believed, could be found in an ethics of love, which was clearly inspired by the Christian religion. One of the main problems this new ethics had to solve was that of the remission of sins, or, in a more secular language, the reintegration of a criminal into the community he belongs to, or in a more fundamental wording, the unification of crime as a dimension of life with life itself. On the legal level, young Hegel argues, this reintegration can only be partial. Punishment remains opposed to crime and cannot offer a true reconciliation. Only love, which presupposes a unity of all living beings within life itself, is capable of reconciling the criminal with his fate. That is what finds its expression in religion and its rituals, an expression which seems to be a necessary objectifying complement to the subjective feelings of love. 5

Kierkegaard’s Second Ethics

Let me finally return to Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous aesthetic author A complained in Either-Or that modern ethics is harsh and severe. We might start the discussion by arguing that in Either-Or Kierkegaard developed a notion of ethics that is somehow in between the respective positions of Kant and Hegel. Maybe it is quite close to that of Schiller, especially when we take into consideration Judge William’s endeavour to show the harmony of ethics and aesthetics in marriage. Harmony is, I think, what Schiller had in mind when looking for an aesthetic education of man—although he did not insist 116  “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion, Text 60: Mit dem Muthe,” GW, 2, 302– 03; ETW, 289 (1799–1800).

In Search Of A Second Ethics

139

on marriage as the example par excellence of an aesthetic state.117 Of course, I should not simply jump from Schiller to Kierkegaard without taking the positions of Romanticists such as Friedrich Schlegel (cf. his Lucinde) into consideration; however, for Schlegel, marriage, and with it bourgeois ethics, is more an obstacle to than a medium of love. His project of establishing a harmony of aesthetics and ethics goes in a more radical direction, though not as radical as Kierkegaard’s A in the first part of Either-Or. But B or Judge William, representing the ethical view of life in the second part of Either-Or, is aiming at harmony just as Schiller was, and, actually as Hegel was as well. The least we can say is that for the later Hegel as well, harmony is the keyword when he is dealing with marriage and even with the state, although he is realistic enough to understand that marriage can fall apart and that states may be torn apart by inner tensions. In any event, there are good reasons for reading Judge William’s ethics in a Hegelian sense, and in Fear and Trembling Hegelian ethics is even mentioned explicitly as being the perspective of ethics as such.118 The situation, however, is quite different when we turn to The Concept of Anxiety. There, we have the impression that, at least in the introduction, Vigilius Haufniensis presents a typically Kantian perspective on ethics. The broader context in which ethics is brought to the fore in the introduction to The Concept of Anxiety is that of the particular status of sin. According to Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonymous author of the book, sin does not belong in any science, since “it is the subject of a sermon.”119 Still, if sin must have a place, it must be close to ethics. But there is some kind of a problem, which is connected with the fact that ethics is conceived of by Vigilius 117  At the end of the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, while speaking of the aesthetic state, Schiller asks the question whether such a state effectively exists and where it should be found. The answer is both ambitious and modest: “Dem Bedürfnis nach existiert er in jeder feingestimmten Seele, der Tat nach möchte man ihn wohl nur, wie die reine Kirche und die reine Republik, in einigen wenigen auserlesenen Zirkeln finden, wo nicht die geistlose Nachahmung fremder Sitten, sondern eigene schöne Natur das Betragen lenkt, wo der Mensch durch die verwickeltsten Verhältnisse mit kühner Einfalt und ruhiger Unschuld geht und weder nötig hat, fremde Freiheit zu kränken, um die seinige zu behaupten, noch seine Würde wegzuwerfen, um Anmut zu zeigen.” (Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen, in SW, 5, 669); On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. William F. Wert, Jr., in Friedrich Schiller, PF, 1, 298. Did he think of a selective circle of friends analogous to what the Jena Circle would realise at least for a very short period in 1799? 118  Kierkegaard, Frygt og Bæven, SKS, 4, 161; Fear and Trembling, HH, 6, 69. 119  Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest, SKS, 4, 323; The Concept of Anxiety, HH, 8, 16.

140

Cruysberghs

Haufniensis as an ideal science in the sense that it wants to bring ideality into actuality (“Virkelighed”), though it will never be able to fully realise this goal. This perspective is perfectly Kantian. If ideality refers to pure reason, we can consider the ethical lawgiving as being typically ideal. And I think this is exactly what Vigilius Haufniensis had in mind. In ethics, ideality indeed appears as a task to be fulfilled, that of introducing the basic characteristic of pure reason, universality, into one’s actual life. In that sense, ethics presupposes that every man has the prerequisite conditions to do so. The famous Kantian saying “Du kannst denn du sollst” thus receives its full meaning. On the other hand, we are well aware that the accomplishment of the ethical imperative is not possible, that it can only be the subject of a continuous striving. In that sense, ethics introduces a contradiction which is inherent in its own status: The ethical imperative unconditionally demands the impossible. Responding to the ethical demand is indeed not just difficult, it is impossible—and still we have to obey it. Now, the very heart of Vigilius’s argument is that ethics tells us how to apply ideality to actuality (in a Kantian sense, this is the subject of the Metaphysics of Morals), but it does not tell us how to raise actuality up into ideality. This perspective is not new, and we can turn to Schiller, but also to Fichte, as a source for this particular problem. In their perspectives indeed, the problem of raising actuality, that is, the human being as a natural being with its natural impulses and inclinations, up to the ideality of ethics is the task of culture. Culture is essentially the cultivation of the senses. There are different ways of cultivating the latter, but one of them is aesthetic cultivation, especially by means of art. The cultivation of our sensuousness thus has an educative character. Schiller suggests that the aesthetic pleasure (connected with the beautiful and the sublime) that we take in works of art will help us take delight in fulfilling our duty as well. But this is not Haufniensis’s or Kierkegaard’s perspective. According to them, I think, aesthetics is too ambivalent to solve the problem of raising actuality to ideality. That’s why Vigilius Haufniensis rejects all aesthetic perspectives on life, including that of Greek ethics. Greek virtue ethics, aiming at the ideal of kalokagathia, remains an aesthetic project that, as such, is too weak to raise an individual up to the level of ideality that Vigilius has in mind: “The more ideal ethics is, the better,”120 that is his position. Ancient virtue ethics is able to bring the sensuous closer to the ethical (by making health, friends, and earthly goods into essential parts of a virtuous life). But that’s not good enough. There is too much immediacy in that kind of virtuous life. That is precisely 120  Ibid., SKS, 4, 324; HH, 8, 17.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

141

what we learned from Kant, so it seems. Therefore, Vigilius Haufniensis wants to keep ethics far away from aesthetics (as well as from metaphysics and psychology). Ethics needs different categories. It should not be contaminated by notions that belong to a different sphere. One of the consequences of this endeavour to safeguard the purity of ethics—as well as its ideal and judging character—is that it cannot avoid dealing with sin. And as a matter of fact, ethics appears to be “shipwrecked” upon this concept.121 In a footnote, Vigilius Haufniensis refers to Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling, who confronted his readers with the shipwrecking of the ideality of ethics as well. Johannes de Silentio had the intention of bringing into light religious ideality as the ideality of actuality. And that is what Vigilius Haufniensis is after as well. Therefore, at the outset, even before introducing the religious as such, Haufniensis already refers to the latter as bringing the solution for a problem that ethics, because of its harshness, cannot solve: that of the ideality of actuality. The ideality of actuality is as desirable, Vigilius Haufniensis says, as the aesthetic (as happiness) and not as impossible as the ideality of ethics. This suggests that, on the one hand, the ideality of actuality refers to a completion of life that is of the order of happiness, typical of sensuousness, and connected with the psychological sphere of impulses, desires, and inclinations. On the other hand, it has to offer an ideality similar to that of ethics, but without being impossible. On the contrary, it is proposed as being possible, not just theoretically, I would suggest, but effectively as well. It is of the order of the evangelical: “Behold, all things have become new.” Ethics as such will never have this capacity of making all things new after being confronted with sin, a confrontation which typically requires that things become new again. It cannot deal with sin at all, that is, it cannot deal with its own shipwrecking. Sin means the end of ethics because in ethical ideality there is no room for sin, only for obeying the moral law. Sin is beyond the level of ethics. In Kantian terms, ethics has an imperative character, and that is all. Ethics is just imposing the categorical imperative, and that is what Vigilius Haufniensis wants to stick to as well. At the same time, Haufniensis argues that ethics should never become so inhuman as to lose sight of actuality. At first sight, this is just a remark that is in line with what has previously been said. It is evident that ethics should never forget that its imperative must be applied to actuality, that it is a question of acting, not just of speculating. But there is more at stake when Haufniensis 121  Ibid.

142

Cruysberghs

points to the risk of inhumanity. He stresses that the ethical task is to make out of the human being “the true and the whole man, the man kat’ exochēn.122 This is more than obeying the categorical imperative, and it is no longer in line with Kantian ethics: Strictly speaking, Kantian ethics does not care about being whole. According to Kant, being whole—and this, I think we must interpret in terms of a harmony of virtue and happiness—is a postulate of practical reason, but it is not a part of practical reason as such, and it is not intended for this life either. Or, as I explained above, Kant would consider it as belonging to the perspective of a pragmatic anthropology, not of practical reason as such. The actuality of sin in life thus seriously threatens the ethical perspective of life. In the context of the struggle to actualise the ethical task, sin shows itself to be “something that withdraws deeper and deeper as a deeper and deeper presupposition, as a presupposition that goes beyond the individual.”123 This somewhat cryptic sentence says in the first place that sin withdraws itself from the ideality of ethics—which is Haufniensis’s claim as a matter of fact: First, he considers sin, being an essential failure over and against the ethical imperative, to belong to a different world than ethics. By sinning, man actually positions himself outside the ethical. Second, Haufniensis brings to the fore the idea that sin has the character of a deep presupposition. This means, I believe, that whenever ethical questions are at stake, the reality of sin is to be taken into account as something that is already there in the world. And, third, this reality goes beyond the individual: It seems to belong to human history or to humanity as such. Haufniensis thus actually introduces the Christian notion of hereditary sin, which should not be our concern here. What we must keep in mind, however, is that sin appears to be a real threat to ethics. “Then all is lost for ethics,” Vigilius says, “and ethics has helped to bring about the loss of all.”124 The severity of the ethical imperative itself somehow generates sin, which, as such, constitutes the debacle of ethics itself that has to give room to dogmatics: the point of departure of a “new science,”125 a “new ethics,” a “second ethics,” which precisely presupposes sin. This science proceeds from actuality in order to raise it to ideality. Thus, the question appears to be this: Taking into consideration that all of us are sinners, how can we open up for the appeal of ideality, or: How do we get out of the morass of despair? In that sense, ethics reappears, but its task is quite different compared to the ethics that starts with 122  Ibid., SKS, 4, 325; HH, 8, 18–9. 123  Ibid., SKS, 4, 326; HH, 8, 19. 124  Ibid. 125  Ibid., SKS, 4, 328; HH, 8, 20.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

143

ideality and is to be realised in actuality. The new task is that of actualising “the dogmatic consciousness of actuality”—which is that of sinfulness.126 The new ethics does not make ideal demands, but it has its ideality in the penetrating consciousness of the actuality of sin. Thus, it has to show and to convince us that we are sinners and that we have to take this seriously (not with metaphysical intentions—as Hegel did in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion—and not with psychological intentions tempting us to understand ourselves as mere concupiscent beings). The first ethics, requiring ideality to be realised in the actual world, shipwrecked when being confronted with the single individual’s sin: It did not explain sinfulness, but it was confronted with it—and not just with the sinfulness of the self as an individual, but also with that of the self as a member of the whole race (hereditary sin). The second ethics “sets ideality as a task, not by a movement from above and downward but from below and upward.”127 It deals with the manifestation of sin, although its coming into existence (“Tilblivelse”) remains hidden for it, as it does for any science: “The first ethics presupposes metaphysics [i.e. immanence]; the second ethics presupposes dogmatics but completes it in such a way that here, as everywhere, the presupposition is brought out.”128 Contrary to an immanent ethics that is based on the first philosophy, namely, metaphysics, the second ethics is based on a second philosophy—the essence of which is transcendence or repetition—not recollection and immanence, as is the case with the first ethics.129 It is very common today to give content to the second ethics by referring to Kierkegaard’s book Works of Love,130 loving one’s neighbour being the typically Christian imperative according to Kierkegaard. Personally, I hesitate to follow this very uplifting path, at least in too hasty a way. It might be worthwhile to pass by The Sickness unto Death first. Before starting with the imitation of Christ, we should first thoroughly realise that we are sinners and that realising Christ’s commandment to love our neighbours is not something like following advice from Reader’s Digest. Otherwise, Works of Love would be just as immanent, or even worse, as the first ethics. Loving should not be made easy. On the 126  Ibid. 127  Ibid. 128  Ibid., SKS, 4, 331; HH, 8, 24. 129  Ibid., SKS, 4, 328–29; HH, 8, 21. 130  Cf., for example, the introduction to the Hong translation of Kjerlighedens Gjerninger (Works of Love).

144

Cruysberghs

contrary, Kierkegaard wants to make things difficult first, and for that very reason I suggest a passage to—or rather through—The Sickness unto Death first. In The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus makes clear that we, all of us, are sinners. Hence, the first task is to reach the level of ideality as it is expressed in the commandment of Christian charity. However, we first have to get ideality into actuality before we can obey the imperative of loving our neighbour. Bringing ideality into our lives is the task of faith more generally and the task of believing in the remission of our sins in particular. If we can deal with that task, we can have some hope of being capable of practicing the Christian charity afterward. The true problem of the sinner is not that of doing his moral or Christian duty: That would just be a question of applying the ethical or Christian ideality to actuality; it would be the way from ideality to actuality. If that were the problem, we would not need a second ethics. The true problem goes the other way around: the way from actuality to ideality, from sin to duty. But if sin is despair, as Anti-Climacus argues, then the problem is that of overcoming a situation in which we are completely helpless: not being able to get out of the situation of despair. If help is available, it has to come from elsewhere. In that sense, the traditional tale of someone who is stuck in a morass, who tries to get out of it, but who only gets stuck deeper into it is an excellent representation of the helplessness of a sinner. The least one can say is that this presentation leaves a logical place for the intervention of a transcendent god promising to absolve us of our sins and to free, so to speak, our capacity of again bringing ideality into our actual lives. Then and only then might there be room for Christian charity, for works of love, for an ethics of love. In that sense, the works of love do indeed presuppose faith—not just because the commandment of Christian charity is something that is beyond the common human perspective of life (somewhat extravagant, a transgression of common sense), but because it requires faith in the remission of our sins. The remission of our sins: For most people, this is something one ought not to care about (I assume), and for others, it is an offence (“Forargelse”), as Anti-Climacus explains in The Sickness unto Death. For those who have been in intense despair and who are ready to give up their pride, faith in the remission of their sins might open up the possibility for a life of Christian charity in which we might be able to forgive others in the same way as God forgives us our sins. That is at least what I understand when reading the discourse “Love [that] Hides the Multiplicity of the Sins” in The Works of Love. That is the way I understand Kierkegaard’s second ethics. If I am right, his second ethics is not that much a question of action but rather one of passion. In order to be able to act, or rather, to be susceptible to the ideality of ethics, we need to get rid of ourselves first, of our demonic enclosedness

In Search Of A Second Ethics

145

(“Indesluttedhed”), of our sins. This seems to be, humanly speaking, an impossible task. Therefore, an intervention from elsewhere is required: the intervention of God himself, the only authority who has the capacity to forgive our sins. Humanly speaking, this is impossible.131 Young Hegel called it a miracle, the effect of love. For Vigilius Haufniensis and for Anti-Climacus, it is the effect of faith—maybe because the sinner is not even capable of loving anymore—if ever he was. In The Sickness unto Death, sin is a qualified form of despair, despair being linked to the representation of God—and that is the sickness unto death. Sin is despair before God. In that sense, the self is a theological self, a self whose criterion (“Maalestok”) is God himself. In The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus makes God into the criterion of the self in such a way that God is not just its judge but its ethical goal (“Maal”) as well. And, of course, according to so high a criterion, the self is doomed to be a sinner. Typical of Christianity is that it is extremely demanding.132 In that context, the question of how to reach ideality from actuality becomes rather urgent. In this sense, ideality is not just the immanent ethical imperative, nor is it even the Kantian “Reich der Zwecke,” but God himself, that is, transcendence. How does one come to the level of God’s imperative? By faith, which is the opposite of sin. And sin in the highest sense, in this context is taking offence (“forarges”) at being called a sinner and, most of all, at being promised that our sins will be forgiven. But at this point, instead of presenting a philosophical analysis, I am giving a sermon, I’m afraid. So allow me, then, to summarise my argument. Our point of departure was the harshness of Kantian ethics. Friedrich Schiller may be considered to be an eminent voice trying to bring in the aesthetic as a complement to the ethical imperative. It might be worthwhile to consider Kierkegaard’s Judge William to be a true disciple of Schiller in so far as he also tried to bring ethics and aesthetics into harmony. More than any of the other Kierkegaardian pseudonyms, Vigilius Haufniensis presents the image of an ethics that is typically Kantian in so far as it is “accusing, judging, and acting.”133 But curiously enough, with his second ethics, stressing the fact that we are sinners and stressing the miracle that is the remission of sins, Haufniensis was quite close to what the Frankfurter Hegel had in mind when considering the spirit of Christianity and its fate. It is quite a surprise to discover that the young Hegel and Kierkegaard appear to be kindred souls, both affirming the Christian forgiveness of sins as 131  Cf. Kierkegaard, Christelige Taler, SKS, 10, 118; Christian Discourses, HH, 17, 107. 132  Cf. Kierkegaard, Sygdommen til Døden, SKS, 11, 196ff.; The Sickness unto Death, HH, 19, 83ff. 133  Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest, SKS, 4, 330; The Concept of Anxiety, HH, 8, 22.

146

Cruysberghs

an alternative for the harshness of modern Kantian ethics. While Kant, affirming the autonomy of ethics, reduced religion to a mere support of the ethical lawgiving, both the young Hegel and Kierkegaard argued that the Christian religion has a perspective of its own, a perspective beyond (first) ethics, one we can call a “second ethics” based on forgiveness of sins. Somehow, human beings seem to be in need of a perspective beyond the severity and harshness of ethical imperatives. In a general way, we might qualify this perspective as a symbolic one.134 Symbolic perspectives should not be identified with ethical or juridical ones. Killing one’s son, as Abraham had the intention of doing (the example given by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling), is unethical and should be punished by the court of law. No human being, no human institution, only God can forgive a crime, Christianity suggests. In a secularised society, however, the Christian perspective of a forgiving God as an alternative or a complement to the first ethics seems to have lost its immediate appeal. Young Hegel may have considered God to be a (necessary) product of the imagination, and Kierkegaard may have presented a non-dogmatic, subjective conception of religion; however, the world does not seem ready and willing to listen to these voices anymore. Over and against crime, there is only room left, I am afraid, for emotional resentment (identifying itself with moral indignation) and juridical revenge, forgetting that punishment is not just a form of retribution but also the right of the criminal, as Hegel argued in his Philosophy of Right.135 Sure, punishment will never undo a crime, and for that very reason the need for a symbolic restitution, which does not just concern the criminal but the offended individual and the offended society as a whole as well, remains open. Today, faith and trust in the possibility of a radical forgiveness of sins seems to be lost. We content our need for salvation with less unified and more partial forms of symbolic restitution. These can be considered to be a form of modesty, to be an acknowledgement that we will never be capable of fully restituting the crimes that were committed. What risks getting lost in 134  I owe the linking of the specifically religious conception of forgiveness to a broader symbolic perspective to a paper presented by Tine Vandendriessche during the International Conference on Bounds of Ethics in Bangalore on January 9, 2014, where she dealt with the question: Should we punish a remorseful offender? She was inspired by the discussions of Arnold Burms with Anthony R. Duff in Arnold Burms, Waarheid Evocatie Symbool (Leuven: Peeters, 2011) and Anthony R. Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 135  Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §100, GW, 14/1, 92–3; Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford’s World Classics) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 102–03.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

147

those forms of restitution is the subjective appropriation of guilt that is present in the Christian confession that we are all sinners. Instead of pointing to the criminal and exclaiming our true or fake moral indignation, we should keep in mind the words of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which warn against “wanting to observe [at betragte] the world and human beings ethically.”136 Observing is not an ethical category, or rather, “there is only one ethical observing—it is self-observation [Selvbetragtning].”137 References Burms, Arnold. Waarheid Evocatie Symbool. Leuven: Peeters, 2011. Duff, Anthony R. Punishment, Communication, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von and, Friedrich Schiller. Xenien und Votivtafeln aus dem Nachlaß. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poetische Werke. Vol. 2. Berlin: Berliner Ausgabe, 1960. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. On Christianity: Early Theological Writings. Translated by T.M. Knox. New York: Harper, 1961. ———. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. Phänomenologie des Geistes. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 9. Edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reçinhard Heede. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1980. ———. Three Essays, 1793–1795: The Tübingen Essay, Berne Fragments, The Life of Jesus. Edited and Translated by P. Fuss and J. Dobbins. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. ———. “Studien 1792/1793–1794” In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Frühe Schriften II. Edited by F. Nicolin and G. Schüler. Vol. 1. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1989. ———. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford’s World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 14, 1. Ed. by Klaus Grotsch and Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2009. 136  Afsluttende uvidenskabeligt Efterskrift, SKS, 7, 291; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, HH, 12/1, 320. 137  Ibid.

148

Cruysberghs

———. “Frankfurter Manuskripte zur christlichen Religion.” In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Frühe Schriften II. Edited by W. Jaeschke. Vol. 2. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2014. Kant, Immanuel. Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft. In Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 6. Berlin: Akademieausgabe, 1911. ———. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. In Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 4. Berlin: Akademieausgabe, 1911. ———. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Zweite Auflage 1787. In Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 3. Berlin: Akademieausgabe, 1911. ———. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. In Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 5. Berlin: Akademieausgabe, 1913. ———. Metaphysik der Sitten. In Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 6. Berlin: Akademieausgabe, 1914. ———. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. In Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7. Berlin: Akademieausgabe, 1917. ———. Religion within the Limits of mere Reason and Other Writings. Edited and translated by A. Wood and G. di Giovanni. In Religion and Rational Theology. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Critique of Practical Reason. In Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. Critique of Pure Reason. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death. Edited and translated by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. In Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 19. Edited by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. ———. Fear and Trembling. In Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 6. Edited by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. Either/Or 1. In Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 4. Edited by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. ———. The Concept of Anxiety. Edited and translated by R. Thomte in collaboration with A.B. Anderson. In Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 8. Edited by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. ———. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Edited by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. In Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 12. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

In Search Of A Second Ethics

149

———. Begrebet Angest. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 4. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 1997. ———. Christian Discourses. Edited by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. In Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 17. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. ———. Enten-Eller 1. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 2. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 1997. ———. Sygdommen til Døden. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 11. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 1997. ———. Frygt og Bæven. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 4. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 1998. ———. Works of Love. Edited and translated by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. In Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 16. Edited by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. ———. Afsluttende uvidenskabeligt Efterskrift. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 7. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 2002. ———. Christelige Taler. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 10. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 2004. ———. Kjerlighedens Gjerninger. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 9. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Gad Forlag, 2004. Rapic, Smail. Selbstverständigung: Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der Ethik Kants und der Rechtsphilosophie Hegels. Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Schiller, Friedrich. “Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen.” In Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Edited by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert Göpfert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993. ———. Über Anmuth und Würde. In Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Edited by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert Göpfert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch­ gesellschaft, 1993. ———. Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen. In Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Edited by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert Göpfert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993. ———. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen. In Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Edited by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert Göpfert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993. ———. Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten. In Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Edited by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert Göpfert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993. ———. On Grace and Dignity. In Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom. Vol. 2. Washington: Schiller Institute, 2003.

150

Cruysberghs

———. On the Moral Use of Aesthetic Manners. In Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom. Vol. 3. Washington: Schiller Institute, 2003. ———. On the Reason Why We Take Pleasure in Tragic Subjects. In Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom. Vol. 4. Washington: Schiller Institute, 2003. ———. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. Translated by William F. Wert, Jr. In Friedrich Schiller, Poet of Freedom. Washington: Schiller Institute, 2003.

CHAPTER 8

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority? Gerbert Faure In this paper, I would like to reveal an ambiguity in the Kantian conception of the sublime experience. I will do this in an indirect manner by turning to a thinker whose views on the sublime are strongly influenced by Immanuel Kant: Friedrich Schiller. In his text Über das Pathetische, Schiller argues that the satisfaction of the sublime experience is ultimately grounded in the discovery of the faculty of freedom, whether this faculty is employed in moral or immoral actions. In this way, Schiller creates a gap between aesthetics and ethics which is absent in Kant’s theory of the sublime, but which nevertheless points to an ambiguity in the latter. Does Kant consider the sublime feeling to be pleasurable because it makes us realise that our moral principles can’t be affected by sensuous nature or because it makes us feel that the moral subject is superior and invulnerable? It will turn out that for Kant and Schiller these insights necessarily go hand in hand. Freedom and morality are inextricably bound up with each other through the notion of rationality. Arthur Schopenhauer will abandon this assumption and thus make room for a more plausible view that is expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche early on in his career: It is not the subject, but the object that is sublime. 1

Friedrich Schiller and the Separation of the Aesthetic and the Ethical

Friedrich Schiller is famous for being a thinker of freedom, which is apparent in his plays as well as in his theoretical writings. This is the reason why he attaches so much importance to the sublime experience, which makes us conscious of our moral freedom as rational creatures. In his early text Vom Erhabenen, Schiller explains that the sublime feeling necessarily originates from the contrast between two moments. We can only become aware of our superior rational nature if we have first experienced our powerlessness as sensuous beings.1 As sensuous beings, we are dependent on the external 1  Friedrich Schiller, Vom Erhabenen, in Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008), 395. In this paper, I will refer to this text as “VE.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_010

152

Faure

world and hence fundamentally vulnerable. In times of prosperity, however, we are not aware of this dependency. Therefore, it is only when our sensuous desires get frustrated that we can become conscious of the fact that our rational nature cannot be affected by the vicissitudes of fortune.2 Following Kant, Schiller makes a distinction between two types of sublime experiences which is based on the kind of frustration that is involved.3 In the mathematical or theoretical4 sublime, we experience a frustration of the power of the imagination, which leads to the revelation of the superiority of reason: The more we realise that the imagination doesn’t manage to represent the infinite as a totality, the more we realise that reason is able to think about the latter. By contrast, in the dynamical or practical sublime we experience a frustration of our sensuous being as a whole: The more we understand that we cannot maintain our natural existence, the more we come to see that the faculty of reason succeeds in maintaining its independence from the course of natural events. Whereas Kant gives more attention to the mathematical sublime, Schiller considers the dynamical sublime to be more valuable.5 Schiller explains that, in the mathematical sublime, we only experience a superiority over something that is located within the subject: The faculty of reason is more powerful than the faculty of the imagination. In the practical sublime, by contrast, we experience that we are superior to something which exists outside the subject. Our entire sensuous being cannot maintain itself because it depends on the external world. The faculty of reason, however, functions independently from our sensuous being, and consequently it can’t be vulnerable to external influences either. In other words, the practical sublime is deemed to be more valuable because in this experience there seems to be more at stake. Furthermore, Schiller believes that the dynamical sublime is manifested most ideally in tragedy: Tragedies are able to reveal the nothingness of our sensuous nature while at the same time demonstrating the possibility of transcending this vulnerable condition as rational beings. Consequently, Schiller’s text Über das Pathetische, which can be read as a sequel to Vom Erhabenen, discusses the sublime experience from the perspective of tragedy (in contrast to the works of Kant, which famously only apply the concept of the sublime to the experience of natural objects).

2  v e, 397. 3  Ibid., 396. 4  Schiller uses the terms “theoretical” and “practical” instead of “mathematical” or “dynamical.” 5  V E, 398.

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority ?

153

In this text, Schiller points out that tragedy can reveal our independence as rational creatures in two distinct ways: In two ways, however, can the independence of the mind in the state of suffering manifest itself. Either negatively: if the ethical man does not receive the law from the physical and no causality over the mind is permitted to the state; or positively: if the ethical man gives the law to the physical and the mind exercises causality over the state. From the first arises the sublime of disposition, from the second the sublime of action.6 The first road to the sublime concerns our moral disposition (das Erhabene der Fassung). We see on the stage how certain painful physical circumstances cannot affect the will, which reveals the independence of our moral attitude in an indirect manner. The second road to the sublime concerns our actions (das Erhabene der Handlung). We see on the stage how certain physical occurrences are caused by a rational will. We understand, in other words, that they are actions instead of mere events. In the sublime of action, the spectator discovers the independency of reason because he understands that the suffering of the hero on the stage is caused by his rational will. Schiller points out, however, that the suffering can be caused by the rational will in either an immediate or a mediate way. In the case of the immediate variant, our physical suffering is caused by an exercise of the will that is informed by the rational moral law. In the case of the mediate variant, by contrast, the suffering doesn’t issue from the fulfillment of a moral duty. Quite the contrary, one suffers because one has neglected one’s duty, which has in turn given rise to feelings of remorse: “An example of the first Regulus gives us, when he, to keep his word, gives himself up to the Carthaginian desire for revenge; he would serve us as an example of the second, when he had broken his word and the consciousness of this guilt has made him miserable.”7 This distinction has an important implication. The sublime experience consists in the consciousness of our independence as rational creatures, and apparently this can also be induced by portraying immoral actions. When a character has acted immorally and subsequently suffers from feelings of remorse, the spectator can figure out that this character has a rational will that 6  Friedrich Schiller, On the Pathetic, in Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom, Vol. III (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1990), 242; Cf. Friedrich Schiller, Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008), 440. In this paper, I will refer to this text as “UP” with the reference to the German original after the slash. 7  U P, 244/441.

154

Faure

doesn’t automatically succumb to sensuous inclinations. An animal just follows its instincts; it does what it does. This is the reason why an animal acts neither morally nor immorally. In fact, it doesn’t even act at all, because it lacks a rational will altogether. By contrast, when a human being yields to his inclinations, he will always realise afterward that he did have the power to prevent the negative consequence that followed from his deed. In such a case, the spectator is displeased from a moral perspective, since the moral law has been disobeyed. Nevertheless, he is pleased from an aesthetic perspective, since through the depiction of the immoral action on stage he has become aware of his rational independence. In short, the only requirement for the aesthetic experience of the sublime is that we experience the freedom of our will as a faculty, whether this be used for moral or immoral purposes. The aesthetic concern is already satisfied with the possibility of our moral destination, whereas the moral concern wants it to be actualised.8 Up to this point in Schiller’s argument, morality and aesthetics are by no means incompatible. Schiller has only contended that aesthetics allows more than morality. A bit further on in the text, however, he seems to suggest that the aesthetic and the ethical perspectives are in tension with each other. From an aesthetic perspective, we are only interested in the possibility of morality, in the freedom of the will as a faculty. And we can only experience the power of our freedom if we are not concerned at all with the realisation of the good. This is explained in a difficult passage, which I shall now attempt to clarify.9 Schiller connects the difference between the aesthetic and the ethical with the distinction between the interest of the imagination and that of reason. The aesthetic pleasure of the sublime experience comes about because the imagination, which is part of our sensuous being, becomes aware of reason’s moral destination. Furthermore, one should know that both the rational and the sensuous part of our being can experience a feeling of satisfaction. When a rational demand is respected, we speak of “approbation” or “approval.” Conversely, when a sensuous desire is fulfilled, we speak of “pleasure.” In addition, both the sensuous desire and the rational demand are conceived of as necessities (the rational demand is an unconditional necessity, whereas the natural desire is a conditional necessity). The feeling of satisfaction is contingent with regard to this necessity. The key to Schiller’s argument lies in the following contention: The intensity of the feeling of satisfaction depends on the grade of contingency of the fulfillment. This view corresponds to the intuition that the most intense pleasures come unbidden. 8  Ibid., 244/441. 9  Ibid., 245–48/442–44.

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority ?

155

Schiller goes on to argue that the satisfaction of the imagination is more contingent, and thus more pleasurable, than the satisfaction of reason. The necessity of reason lies in the rational moral law, and the fulfillment of this demand is contingent because, as free beings, we can just as well choose to follow our sensuous inclinations. The necessity of the imagination, on the other hand, lies in its desire for freedom. The imagination naturally desires to be free, and this is why it functions optimally in the free play of the faculties that constitutes the Kantian experience of beauty. However, the imagination’s desire for freedom is not only satisfied by the beautiful but also by the sublime experience. In the case of the beautiful, the desire for freedom is satisfied because the imagination is not determined by the understanding. In the case of the sublime, by contrast, the satisfaction comes about because the imagination discovers the independency of reason. In this way, it becomes clear that the satisfaction of the imagination in the sublime experience is more contingent and thus more pleasurable than the satisfaction of the rational moral law in the performance of moral actions. The contingency of the satisfaction of the moral law is related to the fact that we have a free will that can also choose immoral actions. We only possess this free will, however, because we are rational creatures. Therefore, the necessity of the moral law and the contingency of its satisfaction are grounded in the same faculty. By contrast, the imagination is really struck by the possibility of a free will because our freedom is granted by an altogether different level than the natural world to which the imagination belongs. The imagination discovers that there is something outside itself that nevertheless satisfies its desire for freedom. It is this exteriority or passivity that makes the satisfaction of the imagination more contingent and thus more pleasurable than that of reason. However, it is not only that the imagination can really derive pleasure from the insight into our freedom. The imagination is also the only faculty that is actually able to experience the latter. As rational beings, we are initially bound by the moral law and we subsequently evaluate whether it has been obeyed. Consequently, we don’t experience a feeling of liberty; rather, we experience that we are under constraint. This perspective is at odds with the instinct of freedom that is characteristic of the imagination. Hence, Schiller advises the author of tragedies not to express moral concepts too obviously in his work: For the lawfulness, which reason demands as moral judge, does not exist with the unboundedness, which the imaginative power desires as aesthetical judge. Therefore, an object will be precisely so much the less fit to an aesthetical use, as it is qualified for a moral one; and if the poet had nevertheless to select it, so will he do well to treat it so, that the attention

156

Faure

of our reason is not drawn to the rules of the will, but rather of our imagination to the capacity of the will.10 If the play directed our attention to certain moral rules, our interest would shift to a law that binds us and the perspective of freedom would disappear from view. Both points about the pleasure and the experience of our capacity to be free are connected by the notion of “passivity.” Passivity is a condition for intense pleasure. At the same time, I can only experience my freedom if I am passively struck by its possibility. If I already know in advance that I am free, I shall never really be able to feel free. From the perspective of pure reason, my freedom is not contingent—it is an indisputable “fact.” The moral law subsequently demands that I use my freedom properly by doing what the categorical imperative prescribes. Yet one cannot experience freedom if one is guided by a rule that one has to obey: “No wonder, therefore, we enlarge ourselves with the aesthetical judgment, with the moral, on the contrary, feel narrowed and bound.”11 2

An Ambiguity in the Kantian Sublime: Negative or Positive Freedom?

The preceding analysis of the distinction between aesthetic and moral judgements prompts us to recognise an ambiguity in Schiller’s characterisation of the sublime experience and its relation to morality. When reading Schiller’s Über das Pathetische, we initially get the impression that the sublime pleasure consists in the knowledge that our moral principles can’t be affected by the sensuous part of our being. Consider, for instance, Schiller’s description of the Greek tragic heroes: “They love life as ardently as we others, but this sentiment does not so much govern them that they cannot give it up, if the duties of honor or of humaneness demand it.”12 Apparently, the aesthetic sublime experience teaches us that there is something within us that transcends the natural determination to which we are subjected as sensuous beings and thus safeguards the sense of our moral principles. One might also consider his interpretation of Laokoon further on in the text: “At whatever moment the serpents would like to have seized him, it would have always moved and shaken us. However, that it occurs just in the moment, where he becomes worthy of 10  UP, 248/447. 11  Ibid., 248/446. 12  Ibid., 229/425.

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority ?

157

our respect as father, that his demise is presented, so to speak, as the immediate consequence of the fulfilled paternal duty, of the tender concern for his children—this inflames our sympathy to the highest.”13 However, toward the end of the text, it becomes clear that the sublime pleasure can never consist in this insight. In the previous section, I have explained that Schiller considers the sublime feeling of liberty to be incompatible with the idea that we have to realise certain moral principles. The fulfillment of our duty is accompanied by the feeling that we are subjugated to a higher principle, whereas the sublime experience makes us feel independent from external constraints. This is confirmed at the end of the text, where Schiller remarks that we admire people who are able to act out of free will, even if this capacity is employed in immoral actions: “A vicious person begins to interest us, as soon as he must risk his happiness and life, in order to put through his bad will; a virtuous person, on the contrary, loses our attention in the same proportion, as his happiness itself obliges his good behavior.”14 The sublime judgement reveals the specific dignity of the human being, which is located in his freedom, irrespective of how this capacity is used. It is not oriented toward the content of our moral principles, but toward the formal capacity to realise these principles, that is, the free will. Consequently, the pleasure of this experience is not derived from the insight that our moral principles are protected against natural determination, but rather from the feeling that we can escape the vulnerable and base condition to which our sensuous being predestines us. In other words, the concept of freedom is a condition of possibility for moral actions, but it also has a broader significance. It points toward an inner realm that allows us to escape suffering and humiliation. In this way, the sublime experience becomes a feeling of superiority (Überlegenheit), independence (Unabhängigkeit), and freedom from boundaries (Freiheit von Schranken).15 In short, there is an ambiguity as to whether in the sublime experience we enjoy the fact that morality is invulnerable or the fact that we are invulnerable.16 13  Ibid., 242/439. 14  UP, 251/450. 15  VE, 395. 16  In the beginning of this section, I have explained that the invulnerability of our rational capacities can only appear against the background of the vulnerability of our sensuousness. Hence, one could object that the sublime experience by no means reveals that we are invulnerable, but only that there is a part of us that transcends vulnerability. However, Schiller identifies the essence of our personhood with our rational capacities (see, for example, UP, 235/431–32). The sublime experience is so satisfying precisely because we realise that the essence of our personality cannot be affected by nature.

158

Faure

In fact, this ambiguity can already be seen in Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime, albeit in a more implicit way. On the one hand, several passages clearly point out that the sublime feeling primarily has a moral significance for Kant. Take, for instance, a passage on the dynamical sublime: In this way, in our aesthetic judgment nature is judged as sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which we are, to be sure, subjected in regard to these things) as not the sort of dominion over ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our highest principles and their affirmation or abandonment.17 In this passage, the sublime feeling is pleasurable because we realise that the preservation of our moral principles is immune to the vulnerability of our natural being. In this case, the sublime feeling is accompanied by a feeling of respect (Achtung) for the moral law within us. We admire a realm that transcends us, but to which we belong at the same time. A similar passage can be found in Kant’s discussion of the mathematical sublime: “But the mind feels itself elevated in its own judging if, in the consideration of such things, without regard to their form, abandoning itself to the imagination and to a reason which, although it is associated with it entirely without any determinate end, merely extends it, it nevertheless finds the entire power of the imagination inadequate to its ideas.”18 This passage illustrates how the imagination looks up to reason, realising that it will always remain inadequate compared with rational ideas. Hence, in this context too, a feeling of respect is appropriate: “The feeling of the inadequacy of our capacity for the attainment of an idea that is a law for us is respect.”19 In his discussion of the dynamical sublime, however, Kant clarifies that we actually only respect our own destination: “And we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another 17  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), A262. Cf. Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145. (My italics). In this paper, I will refer to this text as “KuK.” 18  KuK, A256/139–40. 19  Ibid., A257/140.

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority ?

