CARROLL, JEROME Aesthetics and Modernity From Schiller To The Frankfurt School

Aesthetics and Modernity from Schiller to the Frankfurt School • Carroll, Giles and Oergel (eds)
The essays in this book investigate the complex and often contradictory
relationships between aesthetics and modernity from the late Enlightenment
in the s to the Frankfurt School in the s and engage with the classic
German tradition of socio-cultural and aesthetic theory that extends from
Aesthetics
Friedrich Schiller to Theodor W. Adorno. While contemporary discussions in
aesthetics are often dominated by abstract philosophical approaches, this book
embeds aesthetic theory in broader social and cultural contexts and considers
and Modernity
a wide range of artistic practices in literature, drama, music and visual arts.
Contributions include research on Schiller’s writings and his work in relation
to moral sentimentalism, Romantic aesthetics, Friedrich Schlegel, Beethoven,
Huizinga and Greenberg; philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Benjamin,
Heidegger and Adorno; and thematic approaches to Darwinism and Naturalism,
modern tragedy, postmodern realism and philosophical anthropology from
the eighteenth century to the present day. This book is based on papers given
at an international symposium held under the auspices of the University of
from Schiller
Nottingham at the Institute of German and Romance Studies, London, in
September . to the Frankfurt School
J C is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham, where he
specialises in German history of ideas, aesthetics and modern German theatre. His
publications include Art at the Limits of Perception: The Aesthetic Theory of Wolfgang
Welsch () and he is currently working on the German tradition of philosophical
anthropology from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
S G is Emeritus Professor of German Studies and Critical Theory at the
University of Nottingham. He has published widely on modernism and modernity
in cultural theory and on Bertolt Brecht. His most recent book is a translation and
edition of Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny () and he is currently
working on two new editions of Brecht’s theoretical writings.
M O is Associate Professor in German at the University of Nottingham,

and works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-German intellectual and
literary relations and the intellectual landscape of the Goethezeit. She recently
published Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought –
() and is currently researching the impact of political paranoia on cultural
transfer and exchange between Germany and Britain around .
Edited by Jerome Carroll,
Steve Giles and Maike Oergel
ISBN 978-3-0343-0217-3
www.peterlang.com P L

Aesthetics and Modernity from Schiller to the Frankfurt School • Carroll, Giles and Oergel (eds)
The essays in this book investigate the complex and often contradictory
relationships between aesthetics and modernity from the late Enlightenment
in the s to the Frankfurt School in the s and engage with the classic
German tradition of socio-cultural and aesthetic theory that extends from
Aesthetics
Friedrich Schiller to Theodor W. Adorno. While contemporary discussions in
aesthetics are often dominated by abstract philosophical approaches, this book
embeds aesthetic theory in broader social and cultural contexts and considers
and Modernity
a wide range of artistic practices in literature, drama, music and visual arts.
Contributions include research on Schiller’s writings and his work in relation
to moral sentimentalism, Romantic aesthetics, Friedrich Schlegel, Beethoven,
Huizinga and Greenberg; philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Benjamin,
Heidegger and Adorno; and thematic approaches to Darwinism and Naturalism,
modern tragedy, postmodern realism and philosophical anthropology from
the eighteenth century to the present day. This book is based on papers given
at an international symposium held under the auspices of the University of
from Schiller
Nottingham at the Institute of German and Romance Studies, London, in
September . to the Frankfurt School
J C is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham, where he
specialises in German history of ideas, aesthetics and modern German theatre. His
publications include Art at the Limits of Perception: The Aesthetic Theory of Wolfgang
Welsch () and he is currently working on the German tradition of philosophical
anthropology from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
S G is Emeritus Professor of German Studies and Critical Theory at the
University of Nottingham. He has published widely on modernism and modernity
in cultural theory and on Bertolt Brecht. His most recent book is a translation and
edition of Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny () and he is currently
working on two new editions of Brecht’s theoretical writings.
M O is Associate Professor in German at the University of Nottingham,

and works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-German intellectual and
literary relations and the intellectual landscape of the Goethezeit. She recently
published Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought –
() and is currently researching the impact of political paranoia on cultural
transfer and exchange between Germany and Britain around .
www.peterlang.com P L

Aesthetics
and Modernity
from Schiller
to the Frankfurt School
Aesthetics
and Modernity
from Schiller
to the Frankfurt School

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Aesthetics and modernity from Schiller to the Frankfurt School / Jerome Carroll, Steve
Giles, and Maike Oergel (eds.).
p. cm.
Proceedings of a conference held in Sept. 2009 in London, England.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0217-3 (alk. paper)
1. Aesthetics, Modern--History--Congresses. 2. Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805--Congresses.
3. Arts--Congresses. 4. Philosophy, Modern--Congresses. 5. Institut für Sozialforschung
(Frankfurt am Main, Germany)--Congresses I. Carroll, Jerome, 1972- II. Giles, Steve. III.
Oergel, Maike, 1964-
BH151.A36 2012
111’.850903--dc23
2011036399
isbn 978-3-0343-0217-3 E‐ISBN 978‐3‐0353‐0208‐0
© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2012

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Printed in Germany
Contents
Jerome CARROLL
Introduction 1
Michael BELL
Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the Emergence
of the Aesthetic 9
Gustav FRANK
The Invisible Hand: Schiller’s Media Aesthetics of Modernity 25
Maike OERGEL
The Aesthetics of Historicity: Dialectical Dynamics in Schiller’s
and Friedrich Schlegel’s Concepts of the Art of Modernity 45
Robert LEVENTHAL
The Aesthetics of the Case-History:
Schiller’s Juridical-Psychological Contribution 69
James PARSONS
The Musical Poetics of Modernity:
The Choral Finale of Beethoven and Schiller’s Ninth 93
Norman KASPER
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental
Poetry and the Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic of the ‘Innocent Eye’ 115
vi
Marie-Christin WILM
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom as the Foundation
of Their Concepts of Play 139
Randall K. VAN SCHEPEN

Two Hundred Years of Aesthetic Modernism:
Criticism, Abstraction and Revolution in Schiller and Greenberg 159
Jerome CARROLL
Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and Subjectivity
from Kant to Charles Taylor 183
Sebastian HÜSCH
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage:
Søren Kierkegaard’s Critique of Modernity 209
Nicholas SAUL
The Dark Side of Modernity: Wilhelm Bölsche, Darwinism,
Evolutionary Aesthetics and Spiritualism 233
Bram MERTENS
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism:
Walter Benjamin’s Epistemological Exercise Book 255
Steve GILES
Realism after Modernism: Representation and Modernity in
Brecht, Lukács and Adorno 275
Martin TRAVERS
‘Ek-Stasis’: Away from a Theory of the Lyrical Subject in Adorno
and Heidegger 297
vii
Eric S. NELSON
Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno 319
Martin SWALES
Tragedy and the Aesthetic Dialectic 343
Notes on Contributors 361
Index 365
Jerome Carroll
Introduction
The anniversaries of Friedrich Schiller’s birth and death, in 2009 and 2005
respectively, have been a welcome occasion for renewed interest in his ideas
and their legacy. This recent work has assessed Schiller’s writings alongside
those of his contemporaries: his debt to or divergance from Kant’s writ-
ings about art and his relation to idealist thinking more generally. This
scholarship has also asked after the continued relevance of his ideas for a
contemporary readership. The importance of his legacy as a playwright,
poet and theorist of the role of art and the aesthetic in modern civilization
is undisputed, but it has been asked whether his dated style and the politi-
cal naivety inherent in the claim that beauty is the road to moral freedom
renders his ideas themselves outdated. Conversely, it has been suggested,
the subtle anthropology that accounts for man’s hybrid nature – our pas-
sions and principles – and his account of man’s relationship to alterity has
more enduring relevance.
These discussions are valid and valuable, but the concern of this col-
lection of essays, and the conference at which they were first presented, is
rather dif ferent. It is not primarily a volume about Friedrich Schiller, but
rather locates his work – and in the main his theoretical writings rather
than his literary work – at the start of a 200-year German tradition in intel-
lectual history, and specifically in socio-cultural theory. The over-arching
theme of these chapters, as the book’s title suggests, is the contribution to
theorizing modernity that is made by the German tradition of thinking
about the ‘aesthetic’ dimension. Schiller’s importance for this tradition
often goes unrecognized, particularly in the anglophone world. As such
it is hoped that this volume will bring this connection to greater promi-
nence, in particular for those who do not read German. The cornerstone
of the ideas may be German and aesthetic, but the resonance of the ideas
2 Jerome Carroll
is multidisciplinary and international, as is ref lected in the range of chap-

ters included in the volume. These treat issues in visual culture and music,
as well as literature and drama. They make the connection from Schiller’s
ideas not just to Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno, but to Charles
Taylor and Clement Greenberg. And as a whole they approach the issues
raised by Schiller’s theoretical ref lections not from any predominantly
philosophical point of view, but by placing them in the broad political and
socio-historical context of modernity.
A central strand that runs through a majority of the chapters in the
volume is Schiller’s sensitivity towards the boundaries and tensions between
man’s divergent capacities and the points at which they intersect – what
James Parsons in his chapter calls the Indif ferenzpunkt. On the one hand,
for instance, several of the essays concentrate on the aesthetic dimension as
an aspect of humankind’s make-up that stands in contrast to our rational,
ref lective and conceptual faculties. So Michael Bell, in his discussion of the
emergence of the aesthetic as a category in the eighteenth century, traces
the treatment of the ‘sentimental’ as an emotional or af fective principle –
intuited, not rationalized. This is seen to be an important component of,
for instance, a human moral sense, and cannot be reduced to just ‘feeling’.
Norman Kasper discusses the treatment of the ‘naïve’ in writings about
aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following Schiller’s
distinction between the naïve and sentimental, as an experience that is in
some way purely sensory or ‘material’, preceding conceptual ref lection.
Programmes of ‘naïve’ aesthetics set out by John Ruskin and others aim
to ‘purify visibility’, by privileging presence and materiality. Insofar as they
seek – albeit paradoxically – to restore lost innocence, they have an in-built
moral character. By contrast, Randall K. van Schepen reads the – presum-
ably intrinsically ‘sentimental’ – formalism that makes up the other pole
in Schiller’s essay as the source of an artwork’s non-representational, and
therefore non-instrumental and ultimately political force.
An analogous attempt at restoring a lost link to a non-rational dimen-
sion is apparent in Nicholas Saul’s reading of the 1891 novel by Saul Bölsche,
The Noon-Day Goddess, against the grain of its usual ‘naturalist’ and even
Darwinist interpretation. Saul foregrounds the novel’s thematics of spir-
itualism as an instance of the dethroning of the dominant scientific view,
Introduction 3
as well as the supposedly sovereign ego. The material or sensory quality of
the artwork has more pointed ethical force in Eric S. Nelson’s reading of
Theodor Adorno’s poetics, in which Adorno’s focus on the non-human
is seen to be at odds with, for instance, Jürgen Habermas’ intersubjective
‘truth-claims’.
Alternatively, the aesthetic is read as being central to certain allegedly
distinguishing human capacities, such as meaning or freedom, with sig-
nificance that is equally ‘moral’. The epistemological value of the aesthetic
is what Martin Swales is driving at when he elevates art and the aesthetic
to the ‘central philosphical activity bar none’. In the wake of the demise
of religious belief, the aesthetic has become the activity that the human
longing for meaning attaches to. Central to his discussion of the value of
the aesthetic is the epistemological category of anagnorisis, or privileged
recognition, even in the grip of tragic suf fering. This epistemological signifi-
cance of the aesthetic dimension or experience is central to a number of the
essays. Sebastian Hüsch characterizes Kierkegaard’s conceptualization of the
aesthetic as a ‘category of existence’, which in spite of his criticisms of early
German Romanticism, derives from Friedrich Schlegel. Kierkegaard sees the
Romantic ‘poetization’ of reality as an – albeit seductive – abandoning or
betrayal of reality. Hüsch compares romantic irony, which de-realizes world
and self and leaves us free to (re)create the self, from Socratic irony. The
latter is defined as a capacity for ‘negativity’ that is essential to subjectivity,
and which crucially retains a binding external dimension. The former is
pure freedom. In this theoretical context Hüsch presents Gerhard Schulze’s
more recent diagnosis of the ‘aestheticization’ of everyday life, a phenom-
enology that sees the aesthetic as ‘essence of modernity’, and which Schulze
diagnoses as a source of the ‘erosion of the meaningfulness’ in modern
life. The contrast with the aesthetic as a source of meaning is apparent. In
similar terms, Bram Mertens reads Walter Benjamin’s Kunstkritik essay as
Benjamin’s attempt to lay out his embryonic thoughts on the ‘aesthetic’
nature of knowledge, experience and perception. Benjamin’s epistemology
shares the early German Romantics’ scepticism about Fichte’s immediate
intuition of the self, and echoes their respect for the object, characterizing
experience as a ‘coincidence of subject and object’, and seeking to describe
‘the integrated and continuous multiplicity of knowledge’.
4 Jerome Carroll
Couched in these terms, Schulze’s aestheticization of reality is not

entirely unrelated to one of Schiller’s persistent concerns, namely the nature
of human freedom. Hüsch makes the point that this aestheticization is
predicated on a reduced significance for the ‘material’ aspect of reality: put
in Schulze’s terminology, the society of experience (Erlebnisgesellschaft)
displaces a society of survival (Überlebensgesellschaft). In a more positive
appraisal of autonomy, Marie-Christin Wilm associates the concept of play
in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters with the distanciation at the heart of Kant’s
disinterested aesthetics. Play is seen as an ‘interruption of immediate wants’,
for instance in which biology and psychology are held of f. Wilm traces
Schiller’s legacy in Johann Huizinga’s concept of homo ludens, in which play
is not seen to serve some other instrumental function, but is seen as analo-
gous to the aesthetic because of its captivating quality and the fact that it is
an activity that establishes its own – ‘formal’ – limitations. A similar ironic
distance is also crucial to the self-ref lexivity of the aesthetic dimension in
Maike Oergel’s discussion of the dialectic as a new Denkmodell in Schiller
and Friedrich Schlegel’s thinking. The dialectic accommodates historical
change, and historicity per se, in a ‘safe’ manner. Parsons likewise defines
the ‘aesthetic stage’ as the ability to stand back and think, for instance of
the infinite. Parson’s discussion of Beethoven’s use of Schiller’s ‘An die
Freude’ in his Ninth Symphony, however, turns on Schiller’s predilection
for the union of extremes, in this case the intersection of the earthy here
and now and the boundless beyond.
And this association of the aesthetic with both the sensuous and the
infinite ref lects the sense, which comes through strongly in many of the
contributions, that man in modernity is made up of dif ferent, and perhaps
fundamentally incompatible, aspects: the sublime or infinite and the natu-
ral or mundane (Parsons); the word and the thing (Swales); the moral and
the sensuous (Nelson), which of course tragedy is reckoned to combine
in the cathartic experience, thus giving physical suf fering metaphysical
spiritual value (Swales).
In these terms, the value of the aesthetic is that it is the theoretical sign
under which these spheres are seen to combine in significant ways. For Bell,
the emphasis on distance has distorted our reception of Schiller’s aesthet-
ics, in which emotional engagement, and in particular the sentimental, is
Introduction 5
an indispensible component of the moral attitude and art’s moral force.
Rather than the choice between feeling and principle, sentiment is pre-
cisely the felt principle.
The aesthetic also becomes a project that of fers a kind of synthesis, a sort
of reconciliation between these aspects. So in Schiller’s own terms the suc-
cess of any project of aesthetic education is reckoned to depend on the ‘rec-
onciliation of the purely human, or sensuous, and moral spheres’. (Parsons)
One instance of this unification is the experience of joy, as Parsons reads
Schiller’s Ode to Joy, whose incorporation in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
is taken to ref lect the composer’s similar aspiration to bring together the
mundane and infinite, evident for instance in through five octaves and a
change of key in his choral finale. In the same vein, Nelson reads a kind of
reconciliation with nature or the non-human as the aim of Adorno’s poetics,
albeit with the caveat that this experience of nature can be coercive, and is
in any case always ‘indirect’, mediated by the artwork or our faculties.
But a recurrent concern in many of the contributions is that any such
reconciliation is not a simple, subsuming synthesis of one aspect by the
other. Neither nature nor reason, Schiller tells us in the Aesthetic Letters,
is to rule a person exclusively, but the two ‘are meant to coexist, in perfect
independence of each other, and yet in perfect concord.’ Yet in Oergel’s
comparison it is Schlegel rather than Schiller who is alive to the radically
open-ended nature of the historical dialectic. Whereas Schiller responds to
the modern with a quest for lost completeness, Schlegel sees self-ref lexive
irony as allowing ‘dichotomous elements’ in human reality to be co-rep-
resented, though precisely ‘not synthesized’.
This notion of co-representation introduces a thread in the volume
that proposes the aesthetic as of fering a kind of ‘holist’ grasp of man and
his faculties, which seems to suggest a less heavy-handed approach to what
Swales calls ‘uncovering a logic of the imagination’. In Rob Leventhal’s
essay a similarly holist approach of ‘co-representation’ is central to the
juridical – and aesthetic – concept of ‘case’, whose history he traces as a
method of classifying individual anomalies from a variety of perspectives
and in a variety of circumstances and conditions, as an aspect of Schiller’s
‘rehabilitation of individuality’. In similar terms Jerome Carroll traces the
development of anthropology, a sibling discipline to aesthetics, from the
6 Jerome Carroll
late eighteenth century to the twentieth century, as a study of the whole
person that is seen as overcoming the straightforward approach to subjectiv-
ity and selfhood which separates the internal self from the external world.
A variant of this holism underlies Gustav Frank’s discussion of Schiller’s
novel The Ghost-Seer, which he reads as returning from a narrowly formal-
ist or self-ref lexive view of the value of aesthetics to a broader focus on the
entire field of perception. This holism also turns out to be central to Van
Schepen’s discussion of Clement Greenberg’s aesthetics. Greenberg’s tran-
sition from a more socially-oriented view to a strict formalist aesthetics is
read not as abandoning his progressive principles, but as an adoption of
a fundamental Schillerian (and of course ultimately Kantian) conception
of the aesthetic experience as an exercise in freedom. In the case of both
thinkers, the social force of this experience is indirect, and is seen to be
predicated on an aesthetic that ‘encompasses all of life and revolutionizes
individual experience’.
In many cases the aesthetic is seen to be of value because its verdicts
are not systematic, artworks do not amount to straightforward statements
about pre-existing reality. It is this non-discursive quality that Swales calls
‘another kind of speaking’, often presented on the stage not by any charac-
ter’s utterance, but by music or choric voice. If the aesthetic does ‘uncover a
logic of the imagination’, Oergel informs us that for Schlegel it is primarily
in the form of poetry that ‘hovers’ (schwebt) between the material and the
ideal. Nelson refers in similar terms to the moment of ‘encounter’ with
the object, which brings home ‘the entanglement of human life with its
world, and of reason with nature’. A slightly dif ferent role for the aesthetic
is emphasized in Steve Giles’ discussion of Brecht, Lukács and Adorno,
who are seen to share an indispensable realism. However art is still valued
by Brecht insofar as its representation cannot be limited to straightforward
mimesis. His turn to cognitive realism suggests an important parallel with
Lukács and Adorno, in the view that description and/or photographic
realism is insuf ficient to capture decisive forces of increasingly complex
modern reality. This is in spite of the fact that Brecht prefers epic thea-
tre whereas Lukács opts for the nineteenth century bourgeois novel, and
Adorno, unfairly in Giles’ view, sees Brecht’s views on realism as ‘straight-
jacketed’. Martin Travers’ discussion of Adorno and Heidegger’s aesthetics
Introduction 7
of the subject also begins with Lukács, whose stance that modernism’s
response to modernity had ‘surrendered to subjectivity’ Adorno rejects.
Travers presents the latter’s view that the subjectivity of the lyrical poem
just as much expresses the subject’s desire for self-negation. In particular
poetic language is seen to break the walls of individuality; largely in view
of the fact that language mediates the relationship between subject and
material world. The poet inhabits the space between the two. Here the non-
discursive quality of the aesthetic is again a source of its political force for
both Adorno and Heidegger, in that the relation between word and thing
is not subject to interpretation or explication. For both the encounter with
the text is most valuable where it seeks to hold meanings open, rather than
closing them down in a process of interpretation.
The course of modernity, even where it is ‘aestheticized’, may have
taken us some distance from Schiller’s conviction that ‘beauty alone can
confer on man a social character’. But in Schiller we find foregrounded
the importance of modern aesthetics for human freedom in a complex,
demanding and possibly amoral world. Schhiller’s bequest to modernity
is the notion that the deepest depravity, the most self less heroism, or the
most shattering scientific breakthrough can only be considered freely and
fully – without prejudice or vested interest – in the aesthetic mode, and
that only such an approximation of a full consideration equips the human
mind to judge, equips a complex subject to make some sense of an incom-
patible, complex reality. In this respect Schiller’s purpose of the aesthetic
is as political as it is philosophical, it insists on the political and social
nature and function of art. So human freedom need not be understood
as an aestheticist-formalist project, a reiteration of Kant’s disinterest, or
limited to what Martha Woodmansee calls a ‘consolatory freedom’. Rather
it might begin with the recognition that the epistemological and moral
value of the aesthetic is to be sought in what exceeds the bounds of con-
ceptual or discursive thinking. This aesthetic dimension of human experi-
ence is a shaky ground for determinate knowledge. And it also seems no
less susceptible to instrumentalization and reification than conceptual or
discursive formations. And it seems to put the ideal cart before the real
horses to suggest that all moral questions may be resolved in a reconciled
or harmonious aesthetic experience. But it does place at centre stage one
8 Jerome Carroll
significant obstacle to moral freedom, and to moral or epistemological

certainty: namely, the fact that humankind can plausibly be characterized
as a nexus of dif ferent and sometimes conf licting realms and capacities:
material and ideal, base and moral, discursive and non-discursive, intui-
tive and ref lective, natural and cultural. Schiller’s holist anthropology that
begins with the drama of these conf licting aspects is distorted by arguments
that privilege human autonomy over what Nelson calls the ‘entanglement
of human life with its world’.
The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference titled

‘Aesthetics and Modernity from Schiller to Marcuse’, held in London in
September 2009 under the auspices of the University of Nottingham and
the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies. Participation was inter-
national, with speakers coming from the United Kingdom, continental
Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, South Africa and
Australia. The conference was made possible with generous funding from
the British Academy and the University of Nottingham, and with excel-
lent organization by Jane Lewin of the Institute of Germanic & Romance
Studies.
Michael Bell
Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the

Emergence of the Aesthetic
The analytic elusiveness of the aesthetic is ref lected in the ambiguity of its

historical emergence. Although all human cultures seem to enjoy artistic
practice, and our own tradition has meditated from earliest times on its
significance, it was only in the late eighteenth century, a few stretched out
lifetimes ago, that the notion of the aesthetic as a special category of experi-
ence was formally devised. Was this, then, an invention, or a discovery? Did
the aesthetic come into existence at that time or was it always already there
as a cultural unconscious? This rather abstract question is of importance
in so far as the aesthetic has become a crucial, yet troubling, category in
modern thought. If you are inclined to think it was an invention, and you
also happen to find it ideologically suspect, then you may well conclude
that it is an unnecessary mystification. But if you believe it is the coming to
consciousness of a pervasive condition of human culture, then its signifi-
cance, whether for good or ill, is likely to be central and inescapable. This
ambivalence was ref lected in the late twentieth-century academy when
a widespread tendency to deny or deconstruct the aesthetic gave way in
the last decade or so to a number of defences some of which, like Isobel
Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic, were developed from within the same
theoretical and ideological constituency.1
Modern discussion of the aesthetic is so conditioned by subsequent
developments that its original impact, and indeed the whole context in
which it was required, are frequently lost. It is seen especially through
1 See for example, Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature; Francis Halsall,
Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor, eds, Rediscoverung Aesthetics; Stuart Sims, Beyond
Aesthetics; and Patrick Swinden, Literature and the Philosophy of Intention.
10 Michael Bell
two retrospective, and distorting, lenses: the first is aestheticism, the sepa-
ratist notion developed in the nineteenth century; and the second is the
Arnoldian belief in the intrinsically ennobling ef fect of high art, a belief
which, as an inertially institutionalized assumption, probably underlies
the public funding of many likely readers of this article: hence the divided
legacy of Friedrich Schiller. For Germanists, Schiller remains an indis-
pensible classic, while for many modern critics of culture he has become a
byword of bourgeois liberal mystification. For me, his Aesthetic Education
of Mankind remains one of the most subtle and persuasive accounts we
have of the emotional engagement with literature, although not with the
emphasis that he himself gave. I believe his account of the aesthetic condi-
tion, including delight in semblance, represents a crucial turning point in
modern self-ref lection but he also argues within this a metaphysics of the
beautiful and the good, a kind of reconstructed Platonism, which, despite
its intrinsic and historical interest, is not of the same order of relevance and
plausibility for modern thought and feeling. His metaphysics of beauty
arose from a classical ideal, most notably embodied in Winckelmann and
Goethe, which was to be replaced by the darker, compensatory concep-
tion announced by Nietzsche. Yet, as is well-known, Schiller’s underlying
definition of the aesthetic condition was a crucial premise for Nietzsche
and through him for many of the greatest European writers of the early
twentieth century. The dif ficulty here, of course, is to unpick this account of
the aesthetic from the whole cloth, if not rather the mixed bag, of Schiller’s
idealist thinking and one crucial issue is whether, and if so how, the expe-
rience of great art is intrinsically ennobling. Although he undoubtedly
believed this as an empirical fact, and saw this value not just in the moral
content of art but in the aesthetic condition as such, it is not strictly entailed
by his account of the aesthetic; indeed, when his mind is fully on the aes-
thetic condition as such, he explicitly argues against it. I want to argue that
his apparent two-mindedness on this point is ultimately not a weakness
but the ref lection of a vital insight. Indeed, Schiller’s treatise may be seen
less as a single coherent argument than as a compendium of the necessary
questions and themes bound together by a powerful vortex of insights.
Moreover, he was also responding to dif ferent currents of contemporary
thought and the significance of his thinking on the aesthetic needs to be
Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the Emergence of the Aesthetic 11
understood in relation particularly to eighteenth-century moral sentimen-

talism, although this connection does not seem to have been prominent
in the modern commentary on him.
Sentimentalism, the optimistic mid-century belief in the natural good-
ness of the human af fections, is part of the pre-history of Schiller’s more
technical and historicized idea of the ‘sentimental’ and it provided both
the psychological problematic and the moral idealism in his notion of the
aesthetic. The foundational impact of sentimentalism for modernity as an
af fective turn is often obscured by its more conscious and verbal mani-
festations. For the declining fortunes of the word ‘sentimental’ between
the eighteenth and twentieth centuries ref lect an opposite movement in
its significance. This semantic shift ref lects a complex history whereby
European culture, precisely in resisting the excesses and naiveties of eight-
eenth-century sentiment, gradually absorbed its underlying values. For as
the word ‘sentimental’ has come to refer to merely cheap or false emotion,
it serves to discriminate within the domain of feeling and thereby testifies
to the positive importance of authentic feeling in modern culture. And
most importantly for the present theme, the af fective turn of sentimen-
talism could pass to modernity only through the transformative limbic
of the aesthetic. For the original cult of sentiment was not just a view of
human nature and psychology, it entailed a distinctive, and decidedly un-
aesthetic, conception of literature. Yet at the same time, and for that very
reason, the notion of the aesthetic developed by Kant and Schiller was
already an unrecognized or repressed desideratum of eighteenth-century
literary theory and practice. To appreciate this point more closely it is help-
ful first to take a step backwards and note the continuing impact of the
older neo-classical conception of literary art that sentimentalism displaced.
The significant point here is that, although neo-classicism was in obvious
respects opposed to the literature of sentiment, these movements shared
mutually reinforcing assumptions which were to be jointly transformed
by Schiller’s idea of the aesthetic.
Neo-classicism evinces a remarkable disjuncture between its concen-
trated artistic ef fect and the discourse of its self-understanding. It invokes a
standard of ‘nature’ supposedly embodied in the practice of classical writers
and formulated as principles by critics such as Aristotle and Horace. But
12 Michael Bell
whereas Aristotle had ref lected f lexibly and empirically on the achieve-

ments of his native drama, the systematized and prescriptive version of
Aristotle in the neo-classical conception was now in truth a set of artistic
conventions with an internal aesthetic necessity rather than the external
natural criteria which it constantly claimed or assumed. If the object of
discussion were, for example, a purely literary form such as the sonnet, the
matter would be clear. The sonnet is a literary genre designed to produce a
particular kind of intellectual and emotional concentration. But the word
tragedy, for example, refers not just to a dramatic form but to a conception
of life frequently embodied in known historical events, and it was against
these external dimensions that a writer’s uses of the form were assumed
to require justification. The misleading standard of Nature encouraged a
myopic bias in neo-classical thinking towards the same literalistic criteria
of representation as characterized sentimentalism.
Pierre Corneille, in resisting a too literalistic application of these cri-
teria, while endorsing their artistic spirit and intent, concluded his discus-
sion of the unities with a suggestive analogy. While acknowledging that
the dramatist must observe the unity of place as much as possible, there are
moments, he says, when this will not be possible without sacrificing some
dramatic beauty. On such occasions, the writer may use a generalized loca-
tion so as ‘to deceive the spectator, who […] would not notice the change,
unless it was maliciously and critically pointed out.’ He then goes on to say:
‘Jurists allow legal fictions, and I should like, following their example, to
introduce theatrical fictions by which one would establish a theatrical place
which would not be Cléopatre’s chamber nor Rodogune’s […].’2 Corneille
envisages here a dramatic ef fect made possible by the willing acceptance of
a fictional location unjustifiable by literalistically conceived criteria. Much
later, Samuel Johnson, in his common-sense defence of Shakespeare’s noto-
rious topographical insouciance, could simply declare that the audience
would not be shocked by the sudden switch from Cleopatra’s Egypt to
Caesar’s Rome because they always knew they were never in Egypt in the
2 Corneille, 78.
first place.3 But in Corneille we feel the force of one struggling to uphold
an artistic ideal for which the unity of place was aesthetically significant.
His incongruous literalism ref lects how neo-classical criticism seeks to
express a high aesthetic conception while lacking the category. And it is
notable that its modern commentators readily, and quite rightly, invoke
this term with no sense of anachronism.
Neo-classicism, then, reminds us that the eighteenth-century emer-
gence of the aesthetic occurred from within the extraordinarily tenacious
grip of literalistic rationalizations; so tenacious as to f ly in the face of an
intuitive practice that transcended them. Moreover, literalism with regard
to action and setting applied equally to the supposed moral ef fect. Villains
must be unsympathetic and heroes virtuous because they are assumed to
exert a one-for-one, isomorphic moral impact on the reader or audience.
Now although moral sentimentalism eventually contributed to a new
conception of literature and psychology of response, its initial ef fect was
to intensify this literalistic belief in emotional identification. Indeed, it so
raised the stakes in respect of the emotional response that it was sentimen-
talism, as I now wish to show, that finally enforced the recognition of its
own counter-principle: the category of the aesthetic.
Sentimentalism was a great Enlightenment myth: an upward evalu-
ation of the af fective domain to the extent of seeking to base the moral
life on feeling. In this respect, it sought to reverse the traditional religious
hierarchy whereby the lower appetital nature was under the dominion of
reason and the authority of God. Yet the challenge to religion was rather
implicit and long-term because sentimentalism was in the first instance
more ambiguous, as is shown by its widespread impact on both religious
and deistical constituencies. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of
Shaftesbury, in the essays collected under the title of Characteristics (1711),
inf luentially argued that social benevolence was a natural propensity of
man and therefore a supplement to moral and divine law. The insinuating
inf luence, and the ambiguity, at once fateful and fruitful, of sentimental-
3 Johnson, 501.
14 Michael Bell
ism was that, rather than invoke feeling as a challenge to moral reason, it
sought to identify them.
This is evident in the shifting semantics of the word ‘sentiment’ in the
mid eighteenth century. For Samuel Richardson, in the 1740s, it meant
predominantly ‘principle.’ If a man said, ‘These are my sentiments, Sir,’ he
meant these are the principles by which he lives. But by the time of Laurence
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) the word had come to mean pre-
dominantly feeling. The important point, however, is that it always carried
some charge of both implications. The mid-century use of the word ‘senti-
ment’ implied that feeling had the objective value of moral principle while
moral principle had the immediate and spontaneous authority of feeling.
And as Jacques Derrida has pointed out at length in Of Grammatology,
largely using the case of Rousseau, the logic of supplementarity is danger-
ously circular. Any principle that accepts a supplement concedes a possible
need for it, thereby implicitly shedding something of its own authority,
and this was precisely the process that worked itself out in the history of
eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Feeling came to substitute for principle.
Mid-century sentiment modulated into late-century sensibility as ready
emotion was increasingly assumed to be a moral value in itself, whether in
fiction or in life, and Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Practical Reason
(1788), had good cause to insist, against the sentimental belief in the natural
goodness of the feelings, that no act can be confidently characterized as
moral unless it is performed out of duty and against inclination.
Not surprisingly, by the 1770s, even as it lurched into the full-blown
excesses of sensibility, a reaction had set in against sentimentalism. Laurence
Sterne, of course, was the author who most cunningly combined both
critique and exploitation of sentiment while Rousseau had tended to
veer between them. And in this respect, Sterne points most significantly
towards the future: for the important destiny of sentimentalism lay not
in the hands of its hostile and external critics but in those, predominantly
poets and novelists, who ef fected an internal critique while keeping faith
with its underlying belief in the holiness of the heart’s af fections.4 Once
4 I discuss this more fully in Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling.
again, the aesthetic, as a practical understanding, if not as a self-conscious

philosophical category, was to provide the necessary condition. And to
appreciate the internal logic of this, it is necessary to note a literary corol-
lary of sentimentalist belief.
The literature of sentiment assumed a continuity between the char-
acters’ and the readers’ feelings, and, in so far as the emotional response
was thought to be a good in itself, and was likely in turn to promote good
actions, it naturally sought maximal identification rather than emotional
discrimination. Moreover, the belief in the impetus to practical benevo-
lence went with a distrust of expending moral emotions on purely fictional
objects. Indeed, that was a significant motif in the hostile critique of sen-
timent. Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre (1757) is a notable
example as he scorns the genteel audience for weeping at scenes of distress
in the theatre while passing unmoved the beggars in the street. Sentimental
fiction, therefore, constantly sought to elicit a response as if to a real event
or person; as Rousseau himself was to do in La Nouvelle Héloise (1761). Of
course, the readers who wrote to Richardson to ‘save’ Clarissa were aware
she was a fiction, yet they were in the grip of an identificatory response
that ef fectively excluded them from seeing her as an element in an artistic
action.
In the event, the great writers of sentiment, such as Richardson,
Rousseau, Sterne, Goethe, or Wordsworth, transcended its terms and sub-
mitted it to questioning; and the more ef fectively for doing so dramati-
cally and intuitively rather than at a level of conscious principle. The novel
was a major means by which the impetus of sentimentalism was critically
assimilated into European culture, and the condition of doing so was to
exercise a measure of artistic detachment from within the emotional seduc-
tion of the reader. But in the conventional mass of sentimentalist fiction
a literalistic understanding of literary response was constantly reinforced.
Likewise, an isomorphic understanding of the moral impact of good and
bad characters was reinforced by the assumed continuity between literary
response and moral emotions. In these respects, then, the new literature of
sentiment was at one with the older tradition of neo-classicism except that,
whereas neo-classicism had intuitively invoked an aesthetic consciousness
for which it lacked the term, the literature of sentiment actively repressed
16 Michael Bell
its own aesthetic potentiality. A foundational change in sensibility was

occurring with a dangerous literalism in its self-understanding. Schiller’s
Aesthetic Education did more than gather in both sides of the sentimen-
talist debate. In parallel with the great creative writers, Schiller changed
its terms, and found, most crucially, a new value in the very instability of
sentiment.
Schiller’s opening epigraph from La Nouvelle Héloise, ‘If reason
makes man, sentiment is his guide,’ signals his absorption of both Kant
and Rousseau. Sentimentalism had sought to combine two necessary
goods: moral reason and individual emotion although common experi-
ence has constantly discovered the conf lict between reason and inclination;
a recognition mythically embodied in the notion of original sin. Hence
the over-blown rhetorical investments with which the myth of sentiment
typically sought to sustain itself. Schiller, by contrast, saw neither of these
motivations as unambiguous goods: for him they were two necessary yet
dangerous powers, and he saw their dangers not just in the thought, but in
the personalities, of their principal contemporary proponents, Rousseau
and Kant, who remain to this day their classic embodiments.
Schiller saw human beings as uniquely impelled by two dif ferent orders
of compulsion: as embodied creatures we must satisfy the appetital desires
of the sensory life while as rational beings we cannot escape the authority of
reason. We may, of course, behave irrationally but we cannot avoid recogniz-
ing that two and two make four. Although both of these compulsions, or
‘drives’ (Triebe) as Schiller called them, are inescapable and desirable, they
are both damaging to human wholeness when either of them has too much
dominion over the psyche. And so, for him, Kant, with his formidable mind,
was intellectually muscle-bound, a judgement that anticipates Nietzsche’s
description of him as a ‘conceptual-cripple’5 while Rousseau’s passionate
and poetical nature left him rather the victim than the master of his own
emotions.6 Given the ambivalent necessity of these two principles, Schiller
5 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 77.

6 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 43; and On the Naïve
and Sentimental in Literature, 49–50.
no longer sought to identify them, as in sentimentalist ideology, but rather

saw a new value in their mutual resistance. Their irreducible dif ference was
vital in freeing us from the danger lurking in each if it ruled alone. Reason
saves us from the compulsions of purely animal existence while our sensory
desires free us from the compulsion of reason.7 The resulting capacity for
ref lective freedom between these unstable forces is what Schiller saw as the
essential human property and he called it the aesthetic.
It is important to note that the aesthetic as so defined is not a special
property of artistic experience. It is a capacity that must have arisen at an
early stage of human evolution as a pre-condition of human being as such
while the importance of art is that it uniquely privileges and exercises this
capacity. In ordinary existence we are beset with instrumental purposes
so that the process of free ref lection on our values is constantly subsumed
into specific goal-oriented concerns. But in art, as Kant had put it in the
Critique of Judgement (1790), we experience purposiveness without pur-
pose. With no instrumental purpose to be served, we freely ref lect on the
concentrated range of human possibilities in which, at the same time, we
participate with full emotional inwardness. It follows that the aesthetic is
not an optional extra to human thought, whether generally or about art in
particular. It is rather a condition of ref lexivity as such especially in rela-
tion to questions of value. It follows, too, that the aesthetic exposes us to
the radical condition of human freedom: far from directing the moral will
in any given direction, it focuses the lonely arbitrariness of its responsibil-
ity. Accordingly, although Schiller believed that the frequenting of great
works of art is ennobling, the specific ef fect of the aesthetic condition,
even within such works, is to enforce the dependence on an individual act
of will. Great literature, that is to say, cannot make evil and stupid men
humane and intelligent, although it can help the humane to become nobler
and wiser. This is a further point of connection with moral sentiment as a
belief in the intrinsic goodness of the human af fections. Schiller’s aesthetic
incorporates sentimental belief even as it submits it to a sceptical transfor-
mation. The aesthetic is continuous with the moral sentiments because it is
7 See Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 137.

18 Michael Bell
a modulation of them: and yet it is separate in so far as it raises them to a

speculative, non-literalistic level. To put this recognition in a still valuable
formula: the aesthetic is the unconscious of the moral and, where literature
is concerned, the moral is the unconscious of the aesthetic.
The further corollary here is that Schiller’s aesthetic is emergent not
just in once and for all evolutionary terms, but as a permanent dynamic in
the ref lection on human experience and values. This aspect is sometimes
obscured, when, as in Letter 22, he presents it as an absolute value in itself.
This happens perhaps because, in af firming the aesthetic against sentimental
literalism and moralism, he had to give it a pure clarity of principle, and also
because he is concerned not with specific aesthetic experiences so much as
the ef fect of aesthetic education in general. Hence his remark that
This lofty equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with power and vigour,
is the mood in which a genuine work of art should release us, and there is no more
certain touchstone of true aesthetic excellence. If, after enjoyment of this kind, we
find ourselves disposed to prefer some one particular mode of feeling or action, but
unfitted or disinclined for another, this may serve as infallible proof that we have
not had a purely aesthetic experience – whether the fault lies in the object or in our
own response or, as is almost always the case, in both at once.8
Schiller af firms here the freedom and equanimity of the aesthetic even while
going on immediately to recognize its ideal impossibility: ‘the excellence of
a work of art can never consist in anything more than a high approximation
to that ideal of aesthetic purity’. But in emphasizing that the emergence of
the aesthetic is always partial, Schiller’s phrase ‘true aesthetic excellence’
fatefully confuses two questions: the nature and value of the aesthetic as
such and the value of particular artistic experiences or works. His phrasing
here makes the purity of the aesthetic response the index of artistic quality,
and by implication, of artistic magnitude, as if the aesthetic is a suf ficient
value in itself. This is why he has been assimilated to a later aestheticism.
But the larger logic of his treatise clearly insists on distinguishing these
aspects. The aesthetic in itself, he says, is quite empty. Its plenitude lies in
8 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 153.

the range of values and potentialities it invokes in the mind and the feelings
so that its own value is not as an experience in its own right, but as a quality
of ref lection in the midst of experience. In other words, we may suppose
that the values and experiences engaged by the work have a bearing on its
artistic magnitude. Schiller’s slippage on this point, however, typifies how
his apparent inconsistency ref lects a penetrating and fertile insight for the
aesthetic always has a double relation of separateness and continuity to the
life around it, and that is what I take to be Schiller’s most important legacy
for modern literature and thought especially as mediated by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche articulated some decades in advance what a modernist gen-
eration around Europe would enact. In The Birth of Tragedy he deduced,
like Schiller, the evolutionary emergence of the aesthetic in Greek cul-
ture, where he also saw it created by the dynamic tension between polar
powers now named as Dionysos and Apollo. But whereas Schiller was
writing against the background of sentimentalism, Nietzsche was writing
in the century of ‘art for art’s sake.’ This requires a major shift in emphasis:
Schiller’s insistence on the separateness of the aesthetic gives way to a con-
cern for its liminal connection to living experience. T. S. Eliot was right to
say that the aestheticism to which the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’ gestures was
largely either incoherent or banal.9 Aestheticism, we might say, was a great
myth of the nineteenth century just as an ethics of sentiment had been for
the eighteenth. Most commonly it was a slogan of revolt against excessive
moralism and perceived bourgeois complacency as in Théophile Gautier’s
Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). Nonetheless, Schopenhauer
underwrote metaphysically such a separatist conception of the aesthetic,
and Nietzsche’s career enacted a gradual, proto-modernist inversion of
Schopenhauer’s vision while remaining within his nihilistic premises. He
now celebrated the aesthetic viewpoint as enabling an af firmation of life as
purposiveness without ultimate purpose. Nietzsche stands, therefore, to the
high modernism of a James Joyce as Schopenhauer stands to nineteenth-
century aestheticism and Nietzsche honoured Schiller precisely for his
complex insight into the liminality of the aesthetic.
9 See Eliot, 439, 442.

20 Michael Bell
Although Schiller, the moral idealist who had become an institution

of German national culture, was consistently dismissed by Nietzsche as ‘the
moral trumpeter of Säckingen’,10 when Nietzsche pondered the historical
emergence of the aesthetic, he turned precisely to Schiller. Defining the
function of the Greek dramatic chorus in The Birth of Tragedy, he rejects a
number of literalistic explanations and invokes Schiller for an insight that
arises, it is worth noting, not from a theoretical text, but from Schiller’s
creative concern as a dramatist: ‘Schiller in the celebrated Preface to his
Bride of Messina, […] regards the chorus as a living wall that tragedy con-
structs around itself in order to close itself of f from the world of reality and
to preserve its poetical freedom.’11 We may note in passing that Schiller’s
insight here is a remarkable development of Pierre Corneille’s ‘theatrical
fiction,’ but more importantly, his phrase ‘living wall’ is a wonderfully preg-
nant image ref lecting the subtle pliability of both Schiller’s and Nietzsche’s
aesthetic thought beyond the immediate occasions of its use. In their imme-
diate contexts, both Schiller and Nietzsche emphasize the separateness
of the world of art. But the oxymoronic phrase ‘living wall’ ref lects how,
for both of them, the separation is itself constituted by a collective act of
the living community. The aesthetic separation is attained within, and is
the expression of, a powerful interest. It is emergent from, and only tem-
porarily sustained by, the whole theatrical community without which it
has no meaning. Hence the living wall mediates between the realms that
it divides, and therefore, far from being an image of simple separation, it
is one of supremely concentrated concern. I might say in passing that the
subtlest account I know of the analytically elusive doubleness of the aes-
thetic is W. B. Yeats’s most Nietzschean poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’ which I have
discussed elsewhere.12
In Nietzsche, however, the distinction that Schiller had at times elided
between the aesthetic as a philosophical condition and as the play of
substantive values which it enables became more crucial. For Nietzsche
10 Nietzsche, Twilight, 78.

11 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 58.
12 Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth, 52–59.
saw the high artistic culture, or Bildung, of his time as itself a source of
mischief. Early in his career, he coined the phrase Bildungsphilister, or
culture philistine, to denote a philistinism growing specifically out of
high culture. Nietzsche, therefore, concentrated on the values as such
and, whereas Matthew Arnold, with a residual sentimentalism, believed
in the ennobling value of high art, Nietzsche saw that art per se could not
enforce any such ef fect. Indeed, it is often the alibi of vulgar egotism and
greed: ‘To be cultivated means: to hide from oneself how wretched and
base one is, how rapacious in going for what one wants, how insatiable
in heaping it up, how shameless and selfish in enjoying it.13 Yet for him
too the aesthetic condition remained crucial. It might be supposed that
his late work Twilight of the Idols (1888) elides the distinction between
art and life values in the opposite direction from Schiller for it seems to
define the aesthetic through a simple, almost biological, invocation of life,
thereby erasing the complex ontological model of the aesthetic in Birth of
Tragedy (1872): ‘Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivety
rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add
the second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – with this the domain of
aesthetics is defined.’14 But the dif ference between the two works is that
whereas the Birth of Tragedy is centered on a philosophical definition of
the aesthetic, Twilight of the Idols is more concerned with passing judge-
ment on a quality of life through its culture. Failure to recognize this
distinction frequently bedevils discussion of the aesthetic. In the British
context, the literary critic F. R. Leavis once declared that a critic should
avoid the word ‘aesthetic’ as it almost always signals a loss of critical grip.15
His remark might seem to suggest hostility to the aesthetic on the part
of a naïvely moralist and literalistic critic. But the opposite is the case.
Leavis had a radical commitment to the specialness of the imaginative
experience involved in a literary engagement with language and, by the
13 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 168.

14 Nietzsche, Twilight, 90, trans. modified.
15 Leavis, The Common Pursuit, 89.
22 Michael Bell
same token, had an almost unbearably urgent sense of what it meant to

engage the living values at stake within it. Hence, although often seen as
an Arnoldian, Leavis was more truly a Nietzschean. As with Nietzsche,
his typical attack was not on acknowledged philistines but on the of ficial
guardians of culture. Likewise Schiller, although it was not his primary
emphasis, and he was a channel for sentimental idealism, had nonetheless
understood that the aesthetic as such is no defence against philistinism,
and worse evils. The proper ef fect of the aesthetic is to open up before the
will the full complexity and responsibility of its choices.16
In conclusion, the history I have traced suggests a principled distinc-
tion for invoking the elusive category of the ‘aesthetic.’ For purposes of
defining philosophically the nature of artistic experience this category is
of the essence; and likewise, for engaging with any individual work of art,
an understanding of its individual aesthetic contract is crucial. But for pur-
poses of forming a critical judgement it is likely to be vacuous. In the words
of Leavis, who used the term ‘literary’ essentially as Schiller used the word
‘aesthetic,’ you must read ‘literature as literature and not another thing’ but
‘there are no purely literary values.’17 This conception of the aesthetic does
not just avoid the enduring twin errors of sentimentalist identification and
aestheticist separatism: it is constantly generated precisely by the interaction
of their legitimate but partial and polar demands. Hence, if Schiller did
sometimes confuse the demands of art and life, this points to his deeper
insight into their interrelations. His continuing value, as mediated especially
by Nietzsche, lies in his recognizing the liminal, oxymoronic doubleness of
the aesthetic as a ‘living wall.’ Its dynamic mode of being between worlds
makes it an always emergent category.
16 See Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 149, 161.

17 Leavis, Anna Karenina and Other Essays, 195; and The Common Pursuit, 183, 280.
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GUSTAV FRANK
The Invisible Hand:

Schiller’s Media Aesthetics of Modernity
Introduction
My aim in this discussion is to shed light on the modernity of Schiller’s

aesthetic anxieties before they were alleviated by his classical aesthetics and
then buried under two centuries of Schiller enthusiasm which have lasted
to the present-day. I shall do so by going back to the 1780s and focusing
on Schiller’s novelistic prose rather than his theoretical writings, not least
because literary practice is by definition an enterprise in aesthetics from
the 1770s onwards. My analysis of Schiller’s only novel, The Ghost-Seer,
will present a close reading especially of those aspects of the text that are
af fected by what I refer to anachronistically as ‘media’. As a coherent theory
of media did not emerge until the 1940s, the concept is used here to high-
light textual phenomena that in the contemporary discourses of the 1780s
could not be properly categorized in such terms. These phenomena range
from aspects of textual procedures via popular spectacles to the aesthetics
of fine arts and literature.
Answering the Question:

Why Literature is an Aesthetic Pursuit
The emergence of aesthetics is necessarily linked to the process of

Enlightenment. In formal terms, Enlightenment is grounded in the premise
26 GUSTAV FRANK
that the critical examination of all facts and traditions must be based on the
unbiased use of reason. In substantive terms, the Enlightenment project
involves a comprehensive ‘rehabilitation of sensory experience’, as indicated
by Wilhelm Dilthey and, in particular, Panayotis Kondylis.1 In contra-
distinction to theological orthodoxy, the Enlightenment thus attributes
increasing value to this world and to nature. Following on from the estab-
lishment of scientific curiosity in the Renaissance,2 the Enlightenment
vindicates the comprehensive investigation of nature.3 This turn to nature
requires a thorough understanding of both empirical sense perception
and the many and varied palpable techniques of representation in the
arts and sciences. In the first half of the eighteenth century aisthesis, to
use the Greek term, or sense perception breaks free from the stranglehold
of rationalism in which it had been constrained by continental philoso-
phy since Descartes.4 Descartes had interpreted the scientific revolution
of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo in intellectualist terms, and required
investigations of nature to engage in more geometrico in order to reveal the
rational laws of the world. The Enlightenment abolishes this constraint.
Now the res cogitans focuses not just on external nature and the rational
laws that govern the res extensa, but increasingly on the inner nature and
mental processes of human beings themselves. The emergent monism of
the Enlightenment starts to understand reason with increasing reference
to the senses, ultimately characterizing it as being in thrall to the sexual
drive and the interests of the powerful. In the course of this emancipation
of sense-experience, the prevailing power relationships are turned upside
down, if one compares seventeenth century rationalism with the Western
European mainstream of Enlightenment thinking from Mandeville, Hume
and La Metrie to d’Holbach and, ultimately, de Sade.
1 See Dilthey, ‘Das 18. Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt’, and Kondylis, Die
Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus.
2 See Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit.
3 Prior to the Baroque era, it is possible for this to be explicitly formulated once again
by one protagonist, Galilei: see Galilei, Lettera a Christina di Lorena – Briefe an
Christine von Lothringen.
4 See Meier, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften.
This new idea, whereby knowledge of the sensory world involves sense
experience, becomes the fundamental argument for the scientific standing
of aisthesis, which only now begins to reveal the manifold phenomena of
the external world. The indiscriminate and comprehensive documentation
of nature, which characterizes early Enlightenment literature, is typical of
this initial optimistic stage, unspoilt by natural catastrophes. The knowl-
edge that emerges in this context is novel, and accumulates at breakneck
speed, so that by the middle of the century Diderot and d’Alembert find
it necessary to compile an encyclopaedia that can take stock of what has
been established so far.
Aesthetics develops out of scholastic philosophy on the basis of this
shift in values, which culminates in the celebration of nature. In doing so,
aesthetics remains however within the formulations of scholastic philoso-
phy, so that ‘its arguments are far too a priori and plucked from thin air,
and by the same token disappear into the thin air of general propositions’.5
Nevertheless, the fact that it is possible to congregate in academic symposia
to speak of aesthetics at all is due to the historical foundation of aesthetics
as a predominantly philosophical and above all independent discipline in
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica.
Baumgarten brings the valorization of sensory knowledge to the point
where it may provide a touchstone for truth. But his aesthetics is not just a
theory of sensory knowledge, as it also develops an – albeit metaphysically
grounded – theory of beauty and, moreover – because sensory knowledge
and its palpable representation are intrinsically connected – a veritable
theory of art. Baumgarten’s theory of beauty is, however, no more than a
regulatory idea. While it may appear to us mainly as a synonym for aesthet-
ics as such, Baumgarten adds his theory of beauty to his concept of sense
perception, or aisthesis, and thereby grounds his theory of art. The theory
of beauty has to ensure that as far as possible it excludes sensory ugliness,
not least as the latter is regarded as the sensory side of moral dubiousness.
5 ‘daß sie alles zu sehr a priori und wie aus der Luft hernimmt, und sich also auch in
der Luft allgemeiner Sätze verliert’, Herder, ‘Von Baumgartens Denkart in seinen
Schriften’, 191.
28 GUSTAV FRANK
The rehabilitation of sensory experience around 1750 may no longer be

imbued with the exclusively optimistic aura of the early Enlightenment,
but it remains a leading idea nonetheless – with the proviso that the world
of sense-experience must be beautiful if it is to be worthy of our perceptual
attentiveness.
Finally, when Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling are working in 1796/97
on the ‘oldest systematic programme’ of German Idealism, they explicitly
elevate beauty to regulatory status over and above the trinity of knowledge,
morality and judgement, so that ‘truth and goodness are kindred only in
beauty’.6 Yet in the fifty years or thereabouts that separate the foundation
of aesthetics as a central area of philosophical thought from this Idealist
bottleneck, the late Enlightenment continues to develop the concept of
aisthesis along the trajectory of unbiased investigation of the entire sensory
world untrammelled by pre-existing norms and values.
This is why it is self-evident that Lessing should allocate to beauty
the task of regulating sense-experience in his 1766 treatise Laokoon, or the
Limits of Painting and Poetry. He does so, admittedly, in order to drasti-
cally accelerate the emancipation of poetic writing from the dominion
of philosophical critique, a process initiated in Baumgarten and Meier’s
foundation of ‘all the sciences of beauty’ (1748–50): but the autonomy of
art is paid for by its self-imposed duty to represent beauty and nothing
else. The illusionism of mimetic representation is established as the norm
thanks to the Enlightenment critique of the allegorical art of the Baroque.7
Illusionism encompasses the fine arts and literature in equal measure, so
that in his foreword to Laokoon Lessing can simply take it as read: ‘Both
[…] represent absent objects as present to us, and appearance as reality;
6 ‘daß die Wahrheit und Güte nur in der Schönheit verschwistert sind’, Jamme and
Schneider, eds, Mythologie der Vernunft. Hegels ‘ältestes Systemprogramm’ des deut-
schen Idealismus, 12.
7 On the relevance of Diderot translations for Lessing’s illusionism, see Worvill,
‘Seeing’ Speech. Illusion and the Transformation of Dramatic Writing in Diderot and
Lessing.
both deceive, and the deceptions of both are pleasing.’8 The breakthrough
of illusionism thus presupposes the valorization of sensory nature, and
establishes this as the yardstick for any and every representation of nature
– hence the reservations concerning mathematics and mathematical, non-
sensory models – particularly in those art forms whose pre-eminent task
now involves sensory representations of the world of sense-experience.
The valorization of nature not only enhances the status of the arts,
but also releases the representation of nature from the obligation to illus-
trate rational categories and symbolize philosophical or indeed political
theses. All these factors prepare the ground for artistic autonomy. From
Lessing’s programmatic treatise onwards, poetic writing can be construed as
autonomous; by becoming an independent phenomenon, based only on the
interconnection between perception of nature and its specific techniques of
representation, it is at last able to fully liberate itself from the metaphysical
residues in the rational categories underpinning the philosophical aesthetics
of the likes of Baumgarten and Meier. Furthermore, with the onset of the
Storm and Stress movement around 1770, its represented worlds begin to
show how thoughts and concepts themselves are sensuously grounded in
individuals led by their own interests, so that by the late Enlightenment
its subject matter increasingly concerns the aporia of philosophy. In that
respect, autonomous literature presenting illusionist imitations of nature
and engaging critically with rationality should not be seen as a counter-
movement to the Enlightenment, but as bringing the Enlightenment’s
basic principles to fruition in terms of form and content.
Autonomous aesthetics in the Age of Goethe thus simply means that
art is now standing on its own two feet. Art has emancipated itself com-
pletely from the normative poetics of the early Enlightenment and the
aesthetic theory of art associated with Baumgarten or Meier, and no longer
constructs its represented worlds with reference to epistemology or moral
philosophy. On the contrary, art has reached the point where it can freely
choose its empirical subject matter and its artistic techniques. In other
8 ‘Beide […] stellen uns abwesende Dinge als gegenwärtig, den Schein als Wirklichkeit
vor; beide täuschen, und beider Täuschung gefällt.’ Lessing, Laokoon, 13.
30 GUSTAV FRANK
words, autonomy does not just mean self-referentiality, but art’s freedom to
choose its subject matter and how it treats it. The increasingly radical separa-
tion from the prescriptions of tradition, poetics and rhetoric – exemplified
in Sentimentalism, and even more in Storm and Stress – provides more
than suf ficient evidence for this, and has been described often enough. For
the first time in its history, literature too is able to construe its techniques
as its sole defining feature, tapping into the history of these techniques as
well as devoting itself to the expansion of its formal range. That is why it is
at this precise moment that Herder and Tieck become interested in all his-
torical forms without exception, and Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel
in all cultural forms without exception – including not just Shakespeare
and the Renaissance but also Calderon and Lope de Vega, and translations
not only from European languages but also from Sanskrit.
Art now has the inalienable right to use anything as its subject matter
– though it doesn’t have to – and above all can deal with subjects that phi-
losophers repudiate and even teach philosophers themselves a lesson too.
Autonomous aesthetics in the Age of Goethe also means that no authority
external to literature is competent to adjudicate on its concerns: literature
thus assimilates the entire artistic discourse that had previously accompa-
nied and encircled it. Even though this has of course been polemically dis-
puted by philosophical theorists – I once argued that Kant’s entire critical
philosophy, in its scholasticism, its linguistic mediation and its content, is
an attack on the cultural revolution of Storm and Stress9 − even if this is
9 See Frank, ‘Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion as Logic of German
Counter-cultures’. With Storm and Stress at the latest, it also becomes clear that the
process of gradually valorizing nature by studying it in more detail reveals aspects
of nature that can no longer be accepted by all those who were initially interested
in the process of Enlightenment. At each stage in the progressive development of
Enlightenment, certain groups lag behind as they can no longer identify with any
further exploration or radicalization of the image of nature and therefore from a cer-
tain point onwards reject any increase in Enlightenment. Furthermore, when Kant
provides us with a definition in his famous text ‘Answering the Question: What is
Enlightenment’ – which was, significantly, a response to an essay by the Berlin pastor
Johann Friedrich Zöllner entitled ‘Is it Advisable for Religion to Abjure from the
Sanctification of Marriage?’ – he is not calling for Enlightenment to be extended,
vehemently denied, literature increasingly takes on the tasks of criticism

and theory because it is the predestined agent of a rehabilitation of sen-
sory experience.
One can tell this from the specific form of literary criticism, founded
by the Schlegels, which argues in a refined literary style from the interior
of its objects, as it were, and renders obsolete the old judges of art who
viewed works of literature from the outside.10 But it can be recognized
even more clearly in the way that literary texts themselves now engage in
poetology, and in the way that what had once been philosophical aesthet-
ics is transformed into a literary, intertextual poetology. Consequently, a
split develops from the 1780s onwards. Because philosophical aesthetics
is not developed in a way that would enable it to adequately describe the
historical and cultural variety of the arts, at this moment it splits into two
strands. The first of these is philosophical aesthetics, founded in Kant’s
Critique of Judgement in 1790, whose compelling arguments resonate to the
present-day. In view of the empirical wealth of artistic production and its
diversification, Kant shies away from concrete examples to focus on gen-
eral principles such as ‘the beautiful’ or ‘the sublime’. The second strand,
as already indicated, emerges as a consequence of artistic autonomy: the
arts tend increasingly to internalize discussions about their history and
appropriate artistic techniques, which individual works then ref lect on at
an historical and genre-specific meta-level. One indicator of the strength
of this self-ref lexivity within individual works is its impact on art criticism,
which ceases to be the prerogative of artistic judges external to the domain
of art, and is resurrected with the Romantics in a mode of criticism that is
aesthetically refined and enhances the work by re-enacting it and ref lect-
ing on it. What is lost with this split is the understanding of aisthesis as a
symbiosis of perception and representation in all their manifestations. Non-
but for it to be restricted on the basis of a very narrow conceptual understanding

whereby the primacy of formal determination (rational examination) over substan-
tive determination (rehabilitation of sensory experience) is maintained, and the
predominance of reason is reasserted in true rationalist fashion.
10 See also Walter Benjamin’s doctoral thesis on The Concept of Art Criticism in German
Romanticism, and Bram Mertens’ chapter in this volume.
32 GUSTAV FRANK
autonomous art-forms and popular spectacles in particular are excluded

from the domain of aisthesis and no longer have a theoretical home.11 This
symbiotic understanding of aisthesis, which is absent from Schiller’s later
theoretical work, still informs his novel, not least as its narration is centred
on the various modes of sense perception and the various material media
of representation together with their respective functions. The narrative
process displays these possible functions and assesses and evaluates them.
Although this literary text contains a significant amount of theory – the
famous ‘philosophical discussion’ which was abridged more and more in
later editions – this dimension of aisthesis is mediated in narrative form
rather than in theoretical discourse.
In other words, it is not only the innovative theoretical texts of the
1790s, such as the aesthetic writings of Schiller and the Romantics or even
Hölderlin’s contribution to the ‘Systematic Programme’, that adumbrate
and illustrate the key questions for a media aesthetic of modernity12 under
the aegis of autonomous aesthetics. This is also the case with precursor texts
such as the programmatic poetry and fictional prose of Friedrich Schiller
and the self-referential and parabatic comedy of Ludwig Tieck. This intra-
poetic aesthetic, which encompasses the entire field of aisthesis, reaches a
11 This process has been convincingly described in Staf ford’s Artful Science as a decline
of visual education, though she does not examine the ideological contexts of this
decline as outlined in my discussion.
12 My usage of the term ‘media aesthetics’ here is anachronistic, in the sense that a coher-
ent media theory was not developed until the 1940s, after which it was restricted to
those media that addressed the masses as a uniform entity and, above all, sought to
inf luence them. A contemporary conceptual framework, which might enable me to
develop a coherent perspective on those phenomena in Schiller’s story that interest
me, was not available in the 1780s. The most appropriate context for their discussion
would be an expanded version of aesthetics that theorizes sense perception and the
material representation of the sensory world, engaging with all dimensions of the
sensory world as well as displaying more interest in the material bearers of such repre-
sentations and devising theoretical models appropriate to them. However, aesthetics
did not develop in this direction, and at this point in time diverged instead into the
dual trajectory outlined earlier, so that for a considerable period of time it remained
blind to the materiality of sensory media and their impact on sense perception.
highpoint in Schiller’s novel The Ghost-Seer. From the Papers of Count von
O. If Schiller subsequently issues a call for order in his theoretical writings
of the 1790s, which academic research has come to hold in much higher
regard, then that signifies not so much the triumph of classical aesthetics
as an admission of the failure of the Enlightenment project.
Schiller’s Ghost-Seer:
Histoire and Discours of a Late Enlightenment Novel
It’s only in the last two decades that Schiller’s Ghost-Seer has gradually
emerged from the obscurity13 to which it had been consigned by the author’s
own disparaging observations and his contemporaries’ discontent with a
supposedly fragmentary novel.14 I would first like to present an overview
of the story that the novel narrates, and then describe in more detail the
literary techniques by means of which the story is narrated. I shall conclude
by proposing a set of theses concerning the type of media aesthetic that the
narrated story outlines in conjunction with its narrative techniques.
The story presents the typical biographical narrative that we encoun-
ter again and again in the Age of Goethe. It tells us about an exemplary
human being – i.e. a young man – emerging from a state of immaturity that
is not self-inf licted, and does so in such a way that it can explore in detail
the conditions of heteronomy and autonomy, of successes and failures, on
this road to self-knowledge and self-determination.15 The hero of this story
is the Prince of *** – the text is replete with such asteronyms – while the
action takes place in the Republic of Venice and its environs and lasts the
13 See, for example, the analyses in Reiner, Schillers Prosa; Brittnacher, ‘Dunkelmänner
im Licht. Schillers Romanfragment Der Geisterseher’; and Riedel, ‘Die anthropolo-
gische Wende. Schillers Modernität’.
14 See Schiller, Historische Schriften und Erzählungen II, 998–1064 and 1020–1047.
15 For further discussion see Brandl, Emanzipation gegen Anthropomorphismus.
34 GUSTAV FRANK
best part of a year, starting with the carnival of – in all probability – the
year 1774. Supplementary details from the Prince’s biography enable us to
infer that he fought in the Seven Years War and the Battle of Hastenbeck in
1757, immediately after he had f led at the age of seventeen from his family
home, one of the ruling Houses of Baden.
His decision to escape from his sanctimonious family home and its
entourage of ‘enthusiastic’ and hypocritical educators is the first instance
in the text of a transition as defined in the narratology of Juri Lotman.16
But this first crucial stage in the development of self-knowledge and self-
determination is followed by nothing of note until 1774 – the uneventful
nature of his life between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five providing an
initial indication of the failure of this educational process, which appears
to have been replaced by military engagements and travel.
Only when he is in Venice is his life-story given a belated further impe-
tus. The second noteworthy event in his biography involves his encounter
with the Armenian, who seeks to gain inf luence on the Prince in a vari-
ety of disguises and with numerous accomplices whom the Prince fails
to identify. This event consists in the fact that the Prince manages by his
own ef forts to see through and tear asunder the web of intrigue that sur-
rounds him. Because of his background, those plotting against the Prince
had taken him to be a romancer. They wanted to exploit his overactive
imagination, oblivious to the promptings of reason, in order to bring him
under their power by using apparitions. The reason for the plot is that the
Prince is heir to the throne of his Protestant homeland, even though he
appears at first to be a late-born distant relative. His prospects of succeed-
ing to the throne improve as the ranks of the heirs start to thin out due to
the activities of the plotters. The aim of the plot is to secure the Prince’s
conversion to Catholicism, so that when he takes power the entire terri-
tory will switch its allegiance to the Catholic party in accordance with the
principle of cuius regio, eius religio.
The Prince is able to resist this first attack thanks to the autonomy of
his reason. He sees through the supposedly magical illusions of a ghost-
16 See Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte, 332.