159

kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature.”20 This passage does not so much stress the feeling of respect for a moral destination that transcends us as it emphasizes the feeling of independence from the oppressive sphere of nature. Kant also makes a revealing comparison between the sublime feeling and the feeling of admiration for the warrior, which has not vanished even in civilised times: “Someone who is not frightened, who has no fear, thus does not shrink before danger but energetically sets to work with full deliberation.”21 Kant immediately hastens to say that the warrior must “display all the virtues of peace, gentleness, compassion and even proper care for his own person.” However, the reason why this is necessary lies in the fact that “precisely in this way the incoercibility of his mind by danger can be recognized.”22 In sum, it is not entirely clear whether the sublime pleasure primarily consists in the feeling that we are superior to sensuous nature or in the feeling that we are subject to our moral destination. Is it an experience of independence, liberation, and invulnerability? Or is it an experience of dependence on the moral law, which only presupposes that we are independent from nature? Do I derive a sense of dignity from my capacity to be free from external constraints or from my adherence to moral principles? Schiller seems to answer these questions at the end of his Über das Pathetische. He makes a clear choice by pointing out that respect for moral principles is incompatible with the sublime feeling. This feeling consists in the deliverance from the chains of sensuous being, and hence it can’t be accompanied by the feeling that we are imprisoned again, this time by the chains of reason. This choice has an important advantage: We can save the autonomy of the aesthetic judgement. If we maintain that the sublime feeling consists in the knowledge that our moral principles can’t be affected by the course of nature, it becomes difficult to explain what makes this feeling so special and important. Why is it necessary that I first suffer as a sensuous being (i.e., aesthetically) in order to discover that morality is inviolable? We must assume that every rational creature is conscious of the moral law (Kant calls it a “fact of practical reason”) and thereby of his freedom to obey it. Consequently, an aesthetic experience doesn’t seem essential for the discovery of the moral law and its preservation. Schiller argues, however, that the sublime feeling is not concerned with moral principles at all, but rather with the capacity for freedom, regardless of whether this is employed in moral or in immoral actions. And we 20  Ibid., A261/144–45. 21  Ibid., A262/146. 22  Ibid.

160

Faure

have explained that this capacity can only be experienced from the aesthetic perspective because the moral perspective makes us feel bound. In this way, Schiller saves the autonomy of the aesthetic sublime judgement. However, Schiller’s choice also has a disadvantage. The sublime pleasure seems to have become purely negative. If we enjoy the superiority of our moral destination, the sublime feeling still has a positive object. In Schiller’s theory, there seems to be no room for this anymore. We enjoy the fact that we are no part of nature, that we are invulnerable and independent. It is not clear how this negative capacity is related to the positive orientation toward a meaningful reality. I have tried to show that this difficulty is already present in Kant’s text. He repeatedly stresses that it is not the object, but the subject that is sublime.23 However, what kind of subject are we talking about here? Is it the subject within me that gives me the “fact” of the moral law, or is it I, as a subject, who is merely giving the law to myself? It seems that we have to choose between both alternatives. Kant writes: “Hence the will is not merely subject to the law but subject to it in such a way that it must be viewed as also giving the law to itself.24 Yet how can I simultaneously be subject to the law and be the source of the law?25 3

Subjective vs. Objective Sublimity

Schiller could have provided an answer to the question that ended the previous section. He would have replied that we actually don’t have to choose between respect for one’s own independency and respect for the moral law. To be sure, the sublime feeling is incompatible with the experience of the necessity of the moral law. However, the negative feeling of liberation might be oriented toward the positive moral destination in an indirect way. Toward the end of Über das Pathetische, Schiller qualifies his theory in an important respect. This qualification concerns what we would nowadays call “socially engaged art.” Doesn’t this form of art show that the artistic expression of definite moral concepts might be valuable after all? Socially engaged art can be a very power23  See, for example, KuK, A257/145–46. 24  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81. Cf. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg, F. Meiner, 1999), 57. In this paper, I will refer to this text as “G.” 25  William Desmond calls this tension “the antinomy of autonomy and transcendence.” See William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2001), 137–38.

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority ?

161

ful medium to transfer morally relevant ideas.26 Schiller understands, however, that in that case one wouldn’t recognise the specificity of art. If the function of a work of art were to express moral concepts, then it would be in a sense superfluous. It would serve at most as a vivid illustration of a message that could in principle also be grasped independently. This doesn’t mean, however, that art is not morally relevant at all. Works of art paradoxically have a much greater moral impact when they don’t express recognisable moral principles in a direct way. This is because the absence of the binding perspective of morality allows the spectator to experience his capacity for freedom, which in turn can incite him to act morally: “Poetry can become to man, what love is to the hero. It can neither advise him, nor strike for him, nor otherwise do work for him; but it can educate him as a hero, it can summon him to deeds and to all that he should be, equip him with strength.”27 This cultivation of the capacity for freedom even seems to be a necessary condition for truly moral actions. Kant has stressed time and again that being moral requires that one act not only “in conformity with” duty, but also “from” duty. I am not moral if my actions happen to correspond to the moral law; rather, I am moral if and only if they issue from the will to be good.28 This is why Schiller claims that “the vices which bespeak the strength of the will evidently announce a greater predisposition for truly moral freedom than the virtues which borrow a support from inclination, because it costs the consistent villain only a single triumph over himself, a single reversal of his maxims, in order to turn to the good all the consistency and dexterity of the will, which he lavished on the evil.”29 The truly moral person chooses particular good actions because he knows that they are rational. He has freely chosen them on the basis of this insight and not because he happens to desire them. In this way, the cultivation of the negative capacity for freedom ultimately serves the positive moral law after all: “It belongs to the instinct, to attend to the interest of sensuousness with blind zeal, but it belongs to the person, to limit the instinct through regard for the law. The instinct in itself pays attention to no law, but the person has to take care that the prescriptions of reason be infringed upon by

26  UP, 250/449. 27  Ibid. 28  See G, 52/16 and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, AA81, in Desmond, Ethics and the Between, 205–06. In this paper, I will refer to this text as “KpV.” 29  UP, 251–52/450–51.

162

Faure

no action of the instinct.”30 For this reason, Schiller often calls the capacity for freedom “the moral capacity” (das moralische Vermögen).31 Kant would have formulated a similar answer. The sublime feeling is indeed a feeling of independence, superiority, and personal dignity. I enjoy because I can’t be humiliated by the senses. However, this feeling is not merely negative, it is oriented toward the positive moral law. In Kant’s framework, I can only be free in so far as I am governed by the moral law, “thus freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other.”32 Nevertheless, it is crucial to cultivate the feeling of freedom in itself apart from the concern with the moral law. After all, I only act morally if I understand that my action is rational, that is, if I autonomously consent to the moral law without being guided by a heteronomous principle such as divine authority or natural inclinations. When Kant writes that I give the moral law to myself, he is actually only referring to this contrast. I am essentially a rational creature, and obeying the categorical imperative is rational. Hence, giving the moral law to myself simply means that obeying it corresponds to what I essentially am, in contrast to principles that are strange to me. Therefore, when the sublime experience makes me feel superior, this by no means implies that I feel superior as an individual. My rationality, which constitutes my essence, makes me a citizen of a noumenal realm that transcends my individuality. Consequently, the sublime feeling is a feeling of personal dignity that can only be acquired by subjecting oneself to a higher principle.33 In this way, we come to see that negative and positive freedom are connected by a particular assumption: I can only be free from nature in so far as I am a rational creature, and as a rational creature I am necessarily governed by the moral law. Schiller, too, expresses this assumption at the beginning of his later text Über das Erhabene: “The will is the species character of man, and reason itself is only the eternal rule of the same.”34 This means that the denial of the natural world ultimately serves to produce certain states of affairs in that same world in conformity with rationality. The “freedom from x” enables the “freedom to y.” In short, Kant and Schiller presuppose that the formal capacity 30  Ibid., 235/431–32. (My italics). 31  See, for example, UP, 244/441. 32  KpV, AA29/162. For Kant’s distinction between negative and positive freedom, see G, 94–5/75–6 and KpV, AA33/166. 33  Cf. KpV, AA83/206: “We are indeed lawgiving members of a kingdom of morals possible through freedom and represented to us by practical reason for our respect; but we are at the same time subjects in it, not its sovereign.” 34  This text can be found in the same volume as Über das Pathetische (UP, 255/822).

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority ?

163

to be free implies the knowledge of a moral content, which is guaranteed by the notion of practical reason. However, it is not only that the idea of rationality guarantees that freedom is not empty but connected to a positive content, it is also that this idea safeguards our autonomy. Admittedly, my independence from nature presupposes a new submission. Yet, this time I am merely subjected to my own rationality. It is not something entirely strange and fearful; rather, it is something with which I can identify even though it transcends me and calls for respect: “As submission to a law, that is, as a command (indicating constraint for the sensibly affected subject) it therefore contains in it no pleasure but instead, so far, displeasure in the action. On the other hand, however, since this constraint is exercised only by the lawgiving of his own reason, it also contains something elevating.”35 It is precisely in this respect that Kant’s theory is new. The idea that the capacity to be free implies a rational insight into the good is present throughout the history of philosophy. However, for Kant, the source of the good becomes located in the faculty of reason. Traditionally, the faculty of reason merely discovered the good in nature, but it was by no means the source of the good. Kant’s turn has perhaps been inspired by the fact that nature has become contingent in a modern framework and thus can’t provide a suitable foundation for morality.36 However it may be, this turn toward reason as a faculty has also given rise to the idea that morality is something with which I can easily identify, something which seems closer to me than God or nature. This enables Kant to reconcile the notion of respect for something higher with the enlightened desire for independence and emancipation. The autonomy of the subject is guaranteed by the autonomy of morality. This explains why in the sublime experience we can simultaneously enjoy our own superiority and something which is greater than ourselves. After all, respecting the moral law is tantamount to respecting the faculty from which my sense of dignity is derived, namely, reason. The next question that naturally comes to mind is whether Kant’s assumption is true. Is it correct to say that the enlightened ideal of emancipation and the subjection to morality are intrinsically connected through the notion of reason? I have merely shown that this ethical assumption is the key to the solution of the ambiguity in Kant’s aesthetic theory of the sublime, without 35  KpV, AA81/205. 36  See the many passages in which Kant refutes the idea that nature can provide the foundation of morality on the basis of the claim that it lacks the necessity that is attached to moral judgements.

164

Faure

attempting to inquire as to whether it is correct. It would be impossible to pursue this inquiry here. However, I would like to end this paper by providing a kind of historical “proof” for the correctness of my claim. I have contended that the solving of the ambiguity in Kant and Schiller depends on their assumption that the feelings of superiority and respect are connected through the notion of practical reason. What happens with a theory of the sublime which is similar in all respects but which lacks this assumption? Schopenhauer has provided such a theory. He adopts the Kantian conception of the sublime as a feeling of subjective independence. In his theory, too, the sublime feeling originates from the contrast between two moments: our radical impotency, on the one level, leads to the revelation of our superiority, on the other.37 Moreover, he agrees with Schiller that tragedy forms “the highest degree” of the sublime feeling.38 In conformity with Schiller, he argues that tragedy confronts us with the “terrible side of life,”39 and hence the feeling of contrast that constitutes the sublime experience works most intensely in this art form. Thus, as far as the painful occasion of the sublime experience is concerned, Schopenhauer is in keeping with Kant and Schiller. However, how does he characterise the sublime pleasure itself? He deviates from the view that the sublime experience leads to the revelation of our moral destination in the strict Kantian sense of the term.40 The confrontation with the terrible side of life rather has the following result: “At this sight we feel ourselves urged to turn our will away from life, to give up willing and loving life.41 This modification of Kant’s theory is ultimately grounded in a metaphysical shift. Schopenhauer adopts the Kantian distinction between phenomenal and noumenal reality, but the noumenal level doesn’t coincide with the sphere of reason. It has become identified with the world of natural desire that for Kant constituted the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer accordingly considers reason to be a mere servant of this natural drive, which he calls “the will to live.” Reason is nothing other than the capacity to compare empirical phenomena in an abstract way. At most, it allows us to pursue our desires more efficiently, 37  Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Vol. II, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 433. Cf. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Band II (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 503–504. In this paper, I will refer to this text as “WWRII.” 38  WWRII, 433/503–04. 39  Ibid. 40  Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 205. Cf. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Band I (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 277. In this paper, I will refer to this text as “WWRI.” 41  WWRII, 433/504.

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority ?

165

but it can’t serve as the source of moral action—hence Schopenhauer’s central criticism of Kant’s foundation of morality in reason.42 As a consequence of this, the only escape from the contingent and meaningless reality of nature that Kant still had in store is taken away. Due to this metaphysical shift, the sublime pleasure, for Schopenhauer, can no longer have a positive object. It has become merely negative (Bloβ negativ).43 Kant is a modern philosopher in the sense that the natural world cannot provide a meaningful framework anymore. Nevertheless, we have seen that the Kantian sublime feeling of liberation is not merely negative, since it is oriented toward the meaningful realm of reason. However, now that Schopenhauer has made reason part of the natural world, there seems to be no reality left that can serve as a suitable positive object of the sublime pleasure. Consequently, the sublime pleasure can only consist in a purely negative denial of the natural world: If this rising above all the aims and good things of life, this turning away from life and its temptations, and the turning, already to be found there, to an existence of a different kind, although wholly inconceivable to us, were not the tendency of tragedy, then how would it be possible generally for the presentation of the terrible side of life, brought before our eyes in the most glaring light, to be capable of affecting us so beneficially, and of according us an exalted pleasure? [. . .] Thus the summons to turn away the will from life remains the true tendency of tragedy, the ultimate purpose of the intentional presentation of the sufferings of mankind.44 The sublime pleasure has become purely negative because Schopenhauer lacks the metaphysical resources for a positive pleasure. If there exists nothing besides the meaningless and contingent world of natural desires, salvation can only be oriented toward “the nothing,” as Schopenhauer indicates at the end of his magnum opus.45 In short, Schopenhauer radically chooses for the interpretation of the sublime experience as a feeling of superiority and independence, and this view is directly related to his criticism of the essential role that reason plays in the Kantian framework. In this way, Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime 42  See his Über die Grundlage der Moral (ed. Peter Welsen (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2007)) and WWRI, 514–28/651–67. 43  WWRII, 433/504. 44  Ibid., 435/506. 45  wwri, §71.

166

Faure

can function as a kind of historical proof for the claim that Kant and Schiller can hold together negative and positive freedom thanks to the assumption that there exists a practical rationality in a deeper sense than the merely instrumental. However, Schopenhauer’s radical shift to one side of the ambiguity has enabled the young Nietzsche to abandon the Kantian conception of the sublime altogether. He shares Schopenhauer’s radically modern metaphysical framework, which means that he too leaves no room for the thought of a rationality that could connect freedom and morality. Yet, Nietzsche contests the view that the sublime must have anything to do with subjective autonomy and independence at all, whether it concerns the moral subject or the individual subject. He attempts to show that the very same natural world on which we depend and which makes our existence absurd can be an object of respect and veneration. In the sublime experience, the subject does not escape from its dependence on the object, but it learns, rather, to see the things that make life vulnerable from a different perspective. Nietzsche claims, in the tradition of Schiller and Schopenhauer, that tragedies can produce this sublime effect, “whereby the terrible is tamed by artistic means” (“die künstlerische Bändigung des Entsetzlichen”).46 He writes that tragedy offers metaphysical solace because it “points to that core of being despite the constant destruction of the phenomenal world.”47 On the phenomenal level, we constantly suffer from the transience of things: “We are to recognize that everything which comes into being must be prepared for painful destruction.”48 However, tragedy makes us realise that all empirical reality, including ourselves, is a manifestation of an eternal core of existence that will never vanish, which leads to a feeling of consolation: “For brief moments we are truly the primordial being itself, and we feel its unbounded greed and lust for being: the struggle, the agony, the destruction of appearances now seems to us to be necessary, given the uncountable excess of forms of existence thrusting and pushing themselves into life, given the exuberant fertility of the world-will.”49

46  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40. Cf. Kritische Studienausgabe, Band 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 57. In this paper, I will refer to this text as “GT.” 47  GT, 41/59. 48  Ibid., 80/109. 49  Ibid., 81/109.

The Kantian Sublime: A Feeling of Superiority ?

167

Thus, Nietzsche does not so much solve the ambiguity in the Kantian sublime, so much as he dissolves it by rejecting the basic assumption of the Kantian scheme. Kant, Schiller, and Schopenhauer assume that it is not the object, but the subject, that is sublime. Nietzsche, on the other hand, shows that the sublime feeling should not consist in a subjective superiority at all. On the contrary, I experience that I am inferior to the “world-will” or the “eternal core of existence,” of which I am a mere ephemeral manifestation and which is the cause of my misery. Nevertheless, it is precisely this insight—which is disenchanting at first sight—that can cause a sublime pleasure. It is indeed painful to realise that our individual lives full of suffering are transient. But this is only painful from the individual’s point of view. Tragedy elevates us to the level of the whole and thus makes us indifferent to our individuality. In this way, Nietzsche regains a positive object of the sublime experience. However, the object that we affirm does not differ from the one that caused the initial suffering. The two contrasting moments of the sublime feeling don’t correspond to two metaphysical levels anymore. In other words, the sublime feeling is still a feeling of personal dignity. But Kant, Schiller, and Schopenhauer might wrongly assume that dignity and superiority imply each other. Nietzsche would object that our highest dignity lies in the fact that we are a work of art of the eternal-one, that is, a manifestation of the whole: “We may very well assume we are already images and artistic projections for the true creator of art, and that our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art.”50 It is difficult to explain in a philosophical way how such a paradoxical kind of pleasure—enjoying one’s own vulnerability—is possible. Nevertheless, this seems to be the most plausible explanation of the sublime experience from a phenomenological point of view. Schiller thinks that tragedies ought to evoke subjective resistance on the stage. Yet, many tragedies seem to be deeply satisfying even as they confront us with our nothingness without offering the signal that we can escape this condition. Kant wonders: “And who would want to call sublime shapeless mountain masses towering above one another in wild disorder with their pyramids of ice, or the dark and raging sea, etc.?”51 I would like to ask a question in return: Who has beheld the dark and raging sea and has thereupon considered that one is superior to the natural object in question?

50  Ibid., 34/47. 51  KuK, A256/139.

168

Faure

References Desmond, William. Ethics and the Between. Albany: SUNY University Press, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ―――. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Edited by Karl Vorländer. Hamburg, F. Meiner, 1999. ―――. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Edited and Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ―――. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Edited by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Band 1. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 1988. ―――. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss and Translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Pathetic. In Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom. Vol. III. 227–53. Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1990. ―――. Theoretische Schriften. Edited by Rolf-Peter Janz. 423–51. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008. ―――. Vom Erhabenen, in Theoretische Schriften. Edited by Rolf-Peter Janz. 395–422. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. II. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1958. ―――. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. I. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1958. ―――. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Band I. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998. ―――. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Band II. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998. ―――. Über die Grundlage der Moral. Edited by Peter Welsen. Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2007.

CHAPTER 9

Kant’s Transcendental Reflection: An Indispensable Element of the Philosophy of Culture Simon Truwant Toward the end of the “Transcendental Analytic” in the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant rather poetically depicts the domain of the understanding, which he has just analysed, as “the land of truth.” This land, however, is actually an island [that is] surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean [. . .] where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands and, ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the voyager looking around for new discoveries, entwine him in adventures from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end.1 It quickly becomes clear, in the “Transcendental Dialectic,” that the “stormy ocean” refers to the faculty of pure, theoretical reason. Traditionally, the domain of this faculty was regarded as the domain of philosophy par excellence. For Kant, however, it rather resembles the Bermuda Triangle: While we can more or less identify the boundaries of this area by means of three orientation points—the ideas of reason—we should nevertheless not enter it with any hope of returning from an enriching expedition—or of returning at all. It is not until the Critique of Practical Reason that Kant finds himself an entirely different kind of ship—the moral law—and that a metaphysical journey becomes once again a reasonable endeavour. Taking into account Kant’s entire oeuvre, the picture of a stormy ocean may also refer to the territories of aesthetics and teleological thinking discussed in the Critique of Judgement. Governed by the power of judgement, these fields also lie outside “the land of truth” that is ruled by the faculty of understanding. Yet, unlike speculative metaphysics, Kant’s critical assessments thereof result in positive, influential theories on aesthetics and teleology. Hence, the second

1  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B, 294–95. I will hereafter refer to this text as “CPR.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_011

170

Truwant

and third Critiques show that Kant is ultimately interested in a much broader territory than that which he has called “the land of truth.” It seems appropriate, therefore, to exchange Kant’s limiting topographical sketch of reason for a more encompassing transcendental topology, that is, a map of the different concepts and principles that reason employs in order to interpret the world. For this purpose, I suggest a new reading of Kant’s account of transcendental reflection, the subjective power that outlines a limited transcendental topology in the appendix of the “Transcendental Analytic,” which is entitled “On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection.”2 Most literature on this chapter focuses on its philosophical-historical value because here Kant most sharply opposes his position from that of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and that of John Locke.3 However, inspired by Rudolf Makkreel’s hermeneutical, or “orientational,” reading of the Critique of Judgement,4 I will focus on the systematic role of transcendental reflection in the first Critique instead, and I will expand it to Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole. Finally, I will indicate the (hitherto neglected) importance of this kind of reflection for Ernst Cassirer’s attempt to transform the critique of reason into a full-blown critique of culture. 1

Makkreel on Orientation and “Sensus Communis”

By approaching the Critique of Judgement as a part of Kant’s epistemology, Makkreel counters the contemporary hermeneutical critique that “the main shortcoming of Kant’s transcendental philosophy is that it is foundational and appeals to a priori starting points that are not subject to reevaluation.”5 While he agrees that “Kant’s interpretation of nature in the first Critique was merely an extrapolation of reason from [understanding’s] reading of experience, [and

2  C PR, B, 316–46. I will hereafter refer to this text as the “Amphiboly” chapter. 3  See, for example, Karl Aschenbrenner, A Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 283–98; Karin de Boer, “Pure Reason’s Enlightenment: Transcendental Reflection in Kant’s First Critique,” in Kant Yearbook: Metaphysics, ed. Dietmar Heidemann (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 53–73; and Marcus Willascheck, “Phaenomena/Noumena und die Amphibolie der Reflexionsbegriffe,” in Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Georg Mohr and Marcus Willascheck (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 340–50. 4  Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). I will hereafter refer to this text as “IIK.” 5  I IK, 154.

Kant ’ s Transcendental Reflection

171

therefore] remained on the whole a one-directional abstract process,”6 he also holds that the third Critique allows for a simultaneously Kantian and hermeneutical view of nature. There, Kant introduces three “orientational transcendental conditions” that complement the “foundational” transcendental conditions of the first Critique’s deterministic view of nature.7 First, the principle of purposiveness that is central to the Critique of Judgement installs a dynamic bond between sensations and concepts that is foreign to the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first Critique, Kant discusses the possibility of judgements that subsume our appearances under a priori fixed concepts and thus express the laws of a deterministically conceived nature. In the third Critique, on the other hand, he defends the legitimacy of reflective judgements that allow for an additional, teleological interpretation of the same nature:8 by means of a transcendental principle of purposiveness, we can think of a harmony among natural events that complements their a priori determination of the understanding. Because reflective judgements move from the particular to the general, and thus “let the appearances speak first,” they allow for a dynamic and revisable interplay between concept and sensation.9 Hence, thanks to a teleological principle, we can explain such complex and evolving “natural objects” as organisms.10 Moreover, since reflective judging works in a bottom-up manner, it is not bound to one general but abstract concept of nature, but allows for different natural realms.11 Both cases of interpretation require, in Makkreel’s words, “the mutual adjustment of parts and wholes characteristic of the hermeneutic circle.”12 Second, along with the principle of teleology, a feeling subject enters the process of interpretation. Kant claims that the discovery of purposiveness in nature is “the ground of a very appreciable pleasure, often even of admiration.”13 In fact, the table of faculties in the third Critique’s second introduction indicates the feelings of pleasure and displeasure as the incentives for teleological judging:14 for Kant, teleological explanations betray a subjective interest 6   Ibid., 111. 7   Ibid., 154. 8   Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, in Oxford World’s Classics, ed. James Creed Meredith and Nicholas Walker (Oxford University Press, 2007), 180; §78. I will hereafter refer to this text as “CJ.” 9   IIK, 111–12. 10  CJ, §65. 11  Ibid., 183. 12  IIK, 112. 13  CJ, 187. 14  Ibid., 197.

172

Truwant

rather than an objective reality.15 Makkreel holds that, given the involvement of a subject that is not indifferent to its perceived objects, the hermeneutical process has a triadic structure, including not only the focal point of some object before me, but also my feeling of orientation toward it as focused in my subject. By means of the relation of these two reference points to each other and to the horizon, I can gain a kind of reflective leverage on the world, which is precisely what is needed in hermeneutics as well.16 Third, the validity of teleological judgements, which are thus reflective rather than deterministic, and subjective rather than objective, rests on the assumption of general, intersubjective consent.17 Although an aesthetic judgement— “This is beautiful”—does not determine any objects, it presupposes that all beings capable of reflective judging would agree.18 In this way, the idea of a “sensus communis” or community of communicative human beings also enters the process of interpretation: “[C]ommon sense can orient the judgment of the individual to the larger perspective of the community and thus provide the basis for what Kant calls an enlarged mode of thought or interpretation.”19 15  Ibid., 185–86. Although Kant here uses “the expression universal validity, which denotes the validity of the reference of a representation, not to the cognitive faculties, but to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure for every subject” [CJ, 214], it is perhaps more appropriate to ascribe a general character to reflective taste judgements, in contrast to the universal character of determining judgements. While the latter type of judgement is valid for all rational beings, the latter only pertains to human reason, whose limited understanding of the world leaves it wanting more [CJ, 185]. The Critique of Judgement admittedly deals, in other words, with what is “objectively contingent but subjectively necessary” [CJ, 243], or with the “laws of contingency.” 16  IIK, 159. 17  CJ, 238. 18  Strictly speaking, the term “sensus communis” only occurs in Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judging and not in relation to natural teleology. However, in the “Canon of Pure Reason” in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggests that it is the ultimate touchstone for taking something to be true for all our cognition (CPR, B, 848–50). Makkreel therefore holds that “[b]oth in matters of knowledge and taste, judgmental assent must be coordinated with consent.” [Rudolf Makkreel, “Schematizing with and without Concepts: How Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment Recontextualizes the Object of Cognition,” (paper presented at the first biannual meeting of the North American Kant Society, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, July 2–4, 2011), 12. See http://northamericankantsociety .onefireplace.org/papers]. 19  IIK, 156–57.

Kant ’ s Transcendental Reflection

173

Makkreel further shows that Kant has the same hermeneutical approach to history, culture, religion, and other human sciences.20 In sum, reflective judgement allows us to oscillate between the parts and wholes that we perceive in nature and culture, between these organic views and our subjective stances with regard to them, and between this individual appreciation and the intersubjective community within which we express it. Toward the end of Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, Makkreel relates the idea of “sensus communis” to Kant’s account of transcendental reflection in the first Critique. He raises the idea of a transcendental topology that encompasses “not only the formal discrimination of the cognitive faculties as irreducible sources of knowledge, but also their felt accord and agreement, which must be communicated to produce a scientific consensus,”21 but he never explains how we should understand this. How do we get from Kant’s response to Locke and Leibniz in the “Amphiboly” chapter to a conception of transcendental reflection that maps out our complementary deterministic and hermeneutic views of the world? How, in other words, does this conception mirror the idea of a “sensus communis” understood as “a kind of pre-understanding that orients the subject in the world”? 2

The Role of Transcendental Reflection in Kant’s Philosophy

In the “Amphiboly” chapter, Kant holds that all judging entails comparing representations and that these comparisons always happen according to one of the four pairs of concepts of reflection: identity/difference, agreement/ opposition, inner/outer, and determinable/determination (or matter/form).22 However, the way we perceive the relation between two or more representations can differ significantly according to the cognitive power that we thereby employ. Because they make use of different cognitive tools, namely, the forms of intuition or the categories, sensibility is capable of making distinctions and the understanding is capable of grasping unities to which the other faculty is blind. Kant illustrates this with the example of two drops of water with the exact same logical qualities. While they are identical from the point of view of the understanding, they are nevertheless temporally or spatially distinct from the point of view of sensibility.23 The ultimate meaning of the concepts 20  Ibid., 131–36, 148–53; 136–41; 141–48; and 166–71, respectively. 21  Ibid., 166. 22  CPR, B, 317. 23  Ibid., B, 318.

174

Truwant

of reflection is thus relative to whether or not they are applied sensibly and/ or intelligibly: [W]hether the things are identical or different, in agreement or in opposition, etc., cannot immediately be made out from the concepts themselves through mere comparison [. . .] but rather only through the distinction of the kind of cognition to which they belong, by means of a transcendental reflection.24 From a historical perspective, we should understand Kant’s account of transcendental reflection as a response to both Leibniz and Locke. Because they only accept the understanding or sensibility as a legitimate source of knowledge, these thinkers cannot help but judge the drops of water from the example above as either identical or different, respectively. Kant holds that these positions inevitably result in amphibolies, “a confusion of the pure object of the understanding with the appearance.”25 He himself avoids these categorical mistakes by acknowledging both sensibility and the understanding as sources of knowledge and by invoking the power of transcendental reflection to guard over their different fields of application. From the perspective of Kant’s philosophical system, on the other hand, transcendental reflection is the constructive capacity to identify and direct our attention toward the proper “transcendental topos”26 of our concepts and judgements. As a precondition for any objective judgement, it is the subjective power “through which I make the comparison of representations in general with the cognitive power in which they are situated[:] pure understanding or [. . .] pure intuition.”27 One could thus say that the account of transcendental

24  Ibid., B, 318. 25  Ibid., B, 326. 26  Ibid., B, 324. 27  Ibid., B, 317. Aschenbrenner also refers to transcendental reflection as “transcendental assignment” or “destination” [IIK, 285]. In this capacity, it differs from logical reflection, which merely compares representations without taking into account the cognitive power to which they belong [CPR, B, 318–19]. In the first introduction to the Critique of Judgement, Kant gives a general definition of reflection that encompasses both types thereof that he distinguishes in the first Critique [CJ, 16]. See Peter Reuter, Kants Theorie der Reflexionsbegriffe: Eine Untersuchung zum Amphiboliekapitel der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989), 82–5, 94–5 for an overview of all the different uses of the term “reflection” in Kant’s works and 96–8 for the different definitions of transcendental reflection in the “Amphiboly” chapter. I will argue that

Kant ’ s Transcendental Reflection

175

reflection allows, in retrospect, for the distinction between the “Transcendental Aesthetics” and the “Transcendental Analytic.”28 The most important distinction that Kant makes in the “Amphiboly” chapter is, however, not that of sensibility and the understanding this distinction should already be clear at this point in the first Critique, but that between the empirical and transcendental use of the latter.29 It is well known that, for Kant, the empirical use of the understanding is the only legitimate one. The transcendental use of the understanding, on the other hand, coincides with the traditional conception of pure theoretical reason that Kant rejects in the “Transcendental Dialectic.” On this view, the faculty of reason produces knowledge by applying the categories of the understanding beyond the empirical realm. For Kant, however, this whole undertaking is based on amphibolies; quantitative judgements about the soul—“There is only one soul” no less than “There are several souls,”—express a failure to distinguish the faculties of reason or discern the proper transcendental topos of our concepts. Again, transcendental reflection allows us to discern transcendental-logical categorical mistakes. This time, it is the capacity to orient us toward either the safe land of truth or the stormy ocean of reason. As such, the account of transcendental reflection also prepares the way for the distinction between the “Transcendental Analytic” and the “Transcendental Dialectic.” In order to now expand this account beyond the first Critique, I must first return to the empirical use of the categories of the understanding. Given that, following the above, this is the only legitimate scientific use of the concepts of reflection, we may suspect a correlation between these concepts and the table of the judgements of the understanding. Kant indeed holds that [p]rior to all objective judgments we compare the concepts, with regard to identity (of many representations under one concept) for the sake of

transcendental reflection also differs from teleological reflective judging because of its “preparatory” character and its much broader scope. 28  See Willascheck, “Phaenomena/Noumena,” 341; and Avery Goldman, Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). 29  There is an ongoing debate in the secondary literature on the place of the “Amphiboly” chapter within the Critique of Pure Reason; while located at the end of the “Transcendental Analytic,” some authors (e.g., Avery Goldman, Marcus Willascheck) hold that it in fact belongs to the “Transcendental Dialectic.”

176

Truwant

universal judgments, or their difference, for the generation of particular ones, with regard to agreement, for affirmative judgments, or opposition, for negative ones, etc.30 This quote explicitly links the first pair of reflection concepts we mentioned above—identity/difference—with universal and particular judgements, and the second pair—agreement/opposition—with affirmative and negative theoretical judgements. These are, respectively, the first two quantitative and qualitative judgements from the table of the judgements of the understanding. The “etc.” in this quote further suggests that the other concepts of reflection— inner/outer and matter/form—are linked to the understanding’s relational and modal judgements. The phrase “for the sake of” finally hints at a teleological relationship between transcendental reflection and the understanding; the act of transcendental reflecting happens in function of—amongst others, as we shall see—the scientific determination of the world.31 Interestingly, the moments of quality, quantity, relation, and modality return in the Critique of Practical Reason as the headings of the “table of categories of freedom”32 and in the composition of the “Analytic of the Beautiful”33 and

30  CPR, B, 317. 31  Since the table of the judgements of the understanding corresponds to that of the categories [CPR, B, 105], the concepts of reflection also back up the latter; Kant refers to the four subdivisions of the table of the judgements of the understanding, its categories, and reflection concepts as “headings” (“Titel ”) [CPR B, 95, B, 111, and B, 325], and he twice ascribes a special, foundational status to the fourth one [CPR B, 99–100 and B, 322]. See also Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) 122–23: “It is indeed a striking fact, generally overlooked by Kant commentators, that the Transcendental Analytic, which opens with the parallel exposition of forms of judgements and categories, should close with another parallel exposition, that between forms of judgements and “concepts of reflection,” or “concepts of comparison.” Moreover, Longuenesse holds that the “neglect in which the latter correspondence is held might well be due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and function of judgment according to Kant.” However, when she develops this “latter correspondence,” she focuses almost exclusively on logical reflection in the first Critique (chapter 6), whereas my interest is in the role of transcendental reflection throughout the three Critiques. 32  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), A, 117. 33  CJ, 203–44.

Kant ’ s Transcendental Reflection

177

“Analytic of the Sublime”34 in the Critique of Judgement. I cannot work out the parallels between these tables here, as each of them is already in itself notoriously complicated. However, the recurrence in the second and third Critique of the four moments of judging that Kant in the first Critique relates to the four, “more basic” conceptual pairs of reflection suggests that transcendental reflection, finally, also prepares the way for distinction between the theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic sphere. According to Kant, the understanding is the leading faculty in theoretical matters, while pure reason in the practical sphere and imagination reigns in the aesthetic sphere.35 Although these spheres represent different interests of reason, namely, to determine natural phenomena and intentions of purposive beings, and interpret the status of a certain pleasure, respectively, the four conceptual pairs of reflection nevertheless return in different shapes in each one of them.36 While we apply in the theoretical sphere the concepts of reflection to compare our representations “with regard to identity and difference, for the sake of universal or particular judgments,” in the practical sphere we do so for the sake of commissive and prohibitive judgements, and in the aesthetic sphere for the sake of judgements of beauty or “agreement” (“das Angenehme”). Thus, even when we basically judge the same data by means of the same concepts, due to the particular function of the latter, we can do so with a different tonality—deterministic or reflective—and with different results—the assertion of a scientific fact, a moral duty, or an aesthetically pleasing hypothesis. 3

Toward a Comprehensive Transcendental Topology

Although Kant never uses this term in the Critique of Judgement, its first pages offer a brief overview of an encompassing “transcendental topology.”37 There, Kant says that our rational capacities relate to two “fields”: the natural and the ethical. He refers to the regions of the fields of which we can have cognition as “territories” and to those of the fields where reason is legislative as “domains.” We should think here of mathematics, physics, and ethics. Those parts of the

34  Ibid., 247. 35  Ibid., 174, 198. 36  Gilles Deleuze beautifully explains the changing dominance of the interests, and thus faculties, of reason over the other ones in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 37  CJ, 174.

178

Truwant

territory for which reason is not legislative he calls “dwelling-places.”38 Here, we should think of aesthetics, natural and ethical teleology, and—following Makkreel—history, culture, religion, and other human sciences. The difference between a domain and a dwelling-place corresponds to that between deterministic and reflective judgements, and, as Makkreel showed us, to that between a deterministic and a hermeneutical approach to nature and culture. Whereas the mathematician or physicist is supposed to “record mere facts,” the relationship of the researcher and her life-world with the research object is acknowledged by or even the topic of the non-exact sciences. I have presented transcendental reflection as the capacity to overview the different regions of reason and map out its multifaceted world. This subjective power evaluates the use or topos of our concepts in light of certain experiential input in order to steer us away from speculative metaphysics, which has no place in the territories of reason, and orient us toward the domain or dwellingplace that is most appropriate for further explaining it. Within the domains, this explanation comes about through the categories and constitutive rules of the understanding or through practical reason; within the dwelling-places, reflective principles interpret things more freely, but they have no claim to objectivity. On this reading, transcendental reflection serves philosophical research in the same way that the “sensus communis” serves our teleological judging of nature and art; they both provide an enlarged perspective, whose support grounds our interpretation(s) of the world. However, because I extrapolated the way scholars have hitherto understood the role of transcendental reflection beyond the scope of the first Critique, to the whole of Kant’s critical thought, its overview encompasses the exact sciences, ethics, and the human sciences. By means of this subjective power, we can map out the different faculties—topoi—of reason in order to identify the status of our truth claims as scientific, speculative, ethical, or aesthetic—or, put differently, as objectively true, problematic, or generally valid. 4

Transcendental Reflection and Philosophy of Culture

Following the example of Ernst Cassirer, an early twentieth-century neoKantian thinker who attempted to “transform the critique of reason into a cri-

38  The list of translations of Kant’s term “Aufenthalt” includes “dwelling-place” (Meredith; Bernard), “residence” (Pluhar), “abode,” and “habitat” (Makkreel).

Kant ’ s Transcendental Reflection

179

tique of culture,”39 I will now argue that the role of transcendental reflection can finally also be extrapolated beyond Kant’s thought, toward a philosophy of culture. Despite acknowledging a multitude of cultural spheres—throughout his oeuvre, he distinguishes between the “symbolic forms” of myth, language, art, religion, natural science, history, law, economics, technology, and politics—like Kant, Cassirer sees a limited number of concepts at the root of all our comparisons of representations: the “symbol” is “a factor which recurs in each basic cultural form but in no two of them takes exactly the same shape.”40 Throughout his works, he indeed discusses the different meanings of the symbols of time, space, number, causality, and selfhood.41 Still, like Kant, Cassirer also holds that these concepts receive their actual meaning from a certain “direction of vision and from the ideal goal toward which the vision aims.”42 The meaning of the symbols is, in other words, relative to the symbolic form in which we employ them. Where Kant used the example of two drops of water, Cassirer illustrates this by means of the image 39  Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume One: Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 80. I will hereafter refer to the entire three volumes as “PSF” and then list the specific volume number. 40  PSF I, 84. 41  There are two prominent differences between Cassirer’s symbols and Kant’s concepts of reflection. First, Cassirer’s list of symbols is intentionally incomplete; further empirical research, be it into cultural fields to which he devoted his time (e.g., language), to which he merely referred (e.g., economics), or that have only developed later (e.g., social media), may reveal symbols that he had overlooked: “The forms of judging signify [. . .] only unitary and lively motives of thinking, which penetrate the manifold of its particular shapes and actively cause the creation and formulation of ever new categories.” [Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. Erster Band (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), 18. (My translation). Second, Cassirer’s attention to the data gathered by empirical sciences goes hand in hand with a disinterest in a sphere of pure conceptuality; unlike Kant, he does not deduce the symbols from a logical theory, and he conceives of the symbols as a priori, but not as pure, concepts. Given the lack of a definition from Cassirer, Guido Kreis therefore defines the symbols as “the phrases, images, institutions, artefacts, and the cult or religious or in any other way meaningful, worldly, acts” [Cassirer und die Formen des Geistes (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 19]. (My translation). This explains why Cassirer did not consider the idea of transcendental reflection, even though, as we will see, his philosophy requires it. Despite these two differences, the basic structural resemblances between the symbols and the concepts of reflection are remarkable, and they counter the standard interpretations of the former as mere modifications of Kant’s categories. 42  Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Three: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 138.