seer called Sicilian, recognizing them to be mere deceptions generated by

various media and information technologies. In order to do so, the Prince
needs to be acquainted with the laws of external nature, namely physics,
optics and mechanics, as well as medicine and the state of transport links
and news transmission in Europe, and must then apply this knowledge.
However, the Prince doesn’t only manage to see through the tricks of the
stooge Sicilian. When listening to the Sicilian’s interpolated internal nar-
rative about the Armenian who is actually the real magician, he keeps
his analytical wits about him and is struck by the questionable logic and
motivation in the Sicilian’s narrative, so that in the end he also becomes
suspicious of the Armenian.
But this second step on the road to autonomy is not followed by the
third and crucial one. This is because neither breaking free from ‘enthusi-
astic’ and hypocritical orthodoxy nor rational control of external nature
are themselves suf ficient to ground an irreversible process of attaining
autonomy. Ultimately, science and knowledge of nature must be comple-
mented above all else by morality, the correct – in other words, Enlightened
– religion. The Prince fails to take this crucial third step, which involves
engaging in suitable social activity and choosing a suitable spouse. This is
the point at which the second plot is instigated by the group associated with
the Armenian, and this time they manage to catch the Prince by exploiting
his uncontrolled sensuality. Instead of confronting him with an apparition
of his deceased childhood friend as before, this plot involves an enigmatic
but nonetheless lifelike woman of f lesh and blood. Her appearance was
preceded by a medial fact-finding mission into the Prince’s sensual and psy-
chological weaknesses. He was shown three paintings that were supposedly
for sale. From the stereotypical female figures they depicted, he immedi-
ately selected the Madonna and Child, not the Venus or the Heloïse. The
Madonna and Child is presented to him in the guise of a Greek woman,
albeit of aristocratic German origin, and the plotters make her appear to
him and him alone as a living painting, illuminated as it were by a spotlight
from a church window. They had realized earlier the importance of under-
mining the Prince’s moral philosophy, which they had done by drawing
him into the circle of one Bucentauro, where Jesuitism and Freethinking
– in other words the insuf ficient Enlightenment of Catholic orthodoxy
36 GUSTAV FRANK
and the excessive Enlightenment of Western European materialism and

nihilism – turn out to be one and the same. It is true that the Prince does
not succumb to the unbridled heathen eroticism of Venus, nor does he turn
out to be the emasculated counterpart of a medieval Heloïse, but his fate
his sealed by his susceptibility to the ambivalent eroticism of a virgin and
mother. For her sake, he will ultimately convert to Catholicism and seek
to ascend the throne through criminal means. This triumph of orthodoxy
in relation to the exemplary figure of the Prince indicates weak points in
the Enlightenment project as a whole.
However, the real import of this triumph only becomes clear when we
look more closely at the narrative techniques used in this story of failure. Its
date of composition is clearly later than 1774, while its date of publication
(initially in Schiller’s periodical Thalia in 1787 and 1789) is clearly more
recent. The Prince has been dead for some time, as have most of the other
participants, while the writer – Count von O. – tells us in the first book
version (1789) that he expects to die before his work is published. The
Prince’s older mentor, Count von O., on whose papers the story is based,
was an eye-witness to the first plot, which was successfully thwarted. The
first book in the novel, which is authenticated by his status as an eye-witness,
is drafted as a first person narrative by O. when he is advanced in years. The
second book, however, which contains the second plot involving the Greek
woman, is drafted by O. but was dictated to him by the youngish Baron
von F***, who was a member of the Prince’s entourage, and O. leaves us in
no doubt that the good-natured and pious F*** lacked the perspicacity to
even remotely see through the web of intrigue enveloping the Prince. O.
himself was also compelled to leave Venice due to the interventions of the
plotters – as he puts it, ‘of an invisible hand’17 – in order to rectify their
deliberate disruption of his own af fairs in his homeland. Like O., other
members of the Prince’s entourage were skilfully removed, and replaced
with emissaries of this ‘invisible hand’. F***, however, whose letters are cited
by O. in the second book, remains oblivious to all of this. Nevertheless,
O. himself makes no attempt to enlighten the reader as to how these plots
17 ‘einer unsichtbaren Hand’, Schiller, Geisterseher, 655.

were hatched and who played which role in them – instead, he leaves that
to the reader’s own intelligence. And so the first book, which recounts the
Prince’s detective work that enables him to expose the plotters’ sleight of
hand and other deceptions, becomes a manual as it were for the reader’s
critical analysis in the second book. It is left to the reader alone to pass
judgement on such figures as the Prince’s new aide, Biondello, his new pro-
tegé, the Marquis of Civitella, and the Greek woman and their respective
actions. It is never made clear at any point in or by the text who is playing
which role in the play of intrigue, and above all we are never enlightened
as to what sort of instance or institution the ‘invisible hand’ might actu-
ally be in concrete terms, nor as to how it might be structured or might
function. Similarly, the secret society of which Bucentauro is merely a
superficial visible manifestation is cloaked in the obscurity of a vaguely
Enlightened Jesuitism together with a Freethinking hedonism and nihil-
ism. Some individuals are visible to us, as are some of their actions, but all
the underlying structures remain invisible. The end-result of this mode of
representation is a paranoid world-view, in which the empathetic reader,
beguiled by the semblance of representation, is made the victim of opaque
and impenetrable power-structures, just like the central figure.
Neither the first writer, Baron von F***, nor the second writer, Count
von O., has the last word in the published text. The superior narrative
voice in the text addresses the reader in but a few asides and footnotes,
and the identity of this voice is also hidden behind the abbreviation ‘S’.
While one cannot precisely infer from O.’s editing of the intellectually
challenged F***’s letters how much of their content he communicates to
the reader or on what basis he selected it, S’s explicit interventions into
the manuscript singularly fail to clarify how the Prince’s story was actu-
ally transmitted. Moreover, because we have read O.’s assertion that the
‘invisible hand’ intervened directly in his life, we are also inclined to sus-
pect that its agents are at work everywhere – another consequence of the
paranoid narrated world. Ultimately, it remains quite unclear whether this
entire narrative has been instigated by that same ‘invisible hand’ in order
to disconcert Enlightened circles in Germany or inf luence them in other
ways, by drawing them into an intricately interconnected intrigue of a
similar complexity to the one enveloping the Prince. It was precisely this
38 GUSTAV FRANK
ef fect of the text’s narrative techniques that provoked widespread unease
in contemporary readers. They all expected events and motives to be fully
clarified, and declared the novel to be a fragment because such clarification
was not forthcoming. But this assertion was motivated solely by ideologi-
cal unease, and has no basis either in the history of poetics, which did not
even recognize the novel as a genre because of its so recent emergence, or
in the tradition of novel-writing itself, which had not reached any sort of
closure and in fact had demonstrated its capacity to assimilate any and
every kind of discourse. Indeed, in the context of autonomous aesthetics
and the poetics of genius, it is precisely the novel that is the most liberated
of all genres thanks to its prose form.
Media Aesthetics of the Invisible Hand
In this respect, what Schiller produces in – or rather, with – the Ghost-

Seer can itself be construed as a veritable, albeit intra-literary instance of
aesthetic theorizing. At the same time, this aesthetic is dominated by the
‘invisible hand’, or even – one might say – written by it. In that respect
Schiller’s text throws significant light on the problems facing the disci-
pline of aesthetics when it split in the late Enlightenment, or to be more
precise the problems posed for autonomous aesthetics in Germany by the
mainstream of late Enlightenment in Western Europe, which as we know
was moving towards positions such as La Metrie’s materialism, d’Holbach’s
atheism, and de Sade’s nihilism.
In order to reconstruct this aesthetic of the ‘invisible hand’, it is neces-
sary to explain brief ly what this term actually involves. The ‘invisible hand’,
which Schiller’s Count von O. identifies as the authority that controls the
world, was not invented by Schiller. Its most prominent appearance was in
Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
of 1776. In Chapter Two of Book Four, Smith criticizes import restrictions
on foreign goods as they are inimical to free trade and, using the example
of a merchant acting solely in his own interests, he writes as follows: ‘He

intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by
an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.’
(Wealth of Nations, 456) What Smith encapsulates here is a mode of argu-
ment typical of the Enlightenment that appropriates the discourse of the
invisible hand of Providence from its orthodox opponent. Smith’s argu-
mentation here turns on the heterogony of ends so as to show why it is the
case that, at the end of the day, morally dubious lapses of the individual
as well as with wrong turnings in the history of the collective not only do
not stand in the way of the infinite progress of humanity, but almost drive
it onwards. Bernard Mandeville presents an exemplary application of this
argument as early as 1714 in his Fable of the Bees, where ‘private vices’ always
turn into ‘publick benefits’. And, just as beauty curtails negative features
when the world of the senses is being represented, so too the heterogony
of ends explains away the negative ef fects of human sensuality with refer-
ence to empirical experience.
The impact of this anthropomorphization of the invisible hand,
certainly up to Adam Smith, represented a standard argument of the
Enlightenment that was deployed to rationalize negative trajectories in
individual biographies and the history of the collective. What is striking
about Schiller’s Ghost-Seer is the fact that the invisible hand has obviously
changed sides, and is now in the service of destructive trajectories in indi-
vidual and collective histories. This is clearly exemplified in the fate of the
protagonist, who ends up as a criminal and is already dead by the time the
story is narrated, whereas the unnerving threat from the secret society
hovers above the represented world and, moreover, even overshadows the
genesis of the text itself.
This indicates the extent to which the optimism of the moderate
Enlightenment, otherwise associated with Schiller and the Berlin group
around Nicolai, is now evaporating, and has given way to an altogether para-
noid belief in the rampant spread of hostility to that type of Enlightenment.
Schiller’s demonstration of the helplessness of an Enlightenment forced
into a minority position seems to have been unbearable for his peer group.
After the Great Revolution, with the emergence of Kant’s ‘idealist realism’
40 GUSTAV FRANK
and the classical movement’s ideology of humanitarianism grounded in self-

restraint, other arguments were brought to bear on the late Enlightenment;
but that is not crucial here.
For Lessing, the crucial precondition of illusionism is willing decep-
tion, in other words the audience’s readiness to assent to the artwork’s
beautiful semblance and acquiesce in its semiotic simulation of empirical
worlds. In an empirical world which in historical terms has not yet pro-
gressed to perfection, illusionism thus serves to reprise in fictional terms
the empirical world’s problematic18 and its desirable or inauspicious devel-
opments, thereby making them available to sense-experience even when
they have not yet taken place in reality.
In the more pessimistic world of Schiller’s Ghost-Seer, deception is
imbued with a completely dif ferent quality. Here deception forms part of
a strategic power-play based on overwhelming others by means of superior
information and media technology, so that the aesthetic represented in The
Ghost-Seer essentially involves classifying techniques of deception. At first
sight, that process seems to be straightforward. Evaluation of the various
techniques of illusion seems to depend on whether they are associated with
the agents of good or evil. The agents of evil use the most advanced means
of communication such as express mail, which can deliver to Venice news
of the demise of a ruler in Baden in a specific time period, so that it will
appear to be a prophecy to those who are less well-informed. The agents
of evil also use the most advanced media technology, by deploying magic
lantern projections to create the illusion of communing with the dead. In
the latter case, the term ‘advanced’ refers to the process of projecting very
bright images onto smoke, possibly by using the improved 1784 version
of the Argand lamp, so as to generate the illusion of movement as well as
18 My understanding of this term is based on Sheppard’s account in ‘The Problematics

of European Modernism’, which reminds us of the conceptual metaphor of ‘prob-
lematic history’ that Walter Benjamin develops in 1924–1925 by taking issue with
the methodology of intellectual history associated with Dilthey and seeks to
apply in his treatise on Goethe’s novel Elective Af finities: see Benjamin, Goethes
Wahlverwandtschaften.
the impression of three-dimensionality.19 The term ‘advanced’ also refers

to the fact that the projected moving images of bodies are synchronized
with the auditory illusion of the supposed voices of the dead, emanating
from a fireplace. The agents of evil also use oral narration, as in the case of
the Sicilian and Civitella. Orality, narration linked to a physical body, and
narration by a visible body with an audible voice are much more ef fective
means of deception than arbitrary written characters that strain to evoke
the palpable presence of an absent one. Yet none of this should perplex the
scientifically trained mind or the well-informed Enlightenment subject.
Of greater moment than media technologies and orality is the appear-
ance of actors’ – or rather actresses’ – bodies, and of writing. Once he has
been put into the right frame of mind by the paintings of Heloïse, Venus
and the Madonna – bearing in mind Lessing’s assertion that paintings gen-
erate their illusion by representing involuntary corporeal signs juxtaposed
in space – the Prince is entranced without a moment’s hesitation by the
appearance of the Greek woman disguised as the Madonna and gesticu-
lating like her. What is less surprising is the fact that in this case, the cor-
poreal signs of pictures are replaced by the real body. Up to this point, the
aesthetic of The Ghost-Seer would seem to imply that visuality and orality
are censured because they provide the basis for an overwhelming decep-
tion. And so all this aesthetic can actually af firm is writing, which is used
by positive figures such as the Count of O. and Baron von F***. Yet there
is a sting in the tale here too regarding the certainty of the less powerful
illusionism of writing. For, as we have already noted, the final writer of the
text as a whole, in the guise in which he appears to us, presents himself
simply as the obscure S. – though the represented world of the text fails
to provide even the most gullible reader with any reasonable grounds for
identifying him with the classical author Schiller.
The media aesthetic that Schiller presents to us in The Ghost-Seer is
modern in the sense that it deals with the most scientifically advanced
19 For further discussion, see Kittler, Optische Medien; Mergenthaler, Sehen schreiben –
Schreiben sehen; and Schmitz-Emans, ‘Die Zauberlaterne als Darstellungsmedium.
Über Bildgenese und Weltkonstruktion in Schillers Geisterseher’.
42 GUSTAV FRANK
practices and material technologies enabling ‘proto-cinematographic’20

hallucination, and does so in a ‘sentimental’ manner. As such, it is scepti-
cal of media and thus adopts a critical perspective on modernity to the
extent that audiovisual media, together with the artistic practices of both
the fine arts and the visual arts, are judged to be dangerous and so are
rejected. Ultimately, even writing is embroiled in this scepticism as long as
it is not theoretical but poetic, and so is in thrall to illusionism or simply
serves the needs of narration. Schiller’s theoretically inclined intellectual
poetry, such as the Gods of Greece, consciously rejects the demands of the
late Enlightenment, which according to the world of The Ghost-Seer pro-
duce partly problematic and partly ambivalent results, and takes the road
to classicism – in concordance with the autonomous, self-referential status
of literature, which then seeks to provide a plausible explanation for its
subservience to the values and norms of the bourgeois social stratum that
sustains it. Reading The Ghost-Seer as a literary example of media aesthet-
ics can help us to understand the anxieties that led to this self-imposed
restriction of autonomy.
Translated by Steve Giles
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Maike Oergel
The Aesthetics of Historicity:

Dialectical Dynamics in Schiller’s and Friedrich
Schlegels’s Concepts of the Art of Modernity
This chapter argues that both Schiller’s and Schlegel’s concepts of moder-
nity and modern art are characterised by dialectical dynamics and that this
is due to the increasing problem which the notion of historicity was pre-
senting towards the end of the eighteenth century. Schiller’s and Schlegel’s
ideas regarding the issues that beset modernity and might be alleviated
by an appropriate modern aesthetics, as developed in Aesthetic Education
(1793–1795)1 and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795/1796),2 and On
the Study of Greek Poetry (1795–1797)3 and the Athenäum (1798–1800)4
respectively, have not been short of critical attention, both in conjunction
and separately. In conjunction they have been linked to the notion of a new
‘Querelle’,5 and separately they have been identified, in the course of 150
years of literary criticism, as the respective bases of classical and romantic
aesthetic theory. Their intellectual closeness to Idealist thought has equally
been widely discussed. But the notion of dialectics as a driving force of
1 Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen.
Henceforth ÄE.
2 Schiller, Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung. Henceforth NSD.
3 Schlegel, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe
vol. 1, 217–367. Henceforth Studium.
4 Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe vol. 2 (1967), 165–372. Henceforth Athenäum.
Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe henceforth KFSA plus volume number.
5 See Jauss, ‘Schlegels und Schillers Replik auf die Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’,
see also Brinkmann, ‘Romantische Dichtungstheorie’, more recently Alt, Schiller:
Leben – Werk – Zeit, especially the chapter ‘Antike und Neuzeit’, 208–230.
46 Maike Oergel
their thinking has received little consideration. While the strict notion
that dialectics begins with Hegel no longer has much currency, research-
ers are hesitant to establish true dialectical structures for those who were
thinking in the orbit of German Idealism before Hegel (which includes
everybody associated with the Weimar or Jena circles in the last decade of
the eighteenth century). Kant is considered a key preparatory figure, but
no more,6 Schiller is granted only a notional sense of dialectical structures,7
while Schlegel’s dialectics are, if at all, considered in their relation to Fichte’s
Science of Knowledge, his groundbreaking Wissenschaftslehre, as evident in
the Wechselerweis debate.8 Fichte’s work itself is mainly analysed in terms
of its thinking on the structures of consciousness, rather than any form
of historical dialectics. If, however, dialectics is understood as a perpet-
ually dynamic process in which through contradiction an oppositional
6 This is mainly based on Kant’s suggestion in his Critique of Pure Reason for the need
of a ‘triadic system’ in paragraph 11 of the Table of Categories: ‘All a priori division
of concepts must be by dichotomy, it is significant that in each class the number of
categories is always the same, namely, three. Further, it may be observed that the third
category in each class always arises from the combination of the second category with
the first.’ (Critique of Pure Reason, 116)
7 When discussing Schiller’s Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung, Fischer speaks of a
‘Vorform der Dialektik’ (‘Goethes Klassizismus’, 226), Hewitt sticks with a ‘symmetri-
cal and irreversible dichotomy, which finds a non-synthesising resolution through its
play in the Ideal’ (‘ReZoning’, 199), while Alt, when analysing how Schiller relates
naive and sentimental, identifies the manner in which antiquity is ‘appropriated’
as ‘ein dialektisches Verfahren, das jedoch nicht mit letzter Entschiedenheit zur
Anwendung gelangt’. (Schiller, vol. 2, 209–210). However, when discussing Schiller’s
Aesthetic Education, Alt cannot trace any dialectical basis at all: ‘Der vielbeschworene
Universalcharakter des Schönen entbehrt bei Schiller jener dialektischen Begründung,
wie sie später Hegel im Kontext seiner geschichtsphilosophisch gestützten Ästhetik
anzubahnen sucht.’ (Alt, 151). This remark illustrates well the approach to the emer-
gence of dialectics described above. Szondi discussed Schiller’s development of Kant’s
triadic system in some detail and probably went furthest down the road of granting
Schiller a post-Kantian dialectical understanding in his seminal ‘Das Naïve ist das
Sentimentalische’, 199–203.
8 See footnote 29 and Oergel, Culture and Identity, 78–93. Key ideas in this essay are
also discussed in this publication.
The Aesthetics of Historicity 47
dif ference is generated and gradually assimilated, producing something

new – be that consciousness, knowledge or historical conditions – which
in turn generates new dif ference, certainly Fichte’s Science of Knowledge
(Wissenschaftslehre) of 1794/1795 pioneers modern dialectics. Dialectical
structures become irresistibly attractive intellectually once the awareness
of historicity has undermined the belief in static dichotomies in structures
and values, because dialectics – although not necessarily meaningful in
itself – can potentially give historical change a meaningful structure and
accommodate change – the unprecedented – in a productive development
which is not threatened by nihilistic versions of relativism. Understanding
and interpreting historical change – with a view to project a desirable
outcome – is the driving force of both Schiller’s and Schlegel’s theories
on aesthetics and modernity.
The eighteenth-century concept of aesthetics largely amounted to a
theory of the function of beauty in art, of the purpose and nature of art, and
the relation between beauty, art and human truth. Interest focused on the
beauty created by human art and what this beauty was capable of: beauty
was beginning to be considered as both conditioned and free at the same
time, as idea as well as representation. It thus had great potential to function
as a dialectical synthesis. Clearly this was important under the conditions of
historicity, which, newly identified, were among the most important of the
changing philosophical parameters of the late eighteenth century.9 Under
conditions of permanent historical change, the concept of beauty could no
longer be permanent or absolute, and art could no longer be static.
Initially Schlegel and Schiller find considering this – somewhat rud-
derless – state of contemporary modern culture a painful experience. Both
partake of the later eighteenth-century longing for the lost origin, the lost
state of happiness and completeness, which marked the eighteenth-century
landscape of pre-Romanticism in the shape of sentimentalism, primitivism
and general cultural nostalgia. Schlegel refers to the history of modern
poetry as an ‘aesthetic junkshop’ (ästhetischer Kramladen), defined by
‘characterlessness’ (Charakterlosigkeit) and ‘lawlessness’ (Gesetzlosigkeit).10
9 See Oergel, Culture and Identity.

10 Schlegel, Studium, 222.
48 Maike Oergel
For Schlegel these features are the mark of the modern condition. Schiller
begins his essay on Naïve und Sentimental Poetry with a similar description
of the inharmonious, internally disjointed state of modernity, and modern
art and thought. Both Schiller and Schlegel present critiques of modernity
that rely on increasingly established criteria for cultural assessment going
back to the middle of the eighteenth century, to the ideas of Rousseau, and
the young Herder. But Schiller straight away, in 1795, sets a determined
agenda for action to re-achieve completeness, happiness and harmony via
the long road of culture. For Schiller, an original natural state is no longer
worthy of the contemporary human mind, however desperate and stressful
the experience of the modern condition may be at the moment. Friedrich
Schlegel does not get on to formulating (such) solutions until the later
1790s, some time after Schiller had published his proposals, the potential
of which Schlegel quickly grasped, to his intellectual chagrin.
Both attest the instability of modernity. Modern conditions, intel-
lectual and social, are constantly changing. Modern intellectual existence
has, through cognitive and cultural activities, detached itself from a stable,
harmonious union with nature and set in motion a restless development,
which has variously been identified with ‘striving’ (cf. Faust, or the Romantic
individual in general) or the ‘historical process’. The restlessness of moder-
nity’s cognitive and cultural evolution makes any assumption of universal
values a delusion. Their critiques of modernity are also a critique of the
Enlightenment. Both are certain that the Enlightenment has not (yet)
achieved what it promised: true progress and perfectibility. For Schiller, it
has so far merely produced great confusion and widely diverging approaches
to culture.11 While Schlegel does not see the erosion of the (Enlightenment)
absolutes of constancy, correctness, and moral truth as something to be
mourned, he does not feel either that the wilful rebellious lawlessness of
Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) is the way forward, as both result
from the lack of a truly understood (or intuited) and experienced concept
of beauty.12
11 Schiller, ÄE, 5. Brief, 13–14.

12 Schlegel, Studium, 220–221 and 218–219.
Schiller’s and Schlegel’s awareness of historicity, which forms the basis

of their cultural analyses, is rooted in their rehearsal of the Querelle des
Anciens et des Modernes, the discussion of the merits and demerits of ancient
and modern culture from around 1700. The Querelle was crucial in creating
awareness of historical dif ference, and prepared the awareness of historic-
ity, which came to determine the understanding of culture from the later
eighteenth century onwards.13 Schiller and Schlegel start out as anciens,
full of the deepest appreciation and respect for the achievements of ancient
(Greek) culture.14 Yet they are both equally aware that this type of culture is
irretrievable. What sets them apart from the original anciens of the French
Querelle a century earlier is their conviction that ancient art should not be
reproduced in modern art.15 When they declare the superiority of ancient
culture, they are not harking back to a position that was beginning to lose
ground around 1700, but are responding to the newer mid-century preoc-
cupation with cultural origins and the role of the natural and sensual in
art and culture, which informed British pre-Romanticism, German Sturm
und Drang, and the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Such ‘original culture’
was coming to be seen as superior to contemporary ef forts in terms of
authenticity and communicative power. This is of course part of mid/late-
eighteenth-century criticism of the Enlightenment and enlighted notions
of civilisation, which in German tends to be referred to as Aufklärungs- and
Zivilisationskritik, that devout worship of (natural) origins, which ques-
13 Dealing with the dif ferences between ancient and modern, which had been sharply
defined and heatedly discussed a century before Schiller and Schlegel take them up
in the 1790s, acts as a trigger for a realization of historicity. See Jauss, ‘Schlegels und
Schillers Replik’, and Oergel, Culture and Identity, 29–50.
14 For Schlegel, ancient culture as naïve art is the ‘höchster Gipfel der Idealität […] und
Schönheit’ (Schlegel, Studium, 46), ‘the highest peak of ideality and beauty’ (Study,
32). Schiller is never quite so emphatically superlative, no doubt because he was at
this point already convinced of the crucial merits of modernity: he never loses sight
of the potential and eventual (historical) superiority of the moderns.
15 At least not in any terms of content or detail. Herder had advocated an imitation of
cultural structure, because, as he saw it, the function and structural history of true
art was constant, but its content and appearance dif fered according to historical and
cultural developments. See Oergel, Culture and Identity. 19–29.
50 Maike Oergel
tions the superiority of linear progress, and which in extreme cases sees
‘progress’, and modernity itself, as a deterioration and degeneration. Yet
both Schiller and Schlegel become apologists for modernity. The aspect
that is initially responsible for the inferiority of modernity becomes its
saving grace: the capacity for reason and rationality, the predisposition
towards thinking, which had undermined and made impossible natural art
and a stable conception of beauty. Whereas Schiller’s outright apologia for
modernity is already inscribed in Naïve und Sentimental Poetry, Schlegel
mounts a more muted defence in his essay on the Study of Greek Poetry,
which he then re-enforces positively in his Athenäum contributions. How
did the apologia become possible?
For all their ancien tendencies, they were also modernes, who had
absorbed the notion of, if not historical progress, then of inevitable his-
torical change. If current or recent modernity was inferior to an original
natural achievement, it could still be a stepping stone towards an as yet
unknown or yet not understood improvement. So, too much thinking
could, and in their view eventually would, break on through to a new
level of modern completeness, but only if it took on board some seemingly
superseded yet original entities, which would create a modern naivety.
Thus in the final analysis both do tend towards progress, rather than just
historical change, thereby revealing their Enlightenment upbringing, and
credentials. Schiller suggests:
That nature which you envy in the irrational [non-rational, MO] is worthy of no
respect [yearning, MO][…]. It lies behind you […]. Abandoned by the ladder that
supported you, no other choice now lies open to you, but with free consciousness
and will to grasp the law. […] Let it no longer occur to you to want to exchange with
her [nature], but take her up within yourself and strive to wed her eternal [infinite,
MO] advantage with your external [infinite, MO] prerogative, and from both pro-
duce the divine.16
16 Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, 101–102, henceforth
NSP. ‘Jene Natur, die du dem Vernunftlosen beneidest, ist […] keiner Sehnsucht
wert. Sie liegt hinter dir […]. Verlassen von der Leiter, die dich trug, bleibt dir jetzt
keine andere Wahl mehr, als mit freyem Bewußtsein und Willen das Gesetz zu
ergreifen. […] Laß dir nicht mehr einfallen, mit ihr [der Natur] tauschen zu wollen,
How is this to be achieved? Via the long road of culture:
So long as man is pure […] nature, he functions as an undivided sensuous unity and
as a unifying whole. Sense [the senses, MO] and reason, passive and active facul-
ties, are not separated in their activities […]. Once man has passed into the state of
civilisation and art has laid her hand upon him, that sensuous unity within him is
withdrawn, and he can express himself now only as a moral unity, i.e. as striving after
unity. The correspondence between his feeling and his thought which in his first
condition actually took place, exists now only ideally; it is no longer within him,
but outside of him as an idea still to be realised. […] Through the idea he returns to
unity. (NSP, 111–112)17
Schlegel has the following to say on regaining through progress (on a higher
level) what had been lost through history:
Idealism in any form must transcend itself in one way or another, in order to be
able to return to itself and remain what it is. Therefore, there must and will arise
from the matrix of idealism a new and equally infinite realism. […] This new real-
ism, since it must be of idealistic origin and must hover as it were over an idealistic
ground, will emerge as poetry which indeed is to be based on the harmony of the
ideal and the real.18
aber nimm sie in dich auf und strebe, ihren unendlichen Vorzug mit deinem eigenen
unendlichen Prärogativ zu vermählen und aus beydem das Göttliche zu erzeugen.’
(NSD, 428–429)
17 ‘Solange der Mensch noch reine […] Natur ist, wirkt er als ungetheilte sinnliche
Einheit und als ein harmonirendes Ganzes. Sinne und Vernunft, empfangendes und
selbstthätiges Vermögen, haben sich in ihrem Geschäfte noch nicht getrennt […]. Ist
der Mensch in den Stand der Kultur getreten, und hat die Kunst ihre Hand an ihn
gelegt, so ist jene sinnliche Harmonie in ihm aufgehoben, und er kann nur noch als
moralische Einheit, d.h. als nach Einheit strebend sich äußern. Die Übereinstimmung
zwischen seinem Empfinden und Denken, die in dem ersten Zustande wirklich
stattfand, existiert jetzt bloß idealisch; sie ist nicht mehr in ihm, sondern außer ihm;
als ein Gedanke, der erst realisirt werden soll.’ (NSD, 436–437) ‘[…] Durch das Ideal
kehrt er zu Einheit zurück.’ (NSD, 438)
18 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, 83–84. Henceforth Dialogue
on Poetry. In the Studium essay he had already similarly argued that ‘aesthetic theory
[was] now ready to produce objective results, beginnings of objective art and taste’.
(Schlegel, Studium, 356/7) Der Idealismus in jeder Form muß auf ein oder die andre
52 Maike Oergel
Both clearly describe a historical process (that of intellectual history). What

is striking in this process is the way in which the dichotomous pairings are
put into productive dialectical relations, leading towards (synthetic) integra-
tion. Significantly the elements appear successively in history, the latter as an
initial contradiction of the former. In the first quotation from Schiller we
find the successive appearance of the dichotomous pair of nature and free
will/consciousness. The absorption of nature, from which consciousness
once emerged as an other, by consciousness – a synthetic integration – is
to produce (human) divinity. In the second quotation the dichotomous
pair of the state of nature, i.e. when reason (Denken/Venunft) and the
senses (Empfinden/Sinne) are unified, and the state of culture, i.e. when
they are separated, appear successively. Culture then conceives of the ideal
of a new connection between the two, which still needs to be realised. In
the quotation by Schlegel realism and idealism clearly have appeared suc-
cessively. Idealism is about to produce, from within itself and by relying
on its ‘natural heritage’, a new integrated realism or poetry, which is both
the real and the ideal. The situation Schlegel describes is one step on from
Schiller’s: Schlegel does not refer to original nature here, his ‘idealism’ cor-
responds to Schiller’s ‘culture and consciousness’.
These pairs are not just oppositions between nature and human-made
culture, but also between rational thought and imaginative intuition, and
the intellectual and the sensual. In Schiller’s and Schlegel’s visions, these
opposites, which have come into existence through the historical process of
intellectual history, need to be (synthetically) integrated in a process over
time, in history. What distinguishes their visions from primitivism or his-
torical conservatism, despite their reliance on powerful and venerated ‘ori-
gins’, is the fact that they do not wish to abandon either rationality, reason,
the abstract or progress towards something historically ‘new’. Neither is
Art aus sich herausgehn, um in sich zurückkehren zu können, und zu bleiben, was
er ist. Deswegen muß und wird sich aus seinem Schoß ein neuer ebenso großer
Realismus erheben. […] Dieser neue Realismus [wird], weil er doch idealischen
Ursprungs sein, und gleichsam auf idealischem Grund und Boden schweben muß,
als Poesie erscheinen, die ja auf der Harmonie des Ideellen und Reellen beruhen soll.
(Schlegel, Athenäum, 314–315)
the ‘regaining’ intended to complete a cycle, instead it is to reach the tip of

spiral (human divinity has never existed before, and neither has the fully
conscious ‘hovering’ between ideal and real ever been successfully achieved).
The engine of this historical process is dialectics, which emerges at this point
in (European) thinking as the most productive new Denkmodell, because
it can integrate historical progress, and irreversible change, without fully
abandoning former values. Beauty is to play a crucial role in this process
of dialectical integration, where aesthetics is concerned.
In his Aesthetic Education Schiller suggests that abstract form can be
dialectically regenerated through beauty: ‘[Beauty] as living image, will
arm abstract form with sensuous power, lead concept back to intuition,
and law back to feeling. […] By means of beauty spiritual man is brought
back to matter and restored to the world of sense.’19 The art produced in
this way provides an aesthetic experience that has astonishing results: it
gives human beings (back) their humanity.
As soon as we recall that it was precisely of this freedom that he was deprived by the
one-sided constraint of nature in the field of sensation and by the exclusive authority
of reason in the realm of thought, then we are bound to consider the power which
is restored to him in the aesthetic mode as the highest of all bounties, as the gift of
humanity itself. (AE, 147)20
For modern humanity beauty is the bridge between reason and the senses, as
it was the bridge between the senses and reason when reason first emerged.
For Schiller it is the theatre of dialectical operations. And dialectics is the
19 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 121 & 123, henceforth AE. ‘Sie [die
Schönheit] wird […] als lebendes Bild die abgezogene Form mit sinnlicher Kraft
ausrüsten, den Begrif f zu Anschauung und das Gesetz zum Gefühl zurückführen.
[…] Durch die Schönheit wird der geistige Mensch zur Materie zurück geführt und
der Sinnenwelt wieder gegeben.’ (ÄE, 365)
20 ‘Sobald wir uns erinnern, daß ihm [dem Menschen] durch die einseitige Nöthigung
der Natur beym Empfinden und durch die ausschließende Gesetzgebung der Vernunft
beym Denken gerade diese Freyheit entzogen wurde, so müssen wir das Vermögen,
welches ihm in der ästhetischen Stimmung zurückgegeben wird [i.e. to have both
together], als die höchste aller Schenkungen, als die Schenkung der Menschheit
selbst betrachten.’ (ÄE, 378)
54 Maike Oergel
engine of historical development. The end result of the process is divine
humanity. Crucially, beauty is always conceived as the link between the
intellectual and the sensual, between the moral and the physical.
We need, then, no longer feel at a loss for a way which might lead us from our depend-
ence upon sense [the senses, MO] towards moral freedom, since beauty af fords us an
instance of the latter being perfectly compatible with the former, an instance of man
not needing to f lee matter in order to manifest himself as spirit. (ÄE, 189)21
In Study of Greek Poetry Schlegel has the following to say about the dia-
lectical process:
The predominance of the individual leads of its own accord to the objective; the
interesting is the propaedeutic for the beautiful, and the ultimate goal of modern
poetry can be nothing else but the ne plus ultra of beauty, a maximum of objective
aesthetic perfection. (35)22
The dialectical process is evident, its catalyst is excess; and perfect beauty
expressed through poetry is to be the end-result. It is noteworthy that for
both Schiller and Schlegel, beauty has an immutable aspect, which one
could argue gives beauty a classical quality, but which, as will become
clear, is nevertheless thoroughly historicised in the manner of an adapt-
able structural essence.
The obvious question arising at this point is how much of a dif fer-
ence there is between the two end results, between Schiller’s humanity and
Schlegel’s beauty. For Schiller, beauty’s function, and its result, the aesthetic
21 ‘Wir dürfen also nicht mehr verlegen seyn, einen Übergang von der sinnlichen
Abhängigkeit zu der moralischen Freyheit zu finden, nachdem durch die Schönheit
der Fall gegeben ist, daß die letztere mit der erstern vollkommen zusammen beste-
hen könne, und daß der Mensch, um sich als Geist zu erweisen, der Materie nicht
zu entf liehen brauche.’ (ÄE, 397)
22 ‘Das Übermaß des Individuellen [which was the result of ref lexive philosophical
abstraction] führt also von selbst zum Objektiven, das Interessante [the product of
philosophical modernity] ist die Vorbereitung des Schönen, und das letzte Ziel der
modernen Poesie kann kein andres sein als das höchste Schöne, ein Maximum von
objektiver ästhetischer Vollkommenheit.’ (Schlegel, Studium, 253)
experience, are linked to freedom, freedom from moral and physical coer-
cion. The aesthetic experience, devoid of any utilitarian function,23 is the
mode of endless possibility, it lifts the human being out of any historical or
natural or moral dependencies. It represents the counterpoint to historical
existence. It also exists outside historical reality, in the extra-historical realm
of ‘semblance’ (Schein). But its agent, beauty, and with it the actual nature
of the experience, is conditioned by history in the same way as any other
cultural entity. Beauty occurs in dif ferent guises in dif ferent historical eras,
i.e. it is historicized.24 But, in structural terms, beauty occupies at all times
the middle ground between sensual and intellectual, and can integrate any
split between them. It is thus always capable of dialectical synthesis.25
Although Schlegel shares Schiller’s view that true art – art representing
beauty and allowing an aesthetic experience – is free from intellectual and
physical coercion and utility,26 he ultimately focuses on a dif ferent aspect
of the redemptive qualities of modern art and produces his own ideas of
23 See ÄE, 21. Brief.

24 ÄE, 17. Brief.
25 ÄE, 25. Brief. For Schiller the experience of the beautiful, play, and aesthetic sem-
blance (ästhetischer Schein) are all variants of the synthesis he seeks to establish
between reality and abstraction, between matter and reason, between those entities
that, if left unchecked in art or life, become tyrannical and deprive humans of their
humanity and of freedom. As long as these entities exist in unrelated co-existence,
they are experienced as a painful and dissatisfying split. Their successful interrela-
tion in (dialectical) art makes available in space and time – i.e. history –, albeit in
a pretend fashion, the synthesis that is for all aspects of human existence achieved
only in the fullness of time, i.e. beyond history. The interrelations Schiller endeav-
ours to establish are all based on a link between value and time: the absolute idea is
joined to morphing matter, the universal ideal is joined to changeability, absolutes
transform.
26 ‘Bei den Griechen war die Kunst von dem Zwange des Bedürfnisses und der Herrschaft
des Verstandes immer gleich frei; und vom ersten Anfange griechischer Bildung bis
zum letzten Augenblick […] waren den Griechen schöne Spiele heilig’ (Schlegel,
Studium, 275). Here, too, freedom from coercion and utility is achieved through
the (aesthetic) experience of art in forms of play. Schlegel speaks of the ‘unbedingte
Zweckmäßigkeit des zwecklosen Spiels’, ‘the unconditional purposefulness of pur-
poseless play’ (Schlegel, Studium, 275).
56 Maike Oergel
what this new art of modernity should be like. Rather than a grand his-
torical sweep, Schlegel is interested in the ‘Now’. Schiller spells out what is
possible, and by 1799/1800 Schlegel proposes how to do it, which could be
f lippantly summarised as: work on the creation of a progressive universal
poetry, through new mythology and romantic irony.
In Schlegel’s theory of poetic art there is little trace of the ‘pretend’–
aspect of Schiller’s aesthetics – of the tricky notion of the ‘Schein’. Schlegel
attempts to transport into historical reality what Schiller defines as only
possible in a space of playful extra-reality. Romantic poetry, as Schlegel
understands it, is not just a means to an end, but remains in itself the
end beyond which humanity cannot go conceptually. Art comprises the
most complete representation and understanding of life that the human
mind is capable of, which nevertheless always remains an approximation.
(I suppose it is possible to argue that this approximate quality constitutes
a form or semblance-like un-reality, and that thus Schlegel, too, cannot
quite bring into reality what is ultimately an elusive, and possibly illusory
hope.) Nevertheless, he confidently declares in the seminal 116th Athenäum
Fragment:
[Romantic poetry] […] too can soar, free from all real and ideal interests, on the wings
of poetic ref lection, midway between the work and the artist. It can even exponenti-
ate the ref lection and multiply it as in an endless series of mirrors. It is capable of the
highest and most universal education. (Dialogue on Poetry, 140–141)27
For Schlegel, the aesthetic condition of the mind is a symbolic condensa-

tion of reality. Poetry is capable of the ultimate achievement of ‘highest
and most universal education’ because it can represent human existence in
its productive dynamics. Schlegel’s concept shares its dialectically dynamic
character with Schiller’s aesthetic experience, triggered by beauty. But
while Schiller’s concept is only nominally open-ended, Schlegel’s has genu-
27 ‘[Romantische Poesie] kann auch […] am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und
dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der
poetischen Ref lexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Ref lexion immer wieder poten-
zieren und in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen. Sie ist der höchsten
und allseitigsten Bildung fähig’ (Schlegel, Athenäum, 182–183).
ine open-endedness as its key virtue. Schiller’s dialectics is predicated on

the neutralising capabilities of the dialectic: Schiller sought an eventual
solution to the dynamically warring counter-forces, albeit that this solu-
tion was conceived of as existing beyond current human reality, and that
its realisation is postponed until the end of time. Schlegel, on the other
hand, does not focus on a neutralising resolution (although he may have
one in mind), he instead makes the dynamic process supreme. The 116th
Athenäum Fragment proclaims:
Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. […] Other types of poetry are
completed and can now be entirely analyzed. The Romantic type of poetry is still
becoming; indeed its particular essence is that it is always becoming and that it can
never be completed. It cannot be exhausted by any theory, and only a divinatory
criticism might dare to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, as it alone is free.
(Dialogue on Poetry, 141)28
How does this ‘perpetual becoming’ work? Schlegel works out his ideas in
connection with concepts developed in contemporary idealist-transcenden-
tal philosophy, especially by Fichte, whose work inspires his own as much
as it drives Schlegel to quarrel with some of Fichte’s key principles.29 As
28 ‘Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. […] Andere Dichtarten
sind fertig, und können nun vollständig zergliedert werden. Die romantische Dichtart
ist noch im Werden; ja, das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daß sie ewig nur werden, nie
vollendet sein kann. Sie kann durch keine Theorie erschöpft werden, und nur eine
divinatorische Kritik dürfte es wagen, ihr Ideal charakterisieren zu wollen. Sie allein
ist unendlich, wie sie allein frei ist’ (Schlegel, Athenäum, 183).
29 It needs no reiteration here that Schlegel was deeply inf luenced by Fichte’s Wissen
schaftslehre of 1794/5. Both Schelling and Hegel sought in their own philosophical
endeavours to complete what they thought Fichte had left undone: a thorough ground-
ing of the Fichtean consciousness in the world. They sought to define a direct and
meaningful relationship between subject and object, a relationship that bridges the
two Kantian worlds, and yet allows the world of objects a distinct existence outside the
subject’s consciousness (which Fichte’s theory does not). Friedrich Schlegel set out to
accomplish exactly this, too. Schlegel thought that this grounding of ref lexion could
only occur through the integration of philosophy into poetry. He criticizes Fichte not
just for ignoring the world of objects, of nature, of history, and his own historicity
(see Behler, 190), but for what Schlegel sees as an inconsequential treatment of the
58 Maike Oergel
philosophy has begun to think seriously about thinking, Schegel suggests

that by the same token – or by the same dialectical reciprocity – poetry
should be a ‘poetry about poetry’ and incorporate in its representations a
critique of its own creation and a ref lection of its own content and form.
dialectical dynamic. His quarrel is with Fichte’s first principle, which he criticises for
not being dynamic in itself, which in turn makes the beginning of the dynamic proc-
ess problematic. He contrasts Fichte’s ‘Grundsatz’ with his own ‘Wechselerweis’ or
‘Wechselgrundsatz’, which he considers superior to Fichte’s unconditional founding
principle. See Naschert, ‘Friedrich Schlegel über den Wechselerweis und Ironie’. In
Schlegel’s view, Fichte devalues the world of objects; as non-ego they only function
as stimulant to the ego, which will gradually assimilate them. He wishes to make
them equal elements in a fruitful oppositional reciprocation. So he places dialectic
heterogeneity at the very beginning (of consciousness), which highlights again his
preoccupation with the dynamic process and his doubts about any static entities,
about stable solutions. He appears to acknowledge the relation between subject and
object in Kantian fashion as a split between two worlds, while asserting, in Fichtean
fashion, the existence of a meaningful interaction between the two, while yet again,
in post-Fichtean fashion, wishing to leave the right of the world (non-ego, nature)
to an independent existence intact. From Schlegel’s point of view, Fichte rather than
Kant should be seen as providing the final culmination of Cartesian subject-centred
rationalism, rather than its first thorough critique. Once the dynamic process is set in
motion, though, Schlegel has few problems with Fichte’s principles. In fact he employs
Fichtean processes to explain historical processurality: The way in which Fichte’s ego
gradually absorbs the non-ego is decidedly similar to the way in which Schlegel’s
evolving universal poetry gradually absorbs all historical phenomena of poetry. And,
it should be added as an ironic footnote, that Schlegel himself seems at one point to
suggest that human mental activity sprang from one unique and unitary origin. In
the ‘Rede über die Mythologie’, the most Idealist of the sections in the Athenäum, he
asserts that ‘weder dieser Witz [der alt-romantischen Poesie] noch eine Mythologie
können bestehn ohne ein erstes Urspüngliches und Unnachahmliches, was schlechthin
unauf löslich ist, was nach allen Umbildungen noch die alte Natur und Kraft durch-
schimmern läßt’ (KFSA II, 319). It should not be overlooked that there is always a
polemical element in Schlegel’s treatment of Fichte. Initially enthralled by the older
man’s theories, Schlegel found it a struggle to break free from Fichte’s mesmerising
inf luence. His relationship with Fichte was complicated by their personal acquaint-
ance in Jena, which was beset with tensions and in which Fichte always remained the
senior partner. Fichte is of course acknowledged as a ‘dif ficult’ person, opinionated
and blunt, who intimidated by exuding self-assurance.
There is a poetry whose One and All is the relationship of the ideal and the real:
it should […] be called transcendental poetry. […]. But we should not care for a
transcendental philosophy unless it were critical, unless it portrayed the producer
along with the product, unless it embraced in its system of transcendental thoughts
a characterisation of transcendental thinking: in the same way, that poetry which
is not infrequently encountered in modern poets should combine those transcen-
dental materials and preliminary exercises for a poetic theory of the creative power
with the artistic ref lection and beautiful self-mirroring. […] Thus this poetry should
portray itself with each of its portrayals; everywhere and at the same time, it should
be poetry and the poetry of poetry. (Dialogue on Poetry, 145)30
Schlegel repeatedly argues for the fusion of philosophy and poetry.31 But
it is already clear from the new poetry’s ability to ‘hover’ (schweben)
‘between the real and the ideal’ that poetry occupies a meta-level in rela-
tion to philosophy. This makes poetry, rather than philosophy, the supreme
medium of human understanding. Philosophy is a theoretical preparation
that enables the poet to rise above his individual self and work, and take
up, at various times, a creative distance to his creation.32 This enhanced
30 ‘Es gibt eine Poesie, deren eins und alles das Verhältnis des Idealen und des Realen ist,
und die […] Transzendentalpoesie heißen müßte. […] So wie man aber wenig Wert
auf eine Transzendentalphilosophie legen würde, die nicht kritisch wäre, nicht auch
das Produzierende mit dem Produkt darstellte, und im System der transzendentalen
Gedanken zugleich eine Charakteristik des transzendentalen Denkens enthielte: so
sollte wohl auch jene Poesie die in modernen Dichtern nicht seltnen transzendentalen
Materialien und Vorübungen zu einer poetischen Theorie des Dichtungsvermögens
mit der künstlerischen Ref lexion und schönen Selbstbespiegelung […] vereinigen,
und in jeder ihrer Darstellungen sich selbst mit darstellen, und überall zugleich Poesie
und Poesie der Poesie sein.’ (Athenäum Fragment 238, Athenäum, 204)
31 See Athenäum Fragment 451 (Athenäum, 255) and of course also Athenäum Fragment
116 (Athenäum, 182): ‘die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung
setzen’, translated as ‘put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric’ (Dialogue
on Poetry, 140).
32 Ernst Behler argued that Schlegel joined philosophy and poetry (making good his
claim in Athenäum Fragment 451) by abolishing the ‘distinction between poetry
and philosophy’ because both Idealist philosophy and transcendental poetry par-
take of the (same) ref lective activity (Behler, 139). Guido Naschert, on the other
hand, has argued that it would be more apt to describe what Schlegel does as ‘eine
60 Maike Oergel
self-understanding on the part of the poet-thinker enables the critique to

become part of that which is being criticised, linking subject and object.
Romantic irony is the means by which such dynamics is achieved, the
concept that Friedrich Schlegel invented, more or less single-handedly.33
When employed by a writer-speaker who is equipped with the critical self-
understanding af forded by transcendental philosophy, Romantic irony is
capable of completely representing, and communicating, human reality,
because through irony dichotomous elements can be co-represented, inte-
grated, if not synthesised.
Evidently both Schiller and Schlegel fully subscribe to the hetero-
geneity of humanity, the split between mind and senses, which has been
brought about by the advances of reason, whose dominance has in turn
become questioned by the new awareness of historicity. In terms of the
working poet, this split is manifest in the state of heightened intellectual
sophistication that has dissociated him from a common source of inspi-
rational nourishment, which Schlegel describes in images of vitalising
nature. ‘While [writing poetry] you must often have felt the absence of a
Detranszentalisierung der Wissenschaftslehre’ by making a direct link to reality and

poetic expression (Naschert, ‘Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil
2)’, 31). I am inclined to agree with the latter.
33 See Behler, 134–153. In the Critical Fragments (1797) Schlegel defines irony as follows:
‘It originates in a sense of an art of living and a scientific intellect, in the meeting of
accomplished natural philosophy and accomplished philosophy of art. It contains
and excites a feeling of the insoluble conf lict of the absolute and the relative, of the
impossibility and necessity of total communication. It is the freest of all liberties,
for it enables us to rise above our own self; and still the most legitimate [the liberty
most governed by laws, MO], for it is absolutely necessary.’ (Schlegel, Dialogue on
Poetry, 131) ‘Sie entspringt aus der Vereinigung von Lebenskunstsinn und wissen-
schaftlichem Geist, aus dem Zusammentref fen vollendeter Naturphilosophie und
vollendeter Kunstphilosophie. Sie enthält und erregt ein Gefühl von dem unauf lös-
lichen Widerstreit des Unbedingten und des Bedingten, der Unmöglichkeit und
Notwendigkeit einer vollständigen Mitteilung. Sie ist die freieste aller Lizenzen, denn
durch sie setzt man sich über sich selbst weg; und doch auch die gesetzlichste, denn
sie ist unbedingt notwendig’ (Schlegel, Lyceumsfragment 108, KFSA II, 160).
firm basis for your activity, a matrix, a sky, a living atmosphere.’34 It was this
circumstance that had made thinkers look beyond and before reason, and
led them to consider the notion of origins and their relation to the future.
The form of human conceptualising before the rise of reason had recently
(over the preceding half century) been identified as ‘myth’. Schlegel taps
into this intellectual background when he defines his other form of poetic
innovation: the intellectual mythology (Mythologie des Geistes), which
is equally capable of this integrating dynamics.
Mythology has one great advantage. What usually escapes our consciousness can
here be perceived and held fast through the senses and spirit, like the soul in the
body surrounding it, through which it shines into our eye and speaks to our ear.
[…] Mythology is such a work of art created by nature. In its texture the sublime is
really formed.35
The deeply synthetic nature of mythology, in terms of the human constitu-

tion and human experience, links the immaterial-abstract and the physically
concrete in a reciprocal animation, in a way similar to the capabilities which
Schiller claimed for beauty. Like Schiller’s aesthetic experience induced by
beauty, it gives the ideal reality. By calling it mythology, Schlegel deliberately
connects this new poetry to the original artistic-intellectual form of human
expression, suggesting that its aesthetic structures need to be resurrected
34 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 81. ‘Ihr müßt es oft im Dichten gefühlt haben, daß es
Euch an einem festen Halt für Euer Wirken gebrach, an einem mütterlichen Boden,
einem [umwölbenden Sternen-]Himmel, einer lebendigen [erfrischenden Lebens-]
Luft [um frei aufzuatmen].’ Athenäum, 312. The brackets give the variant readings
according to Friedrich Schlegel. Sämtliche Werke, V, 1823, which are given as foot-
notes to this passage in KFSA II.
35 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 85–86. ‘Einen Vorzug hat die Mythologie. Was sonst
das Bewußtsein ewig f lieht, ist hier dennoch sinnlich-geistig zu schauen, und
festgehalten, wie die Seele in dem umgebenden Leibe, durch den sie in unser Auge
schimmert, zu unserm Ohre spricht. […] Die Mythologie ist ein solches Kunstwerk
der Natur. In ihrem Gewebe ist das Höchste wirklich gebildet’ (Schlegel, ‘Rede über
die Mythologie’, Athenäum, 318).
62 Maike Oergel
and adapted. This is as close as he gets to a structural ideal.36 If Romantic

irony is the means to be used by an individual writer to present the whole
of reality in an individual work, then this new mythology is the combined
result of such individual ef forts, which could, once it has been created, be
a kind of meta-poetry common to all modern poets.
But for all this hopeful optimism expressed in the ‘Rede über die
Mythologie’, which suggests that solutions are possible and within reach,
Schlegel equally expresses doubts as to what extent these problems of
modern humanity are really capable of a lasting solution. (This is, no doubt,
also the result of the transcendentalist poet-thinker’s ironic self-under-
standing.) The very infinity of the Romantic project precludes the pos-
sibility of any settlement. And herein lies the dif ference between Schlegel
and Schiller: while for Schiller (and the Idealists) the logical inevitability
of the final solution,37 which they can already grasp in theory, remains the
focus, Schlegel prioritises a ‘consciousness of perpetual agility’,38 which
fixes his focus on the process itself, because this is all that is likely to ever
really exist. For him, poetry can never fully provide lasting solutions, but
it can represent the status quo in such a manner that the human mind is
af forded a glimpse of the totality of its situation. But this glimpse af fords
no more than the momentary experience of an individual totality by means
of an artistic creation: ‘A work is formed when it is clearly delimited eve-
rywhere, but limitless and inexhaustible within these limits, when it is
true to itself and the same everywhere, and yet rises above itself.’39 Art,
36 Always mindful of the complex relationships between the ancient and the modern,
Schlegel is happy to point out that neither irony nor mythology are specific to moder-
nity, that both in fact originate in antiquity. See Lyceumsfragment 42 (KFSA II, 152).
But, in reconditioned form, both have a crucial function to perform for modern
culture.
37 The rich irony of this term in this context will escape no-one conversant with both
German intellectual and political history.
38 ‘Bewußtsein der ewigen Agilität’, Ideen 69, KFSA II, 263.
39 ‘Gebildet ist ein Werk, wenn es überall scharf begrenzt, innerhalb der Grenzen aber
grenzenlos und unerschöpf lich ist, wenn es sich selbst ganz treu, überall gleich, und
doch über sich selbst erhaben ist.’ Schlegel, Athenäum Fragment 297, Athenäum,
215.
and criticism, are (historically) limited. Schlegel’s thought of this period
is marked by two tendencies running counter to each other, his own dia-
lectic so to speak, which he is trying to grasp within one framework: the
optimistic ‘solutionist’ tendency is expressed in the imminence of the new
intellectual mythology, while the limiting tendency finds expression in his
insistence on the essential presence of irony. Schlegel’s Romantic irony
of fers the writer the means to capture and present, but not neutralise, the
antinomies of human existence. The ‘prospect of an endlessly developing
classicism’,40 which the ‘progressive universal poetry’ provides, pinpoints
this dual approach; it is meant to be a classicism, but one that is in the
continuous process of becoming.
Schlegel’s theory of criticism is a theory of human understanding, of
how the mind processes and expresses impressions, not just of works of
art, but of experiences in general, hence his ‘poetry of poetry’ corresponds
to the ‘philosophy of philosophy’. Ref lection has reached the level of self-
ref lection. Both philosophy and poetry are capable of the all-important
ironic ref lexivity.41 But his theory, like the others discussed here, exists on
the basis of history. His theory is informed by notions of ongoing proc-
esses, which shape its dialectical dynamics and open-endedness. The need
for a connection between theory and history, and the sequential nature of
this connection, is very clearly expressed in the part of Athenäum entitled
‘Dialogue on Poetry’.42 Schlegel’s historical limitation bears some similarity
40 ‘Aussicht auf eine grenzenlos wachsende Klassizität’, Athenäum Fragment 116.

41 See Kritisches Fragment 42 (KFSA II, 152).
42 The Gespräch über die Poesie consists of four short lectures that are given and discussed
in a circle of friends. The dialectical dynamic is presented formally in the advancing
discussion, which at the same time avoids presenting any one view as the only or the
right one. The need for a connection between theory and history is voiced directly
by the participants, and also finds expression in the way the four lectures are related
to each other: ‘Epochen der Dichtkunst’ gives a very concise, but most innovative
overview of literary history, while ‘Rede über die Mythologie’ provides a theory of
poetry as the supreme communicative medium of human expression. The ‘Brief über
den Roman’ then links history and theory by deducing from (literary) history that
the novel, Schlegel’s definition of which is notoriously wide and manages to include
Shakespeare’s plays, is the quintessential literary form of modernity. Finally, in the
64 Maike Oergel
to the limitation imposed on Schiller’s dialectical synthesis through the

pretend-element in his aesthetics. Schiller’s limitation is spatial, his integra-
tion takes place in an extra-real space, while Schlegel’s is temporal, it is the
glimpse. For both, crucially, there can be no lasting solution in history.
In conclusion it is striking to observe the closeness of thinking between
the Weimar classicist and the Jena Romantic – who famously did not get
on, but were clearly grappling with the same problems, and had similar
aspirations. Schiller’s aesthetic education and Friedrich Schlegel’s poetic
projects of the late 1790s are each the result of endeavours to make sense
of historicity by relating universal value to time, with the intention to give
modernity an aesthetic blueprint that would be appropriate and produc-
tive. Both the Aesthetic Education and Progressive Universal Poetry have at
their core the concept of a developing artistic essence that has the capacity
to integrate dichotomous elements through a dialectically driven historical
dynamic. In its synthesis a concrete and particular experience is provided,
which appeals simultaneously to the intellect and the senses, and which in
turn sets the human being free from physical and moral coercion, free to
grasp, however temporarily, the totality of its reality and its being.
Both Schiller and Schlegel suggest that this is achieved through
the reconnection to an obscured original entity (the sensual power of
beauty, structures of mythology), which takes account of humanity’s pre-
rational(ist) imaginative capacities without denying the mind’s rational
capabilities. Such reconnection was not conceived as a return or regression,
but as an integration of the cultural and intellectual advances achieved over
time with original and ef fective modes of expression and representation, to
produce an historicised ideal of art, which can accommodate, rather than
negate, the historical conditions of impermanence. Both are motivated
by a similar desire to understand the way in which human understanding
understands itself and the world, has understood these matters in the past,
and under which circumstances this understanding will be accurate and
piece about ‘Goethe’s Styl’, he proceeds to present a successful example of modern

literature: Goethe points the way to the future.
possibly complete. In this their thinking is closely related to the developing

notions of post-Fichtian Idealism.
The Weimar classicist and the Jena Romantic set their own priorities in
accordance with their own intellectual tendencies. Schiller functionalises
the nature of the origin for his focus on the aim of this process – beauty
led to culture, and through beauty (rationalist) culture will be led back to
a higher form of nature. The aim is a fully realised perfect and complete
humanity. Understanding the cultural and intellectual history of humanity
will enable the artist to contribute towards the acceleration of this process.
Schiller’s aim-oriented focus amounts to a position closest to any form of
classicism, because it keeps an eventually immutable ideal clearly within
sight. But Schiller’s ideal is also firmly out of reach, beyond history, which
positions him outside any ‘classical’ classicist doctrine. Schlegel initially
shares this aim-oriented outlook with Schiller, but has an intense interest
in the process. He situates his focus primarily on, or even within this process
by closely investigating the possibility of achieving a glimpse of complete
reality within time, which, to a large extent, abandons the preoccupation
with the problem of how an eventually immutable ideal can realistically
be worked towards in history. This – to finally answer the question posed
halfway through this discussion – explains his focus on the beautiful, rather
than humanity. The beautiful is not just the means to and the way towards
approximating full understanding and experience, or full humanity, but also
the only representation of this understanding, that which can be achieved
in the here and now of reality.
My comparison makes it possible to test the assumed dif ferences
between the ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ outlooks of the two writers in the
context of a wider intellectual framework, which reveals these dif ferences
as tendencies within generally similar responses to the intellectual, cul-
tural, and historical situation. Both accept the process of temporal f lux
and its resulting impermanence. Both endeavour to find a way of inte-
grating the two opposing, historically successive concepts of the original-
natural-material and the rational-ref lexive-abstract in order to achieve
an approximation of a full sensual and intellectual experience, and with
it an approximation of completely successful communication. Schiller
66 Maike Oergel
attempts this integration by constructing a grand historical sweep from

cultural-intellectual origin through to projected aim, during which the
two concepts vie for dominance, and by focusing on the intersections
within the process at which change occurs. To him, these intersections
provide models of integration and synthesis, which illuminate the means
through which the process can be accelerated towards its aim. Schlegel
prioritises the self-dynamizing process in which opposing concepts con-
stantly and perpetually dislocate each other, and concludes that through
the structures of mythology and romantic irony a new poetry can provide
an experience of both the antagonism and the complementariness between
the two concepts, i.e. between ideality and reality, emotion and intellect,
creation and analysis.
The similar structures of their aims and responses, their focus on
dialectical processes of successive otherness and integration point to the
general coherence of the whole period. This illuminates – yet again – the
special (or even untenable) position of Weimar classicism as a classicism
embedded in an intellectual landscape that in a European context is called
Romanticism. German classicism, occurring after the advent of the aware-
ness of historicity, had from the start to abandon universal norms, the key
characteristic of classicism, and it did. This is not exactly a new thought
and by no means denies that the period around 1800 clearly represents
the classical age of German literature and culture. However, the evidence
I have provided here for the existence of a dominant intellectual frame-
work that shaped most ground-breaking intellectual and artistic activity
at the end of the eighteenth century of fers not just a new perspective on
the (aged) periodization issue, but crucially brings neglected contexts and
developments to the fore: the growing awareness of the historicity of human
existence and its consequences for intellectual, moral and artistic values
and practices – the development of modern dialectics – clearly shaped the
aesthetics that both Weimar classicism and German Frühromantik were
putting forward.
Bibliography
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N. Kemp Smith, first published 1929, revised 1933 (London: Palgrave, 1991).
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Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, Vol. 20.I (Weimar: Böhlau Nachfolger, 1962),
309–412. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans.
E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
——Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung, Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, Vol.
20.I, 413–439. Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime. Two Essays,
trans. J. A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966).
Schlegel, F. Athenäum, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, Vol. 2 (1967), 165–372.
—— Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. E. Behler and R. Struc
(University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).
—— Lyceumsfragmente, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, Vol. 2 (1967), 147–163.
—— Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe,
Vol. 1 (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna: Schönigh/Thomas, 1979), 217–367. On the
Study of Greek Poetry, trans. S. Barnett (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 2001).
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und Sentimentalische Dichtung”’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie (1994),
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European Romantic Review 14 (2003), 197–203.
68 Maike Oergel
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Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970),
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Abhandlung’, Euphorion 66 (1972), 174–206.
Robert Leventhal
The Aesthetics of the Case-History:

Schiller’s Juridical-Psychological Contribution
Statement of the Problem
In Foucault’s genealogy of modernity, the ‘case’ appears as one of several

bio-political techniques of power in the second half of the eighteenth
century. Foucault gives this emergence two dif ferent, yet complemen-
tary descriptions. First, in Discipline and Punish, he wrote that the case
‘is no longer, as in casuistry or jurisprudence, a set of circumstances defin-
ing an act and capable of modifying a rule; it is the individual as he may
be described and judged, measured, compared with others, in his very
individuality.’1 Later, in his writings on governmentality, Foucault placed
the ‘case’ alongside ‘security,’ ‘danger,’ ‘risk’ and ‘crisis’ as components of
what he termed the pastoral apparatus, an ‘individualizing power’ (indi-
vidualisierende Macht) concerned with the guidance of the (individual)
human soul (Gewissensleitung, Seelenführung).2 Foucault’s genealogy is
well-supported by the proliferation particularly of psychological-juridical
case histories in the second part of the eighteenth century in the wake of
François Gayot de Pitaval’s (1673–1743) Causes célèbres et intéressantes.
This is also the era of the first systematic treatises on medical security and
policy for the proper functioning of the state.3 As a component of the
1 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 191.