180

Truwant

of a line drawing: Relative to our interest, we can perceive the spatial figure of a line as a geometrical figure, a geographical border, an aesthetic ornament, a mythical dividing line between the profane and the divine, or a religious symbol.43 In another example, he explains how causal relationships can play an important role in both our scientific and mythological worldviews, despite expressing universal laws in the former case and magical inferences in the latter case: “Here again it is not the concept of causality as such but the specific form of causal explanation which underlies the difference and contrast between the two spiritual worlds.”44 Finally, while Kant made a distinction between deterministic and reflective judgements, Cassirer distinguishes between expressive, representational, and signifying symbols in The Phenomenology of Knowledge and “characterizing symbols” in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences.45 Expressive symbols are typical of mythological discourse; they present an unreflected, one-to-one relationship between a phenomenon and our rational interpretation thereof. Representational symbols dominate natural languages and allow for a more flexible relationship; here, the symbols have a more general and interchangeable meaning. Signifying symbols constitute formal languages like that of mathematics and the natural sciences, and they have a strictly universal modality. “Characterizing symbols,” finally, are typical of the cultural sciences, which acknowledge the “characteristic indeterminateness” of their concepts; in conformity with Kant’s reflective judgements, Cassirer holds that in these sciences the particular is “classified by the universal, but it is never subordinated.”46 Due to their distinctive “directions of vision,” no symbolic form is reducible to another.47 Moreover, given that, from an internal perspective, each form offers a complete interpretation of the world,48 they even seem mutually incompatible with one another. Once we realise that every symbolic form originates in our rational interests, however, we can see past their absolute and exclusive claims about the world and try to understand how to place them beside one another. For Cassirer, this is the task of philosophy: to establish, 43  PSF III, 202–04. 44  Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 48. 45  PSF III, 284; and Ernst Cassirer, “Concepts of Nature and Concepts of Culture,” in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, trans. Steven G. Lofts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 73. I will hereafter refer to this text as “LCS.” 46  LCS, 70. 47  PSF I, 79, 176–77. 48  Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume Four: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 262, 265.

Kant ’ s Transcendental Reflection

181

from an external or detached point of view, a harmony among the different symbolic forms: It is the task of systematic philosophy [. . .] to free the idea of the world from this one-sidedness. It has to grasp the whole system of symbolic forms [. . .] Each particular form [must] be “relativized” with regard to the others, but [. . .] this “relativization” is throughout reciprocal and [. . .] no single form but only the systematic totality can serve as the expression of “truth” and “reality.”49 Thus, in the same way that Kant, as a transcendental philosopher, could demarcate the boundaries of the understanding and reason, the philosopher of culture is capable of keeping in check the pretenses of each symbolic form. We can now understand the philosophy of symbolic forms as a transcendental topology that accounts for the entirety of our cultural life. Cassirer expresses the wish to develop a “ ‘morphology’ of the human spirit”50 or “a general plan of ideal orientation, in which we can [. . .] mark the position of each symbolic form.”51 Accordingly, he defines the symbol as a medium through which all the configurations effected in the separate branches of cultural life must pass, but which nevertheless retains its particular nature, its specific character [and thus provides] the necessary intermediary link for an inquiry which will accomplish for the totality of cultural forms what the transcendental critique has done for pure cognition.52 A mere enumeration of the various ways in which the same symbols recur in the human world does not, however, suffice for establishing a useful plan of this totality. Rather, conceived as the capacity to direct our attention toward 49  Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1953), 447. Consequently, Cassirer explains in The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms that philosophy cannot itself be a symbolic form [PSF IV, 262–65; see also Thora Ilin Bayer, Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 19–23, 80–89; and John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 64]. 50  PSF I, 69. 51  Ernst Cassirer, “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie,” in Ernst Cassirer Gesammelte Werke. Band 17: Aufsätze und Kleine Schriften 1927–1931 (Berlin: F. Meiner, 2004), 303. (My translation). 52  PSF I, 84.

182

Truwant

a diversity of meaningful, cultural domains, and to properly coordinate our different rational interests, the human capacity of transcendental reflection seems like an indispensable element of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. This becomes especially clear in his later, ethically oriented works. In An Essay on Man, he identifies the lack of a unitary view of our cultural life, and hence of the nature of the human being, as the cause of the crisis that hit European culture in the beginning of the twentieth century.53 Additionally, in The Myth of the State Cassirer analyses National Socialism as the successful but illegitimate merging of the symbolic forms of myth, politics, and technology. An evolved version of Kant’s account of transcendental reflection as I have presented it could remedy both of these interrelated problems and thus greatly contribute to the philosophy of culture. References Aschenbrenner, Karl. A Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983. Bayer, Thora Ilin. Cassirer’s Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Cassirer, Ernst. Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1953. ———. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Three: The Phenomenology of Knowledge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. ———. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythical Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. 53  Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 22: “No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found a method for mastery and organization of this material. When compared with our own abundance, the past may seem very poor. But our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity.” Cassirer suggests the symbol as this “clue of Ariadne,” but transcendental reflection or “symbolic reflection” would have been a more complete answer.

Kant ’ s Transcendental Reflection

183

———. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume One: Language. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. ———. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. Erster Band. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971. ———. An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. ———. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume Four: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. ———. “Concepts of Nature and Concepts of Culture,” in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences. Translated by Steven G. Lofts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie.” In Ernst Cassirer Gesammelte Werke. Band 17: Aufsätze und Kleine Schriften 1927–1931. Berlin: F. Meiner, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. De Boer, Karin. “Pure Reason’s Enlightenment: Transcendental Reflection in Kant’s First Critique.” In Kant Yearbook: Metaphysics. Edited by Dietmar Heidemann. 53–73. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010. Goldman, Avery. Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy. Edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Critique of Pure Reason. In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Critique of Judgement. In Oxford World’s Classics. Edited by James Creed Meredith and Nicholas Walker. Oxford University Press, 2007. Kreis. Guido. Cassirer und die Formen des Geistes. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Makkreel, Rudolf. Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———. “Schematizing with and without Concepts: How Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment Recontextualizes the Object of Cognition.” Paper presented at the first biannual meeting of the North American Kant Society, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, July 2–4, 2011.

184

Truwant

Reuter, Peter. Kants Theorie der Reflexionsbegriffe: Eine Untersuchung zum Amphiboliekapitel der Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989. Willascheck, Marcus. “Phaenomena/Noumena und die Amphibolie der Reflexionsbegriffe.” In Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited by Georg Mohr and Marcus Willascheck. 340–50. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998.

CHAPTER 10

Adorno’s Response to Kierkegaard: The Ethical Validity of the Aesthetic? Margherita Tonon This paper will address some of the questions raised by the title of the present volume, namely, The Marriage of Aesthetics and Ethics, by examining Theodor Adorno’s position on the topic as it is expressed in his book Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). The choice of this text is not accidental; it is motivated by factors that go beyond the need to shed some light on this rarely examined and yet seminal book. It is precisely in this book that Adorno addresses the ideas of the thinker who, in the most profound way, engaged with the issue of the marriage between aesthetics and ethics, namely, Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s legacy is profoundly influential on Adorno, yet such an influence often goes unacknowledged. In this paper, I will address Adorno’s reception of Kierkegaard’s aesthetics with particular reference to his so-called “theory of the stages,” or his understanding of the dialectics between the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. I will argue that Adorno reverses such a dialectics by attributing to the aesthetic the highest rank both with respect to its truth value and its ethical significance. The import of this reversal goes beyond the Kierkegaard book and extends to Adorno’s entire work. I will show that ethics and aesthetics have for Adorno a profound kinship, and while it is not possible to argue for the subordination of the former to the latter, it is at least possible to argue that the possibility of the ethical is, to a certain extent, dependent on some functions performed by the aesthetic. In order to show this, I will to move beyond Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic and extend my inquiry both to Negative Dialectics and to Aesthetic Theory. 1

Kierkegaard’s Recovery of the Aesthetic in the Ethical

First, it is fitting to briefly consider Kierkegaard’s position in relation to the topic of the marriage between aesthetics and ethics. If Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of the Power of Judgement, had implied a connection between aesthetic experience and ethics, this alone was not enough to overcome—in the eyes of the Romantic thinkers—the harshness of the Kantian ethics of duty. As © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_012

186

Tonon

a response, Friedrich Schiller pleaded for the harmony of duty and inclination, and deeply associated beauty with truth and the good, while Friedrich Schlegel pushed this connection even further, celebrating the spirituality of sensual love against the moral convention of his time. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, however, was very critical of the Romantic elevation of aesthetics to the highest status, and he intensely opposed Schlegel’s attack on social and moral values. Kierkegaard himself echoes such a Hegelian position in a similar critique of Romantic irony in his dissertation The Concept of Irony. However, it is in his pseudonymous production that Kierkegaard offers his most interesting and original contribution to the Romantic debate on the question of the marriage between aesthetics and ethics, that is, of how is it possible that what is right— namely, what is ethical—is at the same time beautiful and pleasurable. This response is carried out in the second part of Either/Or, where the pseudonymous character Judge William, in a letter to his friend the aesthete, defends the aesthetic validity of the ethical institution par excellence: marriage. If the aesthetic dimension, which is explored in the first part of Either/Or, is the realm of self-loss in a multitude of fleeting pleasures and external diversions, the ethical is for Kierkegaard the realm of self-choice, commitment, and responsibility to such choice. This, however, does not imply that the pleasure and beauty of the aesthetic are left behind once and for all. As is well known, in his letter in defence of the “aesthetic validity of marriage,” Judge William argues—over and against the aesthete—that it is possible to preserve the beauty of first love within a mediated external institution such as marriage. In fact, the beauty of first love (i.e., its aesthetic and romantic qualities) is taken up through marriage into a higher concentricity.1 That is to say, the image of concentric circles suggests to us that the erotic-aesthetic element of first love is not lost but rather incorporated and transfigured in the ethical institution of matrimony. More generally, in his two letters the Judge maintains that it is in the ethical that the aesthetic finds its destination an accomplishment. If they stay at the mere aesthetic level, beauty and pleasure are destined to decay into boredom and melancholy, while it is only when they are raised to the level of the ethical, and made the object of a conscious choice that renews itself in repetition, that they can be preserved and elevated.

1  “Love lets itself be taken up into a higher concentricity.” [Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)]. Cf. Enten–Eller. Anden del, in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, Vol. 3, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997), 94–5.

Adorno ’ s Response to Kierkegaard

187

Utilising a somewhat schematic interpretation, which is also suggested by Johannes Climacus,2 it is possible to see that Judge William is indicating a hierarchy of the spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical, and, finally, the religious. In the aesthetic life, the individual is projected outside of himself and devoted to the quest for pleasurable and interesting experiences. By “choosing himself,” the individual moves from the manifoldness of desires of the aesthetic into the enduring consistency of the ethical. The ethical is thus distinguished from the aesthetic by virtue of such self-choice, such taking up of one’s own existence no longer as a possibility, but instead as a task. Subsequently, the recognition of guilt and sin prompts the transition to the religious dimension. What needs to be kept in mind is that, despite the “either/or” injunction that is the title of the book itself, the transition from one sphere to the other does not imply the negation and dismissal of the lower sphere, but rather, in a Hegelian way, its preservation in the higher one. This means that the enjoyment of pleasure and beauty, which had fateful consequences in the aesthetic realm, can be experienced in its truth only in the context of the ethical, where it is integrated into the stability and endurance of marriage. The ethical takes up the aesthetic and shows it in its true light. 2

Adorno’s Reversal of the Spheres

I will now return to Adorno’s interpretation of Kierkegaard in order to outline his response to the latter’s “elevation” and “legitimation” of the aesthetic in the ethical. Briefly put, Adorno’s response is quite radical and concerns the overall “dialectic of the spheres,” in so far as he puts forward a fundamental reversal of their order. In his book Kierkegaard—Construction of the Aesthetic, Adorno maintains that in Kierkegaard’s authorship, the sphere that comes closest to an experience of truth is not the sphere of the ethical (and even less so, the religious), but rather the sphere of the aesthetic. Thus, we are no longer faced with a hierarchy that goes from aesthetics to ethics and then to the religious, but the 2  In his appendix “Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature,” Climacus writes: “But back to the Stages. In its tripartition it differs markedly from Either/Or. There are three stages: an aesthetic, an ethical, a religious [. . .] What was wrong with Either/Or was that its closure was ethical, as indicated. In the Stages this has been made clear and the religious has stood its ground.” [Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Alistair Hannay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 246–47; Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, Vol. 7, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2002), 222.

188

Tonon

aesthetic has priority over the ethical and the religious. I submit that Adorno’s reversal of the order of the spheres represents, on the one hand, one of the crucial features of his original interpretation of the work of Søren Kierkegaard. On the other hand, I will argue that the primacy of the aesthetic characterises his entire philosophical enterprise and his position with regard to the ethical. As a first step, I will lay out Adorno’s original argument for reversing Kierkegaard’s dialectics of the spheres. Second, I will sketch out how this reversal is not to be limited to Adorno’s critical interpretation of Kierkegaard and how his claim that the aesthetic experience stands in greater proximity to truth and the ethical than any other form of experience permeates his entire work. In his critical reception of the work of the Danish philosopher, Adorno claims that it is in the much disregarded aesthetic sphere that Kierkegaard comes closest to a true grasping of reality: “Where his philosophy, in its selfconsciousness of its mythical semblance, encounters ‘aesthetic’ characteristics, it comes closest to reality: to the reality of its own condition of objectless inwardness, as well as that of the estrangement of things with regard to itself.”3 Let us now examine this claim in more detail. Adorno argues that the aesthetic dimension of Kierkegaard’s work is superior to the other dimensions in at least three ways: a) its interpretative priority, b) its higher faithfulness to the real, and c) its ethical primacy over the other spheres. 2.1 Interpretative Priority of the Aesthetic It is from the aesthetic realm that Adorno extracts the interpretative clue to Kierkegaard’s entire philosophical enterprise, specifically the image of the intérieur. Under the influence of Walter Benjamin, Adorno believed that the analysis of images was to be the necessary key for a materialistic philosophy to open reality and that it constituted the nucleus out of which all critique is generated. Thus, the image of the intérieur, a recurrent representation that pervades Kierkegaard’s aesthetic writings, became for Adorno the cipher that needed to be interpreted in order to break into the world of the Danish philosopher. Adorno takes the intérieur, that is, the interior space of the bourgeois mansion, to be the cipher of the alienation of the bourgeois intellectual from the surrounding world, a world which, driven by the law of capitalist production, no longer corresponds to his inner feelings and desires. In Kierkegaard’s texts 3  Theodor Adorno. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, ed. and trans. Robert HullotKentor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 66–67; Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962), 98. I will hereafter refer to these texts as “K,” and I will put the English citation before the German citation.

Adorno ’ s Response to Kierkegaard

189

such as Stages on Life’s Way, Repetition, and the “Diary of the Seducer,” all action takes place behind closed doors in much the same way as subjectivity never leaves its own interiority and self-reflection. The interior space, typical of bourgeois well-to-do families, is accurately described, and the attention dedicated to each decorative object becomes the symbol of an individuality that is locked within itself, unable to find an outcome in objectivity. This space of meaning is protected against the intrusion of a reified reality, and thus the illusion of a concrete existential experience is preserved. However, such idle objects invoke the external, that is, the historical material conditions of the nineteenth century, and emphasise even further the alienation of Kierkegaard’s declining class from the real process of production—and therefore its position at the margins of the historical process.4 It is in fact, according to Adorno, Kierkegaard’s marginal and declining social position, and its denial or lack of acknowledgement of the social question, which underpins and informs his philosophy of inwardness. 2.2 Faithfulness to the Real of the Aesthetic Hence, it is by analysing the image of the interiéur that Adorno interprets Kierkegaard’s philosophy as characterised by—what I like to call—a “loss of experience” and an “alienation of the object.” In particular, the ethical, that is to say, the movement of self-choice toward the interiority of the self, is in Adorno’s reading the response to a loss of intimacy (a being out of touch) with the objective world, be it history, the socio-political dimension, or economic relations. The truth about such an inward turning is that it manifests the awareness of the alienation of the subject from objectivity (the historical and economic conditions of rising capitalism). In fact, Kierkegaard goes even further and posits the absolute incommensurability between interiority and exteriority. Such incommensurability is experienced by the subject in the failure to have an impact with his actions upon objectivity. This analysis is heavily informed by György Lukács’s account of societal reification5 under capitalist 4  In this respect, Adorno puts forward some insightful sociological observations: “What today appear as Kierkegaard’s petty-bourgeois characteristics correspond to his exclusion from economic production, the ‘accidents’ to which he is indeed ultimately subject. One such characteristic is the powerless hatred of reification in which only the powerful capitalist—in the words of Karl Marx—feels ‘at ease and strengthened’.” [K, 48/71]. 5  It is important to bear in mind, however, that Lukács’s theory of reification is only outlined in his 1922 treatise History and Class Consciousness, which appeared only some years after the publication of the essay “Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen” in Soul and Form in 1910. In this essay, Lukács sees Kierkegaard as the paradigm of the philosopher of modernity, who has fully perceived the subject’s alienation in modern society and especially its separation

190

Tonon

conditions: “Fleeing precisely from reification, he withdraws into ‘inwardness’.”6 Faced with the impossibility of bringing about a change in the external world, the individual resigns himself to a sort of bad objectivity and is forced back into interiority, which becomes the only theatre of action. Adorno, however, maintained that Kierkegaard’s rebellion against injustice in the world, while representing a form of critical negative thought, nonetheless remains impotent and frustrated. Such impotence constitutes precisely the untruth of the inward move and, more generally, a Kierkegaardian ethics. Kierkegaard neither gets to the root of this social malaise nor challenges its presuppositions; rather, he limits himself to rejecting it altogether as a realm of depravity, ultimately leaving the status quo unchanged. In addition, Adorno criticises Kierkegaard’s inward movement as returning to the same subjectivism of Idealism, which the Danish philosopher had rightly opposed in rejecting the identity of subject and object. Although what we are dealing with here is not the active/productive subjectivism of Idealism, Kierkegaard nonetheless believed that the individual could conquer himself in interiority and establish a truth for existence. Kierkegaard’s inward solution is precisely realised in the ethical moment of self-choice; hence, when Adorno takes exception to Kierkegaard’s philosophy of inwardness, he is in fact criticising the preponderance of the ethical (and religious) sphere. According to Adorno, the ethical (and the religious) move away from the insightful intuition of societal reification and the loss of objectivity for the sake of the idea of an abstract self that is engaged in an equally abstract ethical action7 based on an abstract notion of freedom. Adorno thus fully rejects Kierkegaard’s ethical/religious turn as a deviation from the insightful intuition of the malaise of rising capitalism. In fact, such a turn does not provide us, as Kierkegaard would have hoped, with a more from objectivity. While this analysis is insightful, the conclusions that he reaches, that of a philosophical subjectivism which finds refuge in faith, are the wrong ones and go in the direction of even a further alienation. Lukács attributes these to the melancholic character of the Danish philosopher. In a nutshell, the breaking down of relations in a reified society is exemplified by the failure of “the gesture” (Kierkegaard’s breaking of his engagement, upon which he built all his authorship)—no transparent unambiguous meaning can be conveyed in the modern fragmented human experience. [György Lukács, “Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen,” in The Lukács Reader, ed. A. Kadarkay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 11–25. 6  K, 50/75. 7  The contradiction of such kind of ethics are evident to Adorno, who affirms: “The possibility that a person, faultless in terms of private ethics, could act infamously in his objective social function, a function not reducible to inwardness, is a thought that Kierkegaard does not allow to occur.” [K, 50/75].

Adorno ’ s Response to Kierkegaard

191

truthful account of experience, one separate from the alienation of systems of exchange, but goes toward an increasing loss of concreteness and a forgetfulness of nature. 3

Ethical Primacy of the Aesthetic

Adorno maintains that an examination of aesthetic melancholy can offer a more faithful account of experience than the subjective self-assertion which characterises the ethical/religious realm. In Adorno’s analysis, melancholy is in fact the “mood” associated with the image of the intérieur, that is, an “ailment of the age” generated out of the struggle of inwardness with reality. Nature, not being able to find expression in the reified objectivity, migrates into inwardness, which becomes its prison. According to this reading, melancholy is “the emotion of the trapped.”8 In melancholy, truth presents itself as semblance. This means that truth presents itself in images in need of interpretation: “Through melancholy, inwardness conjures the semblance of truth to the point that melancholy itself becomes transparent as semblance; to the point, that is, that melancholy is wiped out and at the same time rescued; melancholy conjures images and these stand ready for it in history as enigmatic figures.”9 Placing the accent on the relation between truth and semblance, Adorno explains in which way his interpretation of the aesthetic differs from what he sees as Kierkegaard’s misconception of such a realm: The figures conjured up by inwardness are not identical to inwardness. Kierkegaard had interpreted them as being products of the imagination of the aesthete and thus as being identical with his “aesthetic deportment,” that is, as a form of existential attitude. In fact, Adorno argues that “a fissure [. . .] separates truth from inwardness, to which truth appears as a mere semblance.”10 Hence, the truth expressed in the semblance of such images hints at something objective—that is, nature, which is repressed and mutilated—and at the possibility of reconciliation with it. For this reason, it is a concealed truth, a truth that awaits interpretation. By exploring and interpreting such images, which recall their natural origin and at the same time its loss, it is possible, according to Adorno, to grasp the possibility of reconciliation beyond the experience of reification, which is denied to any subjective stance. For this reason, Adorno writes: “Semblance, which illuminates thought from the remoteness of the images like the star of 8   Ibid., 60/89. 9   Ibid., 64/94. 10  Ibid., 65/95.

192

Tonon

reconciliation, burns in the abyss of inwardness as an all-consuming fire. It is to be sought and named in this abyss, if the hope that it radiated is not to be forfeited by knowledge.”11 First, what is crucial in Adorno’s interpretation of melancholy and semblance, and what differentiates it from Kierkegaard’s position, is the demand for reconciliation and hope that is expressed in the aesthetic images. This demand is a response to the bad conditions of the objective reality and puts forward an ethical claim that suffering should be redeemed. Thus, it is the responsiveness to suffering in objectivity that makes the real of the aesthetical sphere ethically superior to the subject-centred ethical and religious spheres. It is not a fleeing in imagination or a construction of a fictitious world, as the Romantic aesthetic would have had it, but it offers a glimpse of a better world without forgetting the untruth of the present one. Second, it is important to emphasise Adorno’s rehabilitation of that precise mood which Kierkegaard had taken as the sign of the failure of the aesthetic attitude, that is, melancholy. While for Kierkegaard melancholy indicated the foundering of the delusion of the aesthete who had lost his own self in the manifoldness of pleasures and diversions, for Adorno the melancholic disappointment stands as an accusation against “bad reality,” the reality of reification where the individual is no longer at home, and, at the same time, it denounces the impotence of the subject to amend it by its own strength. Melancholy thus functions as a critique and corrective of the inward subjective turn, which, abandoning the world to evil, claims to be able to establish truth in interiority. On the contrary, melancholic individuality, in its frustration with reality, is well aware of the fact that genuine access to the object in its individual singularity—that is, the possibility of concrete experience—is denied. For this reason, Adorno affirms that “dialectic melancholy does not mourn vanished happiness. It knows that it is unreachable.”12 The hope of melancholic subjectivity is “promised as unattainable.”13 Yet, aesthetic subjectivity clings to the fragments of an “enciphered and distorted truth.”14 Hence, we have seen that in his interpretation and critique of Kierkegaard’s work, Adorno argues for 1) the interpretative priority of the aesthetic, namely, the fact that the images that emerge from the aesthetic writings are more apt to disclose the core of his philosophy; 2) its higher faithful relation to reality, namely, the truth-disclosing power of the aesthetic; and 3) the ethical primacy 11  Ibid., 67/98. 12  Ibid., 126/179. 13  Ibid., 126/179. 14  Ibid., 125/178.

Adorno ’ s Response to Kierkegaard

193

of the aesthetic. While Kierkegaard dismisses the aesthetic realm for the sake of the seriousness of the ethical choice of being oneself, Adorno rehabilitates such a realm by emphasising its connections with truth and with the ethical demands for a better world. The aesthetic attitude is thus more truthful in relation to the object in that it recognises the intolerable conditions of injustice and oppression that characterise it, and, at the same time, it demands to put an end to any thwarting of nature and human suffering. This demand, for Adorno, is precisely the ethical injunction which lies at the core of aesthetics and which Kierkegaard’s dialectics of the spheres fails to acknowledge. 4

The Ethical Validity of the Aesthetic in Adorno’s Work

I maintain that the above-mentioned ethical injunction of putting an end to the repression of nature and the human suffering that ensues from it dominates Adorno’s entire work, and that it is closely linked to his interest in the aesthetic. At the very beginning of his Negative Dialectics, Adorno reminds us that his entire investigation into the possibility of a non-identical dialectics arises from the “need to lend a voice to suffering.”15 It is through suffering that objectivity emerges and impinges upon the subject; thus, by lending a voice to suffering, it is also possible to liberate repressed objectivity from its conceptual burden. In fact, according to the Negative Dialectics, suffering is a type of experience that breaks conceptuality and reveals a more profound truth than the one conveyed by thought. Without purporting to give up conceptuality, which would amount to a fatal lapse into irrationality, the Negative Dialectics fosters an attentiveness to any experience of the object outside of its subjective constraints. Doing justice to the object precisely entails a redressing of the presumed unavoidability of such suffering. It should be noticed that the Negative Dialectics does not deal in an explicit way with the topic of aesthetics; it only does so indirectly by way of the connection between suffering and expression (“Ausdruck”),16 which is explored at length in the Aesthetic Theory.17 Having said this, however, it is possible 15  Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London and New York: Con­ tinuum, 1973), 17; Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 29. I will hereafter refer to this text as “ND.” 16  ND, 18/30ff. 17  Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 110; Ästhetische Theorie, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 169ff. I will hereafter refer to this text as “at.”

194

Tonon

to argue that already in the Negative Dialectics Adorno explores the connection between aesthetics and the ethical injunction to put an end to suffering. This is the case if one is to understand aesthetics in the broader sense of the Greek word aisthesis, which translates as “sensation” or “sense perception.” In fact, the notion of suffering that Adorno had in mind is first and foremost a physical/somatic experience, a suffering that is perceived through and by the body.18 The somatic element in the experience of suffering is precisely what evokes objectivity as repressed and maimed nature. As already anticipated in Kierkegaard—Construction of the Aesthetic, physical suffering acts in the first place as a critique of the current state of affairs: “The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different.”19 And such a critique is quick to turn into an ethical injunction, for Adorno writes: “The telos of such an organization of society would be to negate the physical suffering of even the least of its members, and to negate the internal reflexive forms of that suffering.”20 Yet, it is in Aesthetic Theory that the connection between aesthetics, suffering, and the above-mentioned critique of history and societal organisation is developed to its full potential. In Rolf Tiedemann’s words, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory expounds an understanding of art “as the unconscious, mimetically written history of human suffering.”21 Adorno precisely argues that authentic art should break beyond “the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs”22 and speak for that objective something which lies behind that veil and which fails to be grasped and conveyed by thought. This bottom layer of objectivity is precisely suffering that cannot find rational/conceptual expression. Adorno explains this in the following way: Suffering remains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it conceptually and provide means for its amelioration, knowledge can scarcely express it through its own means of experience without itself becoming irrational. Suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential, as is obvious in post-Hitler Germany.23

18  ND, 202/202ff. 19  ND, 203/203. 20  Ibid., 203–04/203–04. 21  AT, xiiii. 22  Ibid., 18/35. 23  Ibid., 18/35–6.

Adorno ’ s Response to Kierkegaard

195

On the contrary, according to Adorno, art—especially in its modernist form— is able to give expression to the horror of recent historical events and the suffering and lacerations they generated. This comes to be realised in art’s perceived irrationality and negativity, which is more true to reality than any realist representation of it. To put it in Adorno’s own words: The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. What the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn. In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie.24 As is emphasised in this passage, what makes art especially apt to grasp and communicate the suffering inflicted upon mankind by history and societal organisation is precisely its mimetic quality, that is, its capacity “to identify with the disaster.” Therefore, art’s mimetic impulse becomes for Adorno central to the denunciation of the domination and violence that social totality exercises on individuals. That is to say, art uncovers what his hidden and repressed. This becomes apparent in art’s involvement with the ugly, in so far as “in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image.”25 For Adorno, then, the rejection encountered by the modernist “aesthetic of the ugly” is expression not only of the will to preserve the status quo, but also, and even more dangerously, of a denial and repression of all suffering of which the ugly is perceived to be an expression.26 It is especially telling, in Adorno’s view, that such condemnation of “ugly art” as degenerate came precisely from Nazi ideology, which more than ever before used formal beauty to conceal its own horrors. As Adorno writes: “Hitler’s empire put this theorem to the test, as it put the whole of bourgeois ideology to the test: The more torture

24  Ibid., 19/36. 25  Ibid., 48–9/79. 26  Ibid., 49/79. The aesthetic condemnation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination, verified by social psychology, to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it.

196

Tonon

went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure that the roof rested on columns.”27 It is precisely this rejection of the ugly as degenerate on the part of an inhuman ideology such as Nazism that, via negativa, bears witness to art’s connection with morality: Censoring the ugly amounts to suppressing the reality of human suffering while inflicting the most brutal form of suffering on mankind. On the contrary, in Adorno’s view, it is precisely when art is charged as degenerate that the moral is making its way into the aesthetic, not dissimilarly from its function in Kant’s sublime.28 The ugly fulfills a moral function in facing us with the reality of thwarted and mutilated life. That is to say, by presenting suffering as an intolerable offence perpetrated on mankind, it stops us from becoming desensitised to it. Having said this, one should refrain from simply attributing to art an ethical function. This would make it into didactical/edifying art, thus denying it its autonomy and its aesthetic truth. Because of this, art always remains external to suffering in so far as it is not directly involved with its deliverance, but only with its representation.29 According to Adorno, art’s aporia consists precisely in its giving expression to repressed and negated suffering while at the same time neutralising its pressing reality by virtue of its aesthetic distance.30 Thus, what we are talking about is not the straightforward ethical function of the aesthetic, but rather a kinship, a proximity, between aesthetics and ethics. The two meet in their engagement with the reality of suffering and in acknowledging the necessity to lend a voice to it. The need to lend a voice to suffering is made for Adorno even more pressing by the historical events of World War II and the barbarism of Nazi crimes. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno argues that the physical suffering of the mutilated and violated body is precisely what demands an ethical reaction on our part and forces us to rethink our understanding of morality. Hence, Adorno writes: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”31 Adorno shows the deep entwinement of suffering and morality by adding: “The new imperative gives 27  Ibid., 49/80. 28  Ibid., 49/79. In this respect, Adorno writes: “The infiltration of the aesthetic by the moral—as for example Kant sought external to artworks in the sublime—is defamed by cultural apologists as degenerate.” 29  AT, 39/64–5. 30  Ibid. 31  ND, 365/358.

Adorno ’ s Response to Kierkegaard

197

us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum—bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed.”32 Hence, Adorno claims that a morality able to respond to recent historical events and present social conditions can only emerge out of the materialism of physical pain and suffering. Aesthetics, both as the Greek aisthesis—the physical perception of suffering—but also as art—the “memory of accumulated suffering”33—takes on a central role for the development of a new ethics. Conclusion Kierkegaard answered the Romantic question of how it is possible that the ethical is at the same time beautiful and pleasurable by reclaiming the beauty of the first love within the institution of marriage. In such a way, the aesthetic is legitimated only from an ethical point of view. Hence, in his dialectics of the spheres, aesthetics is subordinated to ethics and the religious. In his critical reading of the Danish philosopher, Adorno reverses Kierkegaard’s dialectics of the spheres by attributing to Kierkegaard’s aesthetic realm the capacity to grasp objective reality and to take an ethical stance in relation to it. That is to say, according to Adorno it is precisely in the certain images and motives of his aesthetic writings that Kierkegaard truly grasps the reification of objectivity. In addition, it is still in the aesthetic that we can hear the ethical call to amend or ameliorate the wrong reality. This happens negatively, in the disappointed hope of melancholy, yet nonetheless defies any capitulation or resignation to the status quo, “for the true desire of melancholy is nourished on the idea of an eternal happiness without sacrifice.”34 I have argued that the “priority” of the aesthetic with regard to its relation to doing justice to the object is carried out in Adorno’s work. While in Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic aesthetic melancholy has a pivotal role in shedding light on objectivity and its need of redemption, Adorno’s later work takes a materialistic turn and grants such a function to physical suffering. I have argued that aesthetics is closely connected to the ethical injunction of putting an end to suffering. In Negative Dialectics, such an imperative emerges first in relation to the bodily perception (aisthesis) of physical pain as “the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which 32  Ibid. 33  AT, 261/387. 34  K, 126/180.

198

Tonon

individuals are exposed.”35 In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno fully develops the connection between the aesthetic and the ethical by taking art to be the “memory of accumulated suffering”36 and by emphasising the “ethical” role of the ugly in presenting us with brutality and the intolerability of suffering. At this juncture, according to Adorno, morality enters into aesthetics; yet, one should also keep in mind that the two do not overlap. For this reason, I have argued that the relation between aesthetics and ethics should be understood in terms of kinship and not in terms of strict subordination. In my reading, Adorno has been able to convincingly develop the connection between aesthetics and ethics. Can we then speak, reversing the Kierkegaardian expression, of an “ethical validity of aesthetics”? I maintain that in placing the accent on the somatic moment of suffering, aesthetics has achieved an ethical priority in so far as it enables or makes possible our ethical reaction to it and the development of the only possible ethics: a materialistic one. Yet in doing so, Adorno has significantly weakened—if not altogether eradicated—the connection between the ethical and the beautiful and the pleasurable, which had first defined the Romantic and then the Kierkegaardian inquiry into the possibility of a marriage between aesthetics and ethics. References Adorno, Theodor. Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. In Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962. ———. Ästhetische Theorie. In Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. ———. Negative Dialektik. In Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 6. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. ———. Negative Dialectics. Edited and Translated by E.B. Ashton. London and New York: Continuum, 1973. ———. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Edited and translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———. Aesthetic Theory. Edited and translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London and New York: Continuum, 1997. Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. Part II. Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. Enten–Eller. Anden del. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 3. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al., Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997.

35  ND, 365/358. 36  AT, 261/387.

Adorno ’ s Response to Kierkegaard

199

———. Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Vol. 7. Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al., Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2002. ———. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Alistair Hannay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Lukács, György. “Sören Kierkegaard és Regine Olsen.” Nyugat 6 (1910): 378–87. ———. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. ———. “Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen.” In The Lukács Reader. Edited by A. Kadarkay. 11–25. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Part 3 Post-Hegelian Thinkers on Art and Aesthetics

∵

CHAPTER 11

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis Baldine Saint Girons If the aesthetics must be “married” to ethics, and if the idea of aesthetics as an autonomous science has lost its credibility, it is not only for reasons inherent to its own history, but also for reasons that arise when we deeply question our conception of science. In short, the latter no longer seems to us to have a monopoly on the interpretation of nature, nor is it the temple of validity and truth in omni tempore, in omni loco, ab omnibus established by men with clean hands, endorsed by noble academies, and speaking in the name of things.1 Our focus has shifted from purely theoretical questions to those concerning the relationship between what is said and what is done: Domains are no longer unconditionally extraterritorial, but increasingly intertwined. There is no such thing as complete objectivity; one must, instead, take into account different types of experiences. The scientist no longer lives in absolute solitude; he is involved in civil society. Networks play their role alongside systems. Allowing non-science to enter into the domain of science is as indispensable as allowing science to develop according to its own methods. Theoreticians, no doubt, belong to a different group than practitioners, but there is no impassable gulf between them; if we must maintain lines of demarcation, they can only be provisional, since, as the sociology of science and scientific studies have shown, we, de facto, never stop crossing the theoretically air-tight divisions that separate the exact sciences, strategies of power, and language games. Today’s problem is also how to take into account the hybrid nature of objects and, above all, ourselves, since we are all sages, administrators, and garrulous artists (to different degrees). * Translated from the French by Erica Harris. ** To Paul Cruysberghs in friendship and admiration. 1  See, in particular, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Michel Serres, La Traduction (Hermès III) (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974); Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); and Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, Tome I: La Guerre des sciences (Paris: La Découverte, 1996).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_013

204

Saint Girons

For a long time, aesthetics has been caught not only between ontology and anthropology, but also between ontology and history, philosophy, art, sociology, and criticism. Sometimes it focuses on natural wonders and artistic works, and at others it is interested in the structure of the human subject in so far as he can be taught, inspired, or moved by meditation on the sensible and in so far as he shows himself capable of acting in many different ways. The history of art has the benefit of analysing works in context; the philosophy of art restores large-scale coherence; art criticism deeply emphasises individual masterpieces; and the sociology of art draws attention to the different types of “social ties” created around privileged images. From the outset, these disciplines are all complementary, and one feels the need to alternate between their corresponding fields in order to further one’s understanding of “aesthetic power and ability.”2 In principle, aesthetic objects are not simple, self-sufficient, or self-created, nor do they have a specific use. They are, instead, “objects at risk,” as Bruno Latour has it.3 They are not “bald,” they are “hairy”: Their contours are so hazy that they can be grasped in several different ways. We may be able to identify their author with certainty, but it is impossible to measure their effect in advance, and, finally, “everyone paradoxically expects the unexpected impact that they will not fail to have.”4 The unexpected is, paradoxically, both the sign of the real and of the sublime. Now, one will certainly argue that the market of art, home decoration, and leisure determines—even if only approximately—the value of works of art, furniture, and landscapes. There is no doubt that the market shapes our judgements; but we still have a reciprocal effect on it, albeit a small one. And, even if our concrete reappraisals of works of art only have a very loose connection with the financial world, they can still play a fundamental role in our personal as well as in our social well-being. I would like to draw attention to the existence of a genuine “aesthetic working” that implies a more or less conscious decision on the part of the subject to expose himself to alterity and to then deepen and rework it: a decision, in short, on the basis of which one experiments. The “aesthetic act” that grounds this working is a genuine agent of civilisation: It responds to the provocation of the world, maintains otherness, yokes the signifier to the real, and establishes or solidifies a substantial connection between people. In this fourfold sense, it possesses a properly ethical function. 2  See Baldine Saint Girons, Le pouvoir esthétique (Houilles: Manucius, 2009). 3  Bruno Latour, Politiques de la nature (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 40ff. 4  Ibid.

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis

205

The aesthetic act becomes the condition sine qua non of aesthetics and, more specifically, of a “married” aesthetics: of an aesthetics after aesthetics, whose aims have been displaced, since they are less concerned with rigorous and allegedly universal formulae than they are with the will to concretely establish the efficiency of aesthetic discourse and to reveal the way it emerges and what it is grounded in. The act thus becomes the ultimate touchstone of aesthetics: It removes all excess from its simple speculation and ensures its social, aesthetico-moral, or “aesth-ethic” import.5 We will begin by investigating the enigma of the act and the decision that grounds it in order to make our way, step by step, to the thesis that I would like to defend and that views the act as that which anchors theory in praxis and yokes the signifier to the real. The act is not simply satisfied with producing signifiers: It manifests in concreto the signifier’s ability to make the real emerge, to reshape it, or to simply enlarge it. 1

The Enigma of the Act and the Decision that Grounds It

What is an act? It is not a simple action, it is a sequence of actions; it is not a simple movement, it is movement taken as a principle. The act institutes a beginning and thus presupposes deliberation, decision, and a reorganisation of the world—albeit at more or less conscious levels. It is the intentional operation of the human brain that is not satisfied with reacting to a situation, but instead engenders a hypothesis, simulates a situation, uses tools, and anticipates effects. As Alain Berthoz writes: The act is the intention to interact with the world or with oneself as a part of the world. The act is always upheld by an intention. It is thereby what organizes perception and the perceptual world for organizing perception and the perceptual world.6 Alain Berthoz’s goal is to show how perception is an act, how emotion, far from paralysing it, is a tool that prepares it, and how wagering, simulation, and competition are essential to the functioning of the brain. As such, he orients himself toward a biological theory of decision-making that is not our concern here, but that will be very useful for guarding against the risks of exaggerated

5  See Baldine Saint Girons, L’acte esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 2008). 6  Alain Berthoz, La Décision (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003), 9.