2 Foucault, Geschichte der Gouvernementalität, 191–192.
3 The most inf luential text at this time was likely Johann Peter Frank’s multi-vol-
ume System einer vollständigen medizinischen Polizei (Mannheim: bey CF Schwan,
1784–1819).
70 Robert Leventhal
pastoral apparatus and a ‘method’ for collecting, organizing, and classifying

pathologies and anomalies, the ‘case’ and its construction, elaboration, and
distribution forge an educative-scientific regime for the ordering, classifica-
tion, and understanding of individual anomalies. What is not as evident
in such an account is precisely what I refer to as the aesthetic function of
the case, that is, how the ‘case’ also became an aesthetic-cultural interac-
tion operating between physicians, teachers, philosophers, psychologists,
legal theorists, scientists of the state, or practitioners of the newly emer-
gent Polizeiwissenschaft, and literature. This is particularly relevant in the
case of Schiller, who trained as a physician, edited and translated Pitaval’s
texts, and transformed several psychological ‘cases’ into literary texts, the
most famous of which is his early narrative Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre.4
This transformation of the psychological-medical-legal case into a literary
text is itself an aesthetic act, insofar as it constructs the case in question as
a literary-aesthetic text which is not merely supposed to be entertaining
and interesting, but to contribute to a certain conception of what it means
to be human, to a certain ef fort to be ‘concerned,’ or ‘caring’, and to the
mediation between the sensuous and the cognitive aspects of human mental
functioning at the end of the eighteenth century. Such ‘care’ is to be evoked
through the sympathetic consideration of the history and circumstances
of the individual as mitigating factors in the emergence of mental illness
and criminal action.
Schiller’s medical studies at the Karlsschule confronted him with sev-
eral cases of narrated and actual mental illness.5 Through his teacher and
psychological-philosophical mentor, Jacob Friedrich Abel (1751–1829),6
4 F. Schiller, ‘Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Fricke und
H. Göpfert (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1967). All references to Schiller are from
this edition using the abbreviation SW. All translations are my own. Schiller’s text
first appeared as ‘Verbrecher aus Infamie eine wahre Geschichte’, Thalia. 1785–91.
1786, Volume 2, 1. Stück, 20–58.
5 For a more complete assessment, see K. Dewhurst and N. Reeves, eds, Friedrich
Schiller. Medicine, Psychology, Literature.
6 On Abel, see ‘Abel, Jacob Friedrich (1751–1829)’, Killy Literaturlexikon. Autoren und
Werke des deutschsprachigen Kulturraums. 2., ed. W. Kühlmann, A. Aurnhammer et
al. 13 vols (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2008f ), Volume 1 (2008), 5–7.
The Aesthetics of the Case-History 71
Schiller became acquainted with the most current contemporary theories

of medical science and the therapeutics of mental illness. He also had first-
hand experience in writing the protocol of a mental illness in his report
concerning the Cadet Grammont. (Schiller SW V, 268–280) His transla-
tion and edition of Pitaval’s Sonderbare und merkwürdige Rechtsfälle7 is
evidence of his interest in and passion for the narrative framing of mental
illness and its consequences. In Abel’s teachings, he received the sense of
psychology as an empirical undertaking, one which begins with observa-
tions of appearances and gradually moves to more general laws. In his
Einleitung in die Seelenlehre of 1786, Abel wrote:
The method of the human sciences is identical to that of the research of nature: First,
to collect individual instances, and from these to construct general laws and finally
to use these, partly to explain the individual instances and partly for the discovery
of new rules, through whose application new products can be produced […] Even
the spirit of the psychologist is the same as that of the researcher of nature. But
because the psychologist observes what has occurred in himself, and the study of
the human mind contains concepts which are not easily testable by means of more
nuanced and dif ficult experiments as in the case of the human body, the education
of the psychologist is even more dif ficult, but also more important.8
As aesthetics emerges as a discipline in the second half of the eighteenth

century, it is first and foremost a science of sensible knowledge (scientia cog-
7 Schiller’s text edition and translation is Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle, als ein Beytrag zur
Geschichte der Menschheit. Nach dem franz. Werke des Pitaval (Leipzig: Crusius,
1792).
8 Abel, Einführung in die Seelenlehre, ‘Vorrede’, xxxi. ‘Die Methode der Menschenlehre
ist die bey Erforschung der Natur überhaupt gewöhnliche: Erst individuelle
Erscheinungen zu sammeln, dann aus denselben allgemeine Gesetze zu bilden und
endlich diese theils zu Erklärung der Erscheinungen, theils zu Erfindung neuer Regeln,
durch deren Anwendung aufs neue gewisse Produkte hervorgebracht werden sollen,
anzuwenden. […] Auch der Geist des Psychologen ist also überhaupt der Geist des
Naturforschers. Nur da der Psychologe das in ihm selbst Vorgegangene beobachtet,
und die Menschenlehre unbildliche, feinere, schwerere und durch künstliche Proben
nicht so leicht prüfbare Begrif fe als die Körperlehre enthält, so ist die Bildung des
psychologischen Geistes schwerer, aber auch viel wichtiger.’
72 Robert Leventhal
nitionis sensitivae), and only in a derivative sense a theory of art and the
beautiful. And while these gain the upper hand as its narrative continues,
its driving force was, as Andrew Bowie has stated, ‘to do justice to the
immediacy of the individual’s sensuous relationship to the world’ (Bowie,
Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 4). Aesthetics seeks not simply to rescue, but
to create the space for furthering the uniqueness of the individual in what
Schiller perceived as an era of the increasing reduction of humanity, instru-
mentality, fragmentation, violence, terror and leveling of dif ference. The
maintenance and expansion of such uniqueness, of Eigentümlichkeit, an
essential condition of actualizing the aesthetic state, requires for Schiller
recognition of the entwinement of the particular individual in f luctuat-
ing circumstances and conditions, both internal and external. This raises
the question of the status of the individual case in Schiller, in the multiple
sense of the particularity, the uniqueness of the individual, as an irreduc-
ible person, but also, the legal-juridical-psychological ‘case’ as a literary
genre and discourse-medium. It stood at the center of the late eighteenth
century’s and Schiller’s interests, from his early case-history regarding his
fellow-student Grammont’s depression at the Karlsschule to Der Verbrecher
aus verlorener Ehre: Eine wahre Geschichte, based on the true case-history
of the criminal Friedrich Schwan (1729–1760), and to his translation and
edition of Pitaval’s Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle als ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
der Menschheit (1792).9
Recent works on Schiller have gone a long way towards dispelling
certain calcified preconceptions and fixed interpretations of Schiller’s
aesthetic theory; they have also shown another dimension of Schiller, a
stark realist aspect of his work, which derived from his early medical stud-
ies. Rüdiger Safranski’s 2004 book Friedrich Schiller oder die Erfindung
des Deutschen Idealismus goes to great lengths to emphasize and trace
the importance of Schiller’s medical studies for the development of his
9 Now available in a new edition: Schillers Pitaval: Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle als ein
Beitrag zur Geschichte der Menschheit, verfaßt, bearbeitet und herausgegeben von
Friedrich Schiller, ed. O. Tekolf with an Introduction by H. M. Enzensberger
(Frankfurt: Eichborn 2005).
psychologically acute dramas. With detailed knowledge of the context,

Safranski is able to show how Schiller the medical student undergoes a
transformation in 1778, throwing himself into his medical studies with an
intensity and tenacity he had lacked up that point. Through Jacob Friedrich
Abel and his most inf luential medical Professor Consbruch, who taught
him neuro-physiology, Schiller is inf luenced by what Safranski refers to
as the turn, around 1775, to anthropological empiricism, in which the texts
of Bacon, Locke, Shaftesbury, Platner, Herder and especially Ferguson’s
Institutes of Moral Philosophy, which appeared in German in 1775, assume
particular importance. It is indeed der ganze Mensch, the ‘whole person’,
the human being as a sensuous and rational being which emerges here as
the point of departure for all human science. Safranski also points to the
significance of the emergence of Erfahrungsseelenkunde and the publication
of the first journal of ‘empirical psychology’, Gnothi Sauton: Magazin zur
Erfahrungsseelenkunde (1783–1793): the meticulous observation of indi-
vidual cases, detection of the specific origins of mental dysfunction and
criminality, and a sense of humanity were key forces in the production of
this journal.10 Safranski writes: ‘Schiller, who must learn to do autopsies,
becomes, as regards the human soul, a vivisecting and experimental psy-
chologist. His work on Die Räuber, which he begins in 1777, serves pre-
cisely such a human psychology.’11 According to Safranski, Schiller read the
cadet Grammont’s case as a philosophical, one might even say, existential
crisis culminating in a nihilistic depression resulting from the disastrous
convergence of the rigid discipline of the Karlsschule, the new empiricism,
metaphysical philosophy, and the persistence of pietistic Schwärmerei.
Frederick Beiser’s Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (2005)
presents a forceful re-interpretation of the Aesthetic Letters as ‘an essentially
10 ‘Aber die Begeisterung des Ausdrucks soll die Kraft zur analytischen Distanz nicht
mindern. Die Seele mag sich ausdrücken, doch soll sie nicht die Disziplin einer
“Erfahrungsseelenkunde” – eine Bezeichnung, die Abel von Karl Philipp Moritz
übernimmt – scheuen.’ (Safranski, 76)
11 ‘Schiller, der lernen muss, Leichen zu öf fnen, wird, was die Seele betrif ft, zum
sezierenden und experimentierenden Psychologen. Seine Arbeit an den Räubern,
mit der er 1777 beginnt, dient solcher Seelenkunde’ (Safranski, 76).
74 Robert Leventhal
political work’. For Beiser, Schiller’s text ‘stands in the modern republican
tradition of Machiavelli, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Ferguson’ (Beiser,
Schiller as Philosopher, 120). In contrast to older readings that claim that
Schiller’s text merely codifies Kantian autonomy aesthetics and buries
all individuality in the species-being ‘mankind’ and thus neglects what is
most personal and communicative about the aesthetic experience itself,
Beiser states:
It is of the first importance to note that Schiller thinks that it is the task of culture
to preserve the realm of individuality and variety as much as that of universality
and unity […] the importance of the realm of individuality – its intrinsic value and
status as an end in itself – is stressed in an essentially political context in Letter IV.
It is in this insistence upon the intrinsic value of individuality that Schiller begins to
take one of his more important steps beyond Kant, and anticipate the later romantic
ethic of Schlegel and Schleiermacher. (140)
This rehabilitation of individuality can be traced, I would suggest, to

Schiller’s concern for the particular case in his earliest medical studies, for
it is in this context that Schiller first encounters the dif ficult negotiation
between the individual psycho-physiological human being and the laws of
nature and the state; it is here that the conf lict between what ought to be
and what actually is, the ideal and the real, becomes most pressing.
Despite the fine contributions of Harald Neumeyer, Alexander
Košenina and others in recent years on the legal-medical-psychological
case in Schiller’s work and the Spätaufklärung more generally,12 the aes-
thetic dimensions of Schiller’s concern, that is, how the case figures in
the overall structure of his aesthetic thought, the unique aesthetic merits
and potentiality of the case, have not been discussed. This is all the more
curious since Schiller’s aesthetic and medical-psychological interests are
clearly fused in such dramatic works as Die Räuber, as has been forcefully
12 H. Neumeyer, ‘“Schwarze Seelen”: Rechts-Fall-Geschichten bei Pitaval, Schiller,

Niethammer und Feuerbach’; Kosênina, ‘“Tiefere Blicke in das Menschenherz”:
Schiller und Pitaval’. On Schiller, see also Oettinger, ‘Schillers Erzählung “Der
Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre’’’; Dainat, ‘Der Unglückliche Mörder’; and Fink,
‘Theologie, psychologie et sociologie du crime’.
shown by Wolfgang Riedel. According to Riedel, the ‘soul’ in late eight-

eenth century had been transformed into a stage of radical heteronomous
forces, ‘into a being that is relegated almost helplessly to the instincts and
the af fects (the ‘dark ideas,’ ‘ideae obscurae’) and to the body (the brain and
the nervous-system)’.13 Riedel is clear about the ef fects of such dependency
and contamination: ‘In all of these “heteronomies of the soul” it is a matter
of things that could not be adequately described within the framework of
“rational psychology”, namely, the interactions and entanglements of soul
and body, psychology and physiology.’14
In the following, I shall argue that Schiller’s sustained concern for
the specificity and uniqueness of the case has been marginalized in the
discussion of his aesthetic, even in the literature that presents the new
‘realist’ Schiller. I will seek through some textual examples to show why
the case is significant for Schiller’s aesthetic theory and conversely, how
aesthetic concerns impinge on the literary presentation of the case history.
Specifically, I suggest that it turns on a notion of justice, and in a double
sense: first, of doing justice to the uniqueness of the individual person, and
further, Schiller’s enduring concern of ensuring legal-political justice for
the individual human being: namely the sympathetic understanding of the
mitigating conditions, circumstances and causes that create violence, crime,
and madness in any individual instance or situation. This latter concern,
motivated and guided by a moral and juridical intent to reform society and
the state, is also latent in the transformation Schiller articulates with respect
to the aesthetic state. In a sense, the case becomes an incommensurable
example of the aesthetic as it is the individual and individualizing instance
for which we have, in Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment, no adequate
concept. In Kant, however, the aesthetic experience must be disinterested
13 ‘in ein Wesen, das nahezu hilf los der Triebe und Af fekte, des Unbewussten (der “dun-
klen Ideen,” “ideae obscurae”) und des Körpers (des Gehirns und des Nervensystems)
ausgeliefert ist’ (Riedel, 42).
14 ‘In all diesen “Heteronomien der Seele” geht es um etwas, was im Paradigma der
“rationalen Psychologie” nicht konsistent beschreibbar war, nämlich um Interaktionen
und Verschränkungen von Seele und Körper, von Psychologie und Physiologie’
(Riedel, 43).
76 Robert Leventhal
and disengaged from all worldly and mundane concerns and turns solely
on the representational powers of the subject in order to guarantee the
maximum free play of the imagination. For Schiller, there is a decidedly
moral and juridical interest which impinges on any understanding of the
case; the aesthetic ‘presentation’ of the case, and its reception, is therefore
not entirely ‘free’ or ‘autonomous’ in the strict sense: the reader is not only
to respond to the case cognitively, but viscerally, feeling the af f liction of
the other, and translating this into a deeper and fuller understanding of the
pitfalls of the human condition. Here resides the actual aesthetic import
of the case: its ‘reality’ or the force of the ‘real’ within it should ef fect a
fuller sense of who and what we are, of the discrepancy between the law
and justice, and the psycho-physiological determinants of human action
and behavior.
Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters as an Articulation of Case
To establish the centrality of case from the aesthetic – and not merely psy-
chological, epistemological, or legal – point of view, we begin at the end,
with the Aesthetic Letters, and work backwards. We can, using the basis
provided by Beiser’s reading of the Aesthetic Letters, make the case that
the fourth letter is essentially an attempt to recapture the individuality
of the individual. It states that every individual person harbors the ideal
human being within them, the absolute unity of form and material; to
fully actualize this, Schiller says, is nothing less than the task (Aufgabe)
of human existence. This actualization of this mediation of material and
form is, if we follow the argument, the State (Staat). The state, if it is to
be legitimate and a truly just representant, must do justice to both the
objective/generic and the subjective character, the specificity of the indi-
vidual: ‘[…] it should also honor the subjective and specific character in the
individuals.’15 Schiller distinguishes between the mechanical, the (merely)

aesthetic and the pedagogical-political artist; only the latter is truly capa-
ble of achieving the highest task (Aufgabe) of art. Only in the reciprocity
and the balance of objective and subjective, generic and specific, law and
inclination, can the true unity of the State be sought; if this is achieved,
Schiller argues, ‘he will be able to preserve this uniqueness (individuality)
however much he may universalize his conduct.’16 As Benjamin Bennett
has cogently argued: ‘What is at stake […]is whether we human beings shall
be able to have in the first place, each of us, his or her own relatively unfet-
tered, personal, particular, individual being.’ (Bennett, ‘The Irrelevance of
Aesthetics’, 295–296) For Schiller, the task of aesthetics is to not merely to
restore, but to create the conditions of the individuality of the individual
– ‘die Individualität des Falls’ (SW V 866), i.e. to produce a state in which
our irreducible Eigenthümlichkeit can be preserved and even enhanced,
precisely in the face of ‘universal social and moral claims on us.’ (Bennett,
298) The entwinement of the physical and the mental, of body and soul, of
medicine and literature is so powerful in the emergence of aesthetics that
any attempt to grasp the case-history outside of this double and doubling
apparatus is bound to fail. For Schiller, as for the later eighteenth century as
a whole, aesthetics is a child of a psycho-physiological mode of experiencing
unclear and obscure impressions and sensations, and somehow bringing
these to consciousness and representation so that they can be processed as
such. It is not a matter of making them clear and distinct, but of allowing
them their own, peculiar indeterminacy and not trying to subsume them
under an already existing concept.
We might say, with other words, if this particularity – the individuality
of the individual – is injured, subsumed, or lost, the state will have lost its
legitimacy, that is, its ability to function as the true and real representant of
the full human being. The preservation of particularity – not subjectivity
15 ‘Er soll auch den subjektiven und spezifischen Charakter in den Individuen ehren’
(SW V 577).
16 ‘So wird sich auch bei der höchsten Universalisierung seines Betragens seine
Eigentümlichkeit retten’ (SW V 578).
78 Robert Leventhal
– but the unique pairing of Person and Zustand in the specific individual,
appears here as the sine qua non of justice and the foundation of the truly
representative, legitimate State.
Fast forward now to Letters 11 and 12 of the Aesthetic Letters, just
before the infamous formal splitting or stylized rupture of the Triebe, and
Schiller’s famous positing of the third term to reconcile form and matter,
freedom and necessity. Here, Schiller again underscores the requirement
of the individuality of case as a vital component of the true, actual, full
human being: distinguishing between the Person, which is what endures
(das Bleibende), and the conditions (Zustand) of the person, which shift
(das Wechselnde). Brought to the abstraction of Schiller’s formulation, we
arrive at the distinction between freedom, the absolute self-grounding of
the person as the persistent self, and temporality, as the condition of all
becoming:
Every condition, every particular entity emerges in time, and the human being, as
a phenomenon, must have a beginning, even though the pure intelligence in him
is eternal. Without time, that is, without becoming, the human being would never
become a particular person; his personality would exist as a disposition, but not as
an actual fact. Only in the series of his representations does the persistent ‘I’ itself
become a particular phenomenon and achieve appearance.17
Schiller’s ‘resolution’ of this opposition is that the persistent ‘I’ must actively
form the material, give structure to the world, actively maintaining and
positing the I precisely in the face of the ever-shifting demands of reality.
This, we might say, is the ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ response to the challenge
of existence; if one does not ascend to the level of actively forming time
and reality, one remains simply a part of the world, passive material to be
17 ‘Aller Zustand aber, alles bestimmte Dasein entsteht in der Zeit, und so muss also
der Mensch, als Phänomen, einen Anfang nehmen, obgleich die reine Intelligenz
in ihm ewig ist. Ohne die Zeit, das heißt, ohne es zu werden, würde er nie ein
bestimmtes Wesen sein; seine Persönlichkeit würde zwar in der Anlage, aber nicht
in der Tat existieren. Nur durch die Folge seiner Vorstellungen wird das beharrliche
Ich sich selbst zur Erscheinung’ (SW V 602).
determined: ‘As long as the human being simply senses, and desires, and
acts according to this desire, it is nothing more than a part of the world.’18
In the psychological case, the human being is not grasped in the sphere of
freedom, of actively forming the world, but as a piece of the world, and being
subject to the alternating circumstances of reality.
Schiller recognizes that the opposition of the Triebe also involves
accentuation or attenuation of cases: ‘If the first [instinct, RL] only provides
cases, the other provides laws.’19 Mediation of the individual case with the
law means that both will be preserved. Not by chance does Schiller men-
tion insanity and madness precisely at this point as the loss of the Person,
which he names in the text explicitly: ausser sich sein.
In Letter 14, case appears again, but now as important individual
instances that provide a sensible intuition of actualized humanity: ‘If there
were cases in which the human being could have this double experience,
in which it could simultaneously be aware of and sense its freedom and
its concrete, temporal existence, it would have in such cases, and unfortu-
nately only in such cases, a complete intuition of its own humanity.’20 Only
in the individual cases do we get the tangible intuition of the full sense of
humanity; only in individual cases do we experience the concrete sense of
the complete human being in its humanity. Here, the existence of indi-
vidual cases, not as mere particularity, but as actual temporal experiences of
mediation, are requisite as instances of precisely the envisioned aesthetic
state in which individuality and universality, inclination and law, material
and form are continually mediated with one another.
18 ‘Solange er bloß empfindet, bloß begehrt, und aus bloßer Begierde wirkt ist er noch
weiter nichts als Welt’ (SW V 603).
19 ‘Wenn der erste [Trieb, RL] nur Fälle macht, so gibt der andere Gesetze’ (SW V
605).
20 ‘Gäbe es aber Fälle, wo er (der Mensch) diese doppelte Erfahrung zugleich machte,
wo er sich zugleich seiner Freiheit bewusst würde und sein Dasein empfände, so hätte
er in diesen Fällen, und schlechterdings nur in diesen eine vollständige Anschauung
seiner Menschlichkeit’ (SW V 612).
80 Robert Leventhal
Schiller’s Explication of Case in the Medical-Psychological-

Juridical Writings
In his Preface to the edition he produced of Pitaval’s Causes célèbres et inte-

ressantes (1734–1743) entitled Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle als ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte der Menschheit of 1792 and in the introductory paragraphs of
the case-history Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (1786),21 it is possible to
detect the rudiments of Schiller’s aesthetics of case. First, consider Schiller’s
Preface to Pitaval’s Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle. Schiller stresses both the prag-
matic and epistemological value of writing and reading case-histories: it is
a book that entertains, one which ‘contains a good deal of reality for the
understanding,’ ‘it distributes seeds of useful knowledge and serves to direct
the ref lection of the reader to valuable purposes’;22 ‘One gets a glimpse of
the human being in the most intricate situations, which tense the expecta-
tion, and whose resolution provides the reader’s power of divination with
a pleasant activity’;23 ‘The secret play of passion unfolds right in front of
21 According to existing scholarship, the consensus is that Schiller heard the tale of
the Sonnenwirth from his teacher at the Karlsschule Jacob Friedrich Abel, who
himself edited a collection of case histories Sammlung und Erklärung merkwürdiger
Erscheinungen aus dem menschlichen Leben (1787), including the case Schiller used
for his story. Abel had first hand knowledge of the case since his father was actually
the magistrate who arrested and charged the perpetrator Christian Wolf. While
Schiller might have heard the story from Abel in the course of his studies, Minor’s
hypothesis that Schiller’s literary version was based on Abel’s was shown to be false;
rather, Abel seems to have borrowed from Schiller’s version in Thalia I, 2 (1786),
20–58, as one of his textual bases. See Koopman, 255. See also Jacob Friedrich Abel,
Eine Quellenedition, 620.
22 ‘Streut es den Samen nützlicher Kenntnisse aus, dient dazu, das Nachdenken des
Lesers auf würdige Zwecke zu richten’ (SW V 865).
23 ‘Man erblickt den Menschen hier in den verwickeltesten Lagen, welche die ganze
Erwartung spannen, und deren Auf lösung der Divinationsgabe des Lesers eine angene-
hme Beschäftigung gibt’ (SW V 865).
our eyes.’24 Case-histories therefore have pedagogic, epistemological, and

moral-political-juridical value; they awaken our interest and confront us
with the interesting task of having to ‘resolve’ something. The case-history
is, both in its manner of presentation as well as the way in which it involves
the reader, superior to the Geschichtserzählung:
Add to this the fact that the more nuanced juridical procedure is far more capable of
bringing to light the hidden motivational causes of human action than is the case in
other instances, and if the historical narrative often leaves us dissatisfied concerning
the true motives and the final reasons of the acting players, the juridical trial often
reveals to us the innermost thoughts and the most obscure fabric of malice.25
Schiller also mentions knowledge of the law and jurisprudence gained
through the study of such cases: ‘This important victory for human knowl-
edge and the treatment of human beings is made even more powerful by
the increased insights into the law which are strewn throughout them,
and which gain clarity and interest through the individuality of the case
in which one sees them applied.’26 Finally, Schiller sees in the elucida-
tion of case the performance of the ‘republikanische Freiheit des Lesers,’
that is, the right of the reader herself to evaluate, judge and decide.27 It is
therefore not merely a matter of the interesting and valuable content, but
how the cases are presented: that is, the Behandlungsart. In the Vorrede to
Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle, Schiller insists that the authors have maintained
24 ‘Das geheime Spiel der Leidenschaft entfaltet sich vor unseren Augen’ (SW V
865).
25 ‘Dazu kommt, dass der umständlichere Rechtsgang die geheimen Bewegursachen
menschlicher Handlungen weit ins Klare zu bringen fähig ist, als es sonst geschieht,
und wenn die vollständigste Geschichtserzählung uns über die letzten Gründe einer
Begebenheit, über die wahren Motive der handelnden Spieler oft unbefriedigt lässt,
so enthüllt uns oft ein Kriminalprozess das Innerste der Gedanken und bringt das
versteckteste Gewebe der Bosheit an den Tag’ (SW V 866).
26 ‘Dieser wichtiger Gewinn für Menschenkenntniss und Menschenbehandlung […]
wird um ein Großes noch durch die vielen Rechstkenntnisse erhöht, die darinn
ausgestreut werden, und die durch die Individualität des Falles, auf den man sie
angewendet sieht, Klarheit und Interesse erhalten’ (SW V 866).
27 See Košenina, 392–393.
82 Robert Leventhal
‘the dubiousness of the decision, which often puts the judge on the spot,
and communicate this to the reader by mobilizing for each of the opposing
parties the same care and the same great art.’28 In other words, they have
not determined the outcome in advance; doubt, ambiguity, and multi-
perspicacity have been preserved; the reader herself is placed not merely
in the double role,29 but rather in multiple roles of sympathetic reader, wit-
ness, victim, the public, advocate, judge and jury, and even the perpetrator
himself. The full complexity and multi-dimensionality of the case is cru-
cial to this form of narrative and its aesthetic force to induce the public to
become more careful readers and more sensitive, sympathetic judges, and
this in a time, as has often been noted, when motive and circumstances
were irrelevant to the execution of the law.30 Schiller, in contradistinction,
is interested precisely in the etiology of pathology, on the conditions, or
the causes, of the idiosyncratic turn towards psychological dissolution,
criminality, and transgression.
Secondly, the introductory remarks of Verbrecher aus verlorender Ehre
focus in on the disclosure of the conditions and causes of the particular act;
not on the abstract value of the aesthetic experience of the occurrence or
the Handlung per se, but rather on the specific conditions, circumstances,
and inf luences of the soul. It is only in the annals of the Verirrungen of
human beings, how they, quite specifically, have deviated or become the
subjects of cases, that the real lessons of morality, psychology, and the
power of the state can be learned according to Schiller.
Five distinct features of Schiller’s aesthetics of case can thus be noted:
first, the Vorrang of the case over historical writing in Schiller’s view is
that history is written in order to sway the emotions (durch hinreissenden
Vortrag): ‘a gap remains between the historical subject and the reader …
28 ‘Die Zweifelhaftigkeit der Entscheidung, welche oft den Richter in Verlegenheit

setzt, auch dem Leser mitzuteilen, indem sie für beide entgegengesetzte Parteien
gleiche Sorgfalt und gleich grosse Kunst aufbieten’ (SW V 866).
29 Košenina, 393–394.
30 Neumeyer, 102.
which excludes the possibility of comparison or analogy.’31 In this way,

the connection between the reader and the subject is severed. Second, in
a transformative movement away from the deed, we are focused in the case
instead on the thoughts, or, more precisely, on the ‘sources’ of the thoughts
(Quellen seiner Gedanken) and, more to the point, ‘the situation and state of
af fairs which formed the context surrounding such a person’.32 Third, critics
have often quoted the first part of Schiller’s statement, providing ammuni-
tion to the idealist reading that Schiller was indeed only concerned with
the generalized species-being, but failing to cite the rest of the sentence, or
citing it incorrectly,33 which is focused on the individual case, its particular
instance and signature. This forms a direct link to Schiller’s distinction,
in Letter 11 of the Aesthetic Letters, between Person and Zustand, and the
necessity of preserving both the self and the specificity of its ever-f luctu-
ating conditions, its finite determinations, for any aesthetic mediation.
Fourth, such a method or Behandlungsart would, pace Schiller, decrease
the contempt, arrogance, and the proud and false sense of security with
which, he says, the self-righteous look down upon the accused, thinking
they are made of dif ferent blood; diminish the false distance between the
judge, the public, and the fallen, the virtuous and the criminal, the reader
and the historical subject, and allow us to learn to see, to paraphrase the
prefatory remarks to Verbrecher, ‘Wisdom and folly, vice and virtue in one
cradle together.’34 Finally, cases are based on real individuals and real events.
Verbrecher is subtitled ‘a true story’,35 and in opposition to the drama and
31 ‘Es bleibt eine Lücke zwischen dem historischen Subjekt und dem Leser … die alle
Möglichkeit einer Vergleichung oder Analogie abschneidet’ (SW V 14).
32 ‘Die Beschaf fenheit und Stellung der Dinge, welche einen solchen umgaben.’ (SW
V 15)
33 Košenina’s otherwise fine analysis (see Košenina, ‘Tiefere Blicke’) stumbles here:
he cites the passage, but gets the second part wrong. The sentence reads: ‘Er [der
Menschenforscher, RL] sucht sie in der unveränderlichen Struktur der menschlichen
Seele und in den veränderlichen (my emphasis, RL) Bedingungen, welche sie von
aussen bestimmten’ (SA V, 15), not, as Kosênina cites, ‘unveränderlichen Bedingungen.’
See Košenina, 393.
34 ‘Weisheit und Torheit, Laster und Tugend in einer Wiege beisammen’ (SW V 15).
35 ‘Eine wahre Geschichte’ (SW V 14).
84 Robert Leventhal
the novel, as Schiller notes in the Preface to Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle, cases

have the advantage of ‘historical authenticity’.36
Textprobe: A Comparison of a Literary and

Actual Case-History
A brief comparison of Abel’s ‘actual’ case-history Lebens-Geschichte Friedrich

Schwans37 and Schiller’s literary rendition of the same case in Verbrecher
aus verlorener Ehre might be useful to discern the specifically aesthetic
features of the literary stylization in the sense we have presented at the
outset of this essay: namely, the preservation, even furtherance, of a sense
of the uniqueness and individuality of the individual in the face of increas-
ing reduction and subsumption. The first significant dif ference to note is
that Schiller invents a new early history of the Sonnenwirth. His father is
dead (SW V 16), and Wolf must assist the mother in the hopeless family
business. In Abel’s more ‘reality-based’ case-history, we witness an original,
extreme aggressivity and belligerence in the young boy, especially within
the small, but intact familial context, and more specifically towards the
father. In Abel’s case-history, recourse is made several times to an inher-
ent, intrinsic corruption of the soul: ‘To this day a number of examples are
told in the place of his birth about this early vitiation of his soul […]’; ‘Yet
even in such a vitiated soul a new vice could only strike roots slowly and
gradually.’38 In the place of this assumption of an inherent propensity to
crime, Schiller, similarly to the way in which he depicts Franz Moor in Die
36 ‘Historische Wahrheit’ (SW V 865).

37 Abel, Eine Quellenedition.
38 ‘Noch werden in seinem Geburtsort eine Menge von Beyspielen erzählt, die diese
frühe Verderbnis seiner Seele erweisen […]’; ‘Indessen konnte (zur Freude jedes
Menschenfreundes schreibe ich diese Beobachtung nieder) auch in einer so ver-
dorbenen Seele ein neues Laster doch nur langsam und allmählig sich einwurzeln.’
Abel, Eine Quellenedition, 336. All quotations from Abel are from this edition.
Räuber,39 focuses on Schwan’s natural repulsive looks and his awkward,

compensatory maneuvers:
Nature had failed with respect to his body. A small, non-descript figure, nappy
unpleasantly dark hair, a f lat-pressed nose and a swollen upper lip, which in addition
was distorted by the kick of a horse – this all gave him a contrary look that repulsed
all women and gave plenty of ammunition for the jokes of his comrades.40
The shift from an inalterable, fixed ‘Verderbnis der Seele’ – in some sense still
according to the traditional attribution of an original sin, a basic spiritual
f law or error engraved in the soul – to the externality of ‘chance’ appear-
ance, to awkward and misguided behaviours, and the attendant social
consequences of exclusion and rejection is significant: it makes the crimi-
nal a victim of a social world. In Abel’s case-history, based on eyewitness
interactions with the author and the reports of several reliable men (Abel
1995 334), the worsening of Schwan’s situation was a necessary outgrowth of
the fundamentally disturbed soul. In Schiller’s narrative, Wolf is ruthlessly
pursued by the apprentice of the Förster, Robert, who also happens to be
the suitor of the girl Wolf had fallen in love with. The decisive shift occurs
when the Sonnenwirth is incarcerated for the third time, sentenced to hard
labor in a fortress. The Sonnenwirth becomes a true criminal. Schiller marks
this transformation in the soul of the perpetrator with great intensity and
precision, and it is here that we receive the story from the standpoint of
the protagonist himself for the first time:
The mandate against poaching required a solemn and exemplary retribution, and
Wolf was sentenced, with the sign of the gallows burned into his back, to three
years hard labor at the fortress […] This time also passed, and he departed the for-
tress – but a very dif ferent person than as he had arrived. Here, a new era in his life
39 See Riedel, ‘Die anthropologische Wende’.