206

Saint Girons

intellectualism by reminding us how difficult it is for consciousness to access certain fundamental processes. The aesthetic act has an enigmatic and paradoxical character: enigmatic because its actualisation seems to go hand in hand with an element of failure, and paradoxical because what characterises the analytic technique as an aesthetic technique is a “certain laisser-faire,”7 a calculated receptivity, a suspension of all willing in any other than the abstract or general sense. The act consists in a suspension of action; the decision that appears is both considerable, in view of its weight, and minimal, in view of its apparent content. The act does not only come into the world in its successful form: It appears in its failed form and thus imposes itself in a particularly pressing manner. As experience teaches us all too often, things do not go as planned; the advantage of failure, however, is to make us aware of a dynamic whose power we would otherwise overlook. The experience of the ugly opens the way for aesthetic consciousness and constitutes its punctum saliens because it is more a matter of expelling something from the world than it is recognising its presence. The sensible is thus deprived of its expressive power; it is confronted with the impossibility, not only of attracting and seducing, but also of signifying thought, desire, or will.8 Encountering the obstacle is a brutal wake-up call, whether it be in the form of a scandal that we come across or a simple collapse of what seemed to be obvious. The question of the other side of experience thus shows up as more decisive than the question of the simple movement from one experience to another. Accumulating experiences is not worth much: We must start again from scratch. The act is, however, never simply given to consciousness, especially not as failed: It appears as intrinsically paradoxical and difficult to identify. A subtle mix of activity and passivity, the aesthetic act does not even enter into the mercantile arena that is interested in more visible or materially oriented psychic products; it only reveals its highly moral character if we observe it very attentively: An act is linked to the way that the beginning is determined and, more precisely, to when one needs to make one precisely because there is none.9 7  Jacques Lacan, L’acte psychanalytique: Séminaire 1967–1968 (Paris: Éditions Schamans, 1982), Lecture of November 29, 1967. Available at: http://espace.freud.pagesperso-orange.fr/pens bete.htm. 8  See Baldine Saint Girons, Fiat lux: Une philosophie du sublime (Paris: Vrin, 1995), especially Chapter 2: “Risques de la laideur.” 9  Jacques Lacan, L’acte psychanalytique, Lecture of January 10, 1968.

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis

207

The act therefore constitutes the meeting point, the juncture, that must always be rethought between theory and praxis; it is what anchors theory and what gives praxis its efficiency and its limited, “contained” character at the very place where it seems to elude us the most. But its highly problematic character remains: It is a “foundation without a foundation”: It justifies a discipline and reveals its cultural importance, but only succeeds if we understand the “mess” on the basis of which it intrudes on experience. I refer the reader to my book L’acte esthétique10 for a concrete analysis of these mechanisms. The “aesthetic actor” is inspired, in short, by relating to the world through different artistic practices: He poeticises the world and makes it musical; he gardens it or makes it into a landscape; he paints or sculpts it; he makes it into architecture or choreography. These metaphors are not in vain; they name rigorous operations that are linked to very precise problems and perspectives. But since my goal is to show that the aesthetic act constitutes the core of aesthetics, I would like to insist on its three moments and come back to an example: the experience of the “the evening’s peace” sul lungomare in Syracuse. How is a signifier produced in the real, and why are we led to privilege a shared rather than a solitary experience under such an appellation? Ought we to speak of simple “representation” or of real “knowledge,” and to what degree is going beyond simple “empathy” made possible thanks to what I call “aesthetic working” or aesthetic action? 2

The Paradox of the Aesthetic Act and Its Three Moments

Let us say that the aesthetic act consists in letting things resonate and giving presence to all its opportunities by accepting that it can triumph, at least for some time, over predetermined meanings. It is allowing signifiers to emerge and travel at their own pace according to their materiality and their own ways. Looking, or more precisely, feeling is transformed into a challenge that only meticulous and disinterested working can meet in specific forms of sublimation. But this working is of a special kind thanks to the combination of letting go and investment that it demands; drifting attention is accompanied by a “high degree of libidinal sublimation.” If this working evokes the psychoanalytic act,11 it differs importantly from the latter: The doubling of the aesthetic actor is internal. 10  See above, n. 5. 11  Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 24.

208

Saint Girons

Should the analytic act be attributed to the analyst or to the analysand, either way it presupposes a sharing of tasks: The silence of the one and the respect of the rules on the part of the other are the transcendental conditions for the unconscious to emerge under the effects of transference. In the aesthetic act, on the contrary, I can be alone, even though this is not necessary, as we will see in a moment: All kinds of signifiers emerge, and I try to understand how they are organised and what they produce by suspending my judgement. I am neither in the position of the analysand, giving himself over to the ideas that cross his mind without ever omitting anything—not even what seems to him to be the most strange and incomprehensible—nor am I in the position of the analyst, who, above all else, allows the other’s words to resonate. Let us then try to isolate the three moments of the aesthetic act: exposing oneself to the Other in an ascetic effort to constitute oneself as a sensible surface; being inspired by a current or a kind of energy under the influence of transference and according to well-determined procedures; and extracting elected signifiers, discovering their imaginary and symbolic charge, the birth of a need to bear witness, and the ultimate move toward an artistic act. 3

From the Provocation of the World to the Subject’s Self-Constitution as a Sensible Surface

“The world is my provocation,” writes Gaston Bachelard.12 It provokes the whole of my thinking, willing, and feeling being. That is why the aesthetic act cannot be reduced to a particular species of cognitive or voluntary activity: It does not only allow me to accumulate objective knowledge or situate my action within it; it personally implicates me. I can consent to allow myself to be seized and affected by it, to allow it to act and penetrate the very deepest layers of my being. By refusing to give in to the excitement of understanding or acting, I can use myself as an Other and combine this “othering” with selfobservation. In this way, a play of forces comes about in which the Other, to whom I give priority, begins to reflect and thinks himself through the subject. But this subject is not a transparent mirror that erases the traces of what it has reflected whenever it offers itself to new objects: It is a memory mirror at one with the history that constitutes it, a “parlêtre” in Lacan’s terms, which is to say an active unconscious that only reflects being by reinventing it. Let us, then, try to understand the more or less implicit or explicit decision that constitutes the aesthetic act. Impressed by the claims of the Surrealists, I 12  Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves (Paris: José Corti, 1942), 181.

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis

209

first thought that the latter was considering appearances only on the basis of vision and the emotion that accompanies it by trying to avoid any interference from utilitarian, religious, or scientific considerations: SURREALISM, noun. Pure psychic automatism through which one attempts to explain, either verbally, in writing, or in another manner, the way that thought and the real function. The reign of thought, free of all control exerted by reason and independent of all ethical or moral considerations.13 The aesthetic act therefore corresponds to psychic automatism as André Breton defines it. Now, the problem is to know whether the constitution of a tabula rasa (in the original Lockean sense) is possible or even desirable. I can certainly try, in a labour of discipline and abstraction, to stop projecting what I know or what I want on the way that the world appears. Nevertheless, we still do not know how to distinguish the different human faculties in an equally strict manner, nor can we eliminate the motivations inherent to the imaginative or sensible approach. Before finding one in André Breton, I already found a possible version of the aesthetic act in Kant: Kant essentially demands pure vision, one that is only vision and that puts the subject in touch with the infinite that surrounds it: If then we call the sight of the starry heaven sublime, we must not place at the basis of our judgement concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, and regard the bright points, with which we see the space above us filled, as their suns moving in circles purposively fixed with reference to them; but we must regard it, just as we see it, as a distant, all-embracing vault.14 The formula is magnificent: the disruptive object—whose presentation alone counts, rather than its existence, which does not interest me—corresponds to the dispossession of the aesthetic subject, who has to forget both his knowledge and his pleasure. Aesthetic value is neither instructive nor enjoyable; it pleases purely and simply, and it stimulates the vital function: The subject “feels himself through being affected by representation.”15

13  André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 37. 14  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, §29. 15  Ibid., §1.

210

Saint Girons

The true difficulty, however, is related to the fact that it is not enough to open one’s eyes in order to see. “We hardly perceive an object at all,” writes Merleau-Ponty.16 “I” see nothing. Neurophysiology teaches that the brain never stops simulating and emulating the world in order to perceive it. I may want to transform myself into a tabula rasa; I will never succeed. The aesthetic act must be thought of according to its contradictory structure, that is to say, both as possible and impossible for the subject who commands himself to do it. We must put a real theory of aesthetic spontaneity into action that organises a given that it knows that it has, in part, fabricated and that, for the rest, is brought about by the world. The “aesthetic actor” most resembles the ästhetische Zuschauer described by Friedrich Nietzsche at the end of The Birth of Tragedy.17 It took me some time to realise it because this syntagm was translated in French as “artistspectator” (spectateur artiste) or “artist-listener” (auditeur artiste) in 1964 and 1977. Zuschauer is quite difficult to translate: “Spectator” is correct, but is not really adequate; the translation that I propose by using “witness” or “actor” is somewhat forced, but it accounts for the active orientation of the gaze. But, in order to avoid the redundancy of “aesthetic spectator,” translators have rendered ästhetisch as “artist.” Such a confusion of the aesthetic with the artist seems quite unfortunate because it purely and simply erases the essential idea of a truly aesthetic actor. The spectator’s job, if we wish to keep this word, is aesthetic working in the full sense of the term. 4

Effervescence: Cognition, Inspiration, Seduction

I characterise the second moment of the aesthetic act as “effervescence” in order to indicate the common denominator between the effects it produces. These are, however, both heterogeneous and unstable: I tried to relate them to three radically different types of aesthetic ability, even though they sometimes converge and, most importantly, succeed one another in something like a trail. Sometimes, a happy and concentrated harmony enthrals us in prolonged and increasing admiration by constantly finding new support; at others, the force of thought takes hold of us and inspires us, instituting new demands and seeming to almost make geniuses of us; and in yet other moments, the sweetness of its attributes seduces us and joins us to one another: It incites us to appropriate them and awakens our love. In each of these cases, some of the causes 16  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2013), 293. 17  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §22.

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis

211

of our suffering seem to fade into the background: Believing in the beautiful means forgetting deformity for a while; believing in the sublime means being convinced that mediocrity can withdraw; and believing in grace, finally, means believing that violence does not ultimately triumph. Aesthetic inspiration has many forms: cognitive with respect to beauty, persuasive with respect to grace; it acquires its greatest heuristic intensity in the sublime. In this way, Longinus compares the way that the sublime inspires us to the way that Apollo’s breath vibrates throughout the body of the Oracle of Delphi: For many are carried away by the inspiration of another, just as the story runs that the Pythian priestess on approaching the tripod where there is, they say, a rift in the earth, exhaling divine vapour, thereby becomes impregnated with the divine power and is at once inspired to utter oracles; so, too, from the natural genius of those old writers there flows into the hearts of their admirers as it were an emanation from those holy mouths. Inspired by this, even those who are not easily moved to prophecy share the enthusiasm of these others’ grandeur.18 And Edmond Burke, who is highly attuned to the physiological action of the sublime, or to what Honoré de Balzac calls “the contagion” of the sublime,19 also evokes the transmission of a “fire already kindled in another.”20 Whether inspiration be violent, as in the sublime, or softer and more resistible, as in the beautiful and the graceful, the important thing is to understand the astonishing way that breath and energy are transferred. The simplest illustration of this immediate kind of action is undoubtedly in music: Since music is not at my disposition in the same way as a painting might seem to be, it overtakes my body and places me under its control. There is neither an exterior nor an interior world in music: The opposition between the “I” and the “not-I” seems to be abolished. I am nothing but a “tympanum” that records and transmits vibrations.

18  Longinus, On the Sublime, ed. and trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Loeb Classical Library) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), XIII, 2. 19  “De même que le mal, le sublime a sa contagion.” [Honoré de Balzac, L’envers de l’histoire contemporaine, Tome V: La Comédie humaine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 347]. 20  Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), V, 7.

212 5

Saint Girons

From the Desire to Bear Witness to the Artistic Act

To the discipline of the aesthetic act, and to the effervescence which follows, succeed the desire to bear witness, to invent, or to create. The third moment allows us to better understand the first ones: The Other takes possession of me according to my ability to evade myself and transforms me into a vibrating membrane. But this situation cannot last and, moreover, never achieves the purity it has in my description. On the one hand, the desire to witness, the need for interpretation—relating things to all possible knowledge, imagining, and conscious projection—makes me shift from pure “infusion,” as theologians call it, to an effusion that is, if not actual, at least virtual. On the other hand, I am not able to avoid, at one time or another, feeling the paradoxical character of my act: Do I not also constitute the Other to whom I am submitted? If feeling comes from art, it is because there is no such thing as sensation without invention, without fiction. But it does not matter whether nature is an illusion, Cézanne said: “What falls under nature? Maybe nothing; maybe everything.”21 We are so linked to alterity that the task of distinguishing between what comes from it and what comes from us loses its meaning. The problem is rather to tighten connections in an ongoing work of exposition and composition. Allow me to reiterate. In the first moment, I conceive of the landscape or the work as a given that ought to be preserved: I decide to enter into its play of forces and to submit myself to its visibility as well as its invisibility. But I discover that the links between submission and the creation of a fiction are fixed. What I call the “real” is the object invented in a language whose operation I cannot suspend. If the third moment reveals the truth of the first two, these latter are nevertheless real anchoring points for all aesthetics worthy of the name. There is a moment when works are my master and literally take my breath away, and there is a second moment when I can invoke them as illustrations without ever losing sight of the fact that they exceed the use that I make of them. 6

Aesthetic Act and Artistic Act

To become an artist or a poet, desire is not enough. Why does the famous president Daniel Paul Schreber not deserve the name of poet? Why do his Memoirs interest us, but do not act as a work of art? Even before Nelson Goodman’s 21  P.M. Doran, Conversations avec Cézanne (Paris: Macula, 1978), 109. (My translation).

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis

213

analytical philosophy, Jacques Lacan does not ask “What is poetry?” He asks: “When is there poetry?”: There is poetry every time a writing introduces us to a world other than ours and—giving us the presence of a being, of a certain fundamental relationship—makes it become [. . .] ours [. . .] the poetry is the creation of a subject assuming a new order of symbolic relation with the world.22 Lacan thus introduces a philosophical concept that seems to me to be extremely fertile and whose abandonment is regrettable: the concept of the “signifier in the real” that he opposes both to hallucination and to simple signs. Schreber does not believe in the reality of his hallucination—he knows what psychiatrists mean by “hallucination”—but that does not mean that he stops having them. It is not reality that is at stake here; it is certainty. The witness can attest to this certainty but cannot share it. How, then, can we get at reality; how is it possible to encounter the phenomenon of world? It must be the case that the signifier is produced in the real; Lacan gives the example of the “the evening’s peace,” remarking that “this is a given, a certain way of taking a time of night, to which we can be open or closed.”23 Now, if Lacan evoked, in a particularly suggestive manner, the way that the signifier is tethered to the real, he did not study its properly aesthetic conditions. How and why is it that something that could have remained a simple syntagm—“the evening’s peace”—takes on meaning and consistency? Why does it become the emblem of an experience that is shared and shareable in an indissolubly theoretical and practical aesthetic that we evoke at will? 7

The Evening’s Peace

I kept what Lacan said in the back of my mind, but it took me a long time to really verify it. I finally did so during a remarkable experience that I had in the company of two Sicilian friends: an event that took place at a particular date and time that I will never again be able to repeat with the same intensity. I will describe it briefly now, by way of conclusion, since I think it is of general importance. It was April 29, 2005, in Syracuse at the end of an intense day that began with a conference in Noto on the sublime in antiquity that was followed, in the 22  Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre III: Les psychoses, 1955–1956 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981), 91. (My translation). 23  Ibid., 157.

214

Saint Girons

afternoon, by a visit to the Greek theatre and the Latomia. We had just seen the Ortygia Cathedral and its vestiges from the Temple of Athena: enormous Doric columns whose fluted surfaces emerge from both sides of the outer walls in which they are imprisoned. Sometimes, only a beautifully round head or the base of a column would peek out from the stone. I was thinking of the story of a young Albanian who was sacrificed during the construction of a bridge and buried alive: Her breasts survived for a long time and continued to produce milk for her child, “the milk of death,” as Marguerite Yourcenar writes.24 The marble rounds that emerged from the walls and encircled us actually seemed to be the living flesh of antiquity, its face, its breasts, its kidneys, whose tepidity enveloped and penetrated us. We paused for a long time near the Fountain of Arethusa, reminded of the Peloponnesian nymph, who, having refused the love of her pursuer, Alpheus, ran all the way to Ortygia and was transformed into a living source of water. Alpheus crossed the Ionian Sea to join her and transformed himself into a river so that he could mix his waters with those of his beloved. We continued sul lungomare, exhausted and happy. We were less directly happy, perhaps, than we were attuned to an unexpected musical harmony that welled up between the world and us: Our feelings and our thoughts seemed to achieve unison, despite our differing destinies. “The evening’s peace,” I muttered, as if the words had been whispered to me. A single sweet emotion seized us. It seemed impossible not to recognise it: It enveloped and absorbed us; it wove a double thread between us, both substantial and musical. Did it owe its power primarily to a particular state of the world or to the sound of words? What roles should be attributed to worldly perception and its formation? Silently and holding our breath, we believed that we “heard” the miraculously calm respiration of the cosmos: Was it not the world that spoke to us directly through the ephemeral equilibrium of dusk as the day gave way to night? Did we not hear that voice in a quasi-internal mode, almost as if it were a verbal hallucination? Nevertheless, something new happened as we named “the evening’s peace”: the poetic power of the phenomenon of the world seemed to multiply. We then felt the need to meditate on the music and meaning of words and to recall poems. Let us try to isolate the three moments of the aesthetic act on this occasion: 1)

The provocation of the world and recognition: “that’s it! This is the evening’s peace”—an entity that is both objective and subjective.

24  Marguerite Yourcenar, “Le lait de la mort,” in Nouvelles orientales (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis

2) 3)

215

The effervescence that followed, linked to the acceptance of a current or energy, but also to the will to raise doubt and verify that the assertion was well-founded. The birth of a need to bear witness and the production of linguistic acts, and even philosophical and artistic acts, of different kinds.

The second and third moments were confused when they occurred, since, from the outset, our aesthetic act appeared to be collective, and it incited each of us individually to be its guarantors. Let us quickly come back to the first two moments: A problematic being appears precisely at dusk. It is neither day nor night: It is not so much a void as it is a suspension. However, reacting to the provocation of the world and naming this event “the evening’s peace” is to suddenly multiply its poetic force, its authentically creative power. Here, the subject constituting himself as a surface of sensation is not enough; a signifier that came from elsewhere takes form and reclaims its ties to a worldly phenomenon; it uses the subject to declare its dominion over the real. Moreover, it reveals itself as a collaborating cause of the capture that occurred. Aesthetic power did not only belong to the magnitude of the sky that used the depths of the sea to slowly dim its light; no, it was also something in the syntagm “the peace of evening” that allowed us to think it. Thus was born the need to reflect on the origin of the words (le soir, la sera) and to recall the poems that brought their power its apex. We recited the end of Virgil’s First Bucolic: “maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae” (“bigger still descending from the mountain shadows”); Dante’s verses in chapter VIII of Purgatory (“Era gia l’ora che volga il disio/ai navicanti”); and Hölderlin’s Abenphantasie (Wohin denn ich? Es leben die Sterblichen von Lohn und Arbeit [. . .] Warum schläft denn/Nimmer nur mir in der Brust der Stachel? ”).25 Why do the figures of the explorer, the pilgrim, and the stranger seem destined to make “the evening’s peace” resonate with what is both given and refused to them? And why is it possible to read the anticipation of eternal rest, as does Ugo Foscolo: “Perhaps you are so dear to me, O night, because you are the image of the fatal rest”?26

25  Dante Alighieri, Le Purgatoire, VIII, III, vv. 1–6, 76; Friedrich Hölderlin, Poèmes (Gedichte), ed. and trans. Geneviève Bianquis (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1943): Abendphantasie, v. 9 (= 166). 26  “Forse perche della fatal quiete/tu sei l’immago a me si cara vieni/O sera.” [“Alla sera,” in Ugo Foscolo, Le poesie: Sonetti (Milan: Garzanti, 1974), 23].

216

Saint Girons

Why? It is because “the evening’s peace” does not only say something about the world; it interprets and allows it to emerge a second time as that which is no longer ineffable and contingent, but as that which is thinkable and sayable in its very enigmatic character. The aisthesis and the syntagm therefore joined together, and both are intimately modified. The sensible becomes autonomous and rearranges itself in such a way that the event emerges in a new world, one that is freed of utilitarian constraints and that borders on eternity. In a like manner, the subject uncouples itself from its ego and its imaginary attachments; he becomes conscious of an intense desire for presence in this withdrawal and experiences this presence as both available and unattainable. Between feeling and formulation, event and poetic construction, something emerges in the ephemeral union of a state of the world and a signifier. It is in similar moments, and thanks to the aesthetic act, that Nietzsche’s statement can be understood: “The world is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.” It is not justified as an empty appearance, a decoration without importance; it is justified in so far as it is a phenomenon that is thought, both constructed and encountered, that links humans to the world and to one other. 8

From a Self-Enclosed Aesthetics to Aesthetics in Act, to Historical Aesthetics and to the Aesthetic Network

To conclude, I would like to put forth three theses concerning aesthetics. In order to keep a rigorous status, aesthetics must satisfy three conditions: prove the efficiency of its theories by applying them to concrete acts, take into account the vicissitudes of different historical events, and develop across networks by activating multiple connections: 1)

If the act is necessary, it is because I must “interact” with the world and not simply content myself with “representing” it. The world is not only an image or a collection of images: It exceeds boundaries and frames, it encircles me, penetrates me; it will not let me go. It is a permanent vibration—the vibration of the visible and the hidden, the heard and the unheard, of all the senses—it is a principle of transformation. In the aesthetic act, therefore, I want myself to be double, for I delve into the world and pull myself out of it: as systole and diastole, as a witness and an experimenter. I have to count on surprise, on the world’s provocation. Trauma can always happen—it can either be morbid or, on the contrary, positive, stimulating, heuristic. Faced with so many risks, the aesthetic

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis

217

act succeeds when it, here and now, ties down the abstract and general world of simple representation in the fiery and singular world of life. 2) Contrary to what happens in the physical sciences, whose reversals of form might seem to be of only mediocre interest, the history of aesthetics is not a simple matter of curiosity, but is rather the very core of aesthetics. Aesthetics is the history of aesthetics. To understand it, let us think about the problems that the so-called scientific aesthetics—the aesthetics of modernity—encounters as it attempts to import elsewhere its own values. 3) Now, it is impossible to separate the destiny of aesthetics and that of the other sciences that increasingly develop into networks rather than only within the limits of a particular field or domain. Aesthetic actors have complex positions that are analogous to railway crossings: They can connect or not; they can bring about a reunion; they can create “pluriverses” or “multiverses.”27 In short, they can create simultaneity. Computers are not required for this kind of activity. Getting a taste of “the evening’s peace,” verifying one’s existence, already presupposes the meeting of many different lines of sensation, activity, knowledge, and desire. This is what makes the act emerge in such surprising evidence that we might even use the term “simplexity” to refer to it—a concept dubbed by Alain Berthoz28 to convey how the extreme complexity of origin is compatible with the simplification of actualisation. Conceived of as the joining of theory and praxis, as the tethering of signifiers to the real, aesthetics plays a central role in questioning an intimidating and fairly rough conception of science that has more or less prevailed in the modern age. Scientific discourse is doubtless not an impervious, purely bureaucratic form of knowledge, an “all-knowing” that erases the subject of speech and forgets the circumstances that led to its birth. Cartesian science, which was likely caricatured, is succeeded by another moment: a moment that is both artistic-aesthetic and “aesth-ethic.” We, therefore, exist in a time after celibate aesthetics as it was historically understood: The aesthetics that 27  “Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference—a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe.” [William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” in On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (Penguin’s Great Ideas 75) (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 46. See also Aurélien Barrau, “Quelques éléments de physique et de philosophie des multiverse,” http://lpsc.in2p3.fr/barrau/aurelien/multivers_lpsc.pdf; and Elie During, Faux raccords (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010). 28  Alain Berthoz, La simplexité (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009).

218

Saint Girons

we favour is a discipline with many ramifications, a discipline that is “married” and that goes even so far as to risk the loss of its name in order to gain relevance and efficiency. References Alighieri, Dante. La divine comédie: Le purgatoire. Translated by Jacqueline Risset. Paris: Flammarion, 1988. Bachelard, Gaston. L’eau et les rêves. Paris: José Corti, 1942. Balzac, Honoré de. L’envers de l’histoire contemporaine. Tome V: La Comédie humaine. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. Barrau, Aurélien. “Quelques éléments de physique et de philosophie des multiverse.” http://lpsc.in2p3.fr/barrau/aurelien/multivers_lpsc.pdf. Berthoz, Alain. La Décision. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003. ———. La simplexité. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009. Breton, André. Manifeste du surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Edited by James T. Boulton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Doran, P.M. Conversations avec Cézanne. Paris: Macula, 1978. During, Elie. Faux raccords. Arles: Actes Sud, 2010. Foscolo, Ugo. “Alla sera,” in Le poesie: Sonetti. 23. Milan: Garzanti, 1974. Longinus. On the Sublime. Edited and translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Poèmes (Gedichte). Edited and translated by Geneviève Bianquis. Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1943. James, William. “Is Life Worth Living?” In On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. Penguin’s Great Ideas 75. 33–65. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by J.H. Bernard. London: Macmillan, 1914. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire. Livre III: Les psychoses, 1955–1956. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981. ———. L’acte psychanalytique: Séminaire 1967–1968. Paris: Éditions Schamans, 1982. Lecture of November 29, 1967. Available at: http://espace.freud.pagesperso-orange .fr/pensbete.htm. ———. Le séminaire. Livre VIII: Le transfert. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001. Latour, Bruno. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: La Découverte, 1991. ———. Politiques de la nature. Paris: La Découverte, 1999. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2013.

The Aesthetic Act as Interface between Theory and Praxis

219

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saint Girons, Baldine. Fiat lux: Une philosophie du sublime. Paris: Vrin, 1995. ———. L’acte esthétique. Paris: Klincksieck, 2008. ———. Le pouvoir esthétique. Houilles: Manucius, 2009. Serres, Michel. La Traduction. Hermès III. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974. Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitiques. Tome I: La Guerre des sciences. Paris: La Découverte, 1996. Yourcenar, Marguerite. “Le lait de la mort” In Nouvelles orientales. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

CHAPTER 12

Leap into the Surface: Photography, Repetition, and Recollection Stéphane Symons 1 Introduction On November 27, 1960, the renowned French artist Yves Klein (1928–1962) created one of his most famous works, “Leap into the Void.” It consists of a photograph of a person who does, indeed, seem to leap into the void (sauter dans le vide). The man who can be seen in the photo is the artist himself. This essay starts from an analysis of this work in order to address, first, an element that pertains to the medium of photography as such and, subsequently, the difference between the concepts of recollection and repetition as they were expounded by Søren Kierkegaard in his book Repetition. What will be at stake throughout this essay is an understanding of how a genuine “leap,” that is, an experience of something absolute, might not necessarily entail the experience of a world that is wholly other to the one that surrounds us. On the contrary, with the help of such post-Romantic thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, we will defend the viewpoint that an experience of the truly absolute denotes a novel and irreducible experience of immanence and, moreover, that such a concept of the “absolute” presupposes the idea that what is real exceeds what is merely actual. 2

Leap into the Void

Right off the bat, we should note that Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void” is not in fact a photograph of a leap into the void. The reason for this is not so much that it depicts someone who is quite clearly diving into a street and not into a void, as that it does not depict a leap at all, but merely a jump. The difference between a leap and a jump is that the former denotes a jump into the unknown, while Yves Klein’s photograph cannot be regarded as having registered such a movement because a trampoline was carefully placed on the sidewalk in order to break the artist’s fall. This prop was erased from the final image. Therefore, “Leap into the Void” is not a photograph of a leap; rather, it is a photomontage © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_014

Leap into the Surface

221

that itself needs to be considered as having brought about a leap. It is, to be precise, nothing but the act of the photographer itself which has introduced a moment of non-anticipatibility into the image, thereby charging it with a dynamic that is not derived from the actual scene it had registered. This intervention on the part of the photographer needs to be understood as “other” visà-vis the referent of the image, and it results in the awareness that Yves Klein’s work of art is not a mere reproduction of an event that took place in reality, but the production of something genuinely new. As such, what is most important about Klein’s work is that it manages to interrupt the original event that is registered and thereby modify an “ordinary” jump from a wall into the grand and almost heroic gesture of an artist leaping into a void. To further understand this issue, it is worth briefly comparing this altered picture to an unaltered one. In this manner, we will be able to show that, regardless of what is usually maintained, the mere fact that a photographic image is altered after the moment it was made does not take away from what can be considered to be the most crucial aspect of the medium of photography as such, that is, its indexical nature and the materiality of the link that ties the image to its referent. The possibility that not all elements in a photographic image can be said to have actually originated in the scene that was reproduced does not at all contradict the statement that, in every image that can be called a photographic one, there needs to be something that nevertheless did. Moreover, what seems to be most characteristic of photographic images, both those that are altered after the moment of registration and those that were not, is that they play on the striking and paradoxical conjunction of an experience of necessity with an experience of possibility: All photographic images do inevitably maintain a link with the reality they depict (despite the fact that some parts may have been seriously altered), but they also present us with the irreducible possibility that something new, however banal it may be, might only become visible in the image itself. Comparing Yves Klein’s altered picture (where the new element was only introduced into the image after the moment of its initial production) with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (unaltered) “Behind the Gare St. Lazare” will help us understand that this “experience of newness” refers to a potentiality that is essential to the medium of photography as such—and not only to photographic images that were altered after the fact. That is to say, all photographic images can play around with the viewer’s ultimate incapacity to clearly differentiate between what “has been” and what is only becoming real in and through the image itself: The medium of photography thrives on this very undecidability and tension. For this reason, it can be maintained that even those photographs that were not modified after the fact can create a genuine leap and produce the truly new. This statement, for its part, will lead

222

Symons

us to the claim that photography can confront us with an irreducible layer of possibility that is present within the very world that surrounds us. 3

The Optical Unconscious

On the surface, Cartier-Bresson’s image shows quite another kind of jump than that of Yves Klein and therefore brings about quite another kind of leap, one that does not seem to be quite as heroic. Cartier-Bresson’s iconic image, nevertheless, brings out the singular capacity of the medium of photography to bring time to a standstill and reveal what he has famously called “le moment décisif,” or, to put it in negative terms, photography’s incapacity to render the flow of time passing by. It is only from within this very incapacity, however, that an important capacity of the photographic medium becomes visible: However fleeting, ordinary, and banal the act of walking into a pool of water on a rainy day in Paris may be, and however much the movement of the French man who did so in the winter of 1932 was destined to go by unnoticed, these events have nevertheless regained an existence and visibility that continues to live on until the present day. For this reason, as Thierry de Duve famously argues, much of the medium of photography’s power seems to revolve around the paradoxical duality of its event-like quality as a snapshot and its picture-like quality as an exposure of time: Photographs can both freeze time and protract it simultaneously and thereby both interrupt and extend it.1 In the case of Cartier-Bresson’s picture, this regained existence and visibility has transformed the fluidity of the man’s movement into the immobile scene of a body that is forever hovering in the air: Though mobile in reality, when translated into a still image, the man’s gesture is perpetually suspended between the moment in which an anonymous left leg was being moved up from the ground and the one in which a right foot was then being put down again. In this manner, it seems almost— somewhat metaphorically—as if the camera suddenly interrupted the natural rhythm of someone’s breathing and forced that someone to keep the air inside his lungs forever after. As such, this interruption of the temporal flow becomes “creative,” increasing an internal tension and aliveness that charges the image with a succinct dynamic of its own. Despite the difference with Yves Klein’s altered image, Cartier-Bresson’s photograph does share its curious blend of indexicality and possibility and, like “Leap into the Void,” it produces something that needs to be considered as “other” or “new” vis-à-vis the actual scene 1  Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” October 5 (1978): 113–25.

Leap into the Surface

223

it captured: Unlike this scene in reality, the photographic image has brought time to a standstill and, in fixing the moment in-between two steps, interrupted a natural and continuous movement. In this manner, not at all unlike Yves Klein’s photograph, Cartier-Bresson’s image created an actual leap by preventing the man’s foot from coming down onto the ground. Walter Benjamin has famously referred to this capacity of the camera to reveal something that was hitherto invisible as its capacity to reveal the optical unconscious: Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. “Other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. [. . .] This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.2 This incapacity of the camera to render the homogeneous flow of time and, by the same token, its capacity to interrupt the all too familiar reveal the hitherto unperceived and introduce the optical unconscious; this tells us something very interesting about the concept of the leap. One is automatically inclined to associate a “leap into the void” with an escape from the limitations of temporality and spatiality or with a suspension of the relationship with what is given in time and space. This is surely the way in which Yves Klein himself referred to it. His aim was to create Zen-like images of absence or, in his own words, zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility.3 This is also the way in which Kierkegaard envisaged the leap of faith when he wrote that the knight of faith leaps 70,000

2  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (Third Version), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, ed. H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 266. 3  See, for example, Yves Klein, “Ritual for the Relinquishment of the Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zones (1957–1959),” in Yves Klein 1928–1962: A Retrospective (Houston and New York: Institute for the Arts, Rice University and Arts Publisher, 1982), 207.

224

Symons

fathoms deep.4 What is very interesting in the link between photography and the leap, however, is that photography, in revealing what was hitherto present but invisible, does not deliver us from the confinements of time and space, like one would expect; rather, it brings us right to them: All photographic images, like the one made by Henri Cartier-Bresson, come together with the potential to discover the new in the very core of a concrete and singular spatiotemporal constellation that has already existed in the past. They suspend or freeze the flow of time and they cut, out of the continuum of space and time, an immobile rectangle that is fully determined and that can be scrutinized as such. My suggestion would therefore be that a genuine leap needs to be understood not as belonging to the attitude that is often identified with Kierkegaard’s religious worldview—that is, not as a release from the limits of time and space and a full surrender to the totally unknown—but as a renewed and modified way of responding to this world. It is in this way that photography can be understood as a true medium in the sense that Samuel Weber understands that term, that is, “not as a medium of representation, but as a medium that redefines activity as reactivity, and that makes its peace, if ever provisionally, with separation.”5 In producing the truly new from within the already known, photographs can link a brief, first, and alienating moment of disruption together with a second, more substantial movement of looking at the world with rejuvenated interest, confidence, and engagement. Benjamin writes as follows: On the one hand film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera: On the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of action [Spielraum]. Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris.6 4  See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 204 and Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 327. 5  Samuel Weber, introduction to Theatricality as Medium by Samuel Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 28–9. 6  Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 265.

Leap into the Surface

225

Such a leap, therefore, does not escape out of but into this world; it is not at all heroic, but it can be attained in the most ordinary of experiences, and it does not go 70,000 fathoms deep but necessarily remains at the surface. For an author like Benjamin, it is from within such a primarily aesthetic movement of disruption/reopening that ethical commitment becomes thinkable, that is, a commitment that presupposes, like Weber puts it, “the courage to search for another kind of balance, a balance and movement that is defined in terms of responsiveness, rather than in those of stability and security, much less of spontaneity.”7 Such an “ability to respond” or leap consists of an openness to the most insignificant and concrete elements of reality and an attentiveness to these minutiae that have hitherto gone by unnoticed. Rather than escaping time, it embraces its singular force to differentiate and renew, and it even manages to recover the already existent as something that can be perceived for the first time. It is in this way, moreover, that Deleuze and Guattari read Kierkegaard’s knight of faith as a figure that “constantly recharge(s) immanence: [he is] concerned no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with the immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists.”8 4

The Interesting Can Never Be Repeated

In what follows, I would like to further unpack this link between photography and a leap or rejuvenated openness to the surrounding world by making use of Kierkegaard’s distinction between recollection and repetition, which he presents at the very beginning of his book Repetition.9 The enigmatic statement, a bit further on in the text, that “the interesting can never be repeated” will be the crux of the argument here.10 Let us first of all draw the essential distinction between recollection, as Kierkegaard understands it, and the photographic reproduction of the past. As Siegfried Kracauer has famously argued, contrary to what is often stated, the powers of photography should not be enlisted by the human faculty of recollection: Photographs are no 7   Weber, introduction, 28–9. 8   Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 74. 9   For what follows, Samuel Weber’s essay “Kierkegaard’s Posse” (in Theatricality as Medium, 200–28), was a crucial source of inspiration. 10  Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17.

226

Symons

reliable partners in keeping our memories alive for the simple reason that, as the materialization of an optical unconscious, they confront us first and foremost with the repetition of something that was never even captured by subjective experience to begin with. “Photography,” writes Kracauer, “grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representation.”11 Antithetical to lived memory, photographs give us a past that was never fully present to us before and that only becomes present in and while being reproduced: They come together with a promise to preserve memory, but they dislodge it instead and they reveal its ultimate fallibility. In Kracauer’s words, from the perspective of photography, “memory images appear to be fragments—but only because photography does not encompass the meaning to which they refer and in relation to which they cease to be fragments. Similarly, from the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of garbage.”12 The past that is thus rendered in photographs is, in other words, not a particularly interesting one: It is, in Bergsonian and Deleuzian terms, a passé pur in the sense that it has always escaped our attention and has never seemed worthy of our consideration to begin with. Such a past is to be considered “real,” but it cannot even be said to have been “actualized” at the moment of its first occurrence: Up until the moment of its sudden resurfacing (in the present and through photographic reproduction), it was merely “virtual.” Moreover, however striking such an event may have been, even this unexpected repetition of the past does not modify it into something particularly interesting. In such instances, the past only acquires a sudden and ungraspable form of presence because it is being repeated and not on account of any form of inherent worthiness whatsoever. This capacity of a photograph to produce the new by suddenly and unexpectedly repeating the old is the best example of what Benjamin has famously termed “a Penelope work of forgetting,” since it shows memory working side by side with its polar opposite: oblivion.13 When experienced in this manner, then, photographs cannot be said to recollect anything: The past that they bring back is neither fully restored nor made accessible once and for all 11  Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 50. 12  Ibid., 50–1. 13  Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, ed. Michael E. Jennings, Gary Smith, and H. Eiland (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 238.

Leap into the Surface

227

(Kracauer’s famous formula that “the turn to photography is the go-for-broke game of history” comes to mind here).14 It retains, even when it is remembered against all odds, a form of vacuity, and it needs to be understood as “absolute,” “virtual,” or “pure” in that it is, in Deleuze’s description of involuntary memory, “the instance that is reduced to no ‘passing’ present, but also the instance that makes every present pass, which presides over such passage: In this sense, it still implies the contradiction of survival and of nothingness. The ineffable vision is made of their mixture.”15 Such a form of repetition is active toward its own past: Rather than recollecting it, it differentiates it from within and makes it “other” to itself. In the dynamic that underlies both Benjamin’s and Kracauer’s views on photography, Deleuze’s views on involuntary memory, and Kierkegaard’s views on repetition, the past does come back to the present but not merely as something that has passed: Through being repeated, the past is experienced both as having gone by and as nevertheless sharing in the very freshness and newness of the present. Like Benjamin puts it in his essay on Proust, what is repeated in such a manner is marked by a “rejuvenating force [verjüngenden Kraft]” and thus as “a match for the inexorable process of aging. [. . .] [The] very concentration, in which things that normally just fade and slumber are consumed in a flash, is called rejuvenation [Verjüngung].”16 In Kierkegaard’s framework, recollection, on the contrary, shows the present as merely passive and secondary with regard to the past: It takes the present to be only reactive and considers only the past to be truly significant. Kierkegaard uses the category of the “interesting” to describe a past that is met in such a way—in recollection, only the past is understood to be worthwhile in and of itself, and, by that token, it has become fully closed off from the present: “When the Greeks were saying that all knowing was recollecting, they were also thus saying that all of existence, everything that is, has been. When one says that life is repetition, one also says that that which has existed now comes to be again.”17 The power of recollection is therefore, unlike the power of repetition, antithetical to a genuinely ethical attitude because it lacks a commitment to the now and a lived engagement with what is present. It is to be associated with a “sneaking back out of life” with the “excuse that one has forgotten something,” with “becoming an old man,” and with “leaping over life.” Recollection, then, is an urge to remember that is so strong that it fully disconnects itself from the present and, by that token, succumbs to the 14  Kracauer, “Photography,” 61. 15  Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 63. 16  Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust,” 244. 17  Kierkegaard, Repetition, 19.