40 ‘��
Die Natur hatte seinen Körper verabsäumt. Eine kleine unscheinbare Figur, krau-
ses Haar von einer unangenehmen Schwarze, eine plattgedrückte Nase und eine
geschwollene Oberlippe, welche noch ueberdies durch den Schlag eines Pferdes aus
ihrer Richtung gewichen war, gaben seinem Anblick eine Widrigkeit, welche alle
Weiber von ihm zurückscheuchte und dem Witz seiner Kameraden eine reichliche
Nahrung darbot’ (SW V 16).
86 Robert Leventhal
begins; one can listen to him, as he himself confessed to his spiritual council and
before the court: ‘I entered the fortress,’ he said, ‘as a wayward person and left it as
a criminal; I had had still something in the world that was of value to me, and now
my pride bent under the disgrace. When I was brought to the fortress, they locked
me in with twenty-three other prisoners, among whom there were two murderers,
the rest alleged thieves and vagrants. I was mocked and ridiculed […] the work was
hard and tyrannical, my body became sickly, I needed compassion, and if I were to
say it honestly, I needed sympathy, and this I had to purchase with the last remnant
of my conscience. And so I got used to the most depraved and abominable, and in
the last quarter-year I had surpassed my mentors.’41
The dif ference between Abel’s case-history and Schiller’s literary-aesthetic

rendition of the story could not be more profound: Abel explains Schwan’s
criminality through an original, fundamental inborn f law in his soul. His
acts are a necessary outgrowth of a naturally disturbed mind. Schiller, in
contrast, clearly seeks to trace the origins of this criminality to the absence
of any empathetic understanding, the death of the father, the harsh labor of
the Festung, the deterioration of the body, and, perhaps most importantly,
being, quite literally, a ‘marked’ man – ‘the sign of the gallows branded
into his back’.42 This sense of marking or branding the criminal is repeated
as the Sonnenwirth returns to his town, only to be mocked by the chil-
41 ‘Das Mandat gegen die Wilddiebe bedurfte einer solennen und examplarischen
Genugtuung, und Wolf ward verurteilt, das Zeichen des Galgens auf den Rücken
gebrannt drei Jahre auf der Festung zu arbeiten […] Auch dies Periode verlief, und er
ging von der Festung – aber ganz anders, als er dahin gekommen war. Hier fängt eine
neue Epoche in seinem Leben an; man höre ihn selbst, wie er nachher gegen seinen
geistigen Beistand und vor Gericht bekannt hat. “Ich betrat die Festung”, sagte er,
“als ein Verirrter und verliess sie als ein Lotterbube. Ich hatte noch etwas in der Welt
gehabt, das mir teuer war, und mein Stolz krümmte sich unter der Schande. Wie ich
auf die Festung gebracht war, sperrte man mich zu dreiundzwanzig Gefangenen ein,
unter denen zwei Mörder und die übrigen alle berüchtigte Diebe und Vagabunden
waren. Man verhoehnte mich […] Die Arbeit war hart und tyrannisch, mein Körper
kränklich, ich brauchte Beistand, und wenn ich es aufrichtig sagen soll, ich brauchte
Bedaurung, und diese musste ich mit dem letzten Ueberrest meines Gewissens
erkaufen. So gewöhnte ich mich endlich an das Abscheulichste, und im letzten
vierteljahr hatte ich meine Lehrmeister übertrof fen”’ (SW V 18).
42 ‘Das Zeichen des Galgens auf den Rücken gebrannt’ (SW V 18).
dren, excluded and banned by the populace: ‘Am I perhaps marked on my

forehead,’ he asks himself; ‘[…] The contempt shown to me by this young
boy hurt me more that my three years of hard labor.’43 Schiller’s genetic,
historical-psychological method, focused on the marking that occurs in
the interaction between the social world, the punishment system, and the
internal psychological transformation of the Sonnenwirth, is diametri-
cally opposed to Abel’s presupposition of an original, inalterable mental
dysfunction, a primordially deformed or corrupt soul: in Schiller’s literary
narrative, the external conditions become the internal state or Zustand.
The consequences for aesthetics suggest that there is a dynamic interaction
between the various causal agencies – social, political and psychologi-
cal forces must converge – in order to bring about the type of ref lection
Schiller aims at. Bringing the physical and the psychological, the moral,
political and social codeterminants into play as Schiller does heightens the
reader’s interest while pointing to important social and political factors.
By contrast, Abel’s assumption of an inalterable, original corruption of the
soul diminishes the energy of conf licting forces, arresting the imagination
of the reader in the fixity of a blind determinism.
Conclusion
Schiller’s aesthetics has often been depicted as an idealist aesthetics of

autonomy – idealizing both in its tendency to sublate the real conf licts and
oppositions inherent in the real world, and idealizing in so far as it suppos-
edly opts for the universal, the generic, the objective, and ultimately, the
lawfulness of objective morality at the cost of the particular, the specific,
the transitory, and the f luctuating. Our cursory look at some of the textual
examples from 1786 until 1795 has shown, at the very least, that no account
43 ‘Bin ich denn irgendwo auf der Stirne gezeichnet? […] Die Verachtung dieses Knaben
schmerzte mich bitterer als dreijähriger Galiotendienst’ (SW V 19).
88 Robert Leventhal
of Schiller’s aesthetic is possible without suf ficient note of the importance of

case: to be precise, not the individual, but the particular admixture of Person
and Zustand that inhabits each and every case. Using close reading, we were
also able to point out two questionable assumptions regarding Schiller’s
aesthetic theory of the case: first, that it is aimed solely at the unchanging
structure of human being, considered ahistorically and apart from all vicis-
situdes; and secondly, that the actual cases or experiential instances of the
f leeting intuition of the mediation of form and material are not peripheral,
but actually a condition of aesthetic experience without which we would
have no tangible idea of the aesthetic process of mediation.
Harald Neumeyer has argued that, from 1734 and Gayot Pitaval’s
Causes célèbres to 1811 and Anselm Feuerbach’s collection of case-histories,
the ‘souls of criminals’ are not ‘produced’, nor do they ‘develop’: ‘“dark
souls” are, from the very beginning, simply “there”, in their density and their
irreducibility’.44 What is at stake in Schiller’s aesthetics of case, however, is
nothing less than the rupture of such a theory: for Schiller, cases are made,
dark souls constructed. They are a function of complex constellations of
character, circumstance, and chance. Reading and discussing them serve
a pivotal aesthetic-pedagogical function; indeed, aesthetics per se hinges
on the preservation of the individuality of case. Without suf ficient under-
standing of the specifics of case, a decisive element of aesthetic education
is lost, its putative mediating power destroyed.
Is there an aesthetics of the case? Here I can only sketch the most
rudimentary elements of such an aesthetics for Schiller. The case engen-
ders first and foremost a knowledge that is at once sensuous and analytical,
combining both feeling (sympathy) and understanding, empathy for the
perpetrator and cognitive and conceptual recognition of the law and the
objective political power of the state; secondly, the case induces a multi-
perspicacity or requires the reader to occupy dif ferent stances or posi-
tions vis-à-vis the actual case; such variability incites the reader to become
more completely human, Schiller would argue, as we expand our field of
44 ‘Schwarze Seele, sind von allem Anfang an einfach “da” – in ihrer ganze Dichte, in
ihrer ganzen Unhintergehbarkeit.’ (Neumeyer, 102)
judgment, perception, and sensibility; third, the pedagogical impulse of

aesthetic education – we cannot forget that Schiller understood this, not
as mere abstract theory, but as a cultural-historical project – is advanced
not merely in the careful and nuanced narration or edition of such cases,
but in the thinking and feeling, the curiosity and moral self-ref lection, the
reading and discussion of such cases would spawn. Without the individual
case, we would erroneously view, as Schiller writes in the prefatory remarks
to the Verbrecher, ‘the unfortunate person, in the moment in which he
performed the deed, as well as the one in which he atones for it ‘[…] as a
creature of a strange species, whose blood circulates dif ferently than ours,
whose will obeys dif ferent rules than ours.’45 With and through the case-
history, quite simply, we are able to see the accused as a ‘human being, just
like ourselves.’46 The anthropological empiricism of der ganze Mensch, in the
transmission and reading of the individual psychological case-history, was
successfully translated into a hermeneutic aesthetics in which the human
being has an expanded sense of humanity and a wider field of judgment
precisely as a result of the exposure to the demands made by the specificity
of the individual case. It concurs with the aesthetic as an educational and
political project by assisting us to see the mentally ill and the accused both
as full human beings rather than as demons or as criminals, and as being
‘marked’ socially and politically, and thereby allowing the reader to realize
an aspect of her humanity which is threatened in the increasing mecha-
nization of society and law, precisely at the moment of the origins of the
forensic medicine and the psychological codification of mental illness. The
case-history created the scriptural apparatus and dissemination medium
for the identification and the classification of such illness and crime. At the
end of the eighteenth century, case-histories are the ‘evidence’ of forensic
theory; they are included in or appended to textbooks and to theoretical
works as ‘examples’; they are the equivalent of observations, and to a certain
45 ‘Den Unglücklichen, der doch in eben der Stunde, wo er die Tat beging, so wie in
der, wo er dafür büßet, […] für ein Geschöpf fremder Gattung an, dessen Blut anders
umläuft als das unsrige, dessen Wille anderen Regeln gehorcht als der unsrige’ (SW
V 14).
46 ‘Mensch war wie wir’ (SW V 14).
90 Robert Leventhal
extent, experimentation, in the natural sciences.47 In this, the case-history is

a highly ambiguous genre of truth-telling, real history, empathy, guidance,
education and control/surveillance; its aesthetic function not merely to
move the reader, but to provide significant insight into the mechanisms of
the human psyche, and to articulate the social and political determinants
and construction of mental illness and criminality.
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1979).
47 On this, see Zelle.

—— Geschichte der Gouvernementalität I: Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevölkerung.

Vorlesung am College de France 1977–1978 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2004).
Koopman, H. Schiller-Kommentar, Vol. 1 (München: Winkler, 1969).
Košenina, A. ‘‘‘Tiefere Blicke in das Menschenherz’: Schiller und Pitaval’, Germanisch-
Romanische Monatsschrift 55, 4 (2005), 383–395.
Neumeyer, H. ‘‘‘Schwarze Seelen’: Rechts-Fall-Geschichten bei Pitaval, Schiller,
Niethammer und Feuerbach’, Internationales Archiv der Sozialgeschichte der
deutschen Literatur 31, 1 (2006), 101–132.
Oettinger, K. ‘Schillers Erzählung “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre”’, JDSG 16
(1972), 266–276.
Riedel, W. ‘Die anthropologische Wende: Schillers Modernität’, H. Feger, ed., Friedrich
Schiller. Die Realität des Idealisten (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2006),
35–60.
Safranski, R. Friedrich Schiller oder die Erfindung des Deutschen Idealismus (München
und Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004).
Schiller, F. Sämtliche Werke, Volume V: Erzählungen, Theoretische Schriften, ed. G. Fricke
und H. Göpfert (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1967).
Zelle, C. ‘Experiment, Experience and Observation in Eighteenth-Century
Anthropology and Psychology’, Orbis Litterarum 56 (2001), 93–105.
James Parsons
The Musical Poetics of Modernity:

The Choral Finale of Beethoven and Schiller’s Ninth
For most listeners the Ninth is much more than Beethoven’s last symphony
or simply – assuming anything about the piece ever has been simple – an
imposing display of artistic prowess. As the tradition-smashing finale makes
clear, it is a work without precedence, bringing together for the first time
in the history of the orchestral symphony musical instruments and voices.
One might think this would be enough to guarantee the Ninth an enduring
place within modernity’s ever-enlarging gallery, a point Richard Wagner, in
1849, af firmed when he summarized its union of words and music as ‘the
human Evangel of the art of the Future’ beyond which ‘no forward step
is possible’.1 For all of its overt and covert baggage – and there is a great
deal of both – Wagner’s synopsis exposes a curious incongruity: a liberat-
ing rejection of the past and an ossifying benchmark by which to gauge
new additions to the pantheon of artistic greatness. This uneasy conf luence
is itself one of the many ways by which to understand that oftentimes
freighted concept of modernity. Thus, I do not endorse an either/or mode
of thinking in conjunction with Beethoven’s Ninth or its ties to moder-
nity, wherein this or the other term comprising a binary opposition has
greater value. The really interesting thing, and here I follow Schiller, is the
highly charged space, the Indif ferenzpunkt, he locates between divergent
domains. One example must suf fice for now. In his ‘Über das Erhabene’
(‘Concerning the Sublime’, published 1801), the poet-philosopher spells
out how the worldly here and now and boundless beyond intersect, a sub-
ject that deeply enthralled Beethoven and, I argue, one the latter maps
1 Wagner, ‘Future’, 126.

94 James Parsons
out in the finale of his choral symphony. Schiller makes clear the two
together, the sublime and its conceptual other, nature, are equals. ‘Only
if the sublime is married to the beautiful and our sensitivity to both has
been shaped in equal measure, are we complete citizens of nature, without
on that account being its slaves, and without squandering our citizenship
in the intelligible world.’2
Useful although the concept of an Indif ferenzpunkt is, music criticism
has evinced little use for it, either specifically or in a more general sense,
given that the field has tended to resist the Ninth’s most revolutionary
characteristic, the union of words and music. That neglect has extracted
a price, dulling appreciation as to why Beethoven chose Schiller’s ‘An die
Freude’ together with the ways in which the composer’s response to those
words shaped the movement’s formal design.3 Sustained and spirited,
the lack of interest accorded the movement’s purely textual element began
during the composer’s lifetime. One of Beethoven’s otherwise most sym-
pathetic early critics, Adolf Bernhard Marx, writing in 1826, unequivocally
denied the finale was ‘a composition of Schiller’s ode’, or, for that matter,
‘the musical expression of its content or even of its words’.4 Friedrich
Nietzsche agreed. Even though he viewed the Ninth to be ‘without equal’
and ‘beyond analysis’, he maintained that a ‘relation between poem and
music’ in the finale ‘makes no sense, for the worlds of tone and represen-
tation are an insulting externality’ at odds with the ‘absolute sovereignty’
of music. Rather, the music’s ‘sea of f lames’ inundates the words, and we
‘simply do not hear anything of Schiller’s poem’.5
Inasmuch as Schiller’s poem is a part of the Ninth, the words remain
an essential starting point, even if most scholars begin elsewhere. And there
can be little doubt, given the sheer dynamic volume to which Beethoven
often aspires in the choral finale, that we hear those words, especially the
section stretching from measure 326 (beats 3 and 4) to measure 330 when
2 Schiller, ‘Concerning the Sublime’, 84.

3 I consider some of these in my essay ‘“Deine Zauber binden wieder.”’
4 Marx, Allgemeine, 375.
5 Nietzsche, ‘Über Musik und Wort’, 23, Nietzsche’s emphasis.
The Musical Poetics of Modernity 95
the chorus fervently roars forth fortissimo three times with the words ‘vor
Gott’, before God. Of course, neither Marx nor Nietzsche deny Schiller’s
poem in so literal a way. What they question is that Beethoven fashioned
the finale in response to those words or that the poem held special af finity
for him. It is here we locate the way in which such resistance has dimin-
ished understanding of the Ninth, for Beethoven deeply valued Schiller’s
writings and held fast to the idea of setting ‘An die Freude’ to music for
more than thirty years.6
Paradoxically enough, the finale of the Ninth itself has contributed to
the state of af fairs I seek to redress; in Nietzsche’s formulation, the music’s
‘sea of f lames’ does have the power to overwhelm Schiller’s poem. If we
agree this is problematic and in the end surmountable, a way out suggests
itself: placing Schiller’s poem within the broader culture of its time. To be
sure, the poem enjoyed tremendous popularity during the 38 years before
the Ninth, sweeping the German lands and beyond, inspiring more than
forty musical settings before Beethoven’s, a process that confirms the work
shaped the cultural topography of the later eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries just as the era shaped it.7 Worth knowing, too, is that
Schiller’s poem was not the first to bear that title or some closely related
variant. Such cultural resonance, heretofore unacknowledged, possesses
enormous explanatory potential. Although time does not allow for a full
rehearsal of the literary tradition before Schiller’s poem, one of its central
tenets is that Freude unites opposing realms. As the Anspach poet and
jurist Johann Peter Uz avers in his 1749 poem ‘An die Freude’, Joy is the
6 The earliest evidence for Beethoven’s interest in Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ comes
not from the composer but rather a letter from his friend Bartholomäus Ludwig
Fischenich, Bonn professor of philosophy and jurisprudence, dated 26 January 1793.
The letter, to Schiller’s wife, appears in Thayer, Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, 120–121.
7 Schiller wrote ‘An die Freude’ in 1785 and first published it in his own literary journal
Thalia in 1786. He issued a revised version in his Gedichte von Friederich Schiller.
Zweyter Theil in 1803. For Schiller’s poem in full, along with an English translation,
see Parsons, ‘“Deine Zauber binden wieder”’, 50–53.
96 James Parsons
child of wisdom (‘Kind der Weisheit’).8 Johann Peter Cronegk echoes the
idea in his 1761 ‘Exhortation to Judicious Joy’ (‘Ermunterung zu weiser
Freude’) when he asserts that ‘wisdom’ is the ‘sister of Joy’.9 Friedrich von
Hagedorn, in his 1744 ‘An die Freude’, summons Joy as the ‘goddess of
noble hearts’ (‘Göttinn edler Herzen!’), the ‘cheerful sister of sweet love!
child of heaven! the strength of souls! the half of life!’ (‘Muntre Schwester
süßer Liebe! Himmelskind! Kraft der Seelen! Halbes Leben!’). Even more
importantly, ‘Gracious Joy, you enliven reason!’ (‘Du erheiterst, holde
Freude! Die Vernunft’).10 What emerges is that Joy – ‘our Being’s End and
Aim! / Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! Whate’er thy name’, as Alexander
Pope af firmed in his 1734 An Essay on Man – is the reward granted the
person who reconciles the antithetical spheres of Enlightenment (Pope,
B). As Immanuel Kant observes in the 1787 second edition of his Critique
of Pure Reason, ‘the entire pursuit of reason is to bring about a union of
all the ends that are aimed at by our inclinations, into one ultimate end –
that of Glückseligkeit’.11 Kant’s word ‘union’, or Vereinigung, is noteworthy,
for the idea of fusion or harmony is a central concern of Enlightenment,
Schiller’s poem, and the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth.
Whereas poets of Hagedorn and Uz’s generation circumscribe Joy’s
purview, Schiller enlarges it. While Uz seeks Freude exclusively ‘in the
meadows and the f lowering field!’ (‘Auf Triften und Beblühmter Flur!’),
Schiller continually exceeds those limits with his references to ‘the panoply
of stars’, or Sternenzelt, a locale he cites or alludes to in his ‘An die Freude’
8 Uz, 5: 283–286. All English translations of Uz, Cronegk and von Hagendorn are my
own.
9 Cronegk, 206.
10 Hagedorn, 2: 41–42.
11 Kant, 3: 520. In light of Pope’s statement above, Kant’s ‘Glückseligkeit’ indicates
(most likely) that he is not drawing a distinction between such synonyms as joy,
happiness, or other related words. Seen in this light, the phrase ‘the pursuit of hap-
piness’, familiar from the American Declaration of Independence, emerges with
greater understanding. As David Hume wrote in 1742, ‘the attainment of happiness’
is ‘the great end of all human industry’, especially for ‘the man of virtue, … the true
philosopher, who governs his appetites, subdues his passions, and has learned, from
reason, to set a just value on every pursuit and enjoyment.’ Hume, 148.
eleven times, one that af firms his zeal in building on past conventions while
transcending them. My use of the word transcending does not imply that
Schiller favors one realm over the other. As an assessment of his writings
confirms, he repeatedly enlists the domains of nature and the sublime as
a metaphor for the Enlightenment synthesis of extremes, one he signals
at the start of his ‘An die Freude’ in the revelation that Joy’s magic pos-
sesses the ability to ‘join again that which custom rudely has divided.’
Beethoven aspires to a similar union of the mundane and infinite in his
choral finale.
Necessarily brief my overview of the importance Joy had for eight-
eenth-century thought has been, what is clear is that Schiller’s ‘An die
Freude’ relates to a larger literary tradition. Only when one reads the poem
against that backdrop is it possible to appreciate its boldness and unlock
its meaning. In an ef fort to shed light on both points it helps to know that
poets of Hagedorn and Uz’s generation sought Freude exclusively within
Arcadian nature. With his numerous evocations of the panoply of stars,
Schiller vastly expands the horizon of literature dealing with Joy, enlarg-
ing its conventions for new purposes, above all the all-embracing union of
nature’s beauty and the furthest reaches of infinity. As Schiller rhapsodizes
in his poem’s first choral antistrophe: ‘Be embraced you millions! This kiss
to the entire world! Brothers – above the starry vault must dwell a loving
father.’ (‘Seid umschlungen Millionen! / Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
/ Brüder – überm Sternenzelt / muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.’) Perhaps
not surprisingly, some fifteen years after writing the poem, Schiller found
its youthful intensity embarrassing, a repudiation later critics have found
hard to reconcile with the favor accorded the verse by contemporaneous
audiences, the result being that ‘An die Freude’ inhabits an indeterminate
no man’s land within present-day literary criticism. Writing to his close
friend Christian Gottfried Körner on 21 October 1800, whose modest
musical setting of ‘An die Freude’ precedes the poem with a special foldout
sheet bearing four staves of music in the 1786 Thalia, Schiller denounces
the poem in no uncertain terms. Notwithstanding its ‘fiery enthusiasm’,
he finds its standing as a ‘folk poem’ (‘ein Volksgedicht’) a measure of
98 James Parsons
the ‘bad taste’ (‘fehlerhaften Geschmack’) of its age.12 Whether or not

one agrees with this assessment, Schiller’s use of the word ‘Volksgedicht’
reveals an understanding that the poem had become swept up in larger
cultural currents, that is to say the mutually dependent relation of its pro-
duction and ongoing reception history. Whatever the poem’s quality, what
it addresses af firms one of the poet’s abiding concerns. In his 1795 Letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Man and ‘Concerning the Sublime’ Schiller
refines this line of thought. In both he stresses that the self-cultivation of
Enlightenment entails not only a merging of heart and mind but a fusion
of those forces that motivate humanity as part of the earthly now and as
moral beings, that is beings who aspire to the infinite – what the eighteenth
century called the sublime. (One may gauge Beethoven’s enthusiasm for
such thinking and imagery in the well-known February 1820 entry in his
Conversation Book where he copied out a paraphrase from the conclusion
of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: ‘There are two things which raise
man above himself and lead to the eternal, ever-increasing admiration: the
moral law within us, and the starry heavens above us.’13
The reticence musical scholarship has shown the union of words and
music in the Ninth’s choral finale pales in comparison with the avoidance
behavior the discipline has exhibited in the face of coming to terms with
Schiller the philosopher. Then again, if Thomas Carlyle is correct when,
in his 1825 Life of Friedrich Schiller, he writes of ‘the arcana of transcen-
dentalism’ (173) awaiting the would-be reader, one would perhaps be more
surprised had Beethoven critics taken it upon themselves to read the poet’s
‘An die Freude’ in light of his philosophical speculations. Drawn out though
‘An die Freude’ may be, it sums up, almost in nuce, Schiller’s work as an
aesthetician. Far from being a poem that exclusively deals with universal
brotherhood – a far too limiting view of the poem in any event – a case
12 Schillers Werke, 30: 206.

13 Beethoven did not copy the passage directly from Kant but rather from the article
‘Kosmologische Betrachtungen’ by the astronomer Joseph Kittrow, printed in the
Wiener Zeitung, 20 January and 1 February 1820. See further, Konversationshefte,
1: 235. The union of opposites I have in mind here has to do with humanity in the
everyday, earthly present aspiring to ‘the starry heavens’.
can be made that what Schiller treats is the desire for humanity to become
like ‘the beauteous spark of the gods’ (‘schöner Götterfunken’) he lauds in
the poem’s first strophe. Schiller confirms this in the fifth strophe when
he proclaims that ‘from the fiery mirror of truth she smiles on the seeker’
(‘Aus der Wahrheit Feuerspiegel’ she – Joy – ‘lächelt sie den Forscher an’).
On the steep hill of virtue she guides the suf ferer’s path (‘Zu der Tugend
steilem Hügel leitet sie des Dulders Bahn’). The cultural reverberation of
these lines some six years later in Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791), an opera
Beethoven deeply admired, opens up the possibility of understanding them
more completely. Through the scrim of good-natured entertainment, the
trappings of Freemasonry, the comic antics of a Papageno, Mozart’s opera
– just as does Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’, and, I contend, the choral finale –
treats the journey of self cultivation, that is Bildung.14 At the start of the
act II finale of Mozart’s opera the Three Youths sing,
soon, to announce the morning, the sun will arise on its golden path [gold’ner Bahn].
Soon superstition will disappear, soon the wise man will conquer. O gracious peace,
descend, return again to the hearts of men; then the earth will be a heavenly kingdom,
and mortals like the gods.15
14 I discuss Beethoven’s abiding interesting in Mozart’s opera in my essay ‘Beethoven’s

Mozart’.
15 For an authoritative version of Mozart’s libretto (by Emanuel Schikaneder) see
Freyhan, 246. The fourth choral antistrophe of Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ discloses
an interesting inf luence, one that likewise touched Beethoven. One of the poems
from Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s Geistliche Oden und Lieder (1757) and set by
Beethoven as the fourth of his Sechs Lieder von Gellert, op. 48 (1801–1802) clearly
inf luenced Schiller’s poetic language at this point. The second strophe of ‘Die Ehre
Gottes aus der Natur’ reads: ‘Wer trägt der Himmel unzählbare Sterne? / Wer führt
die Sonn’ aus ihrem Zelt? / Sie kommt und leuchtet und lacht uns von ferne, / Und
läuft den Weg, gleich als ein Held’ (Who supports the infinite stars of the heavens?
Who leads the sun from its tabernacle? She [the sun] comes, gleams, and smiles on
us from afar, and like a hero runs its course). Jessica Waldof f of fers a sympathetic and
compelling assessment of Mozart’s opera as a musical manifesto of the Enlightenment
in her ‘The Music of Recognition: Operatic Enlightenment in “The Magic Flute”’.
100 James Parsons
Although it is unnecessary to belabor Schiller’s frequently heady reason-

ing, what is essential to know is that he places the success of self cultiva-
tion at the crossroads of any number of conceptual opposites, be they
head and heart, the objective and subjective, or the earthly-here-and now
and boundless beyond, or as he puts it in the third strophe of his ‘An die
Freude’, from the lowly worm on whom Freude bestows Wollust, or bliss,
to, in the very next line, ‘der Cherub steht vor Gott’ (the cherub [who]
stands before God). In his Letters on Aesthetic Education, Schiller again
ponders the tension of opposites, of fering here the intriguing concept
of a ‘Spieltrieb’, or play drive, possessing the potential to join together
humankind’s rational and sensual inclinations, or, to use Schiller’s ter-
minology, a ‘Formtrieb’ and ‘der sinnliche Trieb’ (Letter 12). In letter 14
he writes: ‘To the extent that it [i.e. the play drive] deprives feelings and
passions of their dynamic power, it will bring them into harmony with
the ideas of reason; and to the extent that it deprives the laws of reason
of their moral compulsion, it will reconcile them with the interests of the
senses.’ Schiller extols the same union in the opening strophe of his ‘An
die Freude’ as well as first and sixth choral antistrophes: Joy, your charms
join again that which custom rudely has divided. Be embraced ye millions!
The whole world reconciled! (‘Freude, … Deine Zauber binden wieder,
/ Was der Mode Schwerd getheilt; … Seid umschlungen, Millionen! …
ausgesöhnt die ganze Welt!’) Does Beethoven share this view? The jux-
taposition of musical styles and idioms including (but not confined to)
the simple song of the Freude tune (and which carries with it the cultural
baggage of the many previous Lied settings of Schiller’s poem before
Beethoven) double-exposition concerto design, sonata-allegro, variation,
rondo, fugue, double fugato with diminution, double fugue, as well as the
union of instruments and voices provides the most compelling answer.
To return brief ly to Schiller, it is beauty, one discovers in Letter 18, that
sets this play drive into motion. Aesthetic wholeness, for Schiller, entails
one additional requirement: the ability to stand back and think any given
thing through. As he discloses in Letter 25, it is only ‘at the aesthetic stage’,
when humankind contemplates its position in the world, that the infinite
is to be glimpsed.16
While it would be imprudent to put forward an overriding theme in
Schiller’s writings, there can be little doubt he places art at the crossroads.
As he writes in his 1802 essay ‘The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution’,
theatrical works – a concept I take to mean all art – provide ‘a school of
practical wisdom’, ‘an infallible key to the most secret passages of the human
soul.’ (Written in 1784 and first published in 1785 as ‘Was kann eine gute
stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?’ [‘What Can a Good Standing
Theater Actually Accomplish?’], Schiller revised the essay in 1802 as ‘Die
Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet.’) The fusion of opposites
– ‘all the ends that are aimed at by our inclinations’ – Kant identifies in his
Critique of Pure Reason also is important. As Schiller declares in his essay,
the stage encompasses a similar spectrum of inclinations: ‘the entire realm of
fantasy and history, past and future’ is ‘at its beck and call’. Accordingly, the
primary purpose of a stage work is to conduct us toward a ‘gentle harmony’,
one bridging not only the opposing concepts just mentioned but also our
‘animal state’ and ‘the higher ef forts of the mind’. Unifying such extremes
inspires a heightened awareness – Schiller’s word is Empfindung – a rea-
lignment of the senses or spiritual reawakening similar to the euphoria he
captures at the start of ‘An die Freude’: only drunk with fire, feuertrunken,
does one enter Joy’s sanctuary. Again from the 1802 essay, one learns that
in such revitalized Empfindung ‘we find ourselves once more’, a rediscov-
ery of the self through art Schiller labels ‘a triumph’. That victory is hard
won. Meeting its requirements, humankind ‘from all every walk of life,
having shed their shackles of af fectation and fashion, torn away from the
insistent pressure of fate, united by the all-embracing bond of brotherly
sympathy, resolved in one human race again, oblivious of themselves and
of the world, come closer to their divine origin’.17
16 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 14, 94–99; Letter 18, 122–127; and Letter 25,
184–189.
17 Schiller, ‘The Stage’, 28, 25, 24, 32.
102 James Parsons
What interests me in this last statement is not its idealism but the
contention that art permits humanity to glimpse not just the divine, but
also its origins in the divine, a pronouncement that finds a parallel in the
invocation with which Schiller starts his ‘An die Freude’: ‘Freude, schöner
Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elisium’. Intriguing, too, is the conditionality
Schiller locates in art’s reuniting powers. In the theater essay he mentions
that art is a guiding force allowing us to ‘find ourselves once more’. In
‘An die Freude’ he discloses that in entering Joy’s province one learns that
‘Deine Zauber binden wieder / Was die Mode streng getheilt’. The cou-
plet’s significance comes into focus only when one establishes its context.
A prerequisite for the latter is the knowledge that when Schiller revised
his ‘An die Freude’ for his 1803 Gedichte von Friederich Schiller he also
was at work on the essay On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy (‘Über
den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie’). (Schiller published the essay
as the forward to his 1803 play The Bride of Messina or Brothers at War.
A Tragedy with Choruses (Die Braut von Messina oder die feindlichen Brüder.
Ein Trauerspiel mit Chören). Central to my argument is an awareness of
how atypical Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ is within the history of eighteenth-
century German poetry, featuring as it does after each eighth-line stro-
phe a four-line antistrophe the poet labels ‘Chorus’. Schiller thus seeks to
revive in his play and in his 1803 revision of his eighteenth-year old poem a
poetical practice closely linked with the ancient Greeks. This is no trif ling
bow to history. In both works he makes use of the chorus to inject a new
dimension, and not just the element of novelty since audiences of the time
certainly encountered choruses in opera. Whereas above I speculate on a
few of the reasons why Schiller subsequently found the tone and content
of his ‘An die Freude’ awkward, the interest he evinced in the idea of the
chorus at the time he revised the poem in 1803 in part explains why he saw
fit to include it in the 1803 volume. The chorus ‘purifies the tragic poem’,
creating a space for ref lection, an ‘organ of art’, that transforms ‘common
constricting reality’ into ‘das Poetische’, something ‘at once wholly ideal
and yet in the deepest sense real’. Schiller locates this reality at a ‘point of
indif ference’ – an Indif ferenzpunkt – a concept that, despite the English
cognate, does not connote indif ference.18 Rather the coupling of nouns

(Indif ferenz and Punkt) suggests an alignment with what Jean Paul, in his
1797 novel Das Kampaner Tal, speaks of as an ‘electrical condenser’, one
where Dichtkunst, or the verbal arts, consolidate the ‘electrical spider’s web’
of philosophy into ‘lightning bolts that agitate and heal’.19 In other words,
there Schiller’s Indif ferenzpunkt is anything but static: the transformation
of ‘common constricting reality’ demands energetic engagement.
Although such musings may seem far afield from the choral finale, they
are not. As formulated by the eighteenth century, Joy is the reward granted
the person who attains Enlightenment, a state Schiller specifies with a wide
range of terms. In the 1802 theater essay he considers ‘the all-embracing
bond of brotherly sympathy’,20 this last word one that turns up in ‘An die
Freude’ in the second choral antistrophe. In both poem and theater essay
Schiller situates der Simpathie as but another way of specifying Joy’s reunit-
ing abilities. In ‘An die Freude’ such spiritual kinship leads to where ‘the
Cherub stands before God’, in the theater tract recognition of the divine. In
the choral finale, as I have stated above, Beethoven responds to the words
‘vor Gott’ with music that scales the very heavens, three times repeating
the word Gott, each iteration coinciding with a stupendous sonority fill-
ing out four octaves. The first two chords sound the dominant of D major,
the last, with the common-tone A from the preceding chord sustained as
a displaced pedal point in the soprano, swerving to F, the dominant of
B-f lat. With this the register drops five octaves, the key plummets from
D major to B-f lat major, and the Alla marcia begins, a move that graphically
18 ‘In der neuen Tragödie wird er zu einem Kunstorgan; er hilft die Poesie hervorbrin-
gen.’ Schiller, ‘Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie’, 12: 205, 202, 198, 204.
Schiller goes on to long for a type of art ‘zugleich ganz ideell und doch im tiefsten
Sinne reell sein.’ ‘Was bloß die Sinne reizt, nur Stof f und rohes Element in einem
Dichterwerk und wird da, wo es vorherrscht, unausbleiblich das Poetische zerstören;
denn dieses liegt gerade in dem Indif ferenzpunkt des Ideellen und Sinnlichen.’
19 ‘Aber die Dichtkunst ist der elektrische Kondensator der Philosophie, jene verdichtet
erst das elektrische Spinngewebe und die Beatifikation der letztern zu Blitzen, die
erschüttern und heilen.’ ( Jean Paul, 4: 563. My own translation.)
20 Schiller, ‘The Stage’, 32.
104 James Parsons
depicts the heavens ceding to the quotidian, the Enlightenment union of

extremes. Remarkably, Schiller anticipates Beethoven’s sonic marriage of
heaven and earth in the closing sentence of his 1802 theater essay. In sight
of the divine, every individual ‘enjoys the raptures of all, which are ref lected
on him from a hundred eyes in heightened beauty and intensity, and in
his breast there is room for only one sensation: the awareness that he is a
human being’.21 In the choral finale, after the A-major chord def lects to
the dominant of B-f lat major in measure 330, which Beethoven marks f f,
or fortissimo, in the next measure the fall in register to the two bassoons
and contrabassoon gloriously honking away pp, or pianissimo, on their low
B-f lats, to the accompaniment of the bass drum, sparks a question. In all of
music is there another moment that makes one more aware of being human
than the start of the choral finale’s so-called ‘Turkish’ march? My question
is not as subjectively rhetorical as it at first may seem. While I admit that
other examples could be adduced, the ‘humanity’ of the music I have in
mind at this particular moment in the choral finale in large measure is the
result of the composer’s insistence on musical contrasts, that is the sonic
juxtaposition of opposites. In other words, the music beginning in measure
331 (the Allegro assai vivace alla Marcia section) is overwhelmingly ef fective
because Beethoven provides a point of reference by way of the monumental
mass of sound and array of forces leading up to this moment.
For Schiller, and I believe Beethoven, the awareness that one ‘is a
human being’ is dependent on the equipoise of Enlightenment, the bal-
ance of head and heart Schiller lauds in his 1791 review of the poetry of
Gottfried August Bürger. The type of art Schiller most values is that which
‘reunites the separated powers of the soul’, that reassembles ‘head and heart,
insight and wit, reason and imagination in a harmonious cooperation
that restores in us human wholeness’.22 The previously adduced example
from the Ninth’s finale is not the only one where Beethoven juxtaposes
extremes as the sounding manifestation of Aufklärung. Most obviously,
there is the addition of voices to the previously instrumental symphony.
21 Schiller, ‘The Stage’, 33.