228

Symons

melancholic certainty that nothing that is truly important can ever be brought back: “The great advantage of recollection is that it begins with loss. This is its security, it has nothing to lose.”18 5

The Use and Abuse of Repetition for Life

Written exactly thirty years prior to Friedrich Nietzsche’s groundbreaking essay on the relationship between history and life, Kierkegaard’s important distinction between recollection and repetition thus already anticipates the famous plea for a “creative forgetfulness” that saves us from the excessive weight of the past. The active powers that Kierkegaard deems internal to the process of repetition already help us understand why “repetition is the interest of metaphysics, and also the interest upon which metaphysics becomes stranded. Repetition is the solution in every ethical contemplation, repetition is the conditio sine qua non for every dogmatic problem.”19 This should help us further understand Kierkegaard’s phrase that “the interesting cannot be repeated” and the nature of an attitude that does not “sneak back out of life” or “leap over life” but that leaps into life. The most important reason why the “interesting cannot be repeated” is that it can only be recollected. Kierkegaard seems to use the concept of the “interesting” to denote the ability of an object to attract our interest and to awaken our desire on account of the qualities that it shares with the desiring subject. Such qualities, then, are perceived as common to both the object that is longed for and the subject that longs for it: What is interesting derives its significance from somehow being in between (interesse) the desiring subject and the desired object. The best example of such a setup is Plato’s description of the lovers (in the Symposium) whose interest in one another is derived from a shared past and an original unity. For this reason, even though the object that is to be termed interesting can at times be experienced as absent from the subject that is interested, it is always at the same time felt to be potentially present, that is, the relation between subject and object is always seemingly established prior to the actual moment in which both will or will not be brought together. The reason why Kierkegaard implies that the interesting can never be repeated but only recollected is therefore that our interests are seen as merely reactive and secondary to what is interesting: if the concept of “being interested in” presupposes a shared quality or original unity between a subject and an object, the moment in which both are brought together does 18  Ibid., 8. 19  Ibid., 19.

Leap into the Surface

229

not truly change anything let alone that it would actively bring about the “new”. If what is interesting is always already structurally related to that which is interested by it, our interests cannot be said to have the power to truly rejuvenate or refresh anything. This explains why Kierkegaard seems to have smuggled, ex negativo, an intertextual reference to the seducer in his essay on repetition. Throughout Kierkegaard’s oeuvre (Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way), the seducer is the conceptual persona who stands just as much for the continuous thirst for the new as for the ultimate inability to experience it. Ceaselessly hunting for what is interesting, he falls prey to a desire for what is always bound to remain absent, and he cannot genuinely renew or change this desire. The feeling of melancholy or disenchantment that comes over those who constantly long for the interesting is precisely the result of the sentiment that our interests are mere secondary responses to an original fullness that, however illusionary it may be, is nevertheless experienced as still potentially present. Not at all opposed to Plato’s lover in this regard, and not at all antithetical to a longing for the eternal, the seducer is, in truth, the person who “leaps over life” because he has no feeling for what is part of the rhythm of becoming, renewal, and change that colour human existence. In this manner, the seducer never truly relates to anything or anyone whatsoever and is merely out to recollect a unity that he experiences as pre-established, thereby falling under the sway of the peculiar attraction of something that cannot in fact ever fully become present. The seducer’s problem, therefore, is not that he loves the transitive or fugitive too much, but that he loves it too little: He is helplessly passive with regard to his own interests because these are experienced as but derived from an original unity that remains untouched by the contingencies of ordinary existence. Deeply oedipal in this regard, the seducer jumps over what is real because he only longs for the identical recreation of something that, in his eyes, has once been actual: His desire is streamlined by the feeling that the recovery of such an original unity remains possible, and he thereby loses what Weber has called “the ability to respond” and an openness to what is truly “other,” unexpected, or virtual (as Deleuze calls it). The scene in Repetition where Kierkegaard introduces what can be called a counter-seducer is included immediately after the statement that “the interesting can never be repeated.” Kierkegaard describes how the protagonist reflects on a certain moment in the past when, during a solitary lunch, his eye fell on a beautiful young girl: “Six years ago I took a trip thirty miles into the country. I stopped at an inn where I also ate lunch. I had consumed a pleasant and tasty meal, was in a good mood, had a cup of coffee in my hand whose aroma I was in the process of inhaling, when suddenly a lovely young girl, delicate and

230

Symons

charming, passed by the window and into the courtyard that was part of the inn.” However, before he found the time to properly gulp down his meal, leave the table, and strike up a conversation with this girl, “there was a knock on the door and in walks the girl.”20 What follows is a description of how the young girl, to his great surprise, asked him whether he would allow her to ride along in his carriage and a detailed account of how this sudden and unexpected event was sufficient to fully suspend any and all desire to play the seducer’s game and take advantage of the girl: The modest and yet genuinely feminine way she did this was enough to cause me to immediately lose sight of the exciting and the interesting. [. . .] The trust with which she placed herself under my power is a better defence than all the shrewdness and cunning a young girl could muster.21 The most striking element about this story is that it describes how, at times, it is precisely the sudden interruption of our expectations that gives shape to a most worthwhile experience: In this scene, it is the very suspension of the protagonist’s desire which establishes a genuine connection with the young girl. Almost fifteen years prior to the publication of Charles Baudelaire’s famous poem To a Passerby, Kierkegaard’s story manages to already put its finger on a sensibility that, much more than the seducer’s attitude, needs to be called modern: A true relationship between two elements is not derived from any felt unity or shared quality, but instead arises precisely in and through their very difference. A genuine connection, then, takes place when two elements that do not seem to naturally belong together are nevertheless changed from within by the sudden way in which they seem to relate to one another: “It is much more interesting to ride thirty miles alone with a young girl, in one’s own carriage with a driver and a footman, to have her entirely under one’s power, than it is to meet her in a garden. And yet, I am convinced that even a less considerate person than myself would not have felt tempted.”22 Like the unknown passerby who overwhelms the poet in Baudelaire’s famous lines (which Benjamin termed the depiction “not so much [of] love at first sight as [of] love at last sight”), the girl from Kierkegaard’s story retains an irreducible anonymity. However, this lack of familiarity is not at all antithetical to the protagonist’s feeling that she has become deeply important to him. Moreover, 20  Ibid., 17. 21  Ibid., 17–8. 22  Ibid., 17–8.

Leap into the Surface

231

what testifies to this unexpected personal significance is not at all the sentiment that an original unity has been recovered or that what has once been actual has now become possible again, but, on the contrary, the feeling that the girl has, through a form of an “absolute” memory that knows how to preserve “purity,” forever become a part of his future. The cycle of recollection has therefore fully given way to the productive powers of repetition: “I have never tried to learn who she was, where she lived, what could have occasioned her sudden trip. She has always been a pleasant memory for me though, which I have not allowed myself to sully with even an innocent curiosity. A girl who desires the interesting becomes a snare in which she herself is caught. A girl who does not desire the interesting, she has faith in repetition. All honour to one who was originally so. All honour to the one who becomes so with time.”23 6 Conclusion If, like Deleuze puts it, a truly ethical attitude is not to be equated with a moral one in that it presupposes “a set of optional [rather than constraining] rules that assess what we do, what we say, in relation to the ways of existing involved,” the photographic gaze is charged with an important ethical task: It opens reality up toward its unexpected possibilities.24 On account of the ability to reveal the “optical unconscious,” the camera can be considered to bring about a leap not from but into immanent reality, since it shows how the category of the real exceeds that of the actual (what is captured on camera is always more than what meets the eye) and how what is possible cannot be derived from what is merely anticipatable. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, a “photograph keeps open the instant which the onrush of time closes up forthwith.”25 Reading these insights on photography alongside some of Kierkegaard’s texts reveals that what is at stake here is a specific manner of understanding what the process of repetition is about and, more importantly, what it is capable of doing. Contrary to recollection, repetition actively creates the new and brings about the unexpected: What is repeated may not be interesting in its own right, but, through its sudden resurfacing, it shows how even a reality that is

23  Ibid., 18. 24  Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 100. (My italics). 25  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 374.

232

Symons

“gone-for-broke” (Kracauer) or “governed by necessities” (Benjamin) is marked by an ongoing potential for rejuvenation and renewal. As Kierkegaard states: It requires youthfulness to hope and youthfulness to recollect, but it requires courage to will repetition. He who will only hope is cowardly. He who wants only to recollect is a voluptuary. But he who wills repetition, he is a man, and the more emphatically he has endeavoured to understand what this means, the deeper he is as a human being. [. . .] He who chooses repetition, he lives. He does not chase after butterflies like a child, or stand on tiptoe in order to glimpse the wonders of the world. He knows them. Neither does he sit like an old woman and spin on the spinning wheel of recollection. He goes calmly about his life, happy in repetition. What would life be without repetition?”26 References Benjamin, Walter. “On the Image of Proust,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2. Edited by Michael E. Jennings, Gary Smith, and Howard Eiland. 237–47. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (Third Version), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. 251–84. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ———. Proust and Signs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. De Duve, Thierry. “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” October 5 (1978): 113–25. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. ———. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Klein, Yves, “Ritual for the Relinquishment of the Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zones (1957–1959).” In Yves Klein 1928–1962: A Retrospective. 207. Houston and New York: Institute for the Arts, Rice University and Arts Publisher, 1982. 26  Kierkegaard, Repetition, 4.

Leap into the Surface

233

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Edited by Thomas Y. Levin. 47–64. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. 351–78. Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.

CHAPTER 13

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms: Alliances and Displacement in There Will Be Blood Marlies De Munck 1

Tracking the Sound

Since its release in 2007, There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film drama based on the novel Oil! (1927) by Upton Sinclair, has been lavishly praised by film critics. A fair share of the critics’ attention has concerned the film’s striking soundtrack, which contains compositions by Jonny Greenwood, who is better known as the guitar player for the British rock band Radiohead, and Johannes Brahms, the nineteenth-century composer. Anderson’s musical choices are indeed worth scrutinizing, if only for his peculiar use of squarely opposed musical styles. However, a number of crucial questions remain underexplored: How does the music function in the film? What is its impact on the viewer, and how does it influence her understanding of the story? If Anderson’s musical choices are indeed so remarkable, then we should consider the music as a prominent voice in the film. The central question, therefore, should not merely be whether Anderson has chosen music that fits the images and the narrative, but it should also be how the music operates together with or perhaps against the images and the narrative. To this we may add: What does the music contribute to the film? And How does the musical input differ from what is already conveyed on the visual and the narrative planes? These questions concern, in other words, the capacity of film music to blend into and mould what is usually taken to be a visual experience, but they also concern music’s singularity as an autonomous medium with its own distinctive way of affecting the spectator. Before venturing into these complex matters, however, let us first have a closer look at the music itself. Wholly untypical for such a major Hollywood production, Greenwood’s music for There Will Be Blood features no clear-cut themes or crafty leitmotifs, nor does it seem to care for a plain melody. Even though classical strings and piano dominate the overall sound and produce a musical timbre that may be called traditional, the music is still unusual: It sounds genuinely unheimlich and sinister, and—as some might say—it is often simply irritating. After hearing the soundtrack on CD, The Guardian reviewer David Peschek concluded © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_015

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

235

that “Greenwood is a sophisticated musician, but despite the chromatic headiness of much of this music, you feel it needs the movie. In fact, you long for less austere stabbing and scraping, and something more like a good old-fashioned, carefully developed, rich and satisfying theme.”1 Greenwood’s score is presented here as a bloodless affair, more noise than music, stuck in the background from where it throws some “stabbing and scraping” into the picture. And yet, not all of Greenwood’s “austere” music was originally composed for Anderson’s film—an odd detail, perhaps, yet one that is incongruous with the claim that the music “needs the movie.” In fact, the soundtrack contains material from Greenwood’s 2003 solo album Bodysong2 and parts of the symphonic projects Smear and Popcorn Superhet Receiver, both of which were a result of his residency at the bbc Concert Orchestra in 2004. Moreover, the film also features Arvo Pärt’s well-known Fratres for Cello and Piano, as well as two feisty outbursts of the illustrious finale theme of Brahms’s violin concerto in D Major—all music that has done pretty well without the movie. Finishing with a rickety performance of the stale church song “There Is Power in the Blood,” the unorthodox mixture of sounds and styles seems likely to result in a nightmarish soundtrack, and, in a way, that’s precisely what it is—though not for any of the reasons mentioned above. The extensive use of pre-existing and unoriginal works rendered the soundtrack ineligible for an Academy Award nomination, even though it was suggested, off the record, that the score was actually disqualified because “the Academy decided, quite subjectively, that the viewer comes away from ‘Blood’ predominantly recalling the unoriginal works.”3 While this unofficial explanation certainly provides a plausible reason for the exclusion of Greenwood’s score, it nevertheless provides a rather awkward criterion by which to judge the quality of a film’s soundtrack: The longer it sticks in one’s head, the better it is. To be sure, Brahms’s violin concerto will undoubtedly remain “stuck” in the spectator’s head as it blasts off immediately after the last scene. But even 1  David Peschek, “CD: Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood OST,” The Guardian, January 4, 2008, accessed March 10, 2013, www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jan/04/popandrock .shopping4. 2  Bodysong was originally composed in 2003 as a soundtrack for the film of the same name. Perhaps, then, what Peschek really meant in his comment was that the music needs any movie, not Anderson’s in particular. It would be interesting to further pursue the question of whether this music intrinsically differs from non-filmic music and whether and how this difference is reflected in its aesthetic qualities, but unfortunately, such a task falls beyond the scope of the present paper. 3  Kristopher Tapley, “Digging into Oscar’s Controversial Music Branch,” Variety, February 12, 2008.

236

De Munck

if Brahms stays with the viewer long after the film has ended, he has become a different Brahms, as if Greenwood had snuck into the violins, like an earwig, and made the instruments sound unfaithful to their own triumphant melody. To put it in critical terms, one gets the impression that the famous melody has been appropriated by the film’s gory promise, and this is precisely what makes its “stickiness” so disturbing. In short, there is definitely something about this film’s music, original or not, that makes it work particularly well, and “work” is the appropriate and operative term here: This music does something to the spectator, and what it does, in turn, allows for a nuanced understanding of the story. 2

The Double, the Dissonant, and the Displaced

Even if Peschek’s claim were true—that Greenwood’s music “needs the movie”—it does not imply that Greenwood has written a bad soundtrack. While it might fail as an ideal soundtrack according to traditional Hollywood standards—these would indeed look for a “good old-fashioned theme”—for theorists in the line of Siegfried Kracauer, for example, it would most definitely be considered as an ideal film score: eerie sounds illustrating a sinister theme. It could count as an instance of what Kracauer labelled “parallel commentative music,” which “restates, in a language of its own, certain moods, tendencies, or meanings of the picture it accompanies.”4 Consequently, the reproach that the music “needs the movie” should not be understood as referring to a shortcoming with respect to Greenwood’s score, but instead ought to be seen as referring to an accomplishment, as it keeps, still in Kracauer’s terms, with one of cinema’s “basic requirements,” which prescribes that “the imagery should take precedence over sound.”5 However, more dialectically inclined theorists like Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler might have drawn the opposite conclusion, finding that when film music merely “parallels” the meaning of the picture it fails to be a fullyfledged, autonomous partner for the screen. It cannot engage in an interesting relation with the images, since that relation “is not one of similarity, but, as a rule, one of question and answer, affirmation and negation, appearance and

4  Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 139. 5  Ibid., 152.

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

237

essence.”6 In this sense, Peschek’s judgement that the music needs the movie inevitably exiles the music to a dull place, where it can only sustain what is already seen, fully dependent on the story and therefore uninteresting in itself. The critical model, which promotes a relation of dissonance between the music and the images or the story in general, is prominently used in so-called “anti-Hollywood” films. This music, often atonal or at least dissonant in itself, deliberately induces a feeling of alienation in order to counteract the viewer’s tendency to identify with the characters or the plot. Its aim is precisely to preclude the mechanism of assimilation that is all too easily set to work by soothing, unobtrusive music. Moreover, as the argument for dissonance goes, film music should not only preclude full surrender of the spectator, it should also maximise the socially critical potential of the filmic medium by countering and even dismantling the illusive allure of the silver screen. As a dissonant voice, music becomes a strong weapon to emancipate the spectator and to install an awareness of the ideological indoctrination that comes with modern mass media and their false messages of happiness. Rather than promote an ideal of photographic realism, as Kracauer did, this model grants the last word to the auditory side of the filmic experience. In both views, however, the music itself is regarded as a homogenous, almost static element that takes a stance over against the images and the narrative: It either goes along the grain, or it goes against the grain. There is little room for a more complex kind of interaction between music and images that would allow for a heterogeneous view on film music. This leaves us with the aesthetically unsatisfying choice, in this case, between saying that Greenwood has written either a good or a bad soundtrack, depending on the theory that we endorse. If we want to pass a more nuanced judgement, on the other hand, we will have to take into account the entire, agile, and multifaceted nature of music: not only its ways of mirroring, paralleling, or opposing images and ideas, or its capacity to influence and alter the viewer’s perception and understanding, but also the ways in which music itself can be altered and shifted by the images and the story, or by the aural context in which it is heard. In other words, we need to overcome the stereotypical dichotomy between film music as a duplication of images and film music as an uncompromising, dissonant voice. It is crucial, therefore, that we locate the points of intersection in There Will Be Blood where the music truly interacts with the images and the narrative and accurately observe the mechanisms that are at work at these junctions of music, image, narrative, and spectator. 6  Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Continuum, 2007), 47.

238

De Munck

In her essay “Film as Visual Music,” Lydia Goehr develops an argument for a theory of “displacement” to allow for a variety of mechanisms of music in film. “The argument for displacement,” she writes, “acknowledges that music has multiple roles in film and that this music may result from all types of construction associated with classical, jazz, popular, and other traditions. It advances a complex auditory perspectivism to work alongside an equally complex visual perspectivism.”7 As it allows for a more refined approach than the traditional models of mirroring and dissonance, the concept of displacement is promising. Yet, it raises many questions itself. To begin with, what or whom is being displaced? And by what is it being replaced? And how does the mechanism of displacement work and to what end? In what follows, the concept of musical displacement is fleshed out by focusing on two themes that are prominently present in There Will Be Blood: man’s relation to nature and his moral condition as a social being. 3

Horizontal and Vertical Tendencies

There Will Be Blood relates the rise and fall—or, one might argue, the (literal) fall and rise—of Daniel Plainview, an early-twentieth-century oilman. The film opens with a grand, panoramic shot of a desert landscape in good old western style. The iconic mountains stand like theatrical quotation marks, preparing the viewer for the epic Hollywood tale to follow: a parable about man’s struggle with nature and thus about the nature of man. In the nearly wordless, twenty-minute-long opening sequence, we see Plainview dragging himself, like an American Baron von Munchhausen, out of a deep hole in the desert ground. His life story will be that of the modern self-made man who builds his industrial empire from scratch. Yet, first and foremost, the film tells the story of Plainview’s moral decline. Step by step, reinforced by his confrontations with Eli, a young preacher with mundane ambitions, he builds up his hatred of people until he ends up being completely alienated, even estranged, from his adopted and once dearly beloved son H.W. These are the general dynamics in what appears to be an archetypical story: the ups and downs of Plainview’s rise and fall, and the ins and outs of his social life. As so many myths and parables proclaim, living a happy life requires maintaining a precarious balance in and between personal ambitions and relation7  Lydia Goehr, “Film as Visual Music: Duplication, Dissonance, and Displacement,” in Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 237.

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

239

ships with others: The story of Icarus condemns the hubris of those who aim too high, whereas the myth of Orpheus warns against the recklessness of those who venture too low; the parable of the Good Samaritan tells us to love our neighbour, while the tragedy of Oedipus reminds us not to come too close. Put like this, human behaviour can be measured against an imaginary coordinate system of horizontal and vertical axes. By visualising our mostly unconscious inclinations, such a metaphorical framework may help us get a stronger moral grip on all kinds of immanent or transcendent aspirations that we foster in life. Interestingly, There Will Be Blood is full of strong horizontal and vertical images: The immense horizon of the desert landscape over which the derrick rises like a heretical cross forms the background against which Plainview digs deep holes in the ground and renounces any kind of spiritual transcendence. Meanwhile his opponent, Eli, reaches out toward the sky. There is the theme of hidden oil lurking beneath, as unpredictable as the Freudian Es, which is counterbalanced by the impressive image of the oil gusher, a strong symbol of potency and power. Throughout the story runs the unsettling leitmotif of carving the earth: the digging of mines, wells, and holes for pipelines and graves, as opposed to the building of an ever-higher church. Meanwhile, the antagonistic dynamics of sucking out (oil, milkshake) and pouring in (milk, liquor) are continually at work. In contrast to these vertical tendencies, the film abounds in flat, horizontal images of vast plains, railroads, pipelines, and a considerable number of odd, unnaturally horizontal poses: Plainview dragging himself over the desert soil; sleeping flat out on the floor; lying on the ground with H.W.; his fake brother Henry being threatened and killed; H.W. forced to stay in bed; Eli being beaten up by Plainview (“I’m gonna bury you underground!”); Abel being violently pushed to the ground by his own son; and Eli being murdered on the bowling alley floor. In a figurative sense, problematic relationships arise in both directions as well: Central to the story are the “vertical” relationship between father and son, which is mirrored and inverted in the relationship between Abel and Eli, and the “horizontal,” fake fraternal relationship between Plainview and Henry, which is mirrored in the mysterious twin relationship between Eli and Paul. All these themes, images, and motifs lay out a minefield of tensions between the antagonistic aspirations of the characters. 4

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

What could and probably would be expected of a major Hollywood production of this calibre is that its music adds depth to the awkwardly flat construction of horizontal and vertical images. By drawing the spectator deep into the

240

De Munck

story, by eliciting her imaginary participation, music could provide an internal point of view and facilitate a three-dimensional experience. As the traditional ideal for film music prescribes, rhythms and melodies could bridge the gap between the audience and the screen, and by thus absorbing the viewer’s mind they could create a sense of close involvement. As indicated above, however, Greenwood’s music, denies the spectator any such straightforward access to the story. It merely seems to add more unsettling horizontality to it instead, as if the music were aspiring to be just as two-dimensional as the images themselves. The film starts with a fade-in of a sustained, vaguely dissonant chord that sounds as if it has been around for at least as long as the horizon that we are about to see. When the camera focuses on the desert landscape, the tense chord slides into one single note, lending the mountains the aforementioned feel of quotation marks that forebode the advent of something terrible that is about to happen. However, the strings soon glide back into their earlier state of unstable diffusion, as if already retreating into silence again while they are still resounding. The same broad strokes of all-too-long and vague dissonance coming into focus and then coming back out again recur throughout the entire film. In a purely visual sense, this uninviting, stretched-out music fits the images perfectly, as it mirrors the vast plains of the flat, inhospitable desert landscape. Yet, from the point of view of the action, it mostly seems to contradict or just neglect the story. There is no hint of cadence, no gain of momentum when one would most expect it. For instance, when the prospectors arrive to start building the new oil plant, we hear the saddest, slowest little waltz that denies all connotations of progress and growth that would seem to fit this kind of scene. Even though we may be intuitively attracted by its one-two-three rhythm, its intervals are blurred by glissandos in the strings, preventing any straightforward participation from the listener’s side. It is as if the sound had melted into a thick, slobbery mass of oil welling up out of the earth and immediately seeping back into it. This little “anti-waltz” appears in many different guises. Likewise, the few melodies that we are granted remain curiously abstract and dissonant. Often, they are caught in a narrow space between long notes in the strings, whose droopiness is only emphasised by the eerie sounds of the ondes Martenot. One gets the impression that the lines simply refuse to take off; rather, they keep stretching downward, creating an overall feeling of inertia. When there is rhythm, then, it is hypnotising—like primitive drumbeats—while evoking, at the same time, the industrial sound of steam engines: It rattles on and on, mercilessly, only to leave the spectator behind in a loneliness as vast as the desert

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

241

plains. Overall, Greenwood’s music does not offer much of a handle, and when it does, it soon lets go again, pushing the viewer out into a desolate no-man’sland. The music then stretches out again, gloomy like the River Styx, guarding the distance between eye and image. Not surprisingly, Arvo Pärt’s Fratres blends in remarkably well: The strings cluster around one single note and gain momentum only to be brusquely cut off time and again by merciless piano chords that alienate the listener from the music’s inner movement. Surrounded by this desolate acoustic landscape, Brahms’s violin concerto at once appears as an old friend and a complete stranger. Its finale is melodic throughout and overtly ambitious in its vertical dimensions; its main theme is highly recognisable and widely known, intensely present and clear, with melodies and rhythms that are fully developed and harmonies that are just as grand as the intervals mastered by the soloist. Moreover, the theme is deeply rooted in Hungarian folk music and begs for the full and enthusiastic surrender of performers and listeners alike. After roughly one hour of Greenwood’s “austere stabbing and scraping,” Brahms marches in like a conqueror, providing the fireworks for the inauguration of the oil well. Paired with the image of the brand new derrick that towers above the landscape, the concerto’s theme transforms the construct into an impressive arc de triomphe, a testimony to the victory of man over nature. However, it is clear from the outset of the film—if not because of its title alone, then at least as a result of the uncomfortably foreboding music of Greenwood—that this victory will not be neat and clean. Indeed, when the violin concerto finally reoccurs, it has become embarrassingly compromised as a celebration of the crudest violence. Here we experience a curious reversal of music’s power to influence perception as it is often used for propaganda purposes. The stunning presence of the famous Brahms theme does not glorify the blunt murder that precedes it, but is contaminated by it instead. Its feisty character now sounds hollow and fake. Moreover, as indicated above, the music itself has become contagious: It sticks to the spectator as a vicarious feeling of guilt. From this perspective, Greenwood’s music clearly stands in acute opposition to the heavyweight Brahms: While the former mostly shuts the listener out, the latter instantly draws her in. Whereas Greenwood retreats, Brahms suddenly takes us down there, right into the middle of the western plains, and makes us feel the drama. Moreover, their sharp opposition corresponds to the visual tensions on the screen: Brahms is fused with the vertical image of the derrick, while Greenwood teams up with the wide horizon of the unwelcoming desert landscape. Thus, two opposing audiovisual alliances are forged, together symbolising the struggle of man against nature.

242 5

De Munck

The Dissonant in Disguise

Do these audiovisual alliances imply that the music is, after all, nothing but an illustration of what is already seen on the screen? In other words, is each of them held together by techniques of duplication? And if so, does this make the music redundant? Or, the other way around, was David Peschek of The Guardian right in saying that Greenwood’s music “needs the movie”? This does not seem to be the case—if anything, it is the movie that needs the music and not the other way around. One could say, for instance, that the destabilising and unsettling effect of Greenwood’s music elicits a subtle kind of resistance against the violent story. In precluding our full participation, the music prevents us from experiencing any straightforward feeling of identification or sympathy with the protagonist’s struggle. This is, of course, precisely the strategy of dissonance that critical theorists are in favour of. The important social and moral task for film music (and for music in general, as Adorno and Eisler would say) is not only preventing the closing of the gap between the eye and the ear—lest the audience gets so absorbed that it loses its critical distance and becomes all too willingly part of the Gesamtkunstwerk—it is also revealing the theatricality of the images, however realistic their appearance may be. Against the background of Greenwood’s acoustic entropy, Plainview indeed appears as a larger-than-life archetype in an epic narrative. This unreal appearance is further intensified by the John-Huston-like inflection of Plainview’s voice, which makes him sound like an actor in his own life. His eloquent promise to “blow gold” over the barren land of the oil plant sounds like an alchemist’s dream, and it connects his overall theatricality with the magical manipulations of the industrial technology that he uses. Such dangerous fusion of myth and modern rationality is precisely what Adorno and Eisler wanted to see destabilised by the counterpoint of a critical voice. Where exactly, then, is the critical voice to be located in There Will Be Blood? Greenwood’s music, as we have seen, is neatly paired with the images on the screen—horizontality joins horizontality—and as such their relationship is one of duplication rather than of dissonance. And yet, a critical perspective arises from the joint venture of music and image as the coordinate system of horizontal and vertical moral axes begins to emerge from the developing narrative. Backed up by these two opposing tendencies, Brahms’s music is needed to bring about the full critical potential of all the music. To begin with, the triumphant melody not only embodies the “vertical” violence of Plainview, by virtue of its prominent alliance with the derrick, it is also displaced by the images so that it also becomes related to the many “vertical” and troubling activities of digging and carving, drilling, falling, drinking, and swallowing,

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

243

and to the cross that keeps up the delusion of false transcendence. As an effect of quasi-perpendicular contrast, Greenwood’s (and Pärt’s) “horizontal” music takes the side of the injured earth and thus becomes an elegy for the twisted horizontality of the victim: the deceased and the downcast, the threatened and the murdered. As such, Greenwood’s “austere” music is displaced by the Brahmsian theme of glory and success, and becomes more than the song of barren nature. It takes on the guise of the cold echo of a very real, but forlorn, social dimension of warm humanity, a trace that testifies to a lost harmonious relationship between man and nature, and between man and man. Here we find modes of displacement that Gilles Deleuze was committed to. Asking himself how to preclude sound from being redundant in film, Deleuze disagrees with Eisenstein’s dictum that sound and the visual should always have an internal element in common, for instance their particular movement, in order to jointly express a whole.8 The trouble with this view, like with all theories of duplication, is that it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that the music is, after all, redundant. Eisenstein’s theory, according to Deleuze, “fully preserves the idea of correspondence and replaces external or illustrative correspondence by an internal correspondence.”9 Even though Eisenstein stresses the cooperative nature of the relation between sound and the visual, Deleuze questions the actual outcome of such a collaboration. “Since the silent visual image already expressed a whole,” he asks, how can we ensure that the sound and visual whole is not the same, or, if it is the same, does not give rise to two redundant expressions? For Eisenstein, it is a matter of forming a whole with two expressions whose common measure would be discovered (always commensurability). Whilst the achievement of sound rather consisted in expressing the whole in two incommensurable, non-corresponding ways.10 At first sight, the coupling of music and images in There Will Be Blood, as we have explained it so far, seems to accord with Eisenstein’s rule rather than with Deleuze’s: the horizontal paired to the horizontal, the vertical glued to the vertical—a case of perfect commensurability and correspondence of internal movement. And yet, there is more to it. Still discussing the “problem of cinema music,” Deleuze proposes an (early-) Nietzschean solution of pairing 8  Cf. Sergei Eisenstein, “Appendix A: A Statement,” in Film Form (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1977), 257–59. 9   Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 229. 10  Ibid., 229.

244

De Munck

up the image with the Apollonian veil, and the music with the immediacy of the Dionysian expression of the whole.11 This way the music becomes a direct presentation of something that is excluded from the screen, that is, the “out-offield,” which, according to Deleuze, “is nevertheless fully part of the cinematographic visual image.”12 Interestingly, he adds that “it is not sound that invents the out-of-field, but it is sound which dwells in it and which fills the visual not-seen with a specific presence.”13 While the “out-of-field” for Deleuze is specifically connected to the (re)presentation of time in cinema, what is crucial to the present discussion is that this concept opens the way for a dynamic mode of displacement in which the visually absent gains presence by virtue of the music. This, as we have seen, happens when the contrast between Greenwood’s and Brahms’s music sets into motion a domino-like game of significations and embodiments of sounds, which are related to the screen through the abstract tendencies of horizontality and verticality. As Deleuze emphasises, even though this direct musical presentation does not always literally correspond to the visual image on the screen, it is not able to function without it.14 It’s not just that the music provides a dissonant voice on top of the visual experience, added to it as a “foreign body,”15 it’s that a new visual dimension arises in and through it. Greenwood’s music can be regarded as the direct presentation of a dimension that is lost on the screen—the voice of the invisible—while still remaining entangled in the visible image’s horizontality. The same, but reversed, mechanism is at work in the musical interventions of Brahms: Firmly related to the verticality of the derrick, the morally ambiguous effect of the bright, engaging theme lingers on—even when it is not heard—whenever we are visually confronted with new violent vertical motives. 6

Back to Nature?

What is the effect of all these audiovisual displacements on our understanding of the story? Along the lines that we have sketched out above, There Will Be Blood can be read as a parable about the hubris of modern progress, about the 11  Ibid., 229–30. 12  Ibid., 226. 13  Ibid., 226. 14  Ibid., 230–31. 15  Ibid., 230.

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

245

moral dangers of industrialization and the ruthless exploitation of the earth. Vicariously, through the mutual displacement of music and images, it recounts the loss of nature’s virginity and the loss of man’s innocence as a secular expulsion from the Garden of Eden. By continually displacing each other’s connotations, the music and images create an intricate web that becomes the moral background against which the story unfolds: The vertical comes to stand for all of man’s disturbing actions and the horizontal for the lost paradise of nature. This way the story turns into a strong charge against the Enlightenment ideals of emancipation and progress, highlighting the immoral nature of the too deep and the too high. Through the lens of this moral compass, the story reads as a plea for a more holistic, well-balanced, and harmonious relationship with mother earth. This, however, is merely one of the story’s many layers of meaning, and perhaps this interpretation tries too hard to reveal a hidden project. In fact, it turns the film into a form of propaganda, which is precisely what a critical perspective ought to prevent. Besides, there is another good reason to doubt such a plainly dualistic conception of the relationship between man and nature, which is triggered by the following questions: If this story is a charge against the modern Western attitude toward nature, why then does it give the most unsettling voice to the horizontal dimension? Why doesn’t Greenwood’s music try harder to elicit the viewer’s involvement in the victim’s struggle? Why doesn’t what is bad sound repulsive and what is good attractive? In other words, why doesn’t mother earth get the lovely music she deserves? And, turning the argument around, why is the music of violence—Brahms’s violin concerto—the most compelling, indeed, the music that stays with the audience the longest, even after the film has ended? Is it to emphasise the superficial seductiveness of modern success? Or is it a play of contrasts coupling the bad and the lovely in order to delineate the ideological critique more sharply against the musical background? In other words, is the music, after all, merely a dissonant voice that turns the meaning of the images into the exact opposite of those images themselves? Again, things might be more complicated and ambiguous than they seem. A closer look at what we have called the horizontal elements in the film reveals that they hardly allow for a univocal interpretation as the good or healthy dimension. In fact, the many forced horizontal poses are more reminiscent of the intuitive inclination of traumatised children to stay as close to the ground as possible than they are of attitudes of natural security and spontaneous stability. This horizontality is not an expression of vitality or physical strength; it exemplifies, rather, the dimension of the discarded, the retreated, and the handicapped, who is both physically and mentally expelled from communal

246

De Munck

life, like the young H.W. after losing his hearing in an accident in the oil plant. Similarly, nature is depicted by Greenwood’s music as a silent, isolated, and distorted dimension, which is devoid of harmony and welcoming warmth. Indeed, the conception of nature as intrinsically good is neither neutral nor innocent. The ideological programme that promotes a return to nature can—as has been pointed out by numerous commentators, Adorno not being the least influential among them—just as well be taken as a literal inversion, albeit in romantic disguise, of the modern understanding of progress. By conceiving of progress as a linear movement along an imaginary line, one can see that there are two sides to the same enlightened coin. According to this linear view, the very idea of progress can be logically thought of as reversible: If there is such a thing as an unequivocally good nature that we have become alienated from, then there must also be, after all, a possibility that one can return to it. Consequently, adversaries of modern industrial progress only need to reverse the vector in order to be led back to the sweet bosom of mother earth. However, if we acknowledge Greenwood’s music as an autonomous voice in There Will Be Blood, such an uncomplicated conception of nature cannot hold. Rather, the music’s silent, detached alliance with the passive horizontality of nature raises a tricky question: Could it be that this retreat into muteness is not a form of resistance or contestation but a mirroring of nature seen as being mute itself? 7

Dynamics of Engagement

At this point, we have to take a short detour and ask how it is that music can be experienced as meaningful at all. Why, after all, is Greenwood’s music so unsettling? Why does it (supposedly) “need the film” in order to become meaningful? I have stated at the outset that his music does not offer much of a handle to the listener because it does not feature clear-cut themes or recognisable melodies or motifs, and because it does not abound in inviting harmonies or rhythms. All these would facilitate the listener’s involvement in the music. In order to experience it as meaningful, the listener must be able to engage in the music. She therefore needs to find a way to relate to it, for instance, by dancing to it or tapping along, by recognising themes and motifs, anticipating turns and phrases and so on. In order for any of this to happen, however, it is crucial that the listener first hear the music’s appeal: a call that draws her toward the music and seduces her to participate, however minimal or cerebral her participation may be. Accordingly, when music does not invite the listener but rather pushes her away, it becomes very hard for her to engage in it—she

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

247

might not even want to try. As a result, the music runs the risk of being experienced as meaningless or even of not being heard at all. One could indeed say, in accordance with Peschek’s comment, that Greenwood’s music in itself is meaningless, but isn’t that the case with all music? As we have just seen, it is only within the praxis of an actual listener relating to it that music can become truly meaningful. Consequently, a new act of engagement is required on the part of the listener, time and again, in order for musical meaning to emerge. Similarly, now, one can claim that nature in itself is devoid of meaning. When cut off from human life, when dualistically regarded as a detached entity, as another isolated object postulated over and against an autonomous subject, nature appears as disenchanted. Correspondingly, the alienation and loneliness that come with enlightened emancipation are reflected in the image of nature as essentially meaningless. As in a nightmare, the lonely, the abandoned, the expelled, and the isolated all face their empty mirror image in the terrifying muteness of the amoral force of nature. In romantic writings, this frightful, silent, unpredictable nature has of course been often referred to. It is the sublime that we cannot relate to and that therefore necessarily lies beyond the scope of morality. Only within the context of a concrete human praxis can things become bearers of moral meaning. Viewed thusly, nature in itself is not lovely or intrinsically good; only our relation to it can make it so—just like the Freudian Es, it first needs to become part of human consciousness before entering the domain of morality. From this perspective, Greenwood’s detached music does not merely provide a voice for the threatened and violated victim, it also embodies, at the same time, the mute absence of meaning that is caused by isolation and loneliness, by exclusion from the framework of relationships that is needed for any kind of meaning to emerge. Plainview, on the other hand, who is completely dehumanised in his splendid isolation, does not appear so different from the nature that he tries to tame. His final act of violence seems as sudden and absurd, as devoid of meaning, as the violent outburst of the oil gusher—it has become its perfect mirror image. And yet, these two outbursts of meaningless violence are both applauded by Brahms’s violin concerto and not by Greenwood’s mute, “meaningless” music. It is precisely here that the music refuses to be detached or distant and instead pulls the viewer into the picture, almost violently forcing her to engage with what has just happened. The idea of nature as intrinsically good is not only the perfect corollary of the naïve and optimistic idea of modern progress; it also assumes, philosophically, that things can be meaningful in and of themselves, severed from any form of experience, as self-sufficient, Platonic ideas. Greenwood’s music, however, challenges this metaphysical conception of meaning: By merely being

248

De Munck

there, at a distance, almost tacit, his music makes the listener uncomfortably aware of its muteness and therefore of the impossibility of surrendering to the story. The arch of tension that is thus created—the tension between wanting to be involved and being kept at a distance—spans the whole duration of the film: We are refused entrance while the story makes it so obvious that our moral involvement is needed. We are continuously being called upon, but we can never respond. Instead, the music obliges us to dwell in this inbetween space—a space as lonely and detached as Plainview’s mind. Still, when Plainview turns his back to the camera, after having forced a new wedge between himself and the world, we are suddenly invited by Brahms’s music to fully participate. Alas, the participation that we are granted here is radically immoral and makes us accessories to Plainview’s deeds. In the last movement of the ongoing play of displacements—in precisely these two Brahmsian moments of accessoriness, when our desire for participation is finally fulfilled—we strongly feel that we had always already been related, to the film as much as to life and nature itself, if only through our desire and need to be so. We were already fully in the middle of the dynamics of being pushed out and pulled in, of trying to determine our own position in relation to the story. It is this very fact that sets us apart from nature: There is no such possible choice to merely “be in ourselves;” there is no safe place beyond the story, since we are always already in an intentional state of awareness, need, and desire. In spite of this human condition of necessary involvement, Plainview restlessly aspires for an ultimate place beyond. His aspirations find their metaphorical expression in his attempts to connect to the oil beneath his feet, to the unpredictable, self-contained centre of the earth. However, even though he seeks a state similar to that of the nature he exploits—a purely amoral stance—his attempts to isolate himself from the world are inevitably immoral: He cannot avoid his actions being ethically qualified, since his turning away is a turning away from: for instance, from his son H.W. Accordingly, instead of aestheticising the murder and turning it into a sublime work of art, Brahms’s music betrays Plainview and exposes the illusion of making a clean leap to the essence of nature. The music pierces through the veil of the romantic genius who puts himself above the moral law. Instead of being redeemed by it, the final blood embarrassingly exposes Plainview as an incarnate, human being. However animalistic his behaviour may be, as a human being he is forever trapped in a morally qualified web of relations, laid out metaphorically by the horizontal and vertical alliances between the music and the images on the screen.

Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms

8

249

The Displaced Listener

The combined experiences of, on the one hand, being refused entrance by Greenwood’s music and, on the other, suddenly being sucked in by Brahms’s theme reinforce each other to the point that they both also evoke what they are not. Therefore, not only are the musical connotations displaced—success becomes murder, victims become mute—but the listener finds herself continuously displaced as well. By virtue of the play of exclusion and surrender, of involvement and failure to engage, the spectator is almost physically made aware of the fact that she is neither without moral flaw nor allowed to retreat into a safe, non—morally determined realm. She is condemned to run the risk of being manipulated by the game of push-and-pull and nevertheless cannot escape the moral responsibility for it. It is the entire complex, therefore, of images, music, story, and spectator that creates a realm in which, through multifarious forms of displacement, the aesthetic experience is subtly infused with moral questions. Whether we like it or not, as social beings we are condemned to perpetually define our position in and vis-à-vis the world and determine our relation to others. This is where the aesthetic realm perhaps comes closest to the ethical realm. In its own particular way, the aesthetic experience makes us physically aware of how we are in constant search for the proper level of engagement. It makes palpable our attempts (or lack thereof) to keep the opposing forces of sheer voluntarism and passive surrender in check. Accordingly, by engaging in the film’s shifting play of music and image, the spectator can grasp the story’s many layers of meaning, as well as its pertinence, as another object she can relate to her condition as a social being in the world. As I have argued, the particular use of Greenwood’s and Brahms’s music in There Will Be Blood challenges the audience to do so by making use of the virtual compass that ingeniously emerges from its interaction with the images—though time and again it is up to each viewer to use it and to decide just how she will use it. References Adorno, Theodore W. and Hanns Eisler. Composing for the Films. New York: Continuum, 2007. Brahms, Johannes. “Vivace Non Troppo.” Violin Concerto in D Major Op. 77: 3. Performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker. Conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Solo violin by Anne-Sophie Mutter.

250

De Munck

Eisenstein, Sergei. “Appendix A: A Statement.” Film Form. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1977, 257–59. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. Goehr, Lydia. “Film as Visual Music: Duplication, Dissonance, and Displacement.” In Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory, 204–56. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Greenwood, Jonny. Bodysong. Music from the Film. Performed by Julian Aravelles (saxophone), Gerald Presencer (trumpet), Colin Greenwood (bass, programming), Jeremy Brown (bass), Gene Calderazzo (drums), and The Emperor Quartet. ———. Popcorn Superhet Receiver. Performed by the B.B.C. Concert Orchestra. Conducted by Robert Ziegler. ———. Smear. Performed by London Sinfonietta. Conducted by Martyn Brabbins. ———. There Will Be Blood OST. New York: Nonesuch Records, 2008. Jones, Lewis E. “There Is Power in the Blood.” Performed by the Church of the Third Revelation. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pärt, Arvo. Fratres for Cello and Piano. Performed by I Fiamminghi, The Orchestra of Flanders. Conducted by Rudolf Werthen. Peschek, David. “CD: Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood OST.” The Guardian. January 4, 2008. Accessed March 10, 2013. www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jan/04/ popandrock.shopping4. Tapley, Kristopher. “Digging into Oscar’s Controversial Music Branch.” Variety. February 12, 2008. There Will Be Blood. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Santa Monica, CA: Miramax Films, 2007.

CHAPTER 14

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics in the Writings of Robert Musil Stijn De Cauwer 1 In an influential article which appeared in 1958,1 Georg Lukács formulated his objections to the approach of certain modernist authors. According to him, a prominent example of what was problematic with the modern novel was Robert Musil’s unfinished Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Lukács accuses Musil of not being capable of developing a concrete cultural critique in his literary analysis of modern society. The consequences of this are that the sociopolitical reality appears as chaos and that Musil is incapable of giving concrete aims or goals to his critique. Symptomatic of this incapacity to understand society is, according to Lukács, an obsession with the pathological and the morbid. Lukács claims that writers such as Musil have an obsession with the pathological for its own sake: “With Musil—and with many other modernist writers—psychopathology became the goal, the terminus ad quem, of their artistic intention. [. . .] There is first of all a lack of definition. The protest expressed by this flight into psychopathology is an abstract gesture; its rejection of reality is wholesale and summary, containing no concrete criticism.”2 In Lukács’s view, Musil’s “alternative” is mere eccentricity and nothing more. The wholesale rejection of reality that he discerns in Musil’s writing will inevitably lead to the disintegration of the personality, becoming “without qualities,” and will give society a ghostly and nightmarish character. Both the self and society become incomprehensible. In Lukács’s reading, the obsession with psychopathology of modernist writers was an inadequate reaction to life under capitalism, which he finds exemplified in certain statements from Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: “It is to the credit of Musil that he was quite conscious of the implications of his method. 1  Georg Lukács, “Die weltanschaulichen Grundlagen des Avantgardeismus,” in Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Hamburg: Claassen, 1958), 13–48. 2  Georg Lukács, The Lukács Reader, ed. Arpad Kadarkay (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 196–97.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_016

252

De Cauwer

Of his hero Ulrich he remarked: ‘One is faced with a simple choice: Either one must run with the pack (when in Rome, do as the Romans do); or one becomes a neurotic.’ Musil here introduces the problem, central to all modernist literature, of the significance of psychopathology.”3 Lukács claims that the morbid and the pathological first had a stylistic or decorative function in literature, but then became a symptom of an inadequate, escapist protest against capitalist society by bored and wealthy modern city dwellers. It would be easy to dismiss Lukács’s article as an outdated, overly moralising text, written under particular sociohistorical conditions by a militant scholar who does not do justice to the complexity of the views and techniques adopted by the widely diverse authors he critiques. But Lukács’s objections can be seen as an early blueprint for the criticisms and confusions that recur in the reception of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften to this day. Readers and critics often characterise the novel as a work which brilliantly describes the chaos and confusion of the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—the period just before its demise in the First World War. Characters seem to be sliding further into their own forms of madness. A society is presented in which chaos, incomprehension, and outlandish behaviour reign. Stefan Jonsson begins his review of the biography of Musil in the following way: “To read Robert Musil is to sense an approaching catastrophe. His narratives spiral downward from the daylight of bourgeois conventions into the night of madness, the negativity of disorder, criminality, and war.”4 Like Lukács, some critics come to the conclusion that Musil does no more than describe the prevailing confusion of the period and that he is incapable of providing suggestions or solutions. In this essay, I would like to clarify the function of the pathological in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in relation to Musil’s stated intention that the novel should be an “experimental station” to find a new ethics suitable for the challenges of modern life. With this new ethics, he hoped to overcome a destructive and truly pathological condition which was increasingly affecting modern society. We can learn from Lukács’s critique that an understanding of the pathological in Musil’s work will require a clarification of Musil’s views and intentions as they are expressed through his novel. Musil is not interested in the pathological for its own sake, and his interest does not arise out of incomprehension; rather, the pathological plays a crucial role in Musil’s sharp diagnosis of modern life and in his attempt to use his literary talents to find a modern ethics.

3  Ibid., 196. 4  Stefan Jonsson, “A Citizen of Kakania,” New Left Review 27 (May–June 2004): 131.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

253

2 Long before Musil started writing Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the fascination of artists with the pathological had almost become a commonplace. The pathological nature of the new Viennese painting and literature was the cause of repeated scandals and public condemnations. In one of his first essays, Das Unanständige und Kranke in der Kunst from 1911 and published in the journal Pan, Musil rejected the practice of condemning art for allegedly being obscene or pathological. The article was a direct response to the confiscation by the Berlin police of an earlier edition of the journal which contained sections of Flaubert’s travel diary. The law stated that more “daring” artistic representations were allowed if they were justified by a clear artistic purpose. Musil rightly points out that the “artistic purpose” of a work of art is not clearly labelled on the work in an explicit manner. It was not the task of the law or the press to decide on the artistic purpose of a work of art. That the Berlin chief of police fails to see an artistic purpose in the work of art is not the fault of the artist. In such cases, the artistic purpose of the work of art is denied. This early essay contains in a compact form many of the concerns that will preoccupy Musil throughout his life, especially the relationship between art and morality and the place of the pathological in art. In just a few pages, Musil gives us a compact theory of the process of creation, representation, and morality in the work of art. Implicit in the rhetoric about the artistic purpose of the work of art is that art is supposed to reflect the moral norms prevailing in society. Musil strongly opposes the “folderol about the mission of the artist.”5 He rejects the tendency to judge art—as well as human behavior—according to narrow, rigid moral categories. He defends the view “that—in this age which has so much anxiety about health and decadence—the boundary between mental health and illness, morality and immorality, is sought in a much too coarse, geometric way, like a line that is to be defined and respected (every action having to be on one side or the other).”6 Musil reverses the problem. He notices a problematic tendency in society to react to the rapid changes in society and to the complexity of modern life with an uptight and rigid form of morality, condemning new views and art forms as sick or pathological. By doing so, the indirect claim is made that following moral norms guarantees

5  Robert Musil, Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 6. 6  Ibid., 7.

254

De Cauwer

health, sanity, and order.7 A black-and-white view on health, as if one can draw a straight line between health and pathology, is for Musil nothing more than a tool in the rhetoric of people with a conservative moral agenda who are terrified of change. What is at stake in art, according to Musil, is not the reflection of the moral status quo, but the tracing of new connections and patterns that problematise our congealed categories. To experience the need for (artistic) representation means: to depict something: to represent its connections to a hundred other things; because objectively nothing else is possible, because only in this way can one make something comprehensible and tangible, [. . .] as even scientific understanding can only arise through comparisons and connections, and as this is the only way human understanding can arise at all. And even if these hundred other things were to be obscene or pathological: their connections are not, and the tracing of these connections, never.8 Even if a given topic can conventionally be seen by society as pathological or obscene, this is no longer the case once it is expressed in a work of art, as it then becomes necessarily involved in a web of connections and affinities. The artist breaks down the habitual categories by which we ordinarily perceive the world to reorder these elements into new patterns and a new totality that reveals new connections amongst these defamiliarised elements. Instead of a clear “artistic purpose,” the affinities explored by the work of art can only be tentative explorations. Far from representing the prevailing moral order, the work of art dissolves this order and finds new affinities and resonances between the elements it explores.9 The artist must follow the traces and connections he or she is exploring and not reject them beforehand because they are “immoral.” 7  The rhetoric of condemning art for being pathological was taken to a grotesque extreme by the Nazis in their Entartete Kunst expositions. In this travelling exposition, modern paintings (by Modigliani, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, among others) were shown next to pictures of people with deformed faces to show the “degeneration” of these artists who strayed from the Nazi view on health, the body, and moral conduct. It was not so much their aim to dismiss modern forms of painting (in fact, certain Nazi officials loved the Expressionist works displayed as “degenerate art”), but to persuade the viewer of the existence of a national form of health, harmony, and order. 8  Musil, Precision and Soul, 6. 9  In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Ulrich claims that all great novels challenge the status quo: “Every great book breathes the spirit of this love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. [. . .] Extract the meaning out of all literature,

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

255

According to this view, art must by definition move beyond the status quo; it must move beyond the prevailing moral norms in search of new and better ones. Musil writes that the artist is interested in “expanding the range of what is inwardly still possible, and therefore art’s sagacity is not the sagacity of the law, but—a different one.”10 The artist does not follow the law, which is too rigid and narrowly defined, but seeks an expansion of what is possible. Art does not repeat the existing norms, it seeks new norms. Such a view will inevitably be rejected by those defending the moral order. In the essay, Musil strongly rejects such a conservative reflex: “[O]ne should reform forward, not backward: Social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”11 In this early essay, we can find some of the central features of Musil’s view on modern life. For him, the problem was not the changes in modern society, but, on the contrary, it was the overly uptight moral reaction to the changing times that was one of the most pertinent problems. Furthermore, the challenges of modern life required a rethinking of morality, allowing for more creativity and flexibility: “Let us define as morality some common goal, but with a greater measure of permitted side paths, and agree that the movement in that direction should be based on a strong, forward-directed will, in order not to suffer the danger of plopping into the smallest quibble on the road.”12 The complexity and volatility of modern life requires more flexibility and the ability to adapt our moral standards. Rigid, knee-jerk moral responses to change will cause these changes to look threatening, chaotic, and monstrous. By dissolving our habitual categories and exploring new ones, art has a significant capacity to overcome deadlocks and to find better approaches to and guidelines for the challenges of modern life.

and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience which refute the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art!” [Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London and New York: Vintage International, 1995), 398–99]. 10  Musil, Precision and Soul, 7. 11  Ibid., 9. It is interesting to point out here that Musil’s view is almost diametrically opposed to that of his contemporary, Hermann Broch, with whom he is often compared. In one of his most important essays, Broch states unambiguously that “art, in contradistinction to science, which in its structure is revolutionary and absolutely committed to progress, needs always to be conservative.” [Hermann Broch, Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age, ed. and trans. John Hargraves (New York: Counterpoint, 2002), 21]. 12  Musil, Precision and Soul, 9.

256

De Cauwer

3 In 1922, Musil attempted to bring his different reflections on modern life together into one comprehensive essay, Der deutsche Mensch als Symptom. In this rich essay, he provides a general theory of the role of morality in life and why this general human condition has entered into a state of crisis around the turn of the century. In his view, human beings, who are essentially shapeless, are formed in the smallest details by the prevailing moral guidelines, ideologies, and institutional apparatuses of that society. Without the roles, shapes, and patterns provided by society, we would drown in existential angst and insecurity: “Life shapes itself in ready-made forms: It is socially preformed. The feeling of love, for instance, finds modes, modifications, degrees, etc., already prepared, into which it pours itself and in which it becomes reality. Without the guidelines, the individual disintegrates.”13 To avoid the constant existential angst over our life choices or the intense doubt that will arise when one realises the contingency of what we find most important, people adopt pre-existing moral models. The prevailing moral order, which includes social roles, symbols, and hierarchies, serves as a firm guideline for people to follow in order to feel that they belong to a meaningful, ordered society in which they have a specific role and place: [T]he minute a soul has morals, religion, philosophy, a well-grounded middle-class education, ideals in the sphere of duty and beauty, it has been equipped with a system of rules, conditions, and directives that it must obey before it can think of being a respectable soul [. . .] All that remains are only logical problems of interpretation, such as whether an action falls under this or that commandment.14 After decades, people become accustomed to these moral guidelines, which Musil calls Kunstgriffe, artificial systems, and they consider these interlocking value systems to be the natural state of things: But looked at closely, it does seem to be an extremely artificial state of mind that enables a man to walk upright among the circling constellations and permits him, surrounded as he is by an almost infinite unknown, to slip his hand with aplomb between the second and third buttons of his jacket. Not only does every human being, the idiot as much 13  Ibid., 158. 14  Musil, The Man without Qualities, 198.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

257

as the sage, apply his special skills to make this happen; all these personal stratagems are also cleverly built into society’s moral and intellectual systems for maintaining its inner equilibrium, so that they serve the same purpose on a large scale. This interlocking of systems resembles that of nature itself, where all the magnetic fields of the cosmos affect those of the earth without anyone noticing it, because the result is simply whatever happens on earth. The consequent psychological relief is so great that the wisest of men and the most ignorant of little girls, if left undisturbed, feel very clever and pleased with themselves.15 People can become so accustomed to the moral order that it feels like the natural state of things; they can no longer fathom that other ways of ordering and behaving are possible. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, we can find several characters who defend the view that we should unquestionably and firmly adhere to the prevailing moral norms because they provide the best and most certain guidelines for life. Early in the novel, it is Ulrich’s father who most clearly expresses this view of morality as a necessity for existing because it provides us with a guideline and a sense of security. He lives by the following principle: “To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames.”16 Or in the ironic, mocking words of Ulrich: His father would have put it something like this: “Give a fellow a totally free hand, and he will soon run his head into a wall out of sheer confusion.” [. . .] For a man’s possibilities, plans, and feelings must first be hedged in by prejudices, traditions, obstacles, and barriers of all sorts, like a lunatic in his straightjacket, and only then can whatever he is capable of doing have perhaps some value, substance, and staying power.17 According to Ulrich’s father, accepting the traditional moral code is as necessary as solid door frames and, without it, the world would slide into random chaos and excess. Even more, it is a necessity for people to maintain a grip on themselves. Let that grip go, and you end up on a slippery slope toward insanity, crime, and confusion. Morality, in this sense, is the preventing of a situation in which one has too many possibilities and too much freedom.

15  Ibid., 574–75. 16  Ibid., 10. 17  Musil, The Man without Qualities, 15–6.

258

De Cauwer

In Musil’s view, accepting the prevailing moral guidelines and social roles is a way for people to reduce complexity and uncertainty in a world that is becoming increasingly complex: “Life is made easier when it is socially bound, and when it is individually mobile only to a limited extent. A believing Catholic or Jew, an officer, a fraternity brother, an honorable businessman, or an important person, is in every situation capable of a far smaller number of reactions than is a free spirit: This saves and stores energy.”18 However, something fundamentally changed at the end of the nineteenth century. The rapid changes in modern life had made the prevailing moral guidelines, along with the symbols of the moral order, as outdated as a powdered wig. People could no longer believe in the symbols of the moral order, such as the old Emperor Franz Joseph, whose fading power Musil compared with the light of a star that died many years ago. But at the same time, the people longed more than ever for firm guidelines and order as they saw their living conditions change beyond recognition. Hence, they tried to cling to moral guidelines that they could no longer take seriously. It was as if the people had outgrown the old moral guidelines: “[They were] forever incongruent with life, and life shakes them off in recurring crises the way swelling mollusks shed their outgrown shells.”19 The rapid changes that modernity brought along tilted the old established order out of balance, causing a crisis in both personal and collective identity. People no longer knew what to believe, which ideas to endorse, or what to admire. There was a growing list of pessimistic narratives about the decline of society; the decay of civilization or moral values; the loss of moral fibre; the anomie and desensitisation of the masses; the dissolving of social bonds; the degeneration of culture; and the disintegration of values. The cult around Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes and the influence of Max Nordau’s Entartung are but two prominent examples. People need to believe in the order in which they have a place, but in Kakania, as Musil mockingly called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a process had begun where people gradually lost this belief: For Kakania was the first country in our present historical phase from which God withdrew His credit: the love of life, faith in itself, and the ability of all civilized nations to disseminate the useful illusion that they have a mission to fulfill. [. . .] They no longer had the faith or credit, nor had they learned how to fake it. They no longer knew what their smiles, their sighs, their ideas, were for.20 18  Musil, Precision and Soul, 174–75. 19  Ibid., 130. 20  Musil, The Man without Qualities, 575–76.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

259

In Der deutsche Mensch als Symptom, Musil describes the change that occurred in the 1880s as a “lack of faith,” which was “not just a religious matter at all, but includes the secular as well.”21 People could no longer identify with the symbols, institutions, and the life roles they were supposed to take up22—or as Musil phrases it in his Diaries: “Morality was not undermined but proved to be hollow.”23 The problems concerning morality were like an escalating vortex: The need for clear guidelines was greater than ever, but people could only turn to guidelines they no longer took seriously, increasing their frustration and need for firm guidelines, like a vicious circle spiralling out of control. This quagmire created an explosive and destructive psychological condition, which, according to Musil, paved the way for the enormous cataclysmic catastrophes of the early twentieth century. Clinging to the old moral values deprived the people of the capacity to invent new and better ethical guidelines that would be better suited to modern life: For every moral system has, in its time, regulated the feelings, and rigidly too, but only insofar as certain basic principles and feelings were needed for whatever action it favoured; the rest was left to individual whim, to the private play of emotions, to the random efforts of art, and to academic debate. So morality has adapted our feelings to the needs of moral systems and meanwhile neglected to develop them, even though

21  Musil, Precision and Soul, 159. 22  The great literature produced after the First World War, looking back at the period before the war, was filled with protagonists of a wealthy background who were no longer able to lead the lives they were supposed to lead, from Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge to the decay of the old aristocratic families in Joseph Roth’s novels. Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp withdraws from the life he was supposed to lead to the sanatorium in the mountains because of a rather vague illness. But probably the clearest and most explicit example of this phenomenon can be found in Hermann Broch’s trilogy Die Schlafwandler. Pasenow, the protagonist of the first novel Pasenow oder die Romantiek, is trying to cling to the symbols and actions that go along with his position in the old fading society in a truly painful and almost pathetic way. No matter how hard he tries, he can no longer find any meaning and comfort in it. He turns to what used to be the signs of dignity, such as his uniform and military rank; goes to church when he is in moral turmoil; and, in a painful climax, lies next to his newlywed wife during their wedding night in his full officer’s outfit. Pasenow tries to conform to the moral order he was born in, hoping that doing his duty will bring him solace, only to find this moral system to be hollow and inadequate. 23  Robert Musil, Diaries 1899–1941, trans. Philip Payne (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 287.

260

De Cauwer

it depends on feelings: Morality is, after all, the order and integrity of the emotional life.24 We can now understand why Musil, shortly after the end of the First World War, wrote the following controversial assessment: “Germany’s collapse was not brought about by her immoral, but by her moral, citizens.”25 4 Given the fact that people were incapable of developing new and better guidelines to help them cope with the complexity of modern existence, it comes as no surprise that they were looking in the wrong places for solutions for the vast problems society was facing. They were either longing for the restoration of a romanticised past order or seeking pseudo-mystical forms of redemption that would magically transform all present fragmentation and confusion into a new unity. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, one of the protagonists, General Stumm, claims he had been hearing so much talk about redemption that he was sick and tired of it: “His first reaction was that the term was one of those verbal inflections not yet classified by linguistic science.”26 He cynically remarks that he hasn’t heard so much talk about redemption since the religion classes of his youth. For Musil, the popularity of the term “redemption” was a symptom of the incapacity of his society to face the challenges of the present: It was among the so-called intellectuals that the word “redemption” and its kin came into vogue at this time. They did not see how things could go on unless a messiah came quickly. Depending on circumstances, he would be a medical messiah who would redeem the art of healing [. . .], or a messianic poet capable of writing a drama that would sweep millions of people into the theaters despite its ineffable sublimity; besides the belief 24  Musil, The Man without Qualities, 1116. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Musil describes Ulrich’s views on morality in the following way: “He believed in morality without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort of police regulation for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination.” [Musil, The Man without Qualities, 1116–117]. 25  Musil, Diaries, 287. 26  Musil, The Man without Qualities, 565.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

261

that every kind of human endeavor needed a messiah to restore it to its pristine purpose, there was of course also the simple and unadulterated longing for a leader sent to put everything to right with his strong right arm. The age before the Great War was a messianic age.27 A common reaction of the intellectuals to the perceived incongruity between the state of society and their ideals was a longing for the past. They regarded the confusing and incomprehensible present as a period of decline of a previous order or fullness, and they nostalgically looked to the past for answers. Redemption in this context stood for the longing to completely erase all alienation and fragmentation and to restore a presumed old stability along with a sense of order and purpose. Musil strongly rejects such nostalgia: Now I am of course aware of the enormous literature whose content consists of expressions for this incongruity. It embraces the familiar sea of complaints about our soullessness, mechanization, calculatedness, lack of religion, and so on. But I know hardly of a single sensible book that tries to see this problem as a problem, a new problem, and not as an old, failed solution. Generally speaking the cure is sought regressively [. . .] Only very rarely is it made explicit that a new problem has been posed here, that its solution has not yet been found.28 Moreover, the passions of the masses were captured by specific idealised notions, such as state, nation, and race, which were increasingly exploited by political forces. Musil refers to them as the mystical fetishes of his time. These ideologically loaded notions were fetishised as an absolute good and credited with a form of moral agency. Musil remarks that these mystical fetishes were used as piecemeal recipes for all evils of modern life. They were treated as easy “answers”—not as complicated questions. They were dangerous not only because they provided the people with an arousing narrative that could be politically abused, but also because they transferred all moral responsibility to some idealised abstraction outside of the individual: If, in good and evil, the “race” rather than the individual is made responsible for everything, the effect is exactly the same as if one were always making excuses for oneself: The result is not only that truthfulness and intellectual refinement become dulled, but also that all the germ cells 27  Ibid., 567. 28  Musil, Precision and Soul, 154.

262

De Cauwer

of morality degenerate. When virtue is declared to be national property by predestination, the Lord’s vineyard is expropriated and no one needs to work in it anymore. The individual is flattered into believing that he possesses everything desirable by merely contemplating the virtues of his “race”: evidently a fool’s paradise, our happy Germany, where roasted virtues fly into our mouths.29 Musil describes the function of these fetishised notions as “a transforming idealism, that projects the dignity that the human being is unable to achieve in his personal life onto its background: onto the race, the Emperor, a social club, the sublimity of the moral law, or some other such tapestry.”30 Unable to come to terms with the complexity of the present, many were seeking their reference points in abstracted and idealised ideals beyond reality to which the facts of the present were supposed to conform. Unable to realise that reality was bound to be incomprehensible and reprehensible in the light of these lofty ideals and unable to stop and wonder why life did not comply with these ideals, they could not see that the mistake must lie with the ideals themselves. In his last public address in Vienna, in 1936, shortly before fleeing to Switzerland, Musil developed this problem further. In this address, which was a veiled critique of the rise of National Socialism, he calls it a dangerous form of stupidity that had become institutional. This stupidity is the incapacity to adequately assess the complexities of the present, for which the person wants to compensate with blind frustration, resentment, and inadequate emotion. This goes along with a violent hatred of the present and the hope that wild and random destruction could somehow erase this sense of unease. Musil compares this reaction to a sweeping shootout or the throwing of a hand grenade, in which a stray bullet or a piece of shrapnel might accidentally be effective in eliminating the cause of the unease. Such destructive acts mistakenly pass for sound actions. The striking example that Musil uses of this type of behaviour is flinging a book to the ground in the hope this would neutralise the poison it contains. Public book burnings had already taken place in Berlin, with Musil’s writings on the blacklist. Earlier in Der Deutsche Mensch als Symptom, Musil had written about the craving for a “metaphysical bang” coming as a result of discontent with the times, an “apparently human need to rip existence to shreds from time to time, and toss them to the winds, seeing where they fall.”31 It was this feeling which made people welcome the outbreak of the First World War with a festive mood, as if spring had arrived bringing on the new society, 29  Musil, Precision and Soul, 106–07. 30  Ibid., 109. 31  Ibid., 129.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

263

and embrace the arousing mass rallies of the Nazi movement. Redemption in this sense becomes a longing for violent, total destruction, which would miraculously restore order. 5 If Musil rejected a nostalgic longing for the past, he also rejected the belief in a utopian, redemptive moment in the future. He strongly denied all historical determinism or teleology. The necessity that certain people see in historical events was simply a necessity they read post factum in the course of history: “The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard ball—which, once it is hit, takes a definite line—but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to.”32 Human existence was not marked by some kind of iron law of fate, natural rise and decline, or destiny, but a chain of situations. Musil did not accept any form of meaning, direction, purpose, or simple causality in the unfolding of history. It was necessary to break out of such deterministic views on history in order for people to regain a grip on the state of society: “[F]or if it turns out that our innermost being does not dangle from the puppet strings of some hobgoblin of fate, but on the contrary that we are draped with a multitude of small, haphazardly linked weights, then we ourselves can tip the scales.”33 The strict rejection by Musil of all forms of eschatology and teleology does not come as a surprise if we consider the big influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Mach34 on his thought. In Morgenröthe, Nietzsche describes what happens when people are finally freed from teleological thinking. The fact that people, in order to acquire salvation in the afterlife, had to gather all the proper knowledge during a very brief lifespan, gave knowledge a frightful weight. But when people free themselves from this weight, they regain the benefits of error: “We have reconquered our courage for error, for experimentation, for

32  Musil, The Man without Qualities, 392. 33  Musil, Precision and Soul, 122. 34  Musil wrote his doctoral thesis on the work of Mach under the supervision of Carl Stumpf in Berlin. He did not get along well with Stumpf, who was a strong critic of Mach, and he had already made up his mind to abandon an academic career for a career in literature. In his dissertation, Musil is quite critical of Mach, but the influence of Mach on his views nevertheless remained significant.

264

De Cauwer

accepting provisionally [. . .] And it is precisely for this reason that individuals and generations can now fix their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness and trifling with Heaven and Hell. We may experiment with ourselves! Yes, mankind now has the right to do that!”35 Besides the influence of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Mach, Musil was very much inspired by his experiences with the new developments in the sciences. Because of his studies, he was well aware of the profound paradigm shifts that occurred in the sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rather than talk about the gradual accumulation of knowledge about the natural order, the scientists now spoke about probability, instability, and provisional knowledge. Musil believed that such a provisional approach could be transposed to the realm of ethics. Instead of fixed, rigid moral guidelines, which would be shattered by the first fundamental problem, he believed that we needed to develop flexible approaches that could be readjusted to constantly changing challenges. Instead of petrifying reality, Musil wanted to enrich our sense of possibility: Reality could also be different and better. He did not believe in a utopian ideal in the future, but in the utopian potential that the present contains. Rather than presuming certain states of being or ways of ordering society, different possibilities of being human and organising society should be explored and tested out like a hypothesis in an experiment. Musil advocates a provisional, experimental ethos that could provide more lasting stability without falling into the trap of fetishising the past or abstract ideals. Musil’s outlook was formed by the modern scientific sensitivity which was very critical of older, rigid conceptions of natural science and the picture of reality that it presented. The complex phenomena which made up modern life could not be understood as long as people adopted a rigid, outdated framework or model, in the light of which the bewildering phenomena of modern life could only be looked upon as incomprehensible monstrosities. Instead of regarding new phenomena that do not fit in one’s model as a threat to its coherence, Musil argued for an approach that could be readjusted to new phenomena. That requires an approach in which an awareness of error, uncertainty, contingency, partiality, situatedness, and possibility are crucial. Such an approach also requires a different conception of order which is no longer defined by a single form of stability, but by “multi-stability”: the alternation

35  Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 501.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

265

between different forms of stability, such as in so-called “Kippbilder”—figures which can be seen in two or more ways.36 Musil ended his address on stupidity with the following imperative: “Act as well as you can and as badly as you must, but in doing so remain aware of the margin of error of your actions.”37 In Musil’s ethos we can hear an echo of Nietzsche’s “courage for error, for experimentation, for accepting provisionally.” The rupture of the eschatological frees up the possibility of experimentation and the capacity to readjust one’s positions, values, or opinions. It allows for error in the positive sense that the sciences give it, as a necessary component of refining and readjusting one’s hypotheses to accommodate new facts. When temporary and when leading to readjustment, such error is productive and important. If it is not acknowledged and if it becomes institutional, it becomes pathological and dangerous: [E]ach of us is, if not always, at least from time to time, stupid. So a distinction must be made between failing and incapacity, between occasional, or functional, and permanent, or constitutional, stupidity, between error and unreason. This is most important because of the way the conditions of life are today: so unintelligible, so difficult, so confused, that the occasional stupidities of the individual can easily lead to a constitutional stupidity of the body politic.38 If Musil believed in a flexible, experimental ethos, in which one’s approach is permanently readjusted, then we can understand why Musil had an inclination toward an open-ended, essayistic writing style. 6 As we have seen, Musil was highly sceptical of the use of clinical language to dismiss new forms of art or unusual behaviour. Nevertheless, throughout his life, 36  Well-known examples of such Kippbilder are the so-called “duckrabbit,” a single figure that could be seen as both a duck and a rabbit, and the Rubin Vase, a figure that can be seen as a vase or two faces. During Musil’s scientific education, Gestalt Theory was becoming increasingly popular and the phenomenon of multi-stable figures was a popular research topic. Musil repeatedly plays with the inversion of part and whole, figure and background, concavity and convexity, to evoke the feeling of vertigo. 37  Musil, Precision and Soul, 286. 38  Ibid., 284–85.

266

De Cauwer

he repeatedly compared the state of society with the behaviour of inmates in a madhouse. Though he carefully avoided using specific clinical categories, the increasingly frantic behaviour of people reminded Musil unambiguously of a form of pathology. From the earliest to the last of his writings, Musil described the different “symptoms” of what he called in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften “a mysterious malady of the times.”39 In order to comprehend what Musil wanted to achieve with his novel, we need to keep this “diagnosis” in mind. The urge to compare the state of society with pathological behaviour was felt by Musil for the first time on March 30, 1913, when he visited a psychiatric institution in Rome.40 What he saw there left a lifelong imprint on him, and he described his visit in vivid detail in his diary. Many years later, Musil would incorporate his impressions during this visit in the chapter Die Irren begrüssen Clarisse of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. The observations he wrote down in his diary were almost taken up literally in this chapter, which shows that even after many years, Musil was still deeply impressed by what he had seen. The guided visit to the different wards of the hospital is described by Musil, who places special emphasis on the disturbing impression that the patients, and especially their contorted features and wild physical gestures, made on the visitors. The notebook entry culminates in a visit to a man in an isolation cell: A naked man stands in the center of the room. [. . .] Repeatedly he makes the same movement, like a pendulum, hurling his upper body just to one side, with head lowered a little and with a movement of the finger while his arm is bent stiffly at a right-angle and held close to his body as if he were playing mora. Each time he does so, he lets out a cry: “Ah!,” panting and expelling the sound with a colossal tensing of the pulmonary muscles. He is beyond help; one has to wait until he tires. This lasts for hours.41 What strikes Musil the most is that the patients seem to be caught up in wild mannerisms and gestures which they cannot refrain from doing—even if it leads them to nothing other than sheer exhaustion and even more agitation. Their repetitive gestures, contortions, and spasms wear them out and leave them physically and nervously broken. Yet, they compulsively make these gestures over and over again, as if it is the only thing that really matters to them.

39  Musil, The Man without Qualities, 54. 40  He was travelling together with Alice von Charlemont, his mentally unstable friend who served as the model for Clarisse in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. 41  Musil, Diaries, 161.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

267

Musil’s interest in physical details could mistakenly make the reader think that he is interested in the expressive qualities of the patients in the way that Egon Schiele or Oskar Kokoschka were influenced by seeing Jean-Martin Charcot’s pictures of contorted patients in the Salpêtrière Hospital. Instead, he finds the agitation of the patients striking because he notices a similarity between the plight of the patients and the condition of society. Musil makes this link explicit in an essay from 1913, Politisches Bekenntnis eines jungen Mannes, in which he repeats the description of the agitated naked man. In this essay, he writes: An hour ago, I visited a Roman madhouse [. . .] Everything looked to me like the situation we’re in. [. . .] In a cell by himself a naked man was raging; we could hear his screams from far off. [. . .] He constantly repeated the same motion, throwing his upper body around with a single jerk of his muscles, and at the same time always making the same gesture with one hand as if he were trying to explain something to someone. Screaming something no one understood, always the same thing. For him, it was probably the important point he had to make clear, had to hammer into the ear of the world; for us it was pulverized, formless shouting.42 The frustrated, compulsive agitation, combined with inadequacy and incomprehension, was for Musil a striking image of the present condition of the world.43 These patients seem to be fanatically in the grip of something, but the “what” or “why” seems to be beyond understanding. The impression that would never leave Musil from this visit is people who compulsively act out wild, emotional

42  Musil, Precision and Soul, 36. 43  In a series of compelling works, Eric Santner has described a particular situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. He describes a compulsive, somatic reaction (an “irritation of the flesh,” as he calls it) which is a response to a situation in which one is addressed (by the other, the law, or history), but with an address one cannot make sense of. Like Franz Kafka’s protagonists, there was an interpellation of the law, but they found themselves before the law without finding any meaning in it. According to Santner, this surplus will find a way out in a somatic compulsion. In his latest book, Santner finds a similar fascination with compulsive behaviour in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke. [Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 188–244].

268

De Cauwer

gestures which they keep on doing as if it was the last thing they had to do. But to a spectator, these gestures seem utterly incomprehensible and even absurd.44 In 1921 and 1922, Musil wrote the essays Die Nation als Ideal und Wirklichkeit and Das hilflose Europa oder Reise vom Hundertsten ins Tausendste, respectively, in which he sharply assessed the state of Germany and Austria after the First World War. As opposed to many other intellectuals, Musil was of the opinion that the war was not some kind of radical break and that people were still in the grip of the same problems and confusions which had always troubled them in the period leading up to the war.45 According to him, people were still incapable of comprehending the situation they found themselves in. Moreover, there was a tendency to forego all responsibility for the war: “How false the childish excuse, which is, unfortunately, often heard in Germany: ‘We didn’t do it! The Emperor, the generals, the diplomats did it!’ Of course we did it: We let it happen.”46 Musil argued that it would have been a grave mistake—and history proved him right—to see the period after the war as a clean break, a new start, and forget about all that had happened before it. The crisis needed to be worked through: [C]an we then simply come to our senses again, stand up and walk away as if after a binge, calling the whole thing just an intoxication, a psychosis, a mass hypnosis, a delusion of capitalism, nationalism, or whatever? We certainly cannot, without repressing an experience that still has not been assimilated. By repressing it, we would be sinking the foundations of a monstrous hysteria into the soul of the nation.47

44  Elias Canetti, who lived in a room in Vienna with a view over the Steinhof Complex, seemed to have similarly experienced the impact of seeing a psychiatric institution and its patients. He also regarded the patients, each seemingly in their own world, with their own one-sided obsessions and rigid mannerisms, as an image of society in general. They were all stuck in their one-sided world which, combined with all the others, led to nothing else but chaos and incomprehension. As opposed to this, Canetti praised the capacity for transformation, to listen properly, and to have more openness to other ways of living. [Elias Canetti, The Memoirs of Elias Canetti, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999), 546–47]. 45  This explains why Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is not just a dissection of the final years before the First World War, but also a sharp commentary on the chaotic period leading up to the Second World War. 46  Musil, Precision and Soul, 104. 47  Ibid., 103.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

269

This statement is crucial to understand Musil’s intentions with Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Society had been in the grip of a truly pathological condition, a combination of moral and intellectual rigidity with frustrated acting out. This insight first dawned on him in the psychiatric hospital in Rome shortly before the war, and society’s condition had not disappeared once the conflict had come to an end. To avoid compulsively reenacting the same destructive tendencies, a form of working through this pathological condition and its symptoms was required. Musil’s use of the term “symptom” cannot be underestimated. What does the choice of this term reveal? The diverse, problematic, and compulsive tendencies Musil describes are symptoms in the sense that they are responses to an affliction in which modern men and women, Ulrich included, find themselves. More importantly, what the term “symptom” indicates is that it is useless to simply dismiss or ignore a symptom. A symptom by definition wants to repeat itself, and if a symptom is repressed it might return in a more detrimental form. As Musil wrote in Die Nation als Ideal und Wirklichkeit, the symptoms of the times, which led to a war of unimaginable proportions and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, should not be seen as belonging to a bygone era, but should have to be worked through. It is in the nature of a symptom that it allows for the working through of what actually troubles people. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Musil attempted to work through the different symptoms of the times. “Working through” means exposing the impasse to which certain symptomatic approaches to modern life lead and finding a way of “de-petrifying” them, of displacing the compulsive repetition of the same into the exploration of other possibilities. The stalemate of rigid repetition is turned into a new mobility which allows for the trying out of different possibilities. Therefore, a flexible, essayistic literary style was better suited to this purpose than a theoretical tractate. It has often been claimed that Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is an experience rather than an explicit commentary. In the novel, the different fetishes of the people are in a sense desacralised.48 The sacred, mystical fetishes of the time (the state, the nation, the people,

48  In this context, it is interesting to point out Giorgio Agamben’s use of the term “profanation.” Agamben defines profanation as the return to the free use of what used to be sacred or religious. [Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73]. The creation of such a new use, a profanation of what used to be sacred, is “possible only by rendering the old use inoperative” (86). Musil relentlessly renders the prevailing petrified viewpoints, including the sacralised “mystical fetishes,” inoperative and reopens these issues to questioning, reformulation, and experimentation.

270

De Cauwer

the race) are rendered profane, allowed to be questioned, and experimentally redefined according to the complexities and the needs of the present. 7 If Musil wanted to work through a certain dangerous condition which was reducing people’s capacity to experiment with other possibilities, then what was the function of all the “pathological” behaviour in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften that critics such as Lukács have pointed out? I will explain this by looking at the phenomenon of the “monster” in literature. Many scholars have pointed out that the monster appears in times of great historical changes, anxiety, and incomprehension.49 The monster embodies the fear of the unknown and the threatening. According to this view, the monster is something that cannot be placed within the coordinates that one uses to order the world. It is a concrete formation with which one is confronted, but which totally falls outside one’s habitual frame of reference. By falling far outside this frame of reference, the monster cannot but challenge it. By pointing out an inadequacy or gap in thee frame of reference—and by drawing attention to the fact that it is by no means the best, the only, or even a natural frame of reference—the monster makes one realise that his or her frame of reference is contingent and that a better frame of reference is needed. In this sense, the monster is not necessarily something negative, evil, or destructive, as in the common sense opinion, nor is it necessarily something positive. Rather, it is an indication that the coordinates that we use to order the world are inadequate and that other coordinates are possible and in fact needed. Jacques Derrida wrote the following on the topic of the monster: [T]he notion of the monster is rather difficult to deal with, to get a hold on, to stabilize [. . .] monstrosity may reveal or make one aware of what normality is. Faced with a monster, one may become aware of what the norm is and that this norm has a history—which is the case with discursive norms, philosophical norms, socio-cultural norms, they have a 49  For example, Stefan Jonsson writes in his great book on Musil: “A monster is first of all a creature that demonstrates—the Latin word monstrare means “to show” or “to exhibit”— a disturbance in the order of the world. The monster operates outside the social, and it often demonstrates a vice that threatens the cohesion and reason of the human community.” [Stefan Jonsson, Subject without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 208].

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

271

history—any appearance of monstrosity in this domain allows an analysis of the history of norms.50 It is thanks to the monstrous presence that people become aware of the prevailing norms: They are contingent and not natural, and they have a history and are not universal. The monster renders visible the prevailing conception of normality. For Derrida, this is not so much a theoretical process of awareness as it is a practical experience: “To do that, one must conduct not only a theoretical analysis; one must produce what in fact looks like a discursive monster so that the analysis will be a practical effect, so that people will be forced to become aware of the history of normality.”51 When exposed to a monstrous presence, like the many literary monsters in the work of Musil, the reader is called upon to reflect on his or her moral norms. The monstrous presence shows us that other ethical norms are not only possible, but also necessary. The infraction of rigid moral norms is a necessity if one is to explore new and better norms that are more adequate for the challenges of modern life.52 All too often, certain characters from Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften are cited by critics as examples of Musil’s vacant obsession with the pathological. The most obviously monstrous character in the novel is the psychotic serial killer Moosbrugger. In several passages, the extreme case of Moosbrugger instigates a reflection on law, morality, and mental health, whereby rigid and problematic assumptions are exposed. In the context of the trial of Moosbrugger, Musil exposes the lacunae and outdated conceptions in the legal, medical, and psychiatric discourses, which, when confronted with difficulties that expose fundamental problems in their approaches, turn to simple moral judgements.

50  Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 385–86. 51  Derrida, Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994, 385–86. 52  The views by Derrida on norms and the monster are obviously influenced by his former teacher Georges Canguilhem. Canguilhem defines health as the capacity to create new norms given changes in the environment: “What characterizes health is the possibility of transcending the norm, which defines the momentary normal, the possibility of tolerating infractions of the habitual norm and instituting new norms in new situations [. . .] Health is a margin of tolerance for the inconsistencies of the environment.” [Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 196–97]. Conversely, pathological is the state in which one remains stuck in one norm and in which one cannot transcend that norm.

272

De Cauwer

The prevalence of the pathological in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, which Lukács and other critics find so objectionable, serves multiple, connected functions in Musil’s search for a modern ethics. The diverse explorations of pathology, crime, and transgression are a destabilising of the self-evidence, rigidity, and inadequacy of a petrified moral order while at the same time exposing the monstrosities that a rigid morality has engendered: from the unprecedented death toll of the First World War to the mass murder of the Nazi regime. Besides this, Musil’s exploration of the pathological reveals the possibility and necessity of opening up in order to create new and better norms. Musil’s ambition was nothing less than the creation of a new society and humanity, and he saw it as his task as a writer to help to establish the conditions of possibility for this. Instead of deterministic views on human beings and the course of society, he believed modern life provided the opportunity for greater change and experimentation. Musil’s human being “without qualities”53 replaces the view that human behaviour was the consequence of innate, inborn dispositions.54 The changes of modern life were not a threat, but an opportunity to create new ways of being human: “The task is to discover ever new solutions, connections, constellations, variables, to set up prototypes of an order of events, appealing new models of how one can be human, to invent the inner person.”55 Given the fact that Musil wanted to problematise the relationship between pathology and normality, one might expect that he would have been interested in the new theories developed by Sigmund Freud, which quickly became the talk of the town in Vienna. While he had a certain amount of respect for Freud and shared certain interests with him, Musil nevertheless remained very sceptical of the particular theories and concepts that Freud had developed.56 While many associate psychoanalysis with the modern innovations that were booming in Vienna, Musil associates psychoanalysis squarely with the 53  The title “The Man without Qualities” refers in the first place to Ulrich, but this being without qualities of course does not have to refer to a man. One of the most inventive characters in the novel is Ulrich’s sister Agathe. Musil had very high hopes of the new women’s movement in Vienna, which he praised in an essay from 1927, Die Frau gestern und morgen. 54  Stefan Jonsson calls the belief that identities (gender, race, nationality) are expressions of permanent inner dispositions the “expressivist paradigm.” [Jonsson, Subject without Nation]. 55  Musil, Precision and Soul, 64. 56  It should be noted here that Musil had a very critical disposition in general. He was fiercely negative about celebrated authors such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, and Karl Kraus.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

273

outdated, conservative views that could not accept the rapid changes of modern society. He describes the analyst’s room as a retreat from the hectic hustle and bustle of city life, where the patient can relax, lie down, and calmly talk about the mundane details of his or her life, while being safely in the hands of the “soul-improvement expert”: “If the world explodes with all its mechanical energies, here you find the good old time gently flowing.”57 The analyst’s office is a place where old-time values are restored and portrayed as natural again. As opposed to the modern city, here one can find the old nuclear family, with its specific roles and conduct, nicely restored in all its old-fashioned significance. As Musil remarks, every little detail suddenly has its sense and significance. Musil is maliciously going against the common sense opinion that Freud’s theories, especially about infant sexuality, were supposed to be a great shock to bourgeois life. Reversing this view, he claims that Freudian psychoanalysis is steeped in an old-fashioned, bourgeois outlook on life, especially concerning the role of the family. Musil also half-jokingly points out that the image of the mother in Freud’s Oedipal theory is based on women’s fashion of the 1870s and 1880s: the old long dresses forming a nest-like lap, which was no longer the case in modern women’s fashion. With this seemingly playful example, Musil is claiming that Freud’s theory is based on an outdated view on women and does not account for society’s rapidly changing gender roles. The Musilian critique of psychoanalysis fits nicely within his more general critique of society, namely, that the prevailing intellectual theories were stuck in outdated moral patterns—in Freud’s case, the pattern was the traditional nuclear family with the nurturing mother. Because of this, psychoanalysis was for Musil yet another blockage to the inevitable and necessary transformation of people and society. 8 If it was Musil’s wish to find a new ethics suitable for the challenges and complexity of modern life, then it remains strange why he chose to dedicate several decades of his life to writing a huge novel in a peculiar, essayistic style. Moreover, throughout Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften we can find several formulaic proposals that seem to suggest that literature could provide an example for ethical life. Ulrich claims that we should live like characters in a book, and one chapter explores the possibility of living “essayistically.” This aspect of 57  Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (New York: Archipelago Books, 2006), 107.

274

De Cauwer

the novel has triggered a charge of “aestheticism,” launched by certain critics, of denying reality for pure aesthetic fantasies—as in the critique voiced by Lukács. But the role of literature is much more complex and multifaceted in Musil’s case. Musil explicitly stated that literature can never serve as a direct model for ethics. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, he asks the following question: “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity becomes a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?”58 The novel, for Musil, has the capacity to work through petrified views which had been encrusted with strong affects over the course of many years. In this way, the novel could enhance a greater sense of possibility, of exploration and of experimentation, but it could never serve as a direct guideline and it could never crystallise singular insights and turn them into universal truths. Musil is neither using the novel to develop a theory, nor is he regarding the novel as a direct model for ethics. Literature can help us overcome petrified, symptomatic reactions to the challenges of modern life and infuse the flexible ethos Musil believed was needed. Especially in times of profound historical changes and the predictable anxious, atavistic reactions to such times of political confusion, literature could help people to find a way out of a petrified state characterised by frustrated incomprehension, conservative reflexes, and the compulsion to repeat actions which have already proven to be inadequate for modern life. References Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Broch, Hermann. Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age. Edited and translated by John Hargraves. New York: Counterpoint, 2002. Canetti, Elias. The Memoirs of Elias Canetti. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999. Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber. Translated by Peggy Kamuf et al., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Jonsson, Stefan. Subject without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. “A Citizen of Kakania.” New Left Review 27 (May–June 2004): 131–41. 58  Musil, The Man without Qualities, 274.

Pathology and the Search for a Modern Ethics

275

Lukács, Georg. “Die weltanschaulichen Grundlagen des Avantgardeismus.” In Wider den missverstandenen Realismus, 13–48. Hamburg: Claassen, 1958. ———. The Lukács Reader. Edited by Arpad Kadarkay. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Musil, Robert. Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses. Translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ———. The Man without Qualities, 2 Vols. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. London and New York: Vintage International, 1995. ———. Diaries 1899–1941. Translated by Philip Payne. New York: Basic Books, 1998. ———. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. Translated by Peter Wortsman. New York: Archipelago Books, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Santner, Eric L. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 15

The Gnostic “Sur” in Surrealism: On Transcendence and Modern Art Willem Styfhals 1

The Surrealist Experience: Between Spiritualism and Nihilism

It is generally accepted that the modern innovations in early-twentiethcentury art have radically reshaped our perception of beauty, art, and creativity. In order to understand the difference between our contemporary aesthetic experience and a traditional perception of art and beauty, a philosophical analysis of the functioning of the aesthetic experience in the twentiethcentury avant-garde may be revealing. In an attempt to understand the nature of this experience, I will primarily focus on the artistic movement of Surrealism and its specific conception of the aesthetic experience. This exploration of Surrealism will not aim at a mere aesthetical or stylistic analysis, but will instead attempt to determine the historico-philosophical conditions of possibility of this Surrealist experience. The Surrealist artist does not perceive the world from a realistic point of view; rather, he experiences reality from the perspective of dreams, hypnagogia, fantasy, opium, imagination, and free association. In one way or another, Surrealist art tries to capture these experiences and attempts to involve the reader or spectator in this surreal perception of reality. In spite of the vast stylistic heterogeneity of these artistic attempts, surrealist artists have generally applied two different though related procedures for presenting these surreal experiences. The first and earliest artistic procedure is epitomised by the method of “automatism.”1 It is a writing and drawing technique based on free association and unconscious improvisation. The technique of automatism was primarily used by the early Surrealist writers, amongst whom were

1  “Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de toute contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale.” [André Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 37.]

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_017

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

277

André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Robert Desnos.2 The automatic style was also adopted by some Surrealist painters such as André Masson (pioneer of automatic drawing) and Max Ernst.3 This type of Surrealist art strongly rejects any conscious composition or realistic representation. Automatic writing is not a mere reproduction of an independent Surrealistic perception of reality; rather, the Surrealistic experience coincides with the creation of the work of art. Automatic creation is thus not the description of a preceding surrealist experience, but the freely associated and improvised creation is the Surrealist experience in its own right. Instead of describing and reproducing a dream world, automatism opens up a surreal world by uncovering and applying the laws of the unconscious, which are also at work in the process of dreaming. In contrast with this automatism, the second and better-known Surrealist artistic procedure tries to seize an autonomous Surrealistic experience by recreating, reproducing, or describing this experience in the work of art. Very often, these works of art depict a strange and dream-like reality. They describe an unconscious content, but, unlike the automatic poems or drawings, these works of art are composed consciously. Whereas automatism draws on the unconscious faculties of human thought in order to manifest and express the functioning of a hidden or inner reality immediately, this second Surrealist procedure tries to discover this “surreal” reality by reproducing the strange but conscious experiences of dreams, fantasy, and pareidolia. The first procedure emulates the process of dreaming, while the latter recreates the aesthetics of dreaming. The most familiar examples of this second pole of Surrealism are the paintings of Salvador Dali and René Magritte. Louis Aragon’s Surrealistic novel, Le Paysan de Paris, can be categorised here as well. In both cases, surrealist art paradigmatically tries to go beyond the ordinary perception of reality. If we want to grasp the nature of the Surrealistic experience itself, we will have to determine the scope of this “beyond,” which is designated by the French prefix “sur” in the notion of “Surrealism” (the English translation of the French preposition “sur” is “over,” “above,” or even “beyond”). Evidently, the choice for the name “sur-realism” reflects the early Surrealists’ aversion to any kind of philosophical or literary realism. In his First Manifesto, the leading figure of the early Surrealistic movement, André Breton, lashes out against the realistic novels and philosophies of his own age: “The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas to Anatole France, 2  André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Les Champs Magnétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1920). 3  Ernst developed the techniques of frottage and grattage as an implementation of automatism in painting (“Forest and Dove,” “Europe after the Rain”).

278

Styfhals

clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate and dull conceit. It is the attitude which today gives rise to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays.”4 Most fundamentally, the prefix “sur” designates the artistic attempt to burst open the ordinary experience of the world in order to access a new and imaginative dream-like reality. In other words, Surrealism aims to transcend ordinary reality. Affirming that a question of transcendence is at stake in Surrealism, Breton himself grants that Surrealism is synonymous with supernaturalism: “Soupault and I baptized the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends, by the name of SURREALISM. [. . .] To be even more fair, we could also have taken over the word SUPERNATURALISM.”5 Since the question of transcendence will obviously be crucial for the understanding of the Surrealistic experience, we have to determine what kind of transcendence is opened up in the experiences of fantasy, imagination, dreams, opium, and free association. Because Surrealism is a modern and atheistic movement, the experience of a beyond can no longer be conceived of as a religious, let alone a Christian, contact with the transcendent order.6 Although Breton’s interpretation of Surrealism was explicitly secular and even anti-Christian, some surrealists deviated from this hardline atheism—a notable example being the poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Nonetheless, Surrealism remains predominantly an anti-religious movement. Initially, then, the Surrealistic transcendence appears as a negation—a kind of empty transcendence—of the immanent order of this world. Indeed, Breton and the early Surrealists experienced the present immanent reality as boring, evil, and restricting. This negative outlook is reflected in Surrealism’s profound dissatisfaction with the descriptive or realistic attitude in art and philosophy, but also in its revolutionary sociopolitical stance. While fully rejecting the possibility of a romantic escapism into religious transcendence, the Surrealists conceived of this world as a nihilistic and deterministic reality that resists our human craving for freedom. These dynamics of negation can explain the provocative, destructive, and revolutionary potentials of Surrealism and, for that matter, of the twentieth century avantgarde in general. However, they cannot account for the substantial content and creativity that might be at stake in this negation itself. Surrealism originates from this negative and revolutionary momentum, but, at the same time, it tries to surpass it: Indeed, Surrealism is not merely synonymous with anti-realism. 4  Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, 14–5. (My translation). 5  Ibid., 36. (My translation). 6  André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

279

As an avant-garde movement, Surrealism can neither stick to a mere nihilistic rejection of the world and the cultural tradition, nor can it become a full-blown artistic genre with a substantial doctrine in itself. It always has to account for its original negative outlook, but it has to discover positivity within this negation. If Surrealism were stuck in its nihilistic phase, it would have become a mere anti-realism. The importance of the Surrealistic pursuit of transcendence would have been completely absent. However, if this surreal transcendence were, on the other hand, univocally attainable, the nihilistic driving force would have expired. The nature of Surrealism has to be understood somewhere in between a strong nihilistic negation and an affirmation of a transcendence that is opened up from within this negation. If the Surrealist experience cannot be characterised by a religious transcendence or by an empty nihilistic transcendence, the question remains: What kind of a beyond is at stake in the prefix “sur” in Surrealism? In an essay from 1929, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,7 Walter Benjamin indicates that the true Surrealistic experience neither lapses into a dull religious spiritualism nor becomes a mere negative or anarchic revolt. Benjamin is right to pinpoint the specificity of the modern Surrealistic experience between the spiritual experience and the nihilistic experience of a revolutionary negation of this world. He characterises the Surrealistic experience according to the rich and multifaceted notion of profane illumination. First of all, this notion accounts for the revelatory character of the surrealist experience and its ability to transcend the ordinary reality without, however, reducing this experience to a spiritual illumination: “It is a cardinal error to believe that, of ‘surrealist experiences,’ we know only the religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of drugs. [. . .] But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration.”8 The Surrealistic inspirations have an intoxicating vigour that transcends the ordinary perception of empirical reality. But unlike the spiritual illumination, the Surrealistic experience is confined within the bounds of immanent experience itself and does not appeal to an otherworldly realm. Free association, imagination, and dreams can thus give rise to a post-mystical, post-magical experience of a radical otherness 7   Walter Benjamin, “Der Sürrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz,” in Aufsätze, Essays, Vortägen. Gesammelte Schriften Band II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 295–310. In this paper, I refer to the English translation: Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings 2. 1927– 1934 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 207–21. 8  Ibid., 209.

280

Styfhals

within immanence itself.9 In this respect, we can understand why Breton and Aragon presented Surrealism as a modern atheistic alternative to spiritualism.10 As an example of this illumination emerging from within ordinary reality, Benjamin analyses the Surrealists’ fascination for outmoded and destitute architecture. The Surrealists discover a revelatory force in strange and outmoded objects or in obscure places which are disregarded in everyday life and overlooked in the realistic perception of the world. Interestingly enough, Benjamin grants that this profane and revelatory experience of the outmoded and the destitute also entails a strong revolutionary force. In the experience of something meaningful and extraordinary within a meaningless and ordinary world, immanent reality bursts open in a violent and revolutionary way. Another, surreal reality, as it were, explodes from within this world. In its turn, this revolutionary potential of the profane illumination can account for the negative, anarchic component of the Surrealistic experience: No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution— not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects—can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism. To say nothing of Aragon’s Passage de L’Opéra, Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian neighborhoods of great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion.11 In spite of Benjamin’s revealing reflections,12 this essay will focus on a different and hitherto unexplored interpretation of the surrealist experience that is 9   “Like religious illumination, profane illumination captures the powers of spiritual intoxication in order to produce a revelation, a vision or insight which transcends the prosaic state of empirical reality; yet it produces this vision in an immanent manner, that is while remaining within the bounds of possible experience, and without recourse to otherworldly authorities and dogmas.” [Richard Wolin, “From Messianism to Materialism: The Later Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 105]. 10  “Il convient d’y voir, avant tout, une heureuse réaction contre quelques tendences dérisoires du spiritualisme.” [Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, 14]. 11  Benjamin, Surrealism, 210. (Benjamin is referring to Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja). 12  An extensive treatment of Benjamin’s interpretation of surrealism can be found in Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

281

highly influenced by Benjamin’s position. A contemporary of Benjamin, Jacob Taubes, develops in his essay Notes on Surrealism a very original and idiosyncratic interpretation of the Surrealistic experience.13 He equally reflects on the interrelation between the revelatory spiritual component and the nihilistic revolutionary component of the Surrealistic experience, but, unlike Benjamin, Taubes shows how both components essentially belong together by exploring the fundamental dynamics of surrealist transcendence. In other words, he develops an explicit interpretation of the meaning of the prefix “sur” in Surrealism. 2

Jacob Taubes: The Gnostic “Sur”

In Notes on Surrealism, Taubes recognises a recovery of Gnosticism and of the Gnostic conception of transcendence in the Surrealistic beyond. Gnosticism itself is an ancient spirituality characterised by a radical dualism between the god and the world. The Gnostics experience the cosmos as an inferior, even evil world, but they also believe that salvation from this material world is possible through a mystical knowledge (gnosis) of an absolutely transmundane deity. In order to understand Taubes’s idiosyncratic equation of Surrealism with Gnosticism, we will have to ask ourselves why someone would want to connect a modern, artistic movement to this ancient spirituality. Initially, modernity and Gnosticism seem to be opposed in many respects. There is neither a historical nor an obvious ideological relation between the two phenomena. Gnosticism was an ancient religious movement, whereas modernity arose almost a millennium after Gnosticism’s decline and explicitly presented itself as a secular movement. Gnosticism focuses exclusively on the supreme value of transcendence, whereas modernity seems to undermine transcendence. Nevertheless, some philosophers have advocated for a continuity between ancient Gnosticism and certain modern phenomena. The nineteenth-century theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur, for example, explains how Hegelian philosophy is radically influenced by ancient Gnostic ­cosmology.14 13  Jacob Taubes, “Noten zum Surrealismus,” in Immanente Ästhetik, Ästhetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966), 139–43. In this paper, I refer to the English translation: Jacob Taubes, “Notes on Surrealism,” in From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. and trans. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert et al., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 98–123. 14  Ferdinand Baur, Die Christliche Gnosis oder die Christliche Religionsphilosophie in ihrer Geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967).

282

Styfhals

Furthermore, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin recognises the influence of Gnosticism on the totalitarian regimes of the early twentieth century.15 Finally, in his Abendändische Eschatologie, Jacob Taubes himself illustrates how Gnosticism is a structuring force in the history of Western thought—not just in the first centuries AD, but also, in a secular guise, in the centuries that saw the emergence of modernity.16 However, Taubes’s interpretation of Surrealism appeals to yet another understanding of the interrelation between Gnosticism and modernity. In Notes on Surrealism, Taubes explicitly refers to Hans Jonas’s monumental Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist.17 Jonas, a great Gnosticism scholar as well as a student of Martin Heidegger, analyses ancient Gnosticism from a perspective that is highly influenced by Heideggerian and nihilistic philosophy. In an essay entitled Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism, Jonas even develops a systematic comparison between ancient Gnosticism and modern nihilism.18 As stated above, modern thought has a tendency to delegitimise transcendence and to reduce its influence on the immanent order. Both democratic politics and modern science try to shape or understand reality without an appeal to transcendence. The most radical representative of this modern denial of transcendence is of course Friedrich Nietzsche. The Nietzschean demolition of transcendence implies a radical nihilism, a devaluation of the highest values. Without reference to transcendence, only nothingness remains. In modernity, the immanent world eventually becomes meaningless and indifferent. Nature is devoid of any inherent value or order. Although this modern rejection of transcendence is completely opposed to the Gnostic emphasis on transcendence, Jonas argues that modern nihilism and Gnosticism are more closely related than one might initially expect. Indeed, the extreme Gnostic affirmation of transcendence also coincides with a radical renunciation of the immanent order: a devaluation of this world. Jonas states that this Gnostic acosmism implies a nihilism that is almost identical with modern nihilism. According to Gnostic belief, the forces that govern our world are not just evil or inferior, but, 15  Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). 16  Jacob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (Bern: Francke, 1947). In this paper, I refer to the English translation: Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 17  Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1934–1935). 18  Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message from the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 320–40.

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

283

in contrast with the omniscience of the Gnostic god of transcendence, they are also blind, ignorant, and indifferent to the human being. This world is not created for man’s sake, and it doesn’t contain any predetermined set of anthropomorphic values. Just like modern scientists and philosophers, Gnostics thus reject the traditional Aristotelian metaphysics and the ancient optimistic cosmology. The material world we live in is not a harmoniously ordered universe; rather, it is a valueless whole of contingent forces. Obviously, Gnostic nihilism differs from its modern variant to the extent that its motivations for this nihilistic outlook are completely different. Indeed, ancient Gnostic nihilism radically affirms transcendence, whereas modern nihilism originates from a rejection of transcendence tout court. Nonetheless, the practical consequences of both positions are identical, namely, the rejection of the inherent value of this world. Jonas concludes that both Gnostic and modern nihilism originate from the same radical alienation between man and world. The modern and the Gnostic man feel estranged and anxious in a universe that appears to be a hostile environment, indifferent in many ways to man’s aspirations. Jonas’s comparison of Gnosticism and modern nihilism is taken over by Taubes in his interpretation of Surrealism. The latter claims that “the nihilistic worldlessness of the Surrealistic experience repeats in modernity the nihilistic worldlessness of Gnosticism.”19 Taubes argues that both Gnosticism and Surrealism consider immanent reality as a deterministic, valueless, and evil world. In this respect, the world appears to be aesthetically and spiritually irrelevant and even restrictive. Taubes thus equates Surrealism’s nihilistic component with Gnosticism’s acosmism. For the time being, let us abstract from the question of whether or not this acosmism is a proper characterisation of the Surrealistic experience and explore how this acosmic Gnostic interpretation of Surrealism can account for the role of transcendence in Surrealism. By drawing attention to the Gnostic features of the Surrealistic experience, Taubes connects the nihilistic component of this experience to its (pseudo-)spiritual and transcendent component. Indeed, the Gnostic experience of an intra-cosmic nihilism immediately implies the spiritual experience of transcendence. The mystical contact (gnosis) with an absolutely transcendent god originates from a radical alienation and from the rejection of the immanent world. Only by being aware of this world’s godlessness can the Gnostic discover the transcendent god. The Gnostics thus conceive of transcendence as a counter-principle to this world. The transcendent order is not merely a realm beyond this world, but, above all, it is radically opposed to 19  Taubes, “Notes on Surrealism,” 101.

284

Styfhals

it.20 Gnosticism’s fundamental separation between transcendence and immanence is even more radical than any Protestant or Jewish dualism. The transcendent Gnostic god has no relation to immanence whatsoever. Unlike the Judeo-Christian god, the Gnostic god is neither the creator of this immanent world nor does he intervene in it. The immanent reality is rather created and governed by a fallen or evil deity often called the “demiurge.” The Gnostic god can only save humankind by destroying this wicked world. In this sense, Gnostic nihilism also entails a strong revolutionary momentum. This revolution does not aim at a mere immanent sociopolitical change, but rather at some kind of cosmological turnabout, a destruction of the immanent world. The Gnostic revolution wants to oppose “the totality of this world with a new totality that comprehensively founds anew in the way that it negates.”21 In other words, Gnosticism discovers within an acosmic, nihilistic, and form-destroying rejection a forming power beyond this world. From the nihilistic negation itself originates a positive affirmation of a transcendent world. Indeed, the negative Gnostic awareness that this world is evil gives access to a transcendent world and already entails a certain positive amount of salvation. Taubes correctly recognises this positive potential of the negation in Surre­ alism as well. Indeed, Surrealism and the modern avant-garde originate from a nihilistic rejection—often a rejection of the culturo-political tradition—and discover within this negation itself a positive and creative force. This positive creativity can never really overcome or do away with the initial nihilistic negation without endangering the original driving force of the avant-garde movement itself. In Dadaism and early Surrealism, for example, negation and provocation are aesthetical effects in their own right. However, Taubes seems to overrate the resemblance between Surrealism and Gnosticism by comparing the Surrealistic dynamics of transcendence with Gnostic transcendence. Although Surrealism and Gnosticism share a countercultural and revolutionary inspiration, it is questionable whether this resemblance is also valid on a metaphysical level. In Taubes’s view, the surrealist wants to oppose a transcendent order of reality against this material world. Just like in Gnostic transcendence, this Surrealistic transcendence is rooted in man’s alienation from this world and in a nihilistic experience of the world’s determinism. Both 20  “The beyond is beyond the world in its entirety. [Gnosticism] introduces the dualistic feeling of God’s world, a world unidentifiable with the here and now. God’s world differs more and more markedly from the present world; it appears increasingly to be opposed to this world.” [Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 27]. 21  Ibid., 9.

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

285

ancient gnosis and the Surrealistic experience try to overcome this nihilism by opening up a completely new transcendent realm of absolute and unlimited freedom and creativity. Although Taubes’s comparison between Gnostic and Surrealistic transcendence is far-fetched, the close interrelation he explores between the nihilistic outlook and the positive affirmation of a transcendence is fundamental to Surrealism. The prefix “sur” in Surrealism does not merely designate the attempt to go beyond immanence, it also points to the revolutionary and nihilistic origin of this attempt. By comparing Surrealistic transcendence with the Gnostic concept of transcendence, Taubes explains why the former is structurally irreconcilable with the traditional Christian conception of the beyond: “The categories of an orthodox Christian doctrine are useless for grasping the a-cosmism as it articulates itself in Gnosticism and modern poetry [Surrealism].”22 Christian orthodoxy emphasises the interpenetration of the immanent world and the transcendent god, while Gnosticism and Surrealism only allow for radical separation and opposition. The fundamental intertwinement of nihilism and transcendence, characteristic of Gnosticism and Surrealism, indicates the radical difference between the Gnostic and the Christian conception of transcendence. In Christianity, transcendence and immanence are not opposed; rather, they are interrelated. To the extent that the Christian god is the creator of this world, nature itself cannot be nihilistic. On the contrary, nature reveals the presence of the transcendent god within immanence itself. The cosmos is a reflection of the infinite mystery of transcendence. This correspondence between the immanent and the transcendent realm is of course infinitely multifaceted and can ultimately not be grasped univocally. In the Middle Ages, then, the Christian interrelation between transcendence and immanence is interpreted as a kind of symbolic analogy. In modernity, however, this symbolic correspondence is shattered. The modern sciences do not interpret this world as an enchanted and divinised cosmos: Nature is a valueless whole of contingent forces that can only be interpreted more geometrico—in a univocal, mathematical way. This modern separation of transcendence and immanence already entails a return to a more Gnostic conception of the world. More importantly, Taubes claims that this modern scientific revolution and its rejection of Christian scholastic cosmology radically influenced the evolution of the arts in modernity: Modern poetry, despite its opposition to natural science and technology, stands in the shadows of the prevailing natural-scientific concept of 22  Taubes, “Notes on Surrealism,” 101.

286

Styfhals

reality. [. . .] The triumph of the natural-scientific interpretation of reality pushed the symbolic interpretation of the world into poetry and exposed it as a product of fantasy that remains without worldly correlate.23 By proclaiming the modern scientific method to be the only legitimate way to attain true knowledge, the moderns dismissed the (medieval) symbolic interpretation of reality. Any discourse about transcendence is pushed aside and is delegitimised as pseudo-knowledge. Consequently, the symbolic interpretation found refuge in Romanticism and eventually in modern art. However, this symbolism had permanently lost its ontological and epistemological status, for it was no longer founded on a real correspondence between transcendence and immanence. Lacking an external referent, the symbolic correspondences were cut off from the outer world. From now on, they remain confined within the individual interiority of the artist and become as it were self-sufficient. Ultimately, the subjective analogies and correspondences are just the product of human imagination and fantasy. These faculties of imagination and fantasy, the last offshoots of the medieval symbolic correspondence, have played a pivotal role in Romanticism. Romantic art no longer wants to represent reality, but it instead wants to reconfigure and recreate the world according to the subjective principles of analogy and free imagination: “The act of creation here no longer copies an exemplary creation, the order of the world, rather it disassembles and destroys this order, in order to create out of these depths of the soul a new world from its individual parts and to attest to the sensation of the new.”24 In Surrealism, the notion of imagination is obviously omnipresent as well. However, its functioning is radicalised to such an extent that the role of analogy and correspondence eventually disappears completely. In the unrestrained imagination of Surrealism, every trace of correspondence with reality is discarded: “[In Surrealism], heterogeneous elements, tattered and without context, are brought together. The individual object is torn out of its established or original context and is placed in unexpected surroundings or imbued with a new application.”25 Taubes argues that the Surrealist, just like the ancient Gnostic, is completely disconnected from this world and discovers within pure interiority—“in the depths of the soul”—a new world of absolute freedom. He violently destroys the immanent world, and from its ashes he recreates a surreal world according to unknown and internal laws. Both the Gnostic and 23  Ibid., 100. 24  Ibid., 100. 25  Ibid., 101.

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

287

the Surrealist believe that this surreal transcendent realm is only accessible by turning inward and by opening up an inner hidden self. However, unlike Romanticism, Surrealism does not want to manifest the subjective interiority of the individual artist. The Surrealist rather appeals to the more primordial, presubjective force. Gnosticism has called this fundamental interiority “pneuma” (“spirit”). It is the internal spark of a transcendent reality that is inaccessible to the individual human soul. The Surrealists, influenced by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, rather relate this pre-subjective interiority to the unconscious. In Surrealism, romantic imagination is transformed into free association and unconscious automatism. Surrealist automatism is in this sense a method for manifesting this hidden and unconscious self. It is the revelation of a kind of thinking that precedes any rational, moral, or aesthetic thought.26 3

Gnosticism’s Inadequate Ontology

Obviously, Taubes’s comparison between Surrealism and Gnosticism is far-fetched and will ultimately fall short in accounting for the nature of Surrealistic transcendence. First, Gnosticism’s metaphysical dualism is incompatible with the atheistic and materialistic outlook of Surrealism. In spite of some striking similarities between gnosis and Surrealism, Taubes has to recognise a fundamental difference between Gnostic and Surrealistic transcendence. The Gnostic experience consists of individual mystical contact with an order of reality that is ontologically transcendent to the immanent world. If Surrealism is indeed influenced by the modern scientific worldview, this ontological dualism is no longer philosophically conceivable. In the end, it does not really matter whether Taubes conceives of Surrealistic transcendence as a Gnostic or Christian one. The idea of an ontological transcendence in general is ultimately incompatible with the modern and materialistic worldview that Surrealism inevitably adopts. Although Surrealism wants to overthrow this scientific and deterministic conception of reality, it cannot merely recover a pre-modern cosmology. The Surrealistic protest is directed against modern science, but it remains confined to the immanent order itself:

26  “Surréalisme: Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de toute contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale.” [Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, 36].

288

Styfhals

The protest of modern poetry, in contrast to the Gnostic protest, can never reach a beyond of the world in a strict cosmological sense, no matter how far it strives to advance beyond the boundaries of the world drawn by the scientific interpretation. [. . .] The surrealist revolt proceeds against the infinite world posited by the modern natural sciences and technology that is experienced as a system of domination and coercion. But in its escape from this infinite coercive system of the world, it cannot invoke the guarantee of a god beyond the world.27 Despite the inaptness of Gnostic cosmology in modernity, Taubes argues that the structural dynamics of Gnostic transcendence remain fully present in Surrealism. The Gnostic conception of transcendence returns in Surrealism but discards its underlying ontology. Taubes believes that Surrealistic imagination and free association are the post-mystical, post-spiritual experiences of an unthinkable transcendence within immanence itself. In this respect, he connects his interpretation of the Surrealistic experience to Benjamin’s notion of profane illumination.28 Surrealistic transcendence is a profane and secularised transcendence contained within the immanence of the work of art. In modernity, the work of art itself becomes the only possible beyond. In this respect, Taubes refers to the Surrealist writer Louis Aragon: “Seule signification du mot au-delà, tu es dans la poésie.”29 Even if it were possible to drop the metaphysical background of Gnostic transcendence, it remains to be seen whether the radically dualistic and acosmic structure of Gnosticism can be applied to Surrealism. Obviously, Surrealism is characterised by a revolutionary and nihilistic impulse. It is neither interested in ordinary reality as it is, nor in any realistic reproduction of this world. Because the world as such is meaningless and aesthetically uninteresting, Surrealism wants to imagine a radically different world that overcomes the realistic order of this one. However, this nihilism does not imply the anticosmic attitude of Gnosticism. Surrealism does not want to reject or escape from immanent reality. On the contrary, the central importance of photography and film in the Surrealist movement proves that Surrealist art is very often engaged in this immanent world.30 Even so, Surrealist photography is as little 27  Taubes, “Notes on Surrealism,” 103. 28  “I am in agreement with Walter Benjamin that in surrealism a creative overcoming of religious illumination takes place in favor of a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration.” [Ibid., 105]. 29  Ibid., 104. 30  Rosalind Kraus, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (1981): 3–34.

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

289

interested in a mere realistic reproduction of the world as any other Surrealist trend. Surrealist photography wittingly depicts a completely meaningless state of affairs, but by observing and reassembling these utterly insignificant facts it creates or discovers a new surreal world within the immanent world itself. This is why the technique of photomontage takes up such an important position in Surrealist photography. The photomontage is a composite image of different and unrelated photographs, often depicting a strange and even impossible reality. The surrealist montage immanently creates a surreal world by recomposing and reassembling the realistic world. In one way or another, this artistic process of montage is present in a lot of Surrealist poems and paintings as well. Surrealist art paradigmatically associates unconnected facts and impressions in an unusual, dream-like, or freely improvised composition. In this sense, Surrealism installs or discovers a new and hitherto unseen dimension within immanent reality. It creates a transcendent world with immanent means. Although this surreality is inaccessible to and unable to be seen by any ordinary or realistic perception of the world, it does not reject or negate the immanent world in itself. On this basis, Taubes misinterprets Benjamin’s notion of profane illumination. According to Benjamin, the Surrealist illumination is not a modern recovery of a religious experience which opens up an ontological transcendence and negates this world. The profane illumination of Surrealism is rather an intoxicating inspiration that arises from within immanence. Ultimately, Gnostic dualism is an inadequate ontological model for understanding the nature of Surrealism. Surrealistic transcendence has nothing to do with religious transcendence and even less so with acosmic transcendence. Gnosticism scholar Ioan Culianu raises the objection to Taubes that the Gnostic opposition between transcendence and immanence is probably more compatible with Romantic art than with Surrealism.31 The Romantic escapist withdrawal from the immanent world into the artistic depths of the soul more closely resembles Gnostic acosmism. By adopting Gnosticism’s radical dualism and acosmism, Taubes univocally denies the Surrealistic interest in immanent reality. His radically dualistic outlook does not allow him to understand how Surrealistic transcendence remains confined within immanence itself. His perspective cannot account for a so-called “immanent transcendence.” Hans Blumenberg, a German philosopher and a friend of Taubes, has criticised the latter’s interpretation of Surrealism precisely on this basis.32 31  Ioan Culianu, “The Gnostic Revenge: Gnosticism and Romantic Literature,” in Gnosis und Politik, ed. Jacob Taubes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984), 290–306. 32  In a 1964 colloquium of the group Poetik und Hermeneutik, one of the leading interdisciplinary research groups in postwar Germany, Taubes and Blumenberg discussed the

290 4

Styfhals

Hans Blumenberg: The Horizontal “Sur”

In his reply to Taubes, Hans Blumenberg reproaches him for overemphasising the verticality of Surrealistic transcendence. He claims that Taubes should discard any reference to spiritual transcendence. From Taubes’s perspective, modern art appears to be a mere recovery of an old religious pattern, a kind of neo-paganism or neo-mysticism. However, for Blumenberg, this approach obscures the true nature of twentieth-century art in general and Surrealism in particular. He believes that the Surrealistic experience introduces a radically original way of perceiving reality that is incomparable with any pre-modern perception of the world. In short, the modern aesthetic experience is not a secular duplicate of a pre modern religious experience. In order to understand the philosophical scope of Blumenberg’s critical assessment of Taubes’s position, one has to keep in mind his interpretation of modern thought in general. In the renowned Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, Blumenberg radically criticises the positions that have interpreted modernity and different modern phenomena as immanent recoveries or secularisations of a pre-modern religious frameworks.33 Time and again, Blumenberg wants to defend the epochal originality and the intrinsic legitimacy of the modern age. Therefore, he objects to Taubes that the modern turn toward immanence and the loss of transcendence do not necessarily entail the immanentisation of an old religious framework. In the case of Surrealism, the Surrealistic beyond cannot be conceived of as an immanent substitute for Gnostic transcendence. The immanent frame of modernity allows for very different and unexpected possibilities that might be completely independent from old religious methods of approaching reality. In this respect, Blumenberg states that the structure of Gnostic acosmism cannot be applied to Surrealism’s negative and nihilistic experience of reality. The Surrealistic opposition between artistic fantasy and the nihilistic determinism of reality is not a mere immanent recovery of this Gnostic opposition between the transcendent god and the evil world. Blumenberg argues that Gnostic dualism cannot be present in Surrealism because of the yawning gap between the Gnostic and the modern conceptions of nature and reality. The Gnostics believe that the cosmos is governed by an evil law, whereas the moderns interpret nature as something indifferent and meaningless. By calling nature evil, Gnosticism obviously rejects and reverses the metaphysical nature of Surrealistic transcendence. [Hans Blumenberg et al., “Surrealism and Gnosis,” in From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert et al., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 98–123]. 33  Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976).