22 Schiller, ‘On Bürger’s Poems’, 263.
Another example is the movement’s astonishing start: the clash – Wagner

dubs it a Schreckensfanfare, or terror fanfare – the convergence of two
dif ferent triads, one on D minor the other on B-f lat.23 From a single chord
Beethoven fuses the harmonic realms of the first three movements and
from discord ingeniously attains concord. More subtle is the instrumental
recitatives and recall of music from the preceding three movements after the
Schreckensfanfare. Mindful of Joy’s ability to ‘join again that which custom
rudely has divided’, with each appearance of the recitative the thing that
ought to follow does not. What arises from the recitatives is not song but
rather the condensed recollections from the first, second, and third move-
ments. Only after the remembrance of things past does song appear, and
in the most unexpected of guises: not sung by a human voice or voices but
entrusted to the cellos and basses. What is important about the movement’s
opening is what it makes possible. In intentionally thwarting the expected
formula of recitative followed by song, Beethoven finds yet another way
of joining ‘again that which custom rudely has divided’, given that vocal
song soon will makes its appearance.
The most striking example of the finale’s af finity for extremes is how
Beethoven folds into a demanding and dif ficult movement an utterly
uncomplicated unifying tune: the Freude melody, first heard in the finale
entrusted, piano, to the unison cellos and contrabasses for twenty-four meas-
ures (mm. 92–115), the ‘song’ the composer eventually gives to the singing
voice. Within the context of so much complexity, such simplicity is arrest-
ing. For Marx the tune – ‘this innocent, simple folksong’ – springs ‘softly
articulated’ from the ‘deep basses’ as if from ‘some long-buried memories
of youth’.24 Marx’s use of the word ‘folksong’ is provocative and prompts
me to revisit Schiller’s own description of his poem as well as his review of
23 Grey, Wagner’s Music Prose, 101–102, traces Wagner’s developing terminology for the
Ninth’s opening sonority, first as a ‘harsh outcry’, ‘cry of fear upon waking from a
frightful dream’, and Schreckensfanfare in three essays dating to 1846, 1870, and 1873
respectively.
24 ‘… diese unschuldvoll einfältige Volksweise.’ ‘In den dumpfen Bässen geht diese
Weise … und zutraulich still dahin, wie langverschüttete und übertäubte Jugend
erinnerungen.’ Marx, Leben 2: 285, 284.
106 James Parsons
Bürger, a poet who labeled himself a ‘ein Volksdichter’ and a distinction

with which Schiller took considerable exception. Schiller’s words on Bürger,
which at length take up the subject of what it means to write in a popular
style, strike me as marvelously suited to describe Beethoven’s Freude tune.
As Schiller has it, to be truly a truly popular poet he or she ‘would therefore
merely have the choice between the easiest thing in the world, and the hard-
est.’ The poet has ‘either to accommodate himself exclusively to the powers
of comprehension of the great mass, and to renounce the applause of the
cultivated class, or to compensate for the enormous distance between the
two by the greatness of his art, and to pursue both ends together’.25 As the
sketches for the Freude tune attest, writing that melody, which sounds for
all the world like ‘the easiest thing in the world’, proved to be ‘the hardest’.
In sum, and taking our cue from Schiller, one reason Beethoven labored
so intensely to create the Joy tune has to do with his desire to ‘pursue both
ends together’, that is to find a musical way to please the great mass and
cultivated class all at once.26
Tracking ‘both ends together’ is a topic that long interested Schiller
just as it did his contemporaries. (A decade after Schiller’s Bürger review
Johann Karl Friedrich Triest described Joseph Haydn’s musical style as one
given over to ‘kunstvolle Popularität’ or ‘populäre Kunstfülle’, that is artful
popularity or popular artfulness.27) In his Über naive und sentimentalische
Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) completed four years after the
Bürger review, Schiller engages in an extended rumination of what it means
to create art for the ‘great mass’ and for the ‘cultivated class.’. What intrigues
is Schiller’s dichotomy between the realms of nature and learned artifice,
the very division Beethoven foregrounds in the finale. As Schiller would
have it, ‘with painful urgency we long to be back where we began as soon
as we experience the misery of culture and hear our mother’s tender voice
in the distant, foreign country of art’.28 Many of Schiller’s contemporaries
25 Schiller, ‘On Bürger’s Poems’, 265, Schiller’s emphasis.

26 More than thirty years on, the most comprehensive study of Beethoven’s sketches
for the Freude melody is Winter, ‘The Sketches for the “Ode to Joy”’.
27 Treist, col. 407.
28 Schiller, Friedrich Schiller Essays, 192.
heard that ‘tender voice’ with greatest clarity in the kind of song popular
in the German-speaking lands throughout most of the eighteenth century
and which Beethoven remarkably distills in the concluding movement of
his Ninth Symphony in the Freude tune. Such song typically basks in tune-
ful preeminence, uncluttered accompaniments, largely conjunct motion,
diatonic clarity, and strophic design.29 (Beethoven was no stranger to this
endeavor, having labored on its behalf in his 1816 Opus 98 song cycle An
die ferne Geliebte when he aspired, as the text declares, to song that springs
‘aus der vollen Brust / Ohne Kuns[st]gepräng erklungen’ [from a full heart,
sounding without the ostentation of art].) For Schiller the distinction
between what he calls ‘the most complicated’ and ‘unassuming simplicity’
is anything but frivolous. The realms are his means by which to engage in
a full-f ledged review of modern culture, one where: ‘nature must contrast
with art and put it to shame’.30
The intensity of expression Schiller reserves for that variety of nature
that ‘must contrast with art and put it to shame’ is tantamount to a cul-
tural wound, one that recalls Jean Paul’s desire for a form of poetry that
consolidates the ‘electrical spider’s web’ of philosophy into ‘lightning bolts
that agitate and heal’. In the sentence that follows Schiller’s longing for ‘our
mother’s tender voice’ in his naïve and sentimental poetry essay, he explains
the point more completely. ‘As long as we were mere children of nature we
were happy and complete,’ he writes. ‘We became free and lost both happi-
ness and completeness’.31 As I remarked at the start of this essay, regardless
of the binary opposition Schiller might consider, he does not set one up as
superior over the other. Anticipating the Indif ferenzpunkt of his 1803 essay,
Schiller, in Letter 25 of his Aesthetic Letters, af firms that neither nature
nor reason is to rule a person exclusively. The two ‘are meant to coexist, in
perfect independence of each other, and yet in perfect concord.’ Schiller’s
distinction takes me back to Wagner’s observation that the Ninth is ‘the
29 I provide a fuller account of the eighteenth-century German song in my essay ‘The
Eighteenth-Century Lied’.
30 Schiller, Friedrich Schiller Essays, 189, 180.
108 James Parsons
human Evangel of the art of the Future’ beyond which ‘no forward step is
possible’, a work of redemption that curiously cannot impart redemption.
Jürgen Habermas neatly sums up what Schiller (and Wagner?) seems to have
in mind when he states that modernity, whenever such has been at work,
pivots on a dynamic relationship with the past. The Enlightenment ‘ideal
of perfection’, Habermas writes, and the ‘infinite progress of knowledge’
inspired by modern science may have ‘produced a radicalized consciousness’
that ‘detached itself from all previous historical connection and understood
itself solely in abstract opposition to tradition and history as a whole’, yet
‘the modern still retains a secret connection to the classical’ past. Just as
the past contributes to our collective understanding of modernity, so,
too, does the future, and in an equally dynamic way. Such an avant-garde
‘explores hitherto unknown territory, exposes itself to the risk of sudden
and shocking encounters, conquers an as yet undetermined future … As
a self-negating movement, modernism is a “yearning for true presence”.’32
The same animating force informs Schiller’s aesthetic speculation, as it does
his view of nature’s relationship to the aesthetic. ‘Do not let it occur to you
any longer to want to change places with nature,’ he advises. ‘Instead, take
nature up into yourself and strike to wed its unlimited advantages to your
own endless prerogatives, and from the marriage of both strive to give birth
to something divine’.33 The quest for ‘something divine’ – ‘Freude, schöner
Götterfunken’, as Schiller records in his ‘An die Freude’ – absorbed him
for most of his life. As ref lected in his philosophical writings, the search
hinges on a reintegration of the aesthetic and the natural, ‘our mother’s
tender voice’. For Schiller, that attempt does not center simply on healing
culture’s wound. Bridging the gap between the beauty of nature and the
grandeur of the infinite, both domains Schiller traverses in his ‘An die
Freude’, is another way to trace the divine. As much of his writings bear
out, Schiller, sought nature in the sublime and the sublime in nature.
In this essay I hope I have advanced the thought that Schiller’s poem
relates to a larger cultural tradition. Once one locates that tradition, it
32 Habermas, 39–40.
seems hard to believe it bypassed Beethoven, especially since Schiller’s

poem was set to music so frequently before his Ninth Symphony. For now,
I can only sketch the way in which the musical settings of Schiller’s poem
before Beethoven contributed to the larger process of cultural transmission
that shaped much of the eighteenth century, one in which Freude stands
at center stage. Just as Marx heard in the choral finale’s Freude tune ‘this
innocent, simple folksong’, that springs ‘softly articulated’ as if from ‘some
long-buried memories of youth’, more recently Joseph Kerman has found in
the Joy melody the locus for Beethoven’s tendency in his late works toward
directness of appeal, what we might term Beethoven’s own ‘kunstvolle
Popularität’. ‘The great exemplar of this drive is the Ninth Symphony’,
Kerman writes in the ‘Voice’ chapter of his The Beethoven Quartets, most
of all the concluding choral movement. At the core of the latter ‘stands
that famous (or perhaps one should say, notorious) … tune – half folklike,
blinding in its demagogic innocence.’ Yet ‘even before the Finale’, Kerman
continues, ‘a note of immediate popularity in the melody of earlier move-
ments … can hardly be mistaken. It is the very clasp of Beethoven’s hand’.34
While Beethoven alone is responsible for the finale’s all-important melody,
the tune’s ties to an ongoing tradition of musical settings of Schiller’s ‘An
die Freude’ – each of which shares to a considerable degree in diatonic,
four-square regularity and ease of intelligibility – goes far in making the
case that the ‘clasp’ in this particular case extends beyond Beethoven’s.
Relatedly, Marx’s assertion that the melody rises as if from ‘some long-buried
memories of youth’ turns out to have been uncannily on the mark.
Wagner obviously had much more in mind than commenting on the
Ninth Symphony when, in his ‘Oper und Drama’ (1851), he wrote that the
Freude tune possessed significance beyond the Ninth. With this melody,
Wagner contends, Beethoven laid the ‘natural foundation’ for all future
music. Wagner went so far as to claim that the Freude tune was the start-
ing point for the entire symphony. Beethoven ‘shattered’ the tune ‘into its
component parts’ at the start and ‘only in the progress of his tone-piece’
– that is, in the finale – did he ‘set his full melody before us as a finished
34 Kerman, 194.
110 James Parsons
whole’.35 In looking only to the future, Wagner lost sight of the role the
past plays in modernity. The Joy melody, while being the laborious result
of Beethoven pursuing ‘both ends together’, also takes its cue from the self-
ef facing modesty of eighteenth-century German song, of which the many
settings of Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ form a noteworthy component.
Writing in 1812, the composer urged a young admirer to ‘not only
practice your art, but endeavor also to fathom its inner meaning; it deserves
this ef fort. For only art and science can raise men to the level of gods.’36
Beethoven’s words take us back to the trajectory Schiller plots in his ‘An die
Freude’, to where the humble worm moves by stages to the cherub who faces
God, or to cite the fifth choral antistrophe (lines 57–58), ‘die beßre Welt!’
the poet searches for ‘droben überm Sternenzelt’ (the better world, up there
above the starry vault). Reading Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ in its entirety, one
is struck by its unyielding vertical resolve. The first strophe alone contains
four such examples: spark of the gods, heavenly one, [divine] sanctuary,
where your gentle wing abides (Götterfunken, Himmlische, Heiligthum, wo
dein sanfter Flügel weilt). Following the initial statement of the Freude tune
in the choral finale (mm. 92–115) by the cellos and double basses, Beethoven
matches Schiller’s heavenward ascent with a buildup of the overall con-
trapuntal texture, adding next the violas (m. 116), second violins (m. 139),
and first violins (m. 140), that is beginning in the lowest range of the string
instruments after which the others make their entrance in ascending fash-
ion. To be sure, the entire stretch of music from measures 92 to 202 builds
in intensity and, in the process, moves from relative simplicity to compara-
tive complexity. My point is that Beethoven’s compositional process here
stages, however symbolically, a progression that raises the listener to ‘the
level of gods’. At the same time, there also is the sense that this stretch of
music plays out Schiller’s previously mentioned ‘all embracing bond of …
sympathy’, the ‘triumph’ that ensues when humankind, ‘from all every walk
35 Wagner, ‘Opera’, 2: 107, 290, my emphasis.

36 The Letters of Beethoven, 2: 689 (788), dated 15 July 1817 (to Wilhelm Gerhard) and
1: 381 (no. 376), dated 17 July 1812. For the German text see Beethoven, Briefwechsel
Gesamtausgabe, 4: 82 (no. 1141) and 2: 274–275 (no. 585).
of life, having shed their shackles of af fectation and fashion, torn away from
the insistent pressure of fate, united by the all-embracing bond of broth-
erly sympathy, resolved in one human race again, oblivious of themselves
and of the world, come closer to their divine origin.’ In ignoring Schiller’s
‘An die Freude’ as a means to understand the finale, for too long my own
discipline of musicology has kept the Ninth’s ‘inner meaning’ at bay. Since
Schiller and Beethoven’s time humankind has lost a great deal of the con-
fidence it once had in the authority of art, science, or, for that matter, that
which might raise us to the level of gods. Perhaps we no longer care if the
composer’s last symphony concerns itself with the divine or the mundane.
Yet to understand it requires we engage with not only the ‘sea of f lames’
of Beethoven’s music but also Schiller’s poem. To call again on Habermas,
the Ninth unquestionably ‘explores hitherto unknown territory’, opening
vistas that bring with them ‘the risk of sudden and shocking encounters’.
Until culture and the scholars who presume to speak on its behalf accept
more fully the movement as the fusion of words and music it is, the choral
finale’s ‘true presence’, its modernity, will continue to elude us.
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NORMAN KASPER
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in

On Naive and Sentimental Poetry and the
Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic of the ‘Innocent Eye’
Introduction
Schiller’s classification of naïve versus sentimental ‘modes of feeling’1 is

primarily focused on invoking innocence and dealing with lost innocence.
The innocent character of the naïve is thus not merely understood as an
aesthetic but as an intellectual value.2 Children and a setting before all
culture are supposed to guarantee an overarching naturalization that com-
bines individual and social dimensions. The opposite of what is called
naïve is not connoted, as it may seem, by the sentimental, but by ref lec-
tion. While shifting from a natural to a cultivated state, modern man starts
to ref lect on things which were once naturally given. Therefore ref lec-
tion replaces sensual reality. ‘Voluntary existence, the continuation of
things through themselves, existence according to its own unchangeable
1 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 104. ‘Empfindungsweisen’

(‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 777). The talk of naïve and senti-
mental modes of feeling emphasizes the fundamental aesthetical dimension which
preforms poetological consequences of the two kinds of poetry as such. See Binder,
‘Die Begrif fe “naiv” und “sentimentalisch” und Schillers Drama’, 141–145.
2 As we will presently see, the intellectual value of the naïve leads to a ‘moral’ pleasure
in nature. Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 21.
116 NORMAN KASPER
laws’3 as it characterizes naïve nature, is no longer possible under the cul-

tural conditions by which modern man is shaped. That is not to say that
he has given up searching for his idyllic origin, however. Trying to regain
mankind’s naïve roots under the conditions of ref lection, man restores
the naïve by transforming nature into a moral idea. The necessity of the
sensual reality of the naïve is replaced by what Schiller calls ‘freedom of
the capacity for ideas’,4 that is to say, the naïve from a sentimental point
of view.5 Reconciled by the freedom of idea, nature and culture no longer
play dichotomous roles. Inasmuch as the naïve can be constituted looking
back from sentimental times, it becomes itself a part of the sentimental
scenery to which it seems to be opposed. There is one problem that shows
the dif ferences between the naïve and the sentimental, however. Although
the idea transcends finite reality by an infinite and unreachable ideal, the
innocent character of the naïve cannot be transformed into a sentimental
one. There is no innocence within man’s ref lection which would enable
him to renew his lost unity with nature through cultural means.
I will argue against the background of Schiller’s concept of innocence
that nineteenth-century debates on the innocent eye and pure visibility
can be read as a transformation of naïve and sentimental starting from
Schiller’s terms. These discussions mark an important shift in the com-
prehension and construction of innocence and its opposite with regard
to their social, physiological, psychological and aesthetical facets. John
Ruskin and Konrad Fiedler, for instance, develop Schiller’s opposition of
ref lection (sentimental) and sentiment (naïve) towards an opposition of
3 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 21. ‘Das freiwillige Dasein, das
Bestehen der Dinge durch sich selbst, die Existenz nach eignen und unabänderlichen
Gesetzen’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 707).
4 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 67. ‘Freiheit des Ideenvermögens’
(‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 778).
5 Schiller writes: ‘Das Gegenteil der naiven Empfindung ist nehmlich der ref lektierende
Verstand, und die sentimentalische Stimmung ist das Resultat des Bestrebens, auch
unter den Bedingungen der Ref lexion die naive Empfindung, dem Inhalt nach,
wieder herzustellen’ (Schiller, ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 777). See
Szondi, ‘Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische’, 59–105, who extends this thought.
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 117
concept and presence/visibility. Innocence is now understood as aiming

at the purification of visibility, leading to a deconstruction of interpre-
tative models into minimal units. On the one hand, the innocent eye
no longer needs an innocent beholder as soon as combinations of sen-
sation, sentiment/perception and cognition are promoted which rely
on visibility, presence and materiality. On the other hand, doctrines of
pure visibility referring to colour ef fects seem to regiment imagination’s
free play and the aesthetic freedom characterized in Schiller’s alliance
between the conceptual and sensual valances linked in the play impulse
(play drive).
Analysing the development of the modern naïve and its counterpart
with a focus on their history of ideas as well as their conceptual history,
two dif ferent aesthetics will be outlined. On the one hand, John Ruskin’s
famous footnote in his Elements of Drawing, introducing the term ‘inno-
cence of the eye’,6 will be examined with regard to the English eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century aesthetic of the picturesque as well as its impact
on modern and postmodern aesthetic theory. On the other hand, Max
Verworn’s determination of graphic art as displaying physioplastic and
ideoplastic characteristics will take centre stage. Verworn developed this
opposition at the beginning of the twentieth century in a number of essays
asserting the unity of prehistoric and modern art by ranking artistic produc-
tion with regard to its sensual or intellectual origin.7 The aesthetic concept
of innocence of Ruskin and that of Verworn display dif ferent approaches to
Schiller. Therefore, it is necessary first of all to give an outline of Schiller’s
understanding of innocence in the context of the late eighteenth-century
aesthetic debate.
6 Ruskin, 27, emphasis in original.

7 Verworn, Die archaeolithische Cultur in den Hipparionschichten Arillac (Cantal);
Zur Psychologie der primitiven Kunst; Die Anfänge der Kunst; Ideoplastische Kunst;
Keltische Kunst.
118 NORMAN KASPER
Schiller uses the term ‘pure innocence’8 in order to characterize the mindset
of children as opposed to the adult’s culture-bound attitude towards the
world. Children’s behaviour and feelings are based on ‘disposition’, ‘desti-
ny’9 and a necessity that also structures nature. As modern man is forced
to ref lect on his environment and his way of reality making in an endless
process, the child is equipped with natural access to her world. Therefore
it follows that because our childhood remains ‘the only unmutilated piece
of nature which we can still find in civilised humanity’ modern man’s feel-
ing for nature can be compared to that feeling ‘with which we lament the
vanished age of childhood and childlike innocence’.10 ‘[S]ensual truth’ and
‘living present’11 are attributes of the naïve. Both children and some ancient
poets are part of this world, having not yet become disenchanted by ref lec-
tion and the sentimental consequences of the idea. The development of art
follows the same rules as the development of mankind. There is a childlike
artlessness in ancient storytelling not ref lecting on narrative style, structure,
technique or perspective. Schiller names this kind of storytelling plastic, the
opposite of which is constituted by what he calls musical. Referring to the
elegiacal aspect of sentimental poetry as embodied by Klopstock, Schiller
describes the opposition of plastic and musical as follows: ‘According to
whether poetry imitates a certain object as the visual arts do or according
to whether it merely induces a certain state of mind as music does without
8 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 23. ‘reine[…] Unschuld’ (‘Über
naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 709).
9 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 23. ‘Anlage’, ‘Bestimmung’
10 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 34. ‘Die einzige unverstüm-
melte Natur, die wir in der kultivierten Menschheit noch antref fen’, ‘womit wir das
entf lohene Alter der Kindheit und der kindischen Unschuld beklagen’ (‘Über naive
und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 726).
11 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 40. ‘sinnliche Wahrheit’,
‘lebendige Gegenwart’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 735).
needing to have a particular object for it, it can be called graphic (three-
dimensional) or musical.’12 Schiller discusses the relationship between the
plastic and the musical in 1794 in almost the same manner as can be seen
in this passage. In his essay ‘On Matthisson’s Poems’13 he asks about the
possibility of incorporating landscape poetry and landscape painting in the
pulchritude-based discourse. Identifying Greek art with beauty, plasticity
and necessity in contrast to the pleasant colour ef fects of modern landscape
art, he continues the tradition of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes
that also structures On naïve and sentimental poetry and the colore-disegno
debate.14 Schiller likes ‘Claude Lorrain’s magical paintbrush’15 – but how
can his work and the work of Matthisson be thought of as callistic and not
just pleasant? The distinction between the beauty of form and the pleasure
of colour is accentuated in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. The old colour-
design debate is renewed in a transcendental reformulation. Whereas the
free beauty (‘pulchritudo vaga’) constitutes a free play in the interaction
12 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 100. ‘Je nachdem nehmlich die
Poesie entweder einen bestimmten Gegenstand nachahmt, wie die bildenden Künste
tun, oder je nachdem sie, wie die Tonkunst, bloß einen bestimmten Zustand des
Gemüts hervorbringt, ohne dazu eines bestimmten Gegenstandes nötig zu haben,
kann sie bildend (plastisch) oder musikalisch genannt werden.’ (‘Über naive und
sentimentalische Dichtung’, 756, emphasis in original.)
13 Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’.
14 See Jauß, ‘Schlegels and Schillers Replik auf die Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’,
95–105. Jauß does not comment on the nexus between the Querelle and the colour-
design debate in French classicism (relating to this see Imdahl, Farbe, 35–73), but he
identifies the sentimental as the musical with non-objective tendencies in modern art
(‘Entgegenständlichung’, 102–103). As soon as colour is no longer subordinated to
design it unfolds a non-plastic, self-referential, musical aesthetics of reception. With
respect to the reformulation of the positions of the antique and the modern within
distinguishing between naïve and sentimental, a mixture of philosophical-speculative
(naïve – sentimental) and intellectual-historical empirical (anciens – modernes)
argumentation has been criticized: Hermand, ‘Schillers Abhandlung Über naïve
und sentimentalische Dichtung im Lichte der deutschen Popularphilosophie des 18.
Jahrhunderts’, 431–432.
15 Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1017 (‘Claude Lorrain’s Zauberpinsel’).
120 NORMAN KASPER
of imagination and intellect, colours just af fect passively.16 Schiller tries

to rehabilitate pleasure by leading it to a necessity that also allows him to
combine it with beauty. Therefore, first the artist has to arbitrate between
the freedom of imagination and the necessity of evoking certain emotions.
But how can freedom and necessity be reconciled?
By prescribing to our imagination no other course but that which it would have had
to take in total freedom and according to its own laws. The poet’s purpose has to be
achieved through nature, thereby transforming external into internal necessity. It can
thereupon be seen […] that the highest degree of freedom is possible only through
the highest degree of determinacy.17
When one’s emotions are projected onto nature, these emotions ‘can be
represented with respect to their form’,18 like music. This is what landscape
poetry and landscape painting can learn: ‘[R]epresentation of the emotional
faculties’19 as some kind of formal expression without referring to the
world’s objects. As Schiller shows, especially in landscape painting the musi-
cal dimension is not based on the precision of mimetic forms – ‘because the
parts tend to vanish on the whole, and the ef fect is only achieved through
16 ‘In der Malerei, Bildhauerkunst, ja allen bildenden Künsten […] ist die Zeichnung
das Wesentliche, in welcher nicht, was in der Empfindung vergnügt, sondern bloß,
was durch seine Form gefällt, den Grund aller Anlagen für den Geschmack ausmacht.
Die Farben […] gehören zum Reiz; den Gegenstand an sich können sie zwar für die
Empfindung belebt, aber nicht anschauungswürdig und schön machen.’ Kant, Kritik
der Urteilskraft, 305, § 14., B 42.
17 ‘Dadurch, daß er [the poet] unserer Einbildungskraft keinen andern Gang vorschreibt,
als den sie in ihrer vollen Freiheit und nach ihren eigenen Gesetzen nehmen müßte,
daß er seinen Zweck durch Natur erreicht, und die äußere Notwendigkeit in eine
innere verwandelt. Es findet sich alsdann […] daß die höchste Freiheit gerade nur
durch die höchste Bestimmung möglich ist’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’,
1018–1019).
18 ‘ihrer Form nach […] der Darstellung fähig’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’,
1023).
19 ‘Darstellung des Empfindungsvermögens’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’,
1023).
masses’20 –, but on the formal necessity that leads the composition. Beneath
the projection of one’s emotions onto nature through reference to their
musical-picturesque dimension, nature can express and evoke ideas, ‘which
are necessary according to laws of symbolizing imagination’.21 Therefore,
reason tries to copy the structure of imagination’s free play: ‘Nature’s dead
letter becomes a living language of the mind’,22 as soon as the condition of
reason’s possibility, that is to say the structure of reason’s imagination-based
free play, ref lects itself in nature. Sensual experience and moral awareness
of the self are combined:
That lovely harmony of shapes, of tones and of light, which pleases man’s aesthetic
sense, will at the same time also satisfy his moral sense; the unbroken continuity
with which lines in space or tones in time merge into another is a natural symbol
of the disposition’s inner accordance with itself and of the ethical connectedness of
actions and feelings. And within the beautiful attitude evinced by a picturesque or
musical work of art, the representation of an even more beautiful, morally atuned
soul can be seen.23
Referring to the musical-picturesque aesthetics of reception constituted

in landscape art, Schiller is conscious of the loss of objectivity and the
break with the mimetic tradition the soul’s inner accordance with itself
can lead to. It makes such aesthetic ideas attractive, he points out, ‘that we
20 ‘weil die Teile in dem Ganzen verschwinden, und der Ef fekt nur durch Massen
bewirkt wird’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1023).
21 ‘die nach Gesetzen der symbolisierenden Einbildungskraft notwendig [sind]’ (Schiller,
‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1025).
22 ‘der tote Buchstabe der Natur wird zu einer lebendigen Geistersprache’ (Schiller,
‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1025).
23 ‘Jene liebliche Harmonie der Gestalten, der Töne und des Lichts, die den ästhetischen
Sinn entzückt, befriedigt jetzt zugleich den moralischen; jene Stetigkeit, mit der sich
die Linien im Raum oder die Töne in der Zeit aneinander fügen, ist ein natürliches
Symbol der innern Übereinstimmung des Gemüts mit sich selbst und des sittlichen
Zusammenhangs der Handlungen und Gefühle, und in der schönen Haltung eines
pittoresken oder musikalischen Stücks malt sich die noch schönere einer sittlich
gestimmten Seele’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1025).
122 NORMAN KASPER
look at their content as into a groundless depth’.24 Taking up this thread

in On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, Schiller links
his idea of man’s and mankind’s moral freedom with a possible freedom
of appearance. Seeing becomes a quality in itself, as his references to the
principle of massing in ‘On Matthisson’s Poems’ shows.25 As soon as man
starts to ‘enjoy with the eye, and vision acquires an absolute value for him,
he is already aesthetically free also, and the play impulse has developed’.26
But is this really about the ‘play impulse’ (play drive), combining ‘sense
impulse’ and ‘form impulse’ by constituting a ‘living shape’, or is it just an
aisthetic kind of the sense impulse, that is to say, a ‘concept which expresses
all material being and all that is immediately present in the senses’, ‘mere
impression’.27 Schiller seems to consider this problem when he ref lects on
music. Depriving the power of music of the right to operate under the
name of true aesthetic freedom by referring to its materiality,28 the musi-
24 ‘daß wir in den Inhalt derselben wie in eine grundlose Tiefe blicken’ (Schiller, ‘Über
Matthissons Gedichte’, 1026).
25 The ‘ef fect’ of a landscape ‘is only achieved through masses’ (Schiller, ‘Über
Matthissons Gedichte’, 1023). Massing aims at a ‘true representation of the visible
appearance of things: for the eye, when at a suf ficient distance to comprehend the
whole of a human figure, a tree, or a building, within the field of vision, sees parts so
comparatively minute as the hair, the leaves, and the stones or bricks, in masses, and
not individually. Hence the mode of imitation was changed; and, as this massing
gave breadth to the lights and shadows, mellowed them into each other, and enabled
the artist to break and blend them together.’ Knight, 150–151.
26 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 126. ‘und das Sehen
für ihn einen eigenständigen Wert erlangt, so ist er auch schon ästhetisch frei und
der Spieltrieb hat sich entfaltet’ (‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in
einer Reihe von Briefen’, 662).
27 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 76. ‘Spieltrieb’,
‘Sachtrieb’, ‘Formtrieb’, ‘lebende Gestalt’ (emphasis in original), ‘Begrif f, der alles
materiale Sein, und alle unmittelbare Gegenwart in den Sinnen bedeutet’, ‘bloße
Impression’ (‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von
Briefen’, 609–610).
28 See Schiller, ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen’,
640, where he argues that ‘auch die geistreichste Musik durch ihre Materie noch immer
in einer größern Af finität zu den Sinnen steht, als die wahre ästhetische Freiheit
cal qualities of visibility and colour ef fects as outlined in ‘On Matthisson’s