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

291

optimism of Greek cosmology. However, Gnostic cosmology remains confined within an ancient conception of reality to the extent that it is still structured according to the anthropocentric category of evil. The Gnostic world is evil because it resists human happiness—not because it is indifferent to the human being. The modern universe, on the other hand, cannot be categorised anthropocentrically and goes beyond the distinction between good and evil itself. Indeed, the modern cosmos is not metaphysically evil, for it is indifferent, lawless, and valueless. Furthermore, this modern conception of reality obviously implies a different disposition toward reality than does the Gnostic conception of revolt. If nature is evil and explicitly anti-human, the human being has to reject this world in its entirety, and he has to escape it as soon as possible. However, if nature is just a valueless facticity, solutions other than a mere escapist rejection become conceivable. Although the modern cosmos is ultimately meaningless and even indifferent to the human pursuit of happiness, modern man does not reject this world: He can intervene in the world in order to change and improve it for his own benefit because this world is meaningless and has lost its pre-modern divine status. The modern scientist does not ask whether this world is metaphysically good or evil, but rather how it can be made valuable to him. By becoming maître et possesseur of the world, modern man gives a new, immanent meaning to this reality. In view of this modern conception of reality and human action, Blumenberg wonders whether the modern Surrealistic revolt can originate in a strong opposition to this world, that is, in Gnostic acosmism: But is the revolt of Surrealism really targeted against nature? Or is it not rather the purpose of the way in which Nature is treated to forge a selfaffirmation of the human person from the totally hyletic utilizability of the world as it is presented to him, a self-affirmation that succeeds to the extent that this world is not “Nature” any longer?34 Unlike Gnosticism, the nihilistic revolt of Surrealism is not opposed to a metaphysically evil or deterministic reality. According to Blumenberg, the modern Surrealists do not really experience this world itself as deterministic or constraining. Obviously, Surrealism rejects the worldview of the natural sciences and realistic art; it loathes the scientific attempt to contain the versatility and contingency of reality within the dull scheme of a deterministic and realistic theory. Nonetheless, just like modern scientists, Surrealists experience 34  Blumenberg et al., “Surrealism and Gnosis,” 116.

292

Styfhals

this world as a valueless whole—as a world that is “not ‘Nature’ any longer.” Obviously, Surrealism does not want to fix this reality in a deterministic, scientific system in order to contain and control it; rather, it wants to create a new world by the immanent decomposition and destruction of this world’s order. Confined within limits of pure immanence itself, this revolutionary destruction can essentially never be complete or definitive. The new surreal world cannot be interpreted as a determinate metaphysical realm beyond and against this world. The new world of Surrealism originates, rather, from the infinite recomposition of the present world. It is the future world of an inexhaustible revolutionary expectation of freedom and creativity: I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in this quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.35 In conclusion, Blumenberg argues that there is a different and more innovative transcendence at stake in Surrealism than Taubes can account for in his comparison between Surrealism and Gnosticism. Indeed, Surrealistic transcendence should not primarily be understood as a vertical and Gnostic opposition to nature. The revolutionary world of Surrealism is created, rather, by the artist decomposing and recomposing this material world itself—the surrealist montages and collages being the most straightforward examples of this reassembling of immanent reality. The Surrealistic reality does not merely arise as a negation of nature; it arises as a product of the revolutionary artistic intervention in nature itself. The artist can change, alter, and reinvent the order of nature by means of imagination and fantasy. In this respect, the prefix “sur” does not refer to any vertical, mystical transcendence beyond this world; rather, it refers to the new, Surrealistic world that literally “survives” the artistic decomposition of nature. Therefore, Blumenberg interprets Surrealistic transcendence as a kind of horizontal or immanent transcendence. 5

The Interpretation of Modernity: Enlightenment vs. Romanticism

We can conclude that there is more at stake in the discussion between Taubes and Blumenberg than a mere reflection on Surrealism itself. The two philoso35  Breton, Manifestes du Surréalisme, 24. (My translation).

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

293

phers do not seem to disagree so much about the stylistic interpretation of Surrealist art as they do about the historico-philosophical conditions of possibility for the aesthetic experience in modernism and about the historical paradigm of modernity in general. For Taubes, the modern aesthetic experience seems to be a continuation of the pre-modern experience of the sacred. The experience of modern art is the experience of a transcendence that is internal to this world itself, of an otherness within pure immanence. Although Blumenberg might not reject this description of the modern aesthetic experience altogether, he wonders why this transcendence should still be conceived of in (post-)religious terms. Modern and Surrealist art are characterised by a certain kind of transcendence, but this modern variant of transcendence cannot be compared to or derived from any religious conception of the beyond. Most fundamentally, the disagreement between Taubes and Blumenberg about the philosophical nature of the Surrealist and the modernist experience is rooted in a different interpretation of modernity in general. Taubes’s appeal to a vertical transcendence as well as Blumenberg’s rejection of this form of transcendence can eventually be explained by their different implicit conceptions of modernity and, more specifically, of the modern notion of freedom. Blumenberg seems to defend an enlightened interpretation of modernity and freedom, while Taubes takes up the equally modern position of the nineteenthcentury Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism. If we return to the issue of Surrealism, the pursuit of political and metaphysical freedom appears to be the driving force behind this artistic movement.36 Surrealism tries to overcome the world’s nihilism by discovering an unlimited freedom in a new surreal reality. Obviously, Blumenberg’s and Taubes’s different interpretations of this interplay between the nihilistic experience and the attainment of freedom influence their respective ontologies of the Surrealistic beyond. According to Blumenberg, modern nihilism consists in the absence of an inherent value in this world. Because of this meaninglessness, the modern scientist, the enlightened philosopher, and the modern artist can legitimately intervene in the world. They can change and alter the nihilistic and deterministic structure of reality in order to attain freedom within the realm of immanence itself. In other words, the nihilistic experience of this world’s determinism does not contradict the possibility of immanent freedom. On the contrary, the recognition of this nihilism, combined with the knowledge of its deterministic laws, is the condition of possibility of modern freedom itself. 36  “Le seul mot de liberté est tout ce qui m’exalte encore.” [Ibid., 12].

294

Styfhals

Freedom and determinism are for Blumenberg immanently c­ompatible.37 Therefore, the Surrealistic realm of absolute freedom and creativity does not need the dubious appeal to a vertical transcendence. It is attainable, rather, within immanent reality by deconstructing and reconstructing the deterministic order of this world. However, because the Surrealistic pursuit of freedom is confined within immanence itself, the attainment of this freedom can never be absolute. No revolutionary overcoming of the deterministic constraints of reality can be truly definitive, for an ever greater freedom from these immanent constraints is always conceivable. Without the benchmark of an absolute or transcendent goal, Surrealism’s artistic quest is virtually infinite. Therefore, its revolutionary expectation of a surreality is as inexhaustible as it is unattainable. Obviously, Taubes subscribes neither to Blumenberg’s immanent frame nor to his understanding of freedom. He raises the following objection to Blumenberg’s interpretation of freedom and determinism: It bypasses the arguments of the counter-Enlightenment, which perceive the legality of nature and freedom as contradictory. Certainly, the protest against the legality of nature had initially been a topos of the counterEnlightenment since De Maistre. It should be noted, however, that this protest also contains such movements as enter into the protest and revolt of surrealism in the twentieth century.38 Taubes (over)emphasises that the revolutionary and artistic components of the Surrealist movement should be understood as being in line with the CounterEnlightenment and Romanticism. In this respect, freedom and nihilistic determinism are incompatible for Taubes. Because true freedom is essentially inconceivable within immanence itself, his interpretation of the Surrealistic beyond inevitably has to appeal to a vertical transcendence. Although Taubes is aware of the impossibility of this vertical dynamic in modernity, his radically dualistic outlook does not allow him to conceive of Surrealistic freedom without a true transcendence. 37  “The laws of nature are thus precisely not the quality of reality that constrains the self in its freedom [. . .]. Rather, they are the medium allied with freedom under whose influence the phenomenal eidetic of nature proves itself to be the accidental status of a process, or the foreground, studded with secondary qualities, of an inexhaustible and disposable potentiality.” [Blumenberg et al., “Surrealism and Gnosis,” 118]. 38  Taubes, “Surrealism and Gnosis,” 122–23.

The Gnostic “ Sur ” in Surrealism

295

References Baur, Ferdinand. Die Christliche Gnosis oder die Christliche Religionsphilosophie in ihrer Geschichtlichen Entwicklung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967. Benjamin, Walter. “Der Sürrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz.” In Aufsätze, Essays, Vortägen. Gesammelte Schriften Band II, 295–310. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. ———. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” In Selected Writings 2. 1927–1934, 207–21. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Blumenberg, Hans et al., “Surrealism and Gnosis.” In From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason. Edited by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert et al., 98–123. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Breton, André. Le Surréalisme et la Peinture. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. ———. Manifestes du Surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Breton, André and Philippe Soupault, Les Champs Magnétiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1920. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Culianu, Ioan. “The Gnostic Revenge: Gnosticism and Romantic Literature.” In Gnosis und Politik. Edited by Jacob Taubes. 290–306. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984. Jonas, Hans. Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1934–1935. ———. The Gnostic Religion: The Message from the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. Kraus, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October 19 (1981): 3–34. Taubes, Jacob. Abendländische Eschatologie. Bern: Francke, 1947. ———. “Noten zum Surrealismus.” In Immanente Ästhetik, Ästhetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne. Edited by Wolfgang Iser. 139–43. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966. ———. Occidental Eschatology. Translated by David Ratmoko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. ———. “Notes on Surrealism.” In From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason. Edited and translated by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert et al., 98–123. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Wolin, Richard. “From Messianism to Materialism: The Later Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin.” New German Critique 22 (1981): 81–108.

Index absolute 37, 40, 42, 87, 97, 99–105, 107, 116, 180, 189, 203, 220, 227, 231, 261, 285–286, 292, 294 absolute spirit 100 act 10, 13, 16, 24, 40, 42, 48, 51, 53, 56, 60–61, 68, 70, 97, 118–121, 125, 132, 135, 144, 154, 157, 161–162, 176, 190 n. 7, 194, 204–210, 212, 214–217, 221–223, 247, 265, 267, 286 activity 4, 9, 54, 86, 125, 133, 206, 208, 217, 224 actuality 20, 22, 63, 134, 140–145 Adorno 4, 185, 187–198, 236, 242, 246 adultery 69, 71 aesthetical (the) 19–20, 22, 96–97, 111, 126 n. 68, 127, 155–156, 192, 276, 284 aesthetic(s), aesthetic 3–4, 25, 85–86, 90–91, 93, 95, 109, 116, 118, 122–128, 131, 138–141, 145, 151, 154, 169, 175, 178, 185–187, 193–194, 196–198, 203–205, 207, 212, 216–217, 277, 280 n. 9 aesthetics/aesthete/aesthetical 3–4, 19–20, 22, 25, 55, 82, 84–87, 90–91, 93, 95–97, 108–109, 111, 116, 118, 121–128, 131, 138–141, 145, 151, 154–156, 158–160, 163, 169, 172, 175, 177–178, 180, 185–189, 191–198, 203–217, 225, 235 n. 2, 237, 249, 274, 276–277, 280 n. 9, 284, 287–288, 290, 293 aesthetisation 116, 123, 131 Agamben, Giorgio 9, 269 n. 48 agape 46, 57 alienation 188–189, 190 n. 5, 191, 237, 247, 261, 283–284 amphiboly 170, 173, 174 n. 27, 175 anthropology 127–129, 132, 142, 182 n. 53, 204 anxiety 30, 39–40, 42, 47, 61, 72, 111, 131, 139, 253, 270 aphorism 14 apollonian 244 aporia 14, 59, 88, 196 appearance 42, 64, 86, 99, 117–119, 121, 131, 166, 171, 174, 209, 216, 236, 242, 271 Aragon, Louis 277, 280, 288

Aristotle 4, 10–17, 20 n. 40, 21, 24–25, 42, 46, 48, 55, 112 art 2–4, 29, 37–42, 72 n. 29, 82, 84–93, 96, 97 n. 5, 108–109, 115 n. 25, 116–117, 124, 140, 160–161, 164, 167, 178–179, 194–198, 204, 212, 221, 248, 253–255, 259–260, 265, 276–278, 285–286, 288–291, 293 work of -, - work 3, 88–89, 91–92, 96, 108, 161, 167, 212, 221, 248, 253–254, 277, 288 art of living 29, 37–42 art of dying 39 artist 4, 43, 83–84, 89, 96, 107–109, 203, 210, 212, 220–221, 253–255, 276, 286–287, 292–293 Austro-Hungarian Empire 252, 258, 269 automatism (Surrealism) 209, 277, 287 autonomy 57, 98–99, 109, 116–117, 122, 145, 159–160, 163, 166, 196 Bataille, Georges 14, 16–17, 23 beautiful 2–4, 17, 71, 82–84, 95, 116–118, 120–122, 124, 126, 138, 140, 155, 172, 176, 186, 197–198, 211, 229 beauty 3, 25, 28 n. 5, 62, 64, 71–72, 82, 90, 116–125, 127–128, 131, 155, 177, 186–187, 195, 197, 211, 256, 276 Benjamin, Walter 188, 220, 223–224, 226–227, 230, 232, 279–281, 288–289 Blanchot, Maurice 4, 14, 16–18, 21–24 bliss 65–66, 76 Blumenberg, Hans 289–294 Boétie, Etienne de la 12–13, 15, 27–29, 31–34, 37–44 boredom 19–20, 186 Breton, André 209, 277–278, 280 capacity 3, 11, 31, 35 n. 11, 52–54, 113, 125, 135, 141, 144, 156–164, 174–175, 178, 181–182, 195, 197, 222–223, 226, 234, 237, 255, 259, 265, 268 n. 44, 270, 271 n. 52, 274 capitalism 189, 190, 251, 268 Cassirer, Ernst 4, 170, 178–182 certainty 13, 31, 34–35, 37, 40, 42, 49, 55, 204, 213, 228

Index christianity 93, 131–132, 134–135, 145–146, 285 Cicero 12, 14, 42, 46 Climacus, Johannes 22, 112 n. 7, 146, 187 coercion 118, 133, 137, 288 cognition 84, 87–88, 90–91, 172 n. 18, 174, 177, 181 community 3, 16–17, 23, 30, 86, 102–103, 106, 138, 146 n. 134, 172–173, 254 n. 9, 270 n. 49 continuity/discontinuity 16–18, 281 crime 1, 135–136, 138, 146, 196, 257, 272 critique 95, 110, 129, 169–171, 173, 175–178, 181, 185–186, 188, 192, 194, 245, 251–252, 262, 273–274 cultivation 83, 88, 110, 140, 161 culture 33, 90, 102, 130, 140, 170, 173, 178–182, 195, 258 dance 130 death 2, 15, 24–25, 27, 29, 38, 40–42, 55, 64, 68, 70, 97–105, 107, 143–145, 214, 272, 292 decency 124 demonic 47–49, 51, 59, 144 decision 31, 35–36, 39, 57–61, 68–69, 112, 120, 204–206, 208 Derrida, Jacques 4, 10, 14–15, 17–18, 270–271 desire 30, 34, 37, 40–41, 63, 66, 72, 81–82, 84, 92, 123, 129, 141, 152–155, 161, 163–165, 187–188, 197, 206, 212, 216–217, 228–231, 248 despair 47–48, 50–51, 142, 144–145 dialectics 46–47, 49, 52, 54, 185, 188, 193–194, 196–197 dichotomy 19, 237 dignity 56, 90, 116, 118, 120–122, 124, 127, 131, 157, 159, 162–163, 167, 259 n. 22, 262 dionysian 244 dissonance 237–238, 240, 242 divine 3, 57 n. 24, 64, 85, 96, 101, 105–108, 138, 162, 180, 211, 291 divine law 101, 105–108 domination 73, 110, 113, 118, 136, 195, 288 double 16, 41, 53–54, 57, 214, 216 drive 21, 64, 85, 92, 117–119, 123, 164, 188, 230 duplication 53, 133 n. 92, 237, 242–243 Duras, Marguerite 18 n. 29

297 duty 57–59, 75, 112, 116–117, 119–124, 126–128, 133–134, 140, 144, 153, 157, 161, 177, 185, 256, 259 n. 22 dynamical 152, 158 education 49, 83–86, 111, 124, 138, 139 n. 117, 256, 265 n. 36 effervescence 210, 212, 215 elusiveness 33, 44 engagement 11, 42, 190 n. 5, 196, 224, 227, 246, 247, 249 enjoyment 16, 21, 73, 116, 129–130, 187 Entartete Kunst 254 n. 7 eros 46 erotic love 18–20, 46 error 15, 263–265 ethical see ethics, ethics/ethical ethics 3–4, 10–13, 20, 25, 41, 47, 57–59, 61, 69, 85–86, 90–91, 109–113, 115–117, 119, 122–124, 128–129, 131–133, 138–146, 151, 177–178, 185–187, 190, 196–199, 203, 252, 264, 272–274 virtue 11–12, 21, 32, 37, 42, 48, 55, 70, 73, 75, 112–113, 115–116, 121, 125–126, 128–131, 133–134, 137, 140, 142, 159, 161, 187, 196, 242, 244, 249, 262 second 4, 9, 14, 20, 25, 29, 35, 41, 46, 67, 72, 81, 86, 99, 101, 103, 105, 108, 111–112, 116–118, 120, 125, 127, 131–133, 139, 142–146, 153, 169, 171, 176–177, 186, 188, 192, 210, 212, 215–216, 223–224, 256, 277 ethics/ethical 3–4, 10–13, 20, 22–25, 41, 47, 50, 55–61, 69, 85–87, 89–91, 93, 95–97, 108–113, 115–119, 122–124, 127–129, 131–133, 138–147, 151, 153–154, 163, 177–178, 185–194, 196–198, 203–205, 209, 217, 225, 227–228, 231, 249, 252, 259, 264, 271–274 ethos 3, 116, 124–125, 127, 264–265, 274 aesthetic see aesthetic(s) evil 1, 20, 47–48, 87, 161, 192, 261, 270, 278, 281–284, 290–291 existential meaning of as a form of authentic self-involvement  29 as a relation to the self 33 as opposed to other human relationships  30

298

Index

experience 1, 4, 11–12, 14, 23, 29, 33–34, 37–39, 41–44, 49, 59, 66–67, 72, 90, 97–105, 107, 136, 151–157, 159–167, 170, 185, 187–189, 190 n. 5, 191–194, 203, 206–207, 213, 216, 220–221, 225–230, 234, 237, 240–241, 244, 246–247, 249, 254, 255 n. 9, 264, 268, 269, 271, 276–281, 283–285, 287–291, 293

165, 186, 229, 235–239, 245–247, 261, 273, 291 moral 38 will 110, 119, 124–125 good life 21, 38–41, 43, 100, 110 grace 1, 3, 27, 113 n. 8, 116, 118–124, 127–128, 131, 134, 211 Greek world 95–96, 101, 105–106, 109

faith 40 n. 17, 43 n. 20, 58, 61, 137, 144–146, 188, 190 n. 5, 223, 225, 231, 258–259 family life 22, 104 fantasy 81, 132, 276–278, 286, 290, 292 fate 2, 33, 70, 132, 136–138, 145, 254 n. 9, 263 fear of death 38, 97–101, 104–105, 107 feeling 2–3, 12, 15, 42, 83–84, 86–92, 114, 123–125, 128, 132, 133 n. 92, 135, 137–138, 151, 153–155, 157–160, 162, 164–167, 171–172, 188, 207–208, 212, 214, 216, 229–231, 237, 240–242, 256–257, 259–260, 262, 265 n. 36, 284 n. 20 female 106 feminine 81, 230 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 122, 133, 140 First World War 252, 259 n. 22, 260, 262, 268, 272 forgetting 11, 115, 146, 192, 211, 226 forgiveness 49–51, 137, 145–146 freedom 9, 38, 47, 49, 61, 65, 72, 84, 95, 99–106, 108, 109 n. 19, 114, 117–118, 121, 125, 134, 151, 154–157, 159, 161–163, 166, 176, 190, 257, 278, 285–286, 292–294 free will 117, 155, 157 Freud, Sigmund 272–273, 287 friendship 4, 9–25, 28–39, 41–44, 46–62 fusion 15–17, 19–20, 22–23, 25, 74, 83, 174, 242

happiness moral 129–130 harmony 115, 121–123, 125, 131, 134, 137–139, 142, 145, 171, 181, 186, 210, 214, 246, 254 n. 7 health 140, 158, 253–254, 271 heart 9–10, 13–14, 16–17, 23, 38, 46, 52, 55, 66, 68, 90, 115, 121, 132, 140, 211 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4–5, 49, 65, 70 n. 23, 76–77, 85, 95–101, 103–106, 108–109, 95–96, 111, 120 n. 42, 131–139, 143, 145–146, 186–187, 281 hermeneutics 68, 172 historical 4, 27, 71, 85–86, 100, 102, 164, 166, 170, 174, 189, 195–197, 216, 258, 263, 270, 274, 281, 293 Hobbes, Thomas 74 holiness 112 horizontal 239, 242–243, 245, 248, 292 human 1–4, 14, 16, 19–20, 22, 24, 29–31, 40, 42 n. 1, 52, 58, 64–66, 68, 71, 74–75, 81, 85–86, 89, 92, 96–98, 100–108, 110–113, 115–121, 123, 125, 129, 132–134, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146–147, 154, 157, 172–173, 178, 181–182, 190 n. 5, 193–194, 196, 204–205, 209, 216, 223, 225, 229, 232, 239, 247–248, 253–254, 256, 261–264, 270 n. 49, 272, 277–278, 283, 286–287, 291 human law 96, 101–108 human relationships as a pattern 14, 24, 29–30 as a fragmentation of the self 19, 31 humanity 56, 85, 119, 120–121, 127, 129–131, 141–142, 243, 272

game 46, 63, 66, 130, 203, 227, 230, 244, 249 gnosticism 281–285, 287–292 God, god, deity 27, 34, 49, 52, 54, 57–59, 63–64, 83–84, 92–93, 100, 108, 137–138, 144–146, 163, 225, 258, 281, 283–285, 288, 290 good 2–4, 11–12, 21, 30, 37–41, 43, 46–48, 50, 52–53, 58, 64, 67, 71, 75, 83, 87, 95, 100, 110, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 124–125, 129–131, 139–140, 154, 157–158, 161, 163,

ideality 22, 25, 140–145 identity 49, 55–56, 61, 76, 87, 89, 91–92, 97–98, 173, 175–177, 190, 258

Index image 1–3, 43, 69–70, 85, 89–90, 145, 179, 186, 188–189, 191, 195, 215–216, 220–223, 226 n. 13, 237, 239, 241–244, 247, 249, 267, 268 n. 44, 273, 289 imagination 39, 84–85, 88, 90, 134, 138, 146, 152, 154–156, 158, 173, 177, 191–192, 260 n. 24, 276, 278–279, 286–288, 292 immanence 143, 220, 225, 280, 284–286, 288–290, 292–294 immediacy 24–25, 95, 106, 140, 244 immoral (see morality) 151, 153–155, 157, 160, 245, 248, 254, 260 immortal 83–84, 127 imperative ethical 110, 140, 142, 145–146 pragmatic 110 inclination 17, 21, 112–114, 116, 119–126, 129–130, 132–133, 140–141, 154–155, 161–162, 186, 195 n. 26, 239, 245, 265 independence 123, 152–154, 157, 159, 162–166 inspiration 211, 225 n. 9, 279, 284, 288 n. 28, 289 instinct 97, 119, 125, 154–155, 161–162, 195 interact 97, 205, 216, 237, 249 interesting 27, 47, 54, 66, 186–187, 223–231, 235 n. 2, 236, 255 n. 11, 269 n. 48 intérieur (the) 188–189, 191 interiority 22, 189–190, 192, 286–287 interplay of forces 97, 102 interruption 222, 230 intuition 84, 90, 154, 173–174, 190 irony 52, 186 Jesus 133–135, 137 Jonas, Hans 282–283 Jonsson, Stefan 252, 270 n. 49, 272 n. 52 judgment 156, 158, 172, 175–177 jump 139, 220–222, 229 Kant, Immanuel 3–4, 14, 67, 69, 75, 95, 109–113, 115, 118, 124, 127–132, 134–135, 138, 140, 142, 145, 151–152, 158–167, 169–175, 176 n. 31, 177–182, 185, 196, 209 Kierkegaard, Søren 4–5, 18–24, 46–59, 61, 111, 131, 138–140, 143–146, 185–194, 197–198, 220, 223–225, 227–232

299 Climacus, Johannes 22, 112 n. 7, 146, 187 Johannes de silentio 141 Judge William 111, 112 n. 7, 131, 138–139, 145, 186–187 Vigilius Haufniensis 111, 132, 139–141, 145 Korner, Gottfried 117 Laertius, Diogenes 13 landscape 204, 207, 212, 238–241 law 23, 32, 40–42, 53, 57, 69, 74, 83, 86, 88, 96, 98–108, 113–116, 118–126, 128–130, 132–137, 140–141, 146, 153–156, 158–163, 169, 171, 172 n. 15, 179–180, 188, 248, 253, 255, 262–263, 267 n. 43, 271, 277, 286, 290, 293, 294 n. 37 moral 40, 57, 69, 114, 116, 119, 121, 123–124, 128, 130, 133–135, 141, 153–156, 158–163, 169, 248, 262 leap 82, 220–225, 227–229, 231, 248 legality 119, 126, 132, 134, 294 liberation 70, 159–160, 165 life 1–2, 4, 13, 16–17, 20–22, 27, 29, 33–34, 38–44, 48–49, 55, 57–58, 61, 68, 71, 73, 75–77, 83, 85, 97, 100, 104, 110–112, 115, 129–130, 133, 135–142, 144, 156–158, 164–166, 178, 181–182, 187, 189, 196, 217, 227–229, 232, 238–239, 242, 246–248, 251–253, 255–266, 269, 271–274, 280 listener 240–241, 246–249 lord-bondsman Relation 99–100, 105 love 3–4, 9, 11–12, 18–21, 28 n. 5, 33–35, 46, 49–53, 55, 58–59, 63–69, 71–73, 75–77, 81–85, 93, 95, 111, 115, 123, 131–135, 137–139, 143–145, 156, 161, 186, 197, 210, 214, 229–230, 239, 154 n. 9, 255 n. 9, 256, 258 Lukács, Georg 189, 251–252, 270, 272, 274 lust 64, 119, 166 Mach, Ernst 263, 264 madness 252, 264 Makkreel, Rudolf 170–173, 178 male 72, 81, 106 man 2, 13, 21, 28, 35 n. 11, 42, 57, 60, 64, 69–71, 73–75, 100, 105–106, 108, 113–115, 122–124, 128, 132, 136, 138, 139 n. 117, 140, 142, 153, 161–162, 182, 220, 222–223, 227, 232, 238, 241, 243, 245, 256–257, 260

300 man (cont.) n. 24, 263, 266–267, 272 n. 53, 274, 283–284, 291 Maria Magdalena 137 marriage 46, 58, 64–70, 72–76, 82, 95, 138–139, 185–187, 197–198 mathematical 152, 158, 285 melancholy 186, 191–192, 197, 229 mental unrest 42 metaphor 113, 207 metaphysics 55, 61, 69, 112–113, 140–141, 143, 169, 178, 228, 283 modesty 82, 93, 146 monogamy 76 monster 113, 270–271 monstrous (see monster) 61, 255, 268, 271 montage (surrealism) 289, 292 Montaigne, Michel de 4, 12–15, 17, 27–44, 46 moral (see morality) moral disposition 112, 126, 153 moral duty 177, 119, 122, 128, 153 morality 2, 37, 41–42, 58–59, 65, 69, 85, 87–88, 110, 119–120, 124–127, 132–135, 151, 154, 156–157, 159, 161, 163, 165–166, 196–198, 247, 253, 255–257, 259–260, 262, 271–272 morals 69, 112–114, 140, 162 n. 33, 256 mortal 54, 83–85 music 2, 4, 89, 130, 211, 214, 234–249 Musil, Robert 251–256, 258–274 Das hilflose Europa oder Reise vom Hundertsten in Tausendste 268 Das Unanständige in der Kunst 253 Der deutsche Mensch als Symptom 259, 262 Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 251–253, 254 n. 9, 257, 260, 266, 268 n. 45, 269–274 Die Nation als Ideal und Wirklichkeit 268–269 Politisches Bekenntnis eines jungen Mannes 267 National Socialism 182, 262 nature 3–4, 9–10, 12–13, 28, 30, 32, 35, 38, 40 n. 17, 56–57, 60, 63–66, 69–73, 75, 85–87, 98–102, 105, 108–109, 112, 114–115,

Index 117–121, 126, 132–134, 136, 151–152, 157 n. 16, 158–160, 162–163, 165, 170–171, 173, 176 n. 31, 178, 181–182, 191, 193–194, 203, 212, 217 n. 27, 221, 223, 228, 237–238, 241, 243–248, 253, 257, 269, 276–277, 279, 282, 285, 287, 289–294 Nazi (see National Socialism) 2, 195–196, 254 n. 7, 263, 272 necessity 33, 50, 58, 120, 154–155, 160, 163 n. 36, 196, 221, 257, 263, 271–272 Nietzsche, Friedrich 14–18, 63, 151, 166–167, 210, 216, 228, 243, 263–265, 282 Morgenröthe 263 nihilism 280, 282–285, 288, 293 noble 39, 64, 121, 123, 203 Nordau, Max 258 norms 31, 42, 59, 100, 102, 104, 133, 253, 255, 257, 270–272 teleology/purposiveness 169, 171, 172 n. 18, 178, 263 nothingness 152, 167, 227, 282 other 2–4, 9 n. 1, 11–12, 15–16, 19–25, 28–37, 39–41, 43, 46–56, 58–61, 64–65, 67–68, 70–71, 73, 76–77, 83, 86–92, 101–102, 106, 110, 113, 115–119, 122–124, 126, 129–130, 134, 136–137, 140–141, 144–145, 151–157, 162–164, 167, 171–179, 181, 187, 195, 204, 206, 208, 210–213, 216–217, 220–224, 226–227, 229, 234, 237–239, 242, 245, 247, 249, 251, 253–254, 257, 262, 266, 267 n. 43, 268–272, 278–279, 281, 284, 289, 291, 293 paradox/paradoxically 15, 17, 32, 41, 46–47, 55, 161, 204, 207 Pascal 35 passion 18–19, 88, 126, 130, 144, 159, 261 pathological (see pathology) 115, 128, 251–254, 265–266, 269–272 pathology 254, 266, 272 pathos 95–97, 99–102, 104–109 perfection 15, 35, 40, 110–111, 118–119, 125–129 performative contradiction 14 personality 27, 31–32, 74, 76–77, 90, 157 n. 16, 251 philia 21

Index photography 4, 220–222, 224–227, 231, 288–289 physical 11, 27, 53, 63, 90, 98, 126, 129, 153, 194, 196–197, 217, 245, 266–267 pleasure 10–12, 16, 28, 33, 54, 67, 83, 87, 112, 119, 127, 129, 140, 154–157, 159–160, 163–165, 167, 171, 172 n. 15, 177, 186–187, 192, 195, 209 pluriverse 217 poetry 82–83, 85, 89, 93, 161, 213, 285–286, 288 polis 101–104, 107–108 polyandry 70 polygyny 70 possibility 9, 12–13, 22, 32, 42, 50, 53–55, 59–61, 113, 123–124, 134, 144, 146, 152, 154–157, 171, 185, 187, 190 n. 7, 191–193, 198, 221–222, 246, 264–265, 271 n. 52, 272–274, 276, 278, 293 praxis 205, 207, 217, 247 profane illumination 279–280, 288–289 pseudonym/pseudonymous 18–19, 22, 46, 111, 138–139, 145–146, 186 psychoanalysis 223, 272–273, 287 psychopathology (see pathology) 251–252 punishment 135–138, 146 real 3, 30, 36, 53, 58–60, 66, 68, 84, 88, 90, 98, 105, 123, 135, 142, 182 n. 53, 188–189, 192, 204–205, 207, 209–210, 212–213, 215, 217, 220–221, 226, 229, 231, 243, 286 reason 3, 9–17, 19–20, 22, 29–30, 32, 43, 47, 52, 55–56, 58–59, 62, 64, 66, 68–71, 73–74, 85–87, 90, 95, 97, 100, 110–115, 117–121, 123–127, 129, 132–133, 135, 139–140, 142–143, 146, 151–156, 158–159, 161–165, 169–171, 172 n. 15, 175–178, 181, 191–192, 198, 203, 209, 220–222, 226, 228, 235, 245, 264, 270 n. 49, 281 n. 13 practical 11, 95, 110, 112–115, 117–118, 124, 129, 132–133, 135, 142, 159, 162 n. 33, 164, 169, 176, 178 recollection 143, 220, 225, 227–228, 231–232 reconciliation 122, 136–138, 191–192 redemption 197, 260–261, 263 reflexivity 25 reification 189–192, 197

301 relation 9, 19, 21–25, 29–31, 36–37, 40–42, 54–55, 69, 75, 86–88, 90–93, 95, 97, 99–101, 103, 105–106, 108–109, 156, 172–173, 176, 185, 189, 190 n. 5, 191–193, 197–198, 213, 226, 228, 231, 236–238, 243, 247–249, 281, 284 religion 3, 66, 83–84, 86–88, 90, 100, 108, 111, 113 n. 8, 126–127, 131–135, 137–138, 143, 145–146, 173, 178–179, 256, 260–261 religion of art 108 religion of nature 100 religious (the) 3, 33, 39, 57–58, 61, 83, 87–88, 90–93, 100, 111, 141, 146 n. 134, 179 n. 41, 180, 185, 187–188, 190–192, 197, 209, 224, 259, 269 n. 48, 278–279, 281, 288 n. 28, 289–290, 293 repetition 52, 56–57, 60–61, 143, 186, 189, 220, 225–229, 231–232, 269 representation 87–89, 90 n. 45, 91–93, 108, 116, 144–145, 172 n. 15, 173–175, 177, 179–180, 188, 195–196, 207, 209, 217, 224, 226, 253–254, 277 respect 30, 34, 53, 56, 64, 66, 68, 71–72, 76, 83, 90, 93, 96–97, 114–115, 119, 123, 126, 128, 134, 157–160, 162 n. 33, 163–164, 166, 185, 189 n. 4, 196 n. 28, 208, 211, 236, 257, 272, 280–281, 283, 288, 290, 292–294 Sallust 19 Schiller, Friedrich 4, 111, 113 n. 8, 115–128, 131–132, 134, 138–140, 145, 151–157, 159–162, 164, 166–167, 186 Schlegel, Friedrich 81–85, 89, 93, 139, 186 science 86, 122, 139, 140, 142–143, 173, 178–180, 203, 217, 255 n. 11, 260, 264–265, 282, 285, 287–288, 291 seduction 210 self 19, 21, 33–34, 36–37, 40–44, 46–47, 49, 51, 53–58, 61, 99, 101, 103–105, 107–109, 135–136, 143, 145, 190, 192, 287, 294 n. 37 self-choice 186–187, 189–190 and self-development as a moral experience 41 as an authentic self-involvement 29 self-knowledge 36–37, 39, 41–42, 44 self-love 18–19, 21, 35, 37, 46, 115 and self-understanding 36–37, 42 semblance 13, 37, 188, 191–192, 284

302 senses 68, 82, 87, 110, 123, 134, 140, 162, 216, 268 sensuousness 111, 113, 116, 119–121, 124–125, 132–133, 140–141, 157 n. 16, 161 sensus communis 170, 172–173, 178 sentiment moral 119–120 sexual 28, 34, 71, 81 signifier 204–205, 207–208, 213, 215–217 sin 137–139, 141–146 singularity 20, 22–23, 31–34, 41, 47, 49, 55, 57, 61, 76, 192, 234 slavery 70, 73 social organism 99–106 sociality 130 society 65, 68, 76, 100, 103, 106, 146, 189 n. 5, 190 n. 5, 194, 203, 251–254, 255 n. 9, 256–258, 260–264, 266–267, 268 n. 44, 269, 272–273 solitude 23, 203 somatic (the) 194, 198 soul beautiful 120–122 sovereign 114–115, 162 n. 33 species 11, 71, 106, 162, 208 spectator 153–154, 161, 210, 234–237, 239–241, 249, 268, 276 Spengler, Oswald 258 stages, theory of the 185 statue of the god 108 strangeness 24 stupidity 255, 262, 265 subject 22, 29, 43, 49, 60–61, 64, 67, 77, 83, 113–115, 118, 127–128, 133, 135, 138–140, 151–152, 159–160, 162 n. 33, 163, 166–167, 170–173, 189–190, 192–193, 204, 208–210, 213, 215–217, 228, 247 subjection 110, 113–115, 133–135, 137, 163 subjectivity 23, 89, 133, 189, 192, 274 sublime 46, 85, 87, 89, 118, 120–121, 128, 140, 151–160, 162–167, 177, 196, 204, 209, 211, 213, 247–248 substance 55–56, 87, 100–103, 108, 257 suffering 53, 153, 157, 165, 167, 192–198, 211 superiority 112, 116, 152, 157, 160, 162–165, 167 supra-human 3–4

Index surface 208, 214–215, 222, 225 surrealism 209, 276–294 surrender 50, 76–77, 135, 224, 237, 241, 249 symbiosis 15–17 symbol 179–181, 189, 239, 256, 258–259 symbolic forms 89, 179, 181 sympathy 54, 115, 157, 242 symptom 252, 256, 259–260, 262, 266, 269 symptomatic (see symptom) 274, 251 synthesis 90, 107–108 taste 71, 117, 123–127, 131, 172 n. 15, 217 Taubes, Jacob 281–290, 292–294 teleology/purposiveness 169, 171, 172 n. 18, 178, 263 temple 108, 203, 214 theological 18, 76, 145 theory 46, 54, 91–92, 112, 151, 160, 163–165, 179 n. 41, 185, 189 n. 5, 193–194, 198, 205, 206, 210, 217, 237–238, 243, 253, 256, 265 n. 36, 273–274, 291 togetherness 15, 17–18, 23 totality 31, 88, 90, 92, 152, 181, 195, 254, 284 tragedy 58–59, 127 n. 71, 152–153, 164–167, 210, 239 transcendence 143, 145, 239, 243, 278–279, 281–290, 292–294 transcendental reflection 170, 173–179, 182 transcendental topology 170, 173, 177, 181 transience 166 truth 15–16, 27, 34, 39–40, 49, 52, 58, 64–65, 67, 90, 95, 100, 169–170, 175, 178, 181, 185–193, 196, 203, 212, 229, 274 ugly (the) 195–196, 198, 206 unconscious 194, 208, 222–223, 226, 231, 239, 276–277, 287 unity 20, 23, 31, 35, 60–61, 74–75, 83–84, 87–88, 90, 92, 95, 123, 133, 138, 182 n. 53, 228–231, 260 utility 10–12, 77 vertical 54, 239, 241–245, 248, 292–294 vice 64, 70, 106, 113, 137, 161, 270 n. 49 violence 1–2, 117, 195, 211, 241–242, 245, 247

Index virtue/virtuous 11–12, 21–22, 32, 37, 42, 48, 51, 55–56, 70, 73, 75, 112–116, 121, 125–126, 128–131, 133–134, 137, 140, 142, 157, 159, 161, 187, 196, 212, 242, 244, 249, 262 void 42, 215, 220–223 volatility of the mind 39 vulnerability 33, 42, 54, 59, 157 n. 16, 158, 167 will free 117, 155, 157 good 110, 119, 124–125 witness 1, 60–62, 196, 208, 210, 212–213, 215–216

303 woman 69–71, 73–75, 81, 105–106, 232 world 1–4, 35, 53, 60, 64–65, 70–72, 76, 83–85, 92–93, 95–97, 101, 105–106, 109, 113, 115, 121, 126, 128–129, 142–143, 146, 152, 155, 162, 164–167, 170, 172–173, 176, 178, 179 n. 41, 180–181, 188–190, 192–193, 195–196, 204–211, 213–217, 220, 222, 224–225, 232, 248–249, 252, 254, 257–258, 259 n. 22, 260, 262, 267–268, 270, 272–273, 276–294 work of art 3, 88–89, 91–92, 96, 108, 161, 167, 212, 221, 223 n. 2, 248, 253–254, 277, 288