Poems’ are also in danger of being too sensual. The aspect of freedom could
become less decisive – that is what Schiller is afraid of in legitimating
pure visibility as a musical way of expressing emotions and ideas. This is
not unfounded, as the genesis and development of sheer visibility and its
functionalization in art discourses show. This development is not only – as
Schiller claims – about the great artist who purifies the sensory by the form
but about the sensory which emancipates itself from the form. Stressing
that music has to become shape, the fine arts should stir us by their music
like presence in the senses. The freedom of disposition (‘Gemüt’) could be
limited, however. Shapeless music is like the massing of colours that leads
to pure visibility.
The distinction between a more plastic and a more musical kind of
poetry and landscape painting is taken from eighteenth-century aesthetic
debates. In these debates, this dichotomous classification is based on the
hierarchy of the special senses. Whereas the sense of touch becomes more
and more important in terms of the perception of objects, the eye is sup-
posed to be a weak special sense – without haptic information the eye is
held to behold nothing but colours and shadows. In German rationalistic
discourse subsequent to Baumgarten this issue has been treated in a way
analogous to seventeenth-century French classicism. While colours just
af fect the body, form is identified with the soul and the mind. Therefore,
for example, Johann August Eberhard, a supporter of Baumgarten until
the beginning of the nineteenth century, argues that only children are
allowed to enjoy the play of colour.29 They possess a musical but not a
plastic understanding of the world. Thus far here musical precedes plas-
tic, an inversion of Schiller’s historical development can be seen. In this
duldet’. In his review ‘Zu Gottfried Körners Aufsatz Über die Charakterdarstellung
in der Musik’, 1083, he writes accordingly: ‘Of fenbar beruht die Macht der Musik
auf ihrem körperlichen materiellen Teil. Aber weil in dem Reich der Schönheit
alle Macht, insofern sie blind ist, aufgehoben werden soll, so wird die Musik nur
ästhetisch durch Form’. ‘Form’ and ‘Macht’ can be compared to the relationship of
form impulse and sense impulse.
29 See Eberhard, Theorie der Schönen Künste und Wissenschaften, 147.
124 NORMAN KASPER
interpretation the naïve is not identified with the truth of the plastic but
with a kind of seeing that is concerned with the musical dimension of
the sentimental.
II
From the 1750s until the 1790s popular philosophers like Johann Georg
Sulzer and Moses Mendelssohn exposed the nature of art in its inf luence
on our sentiment. Intellectual valances became less decisive to the same
degree. Determining reorientations enables integration of the eye’s mode of
action into the sentiment-orientated discussion. Adopted from the English
sensualistic aesthetics, the variety, the melting and massing of colours, sfu-
mato and low dark-light contrasts are now no longer considered in terms
of their intellectual insuf ficiency. Colourfulness, as indicated by a cloudy
morning or an evening sky, is not measured against plastic-haptical quali-
ties but by its emotional ef fects. Next to the musical aesthetics of recep-
tion Schiller mentioned with reference to Klopstock, Claude Lorrain and
Friedrich von Matthisson, the term picturesque describes the sensualistic
dimension in a historical as well as in an anthropological-physiological way.
The well-known occurrence recounted by William Cheselden in 172830
can doubtless be considered as the prologue to the development of the
picturesque. Richard Payne Knight mentioned Cheselden and his patient
several times in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805).
30 The English surgeon William Cheselden is famous for performing one of the first eye
operations leading to recovery from blindness. In his interesting report he writes about
the convalescent, a thirteen-year old boy: ‘“We thought he soon knew what pictures
represented, which were shewed to him, but we found afterwards we were mistaken:
for about two months after he was couched he discovered at once, they represented
solid bodies; when to that time he considered them only as party-coloured planes,
or surfaces diversified with paint”’. Cited in Smith, A Compleat System of Opticks,
43–44.
A young man who starts to see without realizing and identifying the seen
– that is what interests the nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic
of the innocent eye and what Schiller points to in the form of a pictur-
esque painting and a musical poem as a force of attraction: ‘that we look
at their [aesthetic ideas] content as into a groundless depth’.31 The inno-
cence Schiller attested in children and naïve poets by stressing their ability
to apprehend a non-mediated sensual reality is replaced by an innocence
which no longer aims at the unity with oneself. In the changing of inno-
cence from a moral-intellectual to a more aesthetic, that is to say, aisthetic
value, two fundamental alterations can be recognized. In evolutionary
terms, we can detect a momentous change in the succession of styles. The
plastic character of art can no longer be considered as the idyllic beginning
of mankind as the origin of vision has to be distinguished from the origin
of the tactile sense. From this it follows that the innocent eye has nothing
to do with the idea on which the sentimental is based. Schiller character-
izes the naïve through the eye and its plastic products and the sentimental
through the inner sense or imagination. By way of contrast, the child-
like eye as the innocent eye is a picturesque not a sculpturesque one. The
resultant development can be outlined as follows: aiming for unity with
oneself and with nature, Schiller’s concept of innocence is a holistic one
that combines sensual, ontological and intellectual dimensions in terms
of ‘sensual truth’ and ‘living present’.32 In man’s idyllic historical origin as
well as in his developmental-psychological beginnings there was no need
for ref lecting on epistemological problems like the body-mind problem.
Compared with this, the sensualistic tradition of the innocent eye ref lects
on man in a physiological perspective. In isolating visibility from other
sensual functions and mental ref lection, a kind of gap separates man from
his seeing and the truth of the world.
31 ‘daß wir in den Inhalt derselben wie in eine grundlose Tiefe blicken’ (Schiller, ‘Über
Matthissons Gedichte’, 1026).
32 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 40. ‘sinnliche Wahrheit’, ‘leb-
endige Gegenwart’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 735).
126 NORMAN KASPER
When John Ruskin footnoted his Elements of Drawing (1856) the
meaning of what he presented in the term ‘innocence of the eye’ was any-
thing but new. ‘The perception of solid forms is entirely a matter of expe-
rience’, he writes, and: ‘We see nothing but f lat colours […] The whole
technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called
the innocence of the eye, that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these
f lat stains of colours, merely as such, without consciousness of what they
signify, – as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight’.33 A
blind man suddenly gifted with sight – that is the story of the young man
treated by Cheselden (who lost the innocence of his eye step by step by
connecting optical and haptical information habitually). In English dis-
cussion of the picturesque, this topic has been accentuated dif ferently. As
Uvedale Price argues, on the one hand, in 1801, a ‘pure abstract enjoyment
of vision’34 seems to be possible in the future. In Richard Payne Knight’s
Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, pure visibility becomes, on the
other hand, a part of cultural criticism. Stressing the impact of education
and literacy on the development of children’s knowledge and cognition,
the sense of sight is to be considered as a form of sensual and pleasant self-
relation. ‘Children are delighted with every gay assemblage of colours: but
as the intellect and imagination acquire strength by culture and exercise,
they obtain so much inf luence over the sense, as to make it reject almost
every gratification, in which one of them does not participate.’35 Describing
seeing as an experience-based sort of learning Ruskin links his remarks to
that understanding of visibility. The eye loses its innocence, being restricted
by culture and exercise. Ruskin does not comment on the pleasures of
seeing (as Price and Knight do) referring to feeling, association or taste
but on seeing as an artistic necessity that the artist to-be has to bear in
mind. ‘Being suddenly endowed with sight’, he puts himself in the place
of someone who has to learn to see, who has no knowledge of the proper
33 Ruskin, 27.
34 Price, ‘Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the Beautiful’,
233.
35 Knight, 95–96.
colours of things. Therefore, he argues, the green of the grass can turn on
a sunny day into a ‘dusty-looking yellow’, and this is what you see without
knowing. Another example chosen by Ruskin is also based on the nature
of colour ef fects. A book is not a book: ‘it is to your eyes nothing but a
patch of white, variously gradated and spotted’; and a table is not a table
but ‘a patch of brown, variously darkened and veined’.36
The innocence Ruskin has pointed out has nothing to do with Schiller’s.
Aiming at the mode of perception, the objects by which the eye is af fected
are of little or no interest. This is what French impressionist art theory
and practice has learned from Ruskin. Once characterized as the naïve,
the plastic of the form is now listed as part of knowledge, culture and the
exercise that removes man from his childish state of nature. Innocence as
a metaphor changes its meaning: from ‘sensual truth’,37 which eliminates
subjective modes of representing and ref lecting in confirmation of oneself
and of the world’s objects, innocence shifts to signify the subjective mode
itself. In this sense, the innocent eye becomes a sentimental one in Schiller’s
classification, as picturesque theory shows. This eye focuses on the ‘state
of mind […] without needing to have a particular object for it’38 and – as a
consequence – without imitating or presenting nature. In other words, it is
about the musical as aimed at emotions, not about the plastic as referring to
the world’s things.39 The loss of plasticity is one of the characteristic features
36 Ruskin, 28.
37 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 40. ‘Sinnliche Wahrheit’ (‘Über
naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 735).
38 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 100. ‘bloß einen bestimmten
Zustand des Gemüts hervorbringt, ohne dazu eines bestimmten Gegenstandes nötig
zu haben’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 756).
39 Although there is a shift in the code of the naïve and the sentimental the dichotomous
character of Schiller’s categories remains preserved. The plastic and the picturesque/
musical constitute in their transcendental-ontological foundation, as Wolfgang Binder
argues, ‘antithetische Seinsweisen’ governed by reality (plastic: naïve) or idea (musi-
cal/picturesque: sentimental). Binder, ‘Die Begrif fe “naiv” und “sentimentalisch” und
Schillers Drama’, 143. Wilfried Barner follows Binder but accentuates the antitheti-
cal character of the naïve and the sentimental in an anthropological-psychological
dimension. See Barner, ‘Anachronistische Klassizität’, 66.
128 NORMAN KASPER
by which impressionism and neo-impressionism are defined. Sharing the

same aim under dif ferent conditions, impressionism as well as picturesque
art theory40 is part of the sentimental scenery Schiller described by point-
ing out the musical dimension. Although Ruskin’s purity requirements
were attacked by many researchers, especially in the twentieth century,41
the naturalization impetus by which the innocent eye was shaped had a
great inf luence on art, art programmes, art criticism and also art history.
From Clement Greenberg’s claims for purification, Susan Sontag’s verbal
assaults on interpretation and the catchwords chosen by minimalist art-
ists of the 1960s like Frank Stella (‘What you see is what you see’) to the
work of Max Imdahl, a turning away from an intellect-based hermeneutical
understanding of art and its methodological self-conception and a refusal
of iconographic and iconological methods can be considered as the lowest
common denominator.42
III
Hereafter I will not concentrate on that context but on another modifica-

tion of Schiller’s dichotomous classification within the discussion about
the origin of graphic art that took place around 1900. On the one hand
this modification has to be interpreted within similar antithetical concepts,
like Wilhelm Worringer’s contraposition of abstraction and empathy in his
eponymous dissertation (1907/08).43 Oskar Walzel, in his famous Mutual
40 Christopher Hussey discusses the picturesque with a view to its impressionistic

impact. Hussey, The Picturesque, 16–17.
41 See for example Goodman, Languages of Art [1969], 7; Gombrich, Art and Illusion
[1960], 12, 149, 246–247, 250–254, 258, 260, 261, 264, 274, 276, 331.
42 See Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ [1961]; Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’
[1966]; Glaser, ‘Questions to Frank Stella and Donald Judd’ [1966]; Imdahl, Giotto:
Arenafresken [1980].
43 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung.
Illumination of the Arts (1917), refers to Schiller’s distinction between

the musical and the plastic in its pioneering dimension with a view to
the concepts Worringer (abstraction vs. empathy), Heinrich Wölf f lin
(painterly/picturesque vs linear) and others suggested.44 That is why the
following can be understood with good reason simply as another develop-
ment departing from the basis Schiller laid. Thus far the role of the naïve
is recapitulated from an evolutionary point of view, the developmental-
psychological dimension Schiller accentuated in combining man’s (‘the
child’) and mankind’s (‘the Greeks’) intellectual history is on the other hand
renewed more specifically: The naïve is not identified with the tradition of
the innocent picturesque eye as a form of Schiller’s musical sentimental, but
refers to the plastic, mimetic and sensual truth the author of The Robbers
attributes to some ancients.
Max Verworn (1863–1921) was one of those interested in prehistory
and archaeology who sought art’s beginning and development by referring
to developmental psychology in its individual and collective dimension.
Subsequent to Darwin’s theory of evolution, the idea of the development
of art becomes more and more interesting. Conjecturing an analogous way
of advancement, the progress of individuals and of humankind in the arts
is seen together. Schiller had already suggested that the parallels between
child-like innocence and naïve poets have a great metaphorical and heu-
ristic potential. Ernst Haeckel, a German Darwinist, turns this into what
he calls the ‘biogenetic law’, meaning that ontogeny recapitulates phylo-
genesis.45 The child’s development can be compared to that of mankind.
From this, the question follows: Does children’s art recapitulate mankind’s
intellectual history?
First I want to show how Verworn came to be confronted with this
question. Comparing Palaeolithic with pre-Palaeolithic art, he is surprised
by their significant dif ferences. Lacking parallels, he has to suppose dis-
tinct developmental-psychological motivations or stages of development.
44 Walzel, Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste, 25–28, 74–77.

45 Verworn refers to the ‘biogenetic law’ (‘biogenetisches Grundgesetz’) given by
Haeckel in his Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen (1874).
130 NORMAN KASPER
Palaeolithic art has to be understood as a kind of imitative art. One can

identify the presented objects which seem to copy nature very faithfully.
Instead of becoming more illusionistic, the following period of art has
nothing to do with a realistic truth of nature. Pre-Palaeolithic art as well as
the art of primitive people, of children and of the Middle Ages (Verworn
refers here to the Gothic ornament that also interests Worringer) moves
from the imitative and mimetic impetus towards more abstract tendencies
so that it cannot be understood as a continuation. Describing the two forms
of art, Verworn uses the neologistic terms ‘physioplastic’ and ‘ideoplastic’
art. Physioplastic art results from ‘pure seeing’: Verworn understands it as
a reproduction from the seen. The later ideoplastic art is based on ideas
and associations. Characterized by the reshaping of realistic motives into
ornamental abstraction a turning away from Schiller’s sensual truth of the
naïve has to be noted. Therefore ideoplastic art in its geometrical character,
called ‘triangulism’,46 can be compared to modern idea-related art move-
ments like cubism.47 The association of ideas needs ref lexion; that is why
ideoplastic art has to be associated with a higher level of human develop-
ment. People producing physioplastic art, hunters of the Pleistocene era,
for example, are supposed to have a weak imagination. They are not able
to abstract from the seen towards its ornamental dimension. This dif fer-
ence between sight-related and idea-related products of art transposes
Schiller’s transcendental-ontological opposite of eye (naïve) and imagi-
nation (sentimental)48 in a way that combines ref lexion on prehistoric
culture and developmental psychology. Insisting on the sensual truth of
the eye’s products, physioplastic art reformulates Schiller’s naïve as an
46 Verworn, Ideoplastische Kunst, 16 (‘Triangulismus’).

47 See Verworn, Ideoplastische Kunst, 17, figure 11, which presents a ‘modernes kubis-
tisches Poträt von W. Burljuk. Nach Kandinsky und Franz Marc’.
48 With a view to the transcendental distinction between an objective naïve and a more
subjective sentimental way of worldmaking, Binder writes: ‘die Seinsweise ist nur das
objektive Korrelat der Denkweise. Was als eine sich selbst genügende Wirklichkeit
gedacht werden muß, das ist naiv, und was aus seinem Bezug zur Idee gedacht werden
muß, das ist sentimentalisch’. Binder, ‘Die Begrif fe “Naiv” und “Sentimentalisch”
und Schillers Drama’, 141.
art historical and developmental-psychological category. Ideoplastic art

takes up the tradition of Schiller’s imagination based sentimental: To the
extent that the idea constitutes the linking datum, imitative tendencies,
which are identified with physioplastic art, become less decisive. Verworn
is not interested in the sentimental as the musical or the picturesque but
in its abstract tendencies. That is what ideoplastic art refers to. The nexus
between prehistoric culture and developmental psychology is not under-
stood as a fact but as a supposition that has to be verified. For this purpose
Verworn collects children’s art in order to compare it with Palaeolithic and
pre-Palaeolithic art. His leading question is: Are there any indications that
allow us to understand the phylogenetically based development of art as
its ontogenic recapitulation?
Initially Verworn says no. Comparing the two kinds of art, we cannot
fail to notice that children’s drawings are more related to ideoplastic than
to physioplastic art. That would mean, however, that there are no parallels
between the development of children’s art and prehistoric art in the way
the biogenetic law requires. In this sense ontogenesis does not recapitulate
phylogenesis. Ref lecting on the definition of the biogenetic law given by
Haeckel, it appears to Verworn, however, that certain irregularities within
the relationship of ontogenesis and phylogenesis have to be tolerated. These
irregularities are known as cenogenesis. In search of an answer for the ideo-
plastic beginning of children’s drawings, Verworn points to the enormous
impact of education on children’s capability of seeing. A phylogenetic kind
of seeing is replaced as soon as cultural inf luences take ef fect. Following
Verworn, education and literacy are the factors which induce the absence
of the physioplastic prestage. Within the ontogenesis of children’s art these
cultural inf luences play the role of the cenogenetic factor.49
49 Verworn writes: ‘Es ist aber ganz besonders interessant, daß wir in der Ontogenese
der Kinderkunst diesen cenogenetisch wirkenden Faktor, der den Ausfall der physio
plastischen Vorstufe bedingt, ganz genau kennen. Es ist die Erziehung oder – um
einen Begrif f zu gebrauchen, der in unserer Zeit allmählich anfängt, einen weniger
wohltuenden Klang anzunehmen – die “Bildung”. Schon in den ersten Lebensjahren
beginnt die künstliche Düngung der harmlosen Kinderseele mit Wissen, das nicht
auf Selbsterlerntem beruht. Das moderne Kind ist eine Treibhauspf lanze; der
132 NORMAN KASPER
The innocent eye producing physioplastic art is distorted by knowl-

edge and education. Schiller, Knight and Ruskin have called attention to
the cultural process af fecting naïve perception and behaviour by means
of social regulations and epistemologically sensual standards. Verworn’s
physioplastic art can be read as a restitution of the naïve within the
discussion of the comparability of art’s ontogenetic and phylogenetic
explanation. He uses the term ‘naïve’50 in order to characterize mimetic
tendencies in Palaeolithic art. Although children’s drawings are identified
as a form of non-imitative art, ideoplastic art can be adduced to suppose
theoretically a naturally physioplastic beginning – with good, but not
verifiable reasons. Compelling evidence for the genesis of Palaeolithic
and pre-Palaeolithic art is given by Verworn with reference to the body-
mind problem. Naïve physioplastic art is founded in an epistemologi-
cal monism that does not separate the mind from the body or the seen
from the known. But as the notion of the soul becomes more and more
important and imagination starts to replace the belief in sensual reality,
non-imitative ideoplastic art is supposed to deal with the hidden core
of things. That is the reason why it has to move from imitation towards
the possibilities of idea.51 Schiller describes the restitution of the naïve
by transforming nature into an idea per ‘freedom of the capacity for
ideas’52 in an analogous way. The possibility and the freedom of the idea
substitute the sensual reality of the naïve and its sight-related plasticity
of form. In Schiller’s reasoning this freedom is not a result of the body-
paläolithische Jäger war ein Wildling, der sich in der Natur entwickelte. Darin
liegt der Unterschied der sich in ihrer Kunst äußert.’ Verworn, Ideoplastische Kunst,
72–73.
50 ‘Naive […] Physioplastik’. Verworn, Ideoplastische Kunst, 41, emphasis in original.
51 See Verworn, Naturwissenschaft und Weltanschauung, 26–28; Die Mechanik des
Geisteslebens, 10.
52 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 67. ‘Freiheit des Ideenvermögens’
mind problem as in Verworn but the first step to overcoming the division
on which he ref lects as a philosophical physician.53
IV
Reviewing the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetic of the

innocent eye attendant on Schiller’s dichotomous classification (naïve
vs. sentimental), dif ferent accentuations can be pointed out. Within the
comprehension of innocence, Ruskin and Verworn deal with two dif ferent
modes of the naïve. Ruskin’s innocence of the eye is focused on the natural
mode of seeing as treated in the eighteenth-century sensualistic aesthetic.
He develops Schiller’s opposition of sentimental ref lection, which aims at
the naïve under modern conditions (represented idea in nature), and the
naïve natural sentiment of nature towards the opposition of concept and
visibility. To put it in Schiller’s terms: ‘form impulse’ and ‘sense impulse’
are not synthesized within the ‘play impulse’54 but opposed. This is the
opposition af fecting the postmodernist update of Schiller’s On the Sublime.
As Klaus Poenicke has shown, referring to Lyotard on the one hand, the
leading function of the idea in Schiller’s concept of the sublime under-
mines its character of immediate presence and sensual power as outlined
in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful (1757).55 In the connection of sentimental art with the
discourse of the sublime, on the other hand, as per Carsten Zelle,56 a pos-
sibility of linking the problem of presenting and presentability with the
53 See Schiller, ‘Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen
mit seiner geistigen’; Riedel, Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller, 100–142.
54 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 126. ‘Formtrieb’,
‘Sachtrieb’, ‘Spieltrieb’ (‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe
von Briefen’, 609).
55 See Poenicke, ‘Eine Geschichte der Angst?’, 78–79.
56 See Zelle, Die doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne, 179–184.
134 NORMAN KASPER
heuristical potential of the naïve and the sentimental can be seen. Schiller
distinguishes between an ‘absolute representation’ and ‘the representation
of an absolute’.57 The religious and metaphysical adoption of the non-
objective, sensual products of the innocent eye within nineteenth- and
twentieth-century aesthetic discourse can be read as a way of representing
the absolute without absolute representation. Combining the representa-
tion of the absolute with Schiller’s understanding of the sublime, as post-
structuralism has outlined, the sublime is updated in its overwhelming
aesthetics of ef fect.58 For example, Barnett Newman’s striving for imme-
diacy as described in his text The Sublime is Now! (1948) has to be seen in
relation to his assaults on colour’s plastic functionalizing as it is developed
in the same text and in the programmatic The Plasmic Image (1945).59
The overwhelming materiality of colour as an ef fect is here understood
as revelation that has to be protected from the form impulse and – con-
sequently – from ‘an art within a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek
ideal of beauty)’.60 It is obvious that the English picturesque theory as well
as Ruskin’s innocence of the eye can be considered as the prologue to an
immediate non-objective experience of the sublime. And it is also obvious
that such an understanding of colour ef fects marks an important dif ference
when contrasted with (picture) theories concentrating on concept and
knowledge. Leading on to a discourse-free zone, the innocent eye loses its
ethical relevance as outlined in Schiller’s understanding of the sublime and
the beautiful. The gesture of overwhelming is hollowed as soon as it is tied
to a convertible series of ef fects. Schiller’s Kantian division of free beauty
and sensual pleasure is transformed within an opposition that stresses on
57 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 64. ‘absolute Darstellung’,

‘Darstellung eines Absoluten’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 772).
58 See Zelle, ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 468–469.
59 Newman confronts not only artists but also art critics and aestheticians with an
inappropriate plastic-based treatment of painting: ‘The plastic attitude has been the
dominant postulate of modern art […] This attitude, based on the scientific approach,
treats pictures and sculptures as if they were objects’. Newman, ‘The Plasmic Image’,
151.
60 Newman, ‘The sublime is now!’, 173.
the one hand a quasi-religious, transcendental experience of art and – on

the other – its profanation in a hedonistic sensualism completed in modern
advertising, lifestyle design and glistening shopping mall aesthetics.61 The
freedom of appearance loses its aesthetic and moral dignity. The aisthetic
mode of perception is no longer connected with its elevating sanctioning,
as Wolfgang Welsch has emphasized.62
Another possibility for dealing with Schiller’s naïve has been out-
lined by Max Verworn. He uses the term as heuristic method of art clas-
sification. Like Schiller, Verworn accentuates the naïve in a historical as
well as a systematic perspective. And like Schiller, man’s and mankind’s
developmental psychology are seen together. Comparing children’s art
with the history of the development of art, Schiller’s alliance of innocent
childish and child-like behaviour and the innocence of the unref lecting
naturalness of ancient poets is renewed. Verworn talks of the naïve physi-
oplastic that is more concerned with Schiller’s plastic-dominated ‘sensual
truth’ than with the innocent eye to which Ruskin and Knight referred.
The critique of the concept’s inf luence on seeing participates in the naïve
as a ‘living present’63 waiving knowledge and ref lection. Agreeing with
Schiller’s reservation on education Verworn aims at a scientific foundation
of prehistoric art history. Consolidating his understanding of Palaeolithic
and pre-Palaeolithic art in Haeckel’s biogenetic law he is not in danger of
presenting speculative presumptions.
Between its overwhelming delights and scientific functionalizing,
the naïve is accentuated in dif ferent ways. Although they do not explic-
itly make references to Schiller, Ruskin and Verworn can be understood
better through reference to a concept that stands at the beginning of an
aesthetic of modernity.
61 See Imorde, 25–26. See also Welsch, ‘Ästhetisierungsprozesse – Phänomene,

Unterscheidungen, Perspektiven’, 10–14.
62 See Carroll, 25–26.
63 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 40. ‘lebendige Gegenwart’
136 NORMAN KASPER
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Marie-Christin Wilm
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom

as the Foundation of Their Concepts of Play
Homo Ludens
For, to mince matters no longer, man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the
word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.1
By identifying man as a being whose essence is play and by identifying

man at play as the only true, complete human being, Schiller underscores
an anthropological idea that sees the defining characteristic of humanity
neither in reason nor in accomplishments but in play. This quote from
Schiller’s 1795 work On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Briefe über die
Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen) suggests that Schiller conceptualizes
man neither as homo sapiens nor as homo faber,2 but as homo Ludens.
1 Schiller, AE 15, 107. ‘Denn, um es endlich auf einmal herauszusagen, der Mensch spielt
nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch,
wo er spielt’ (Schiller ÄE 15, 359). Quotes from Schiller’s Ästhetische Erziehung are
referenced with the abbreviations AE (English) and ÄE (German) and the respec-
tive letter and page numbers.
2 Whereas the term Homo sapiens was introduced by Linnaeus in 1760 as a species
designation for man (see Ritter 1178), the term Homo faber came into use only in
the 20th century, particularly through its application by Bergson and (critically) by
Scheler. Knowledgeable man, according to Bergson, arises from Homo faber’s ref lec-
tion on that which he has manufactured (see Ritter, Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 1174).
Scheler criticises the hierarchy inherent to this approach, which places knowledge of
authority and achievement above the educational and redemptive knowledge that
distinguishes man when one thinks of him as defined by reason and God (ibid.).
140 Marie-Christin Wilm
Whether such a species designation does justice to Schiller’s anthropology,

however, remains to be considered.
The term Homo Ludens, in any case, does not derive from Schiller
but is of far more recent provenance and lies at the centre of the theory of
play propounded by the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga, who in 1938
published his Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture.3
Huizinga’s prominent thesis is ‘that civilization arises and unfolds in and
as play.’ The central question that concerns him in Homo Ludens is not ‘the
place of play among all the other manifestations of culture’ but ‘how far
culture itself bears the character of play’ (Homo Ludens, ix).
Following the 1919 book The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Homo Ludens
is Huizinga’s second masterstroke: his much-discussed study of a theory of
play was not only to inspire cultural anthropology, ethnology and religious
studies in the decades following its publication, but also became a point of
departure for contemporary research on ritual performance in the fields of
cultural theory and the theory of art.4 The novelty of Huizinga’s approach
lies first of all in his severing of the concept of play from every kind of
instrumentally rational argumentation, a move that was to shape the early
twentieth-century discussion of the essence and meaning of play:
By some the origin and fundamentals of play have been described as a discharge of
superabundant vital energy, by others as the satisfaction of some ‘imitative instinct’,
or again simply a ‘need’ for relaxation. According to another theory play constitutes
a training of the young creature for the serious work that life will demand later.
According to another it serves as an exercise in restraint needful to the individual.
Some find the principle of play in an innate urge to exercise a certain faculty, or in
the desire to dominate or compete. Yet others regard it as an ‘abreaction’ – an outlet
for harmful impulses, as the necessary restorer of energy wasted by one-sided activ-
ity, as ‘wish-fulfilment’, as a fiction designed to keep up the feeling of personal value.
(Homo Ludens, 2)
3 Huizinga had previously investigated the fundamental meaning of play for human
culture in three lectures, which were published in Dutch, German and English
between 1933 and 1937 and which in nuce contain the core theses of the later book.
Due space constraints, the text can not be quoted in the original Dutch version.
4 For the reception of Huizinga’s play theory see Bührmann, ‘Das “Spiel der Natur
völker”’, 135–156.
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom 141
I cannot here pursue the multitude of theories of play upon which this
quote touches,5 but let us take as exemplary Freud’s interpretation of play
as ‘conservation of ef fort’, which he develops in his 1908 lecture Creative
Writers and Daydreaming: through play children and writers alike try to
keep away ‘from the joyless demands of reality’; both children and writers
transfer the things burdening them in reality into a new order favourable
to them. Thus the opposite of play, according to Freud, is not seriousness
but reality.6 Huizinga’s justification of his critique becomes apparent here:
like all the others whose approaches he has outlined, Freud too assumes
that ‘play must serve something which is not play, that it must have some
kind of biological purpose.’ Instead of taking on the phenomenon of play
directly with the ‘quantitative methods of experimental science,’ Huizinga
aims his attention first at ‘its profoundly aesthetic quality’ (Homo Ludens,
2). In this I wish to follow his lead, and do so in regards to the three terms
‘beauty’, ‘play’, and ‘freedom’, as these lie at the centre not only of Huizinga’s
concept of play but also of Schiller’s.
Concepts of Play as Aesthetic Constructions of Freedom
This article will neither neglect nor overemphasize the fact that, notwith-
standing the all-too-familiar scholarly cliché that Huizinga’s concept of
play would be unthinkable without Schiller,7 the two authors’ concepts
of play are fundamentally divergent. It is true that Schiller and Huizinga
speak of dif ferent things when they say ‘play’; at the same time, however,
both thinkers work with a highly significant set of terms to describe that
5 A comprehensive survey on the meanings of the term and the conceptional variety
of conceptions of play is provided in Wetzel, ‘Spiel’, 577–618.
6 See for these (as opposed to other) Freudian interpretations of play, Wetzel, ‘Spiel’,
597–598.
7 See Zelle, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 438.
which they call ‘play’ – and both use exactly the same three terms. I shall
demonstrate that in both Huizinga’s and Schiller’s approaches ‘play’ is
closely connected with the concepts of beauty and freedom. The following
will investigate both the comparable structure and the divergent deploy-
ment of this three-term constellation.
The Evidence of Freedom in Play: Huizinga
Although Huizinga is unwavering in his assumption that not only all human
beings but also animals engage in play, he directs his attention to the ‘func-
tion of culture proper’ that is expressed ‘not as it appears in the life of the
animal or the child, we begin where biology and psychology leave of f ’
(Homo Ludens, 2), as it is only in terms of culture that one can speak of
a concept of play that does not have to be conceived biologically or psy-
chologically. How does Huizinga approach the concept of play that he, as
previously mentioned, does not understand as an expression of culture but
through which he, rather conversely, seeks to demonstrate that ‘myth and
ritual,’ ‘law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom
and science … are rooted in the primeval soil of play’ (Homo Ludens, 13)?
Huizinga first establishes that play is an independent, autonomous
form, lying beyond the dichotomies of ‘wisdom and folly,’ ‘truth and false-
hood’ and ‘good and evil.’ Although play is thus a ‘non-material activity’
(Homo Ludens, 6), it fulfils neither an epistemic nor a logical nor a moral
function. Huizinga sees the proximity of play to the aesthetic, however, as
indisputable: ‘Many and close are the links that connect play with beauty’
(Homo Ludens, 7). He identifies these links as freedom, indif ference, and
governance by rules, as his enumeration of the formal ‘main characteristics
of play’ reveals: ‘First and foremost, then, all play is a voluntary activity’
(Homo Ludens, 7). Play is not imposed through physical necessity, nor
through moral obligation, but rather human play sets itself apart from
other natural processes through its character of freedom: ‘Here, then, we
have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom’
(Homo Ludens, 16).
The assumption that play and man at play are free is at the same time
the sine qua non of Huizinga’s theory of play. Before man can become con-
scious of duties and cultural rituals, which can be potentially life-threatening
in nature, for example the feudalization process in the waning days of the
ancient Chinese seasonal festivities, he experiences, individually or col-
lectively, his own freedom in play.8
According to Huizinga, this freedom is grounded in the ‘inf lux of
mind’ that ‘breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos’ (Homo
Ludens, 12). In contrast to the ‘point of view of a world wholly determined
by the operation of blind forces’ (Homo Ludens, 3), from which scholars
interpreted human beings, the state, the economy and, of course, nature
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mind is capable,
according to Huizinga, of leading humanity out of its predictable deter-
minedness: ‘The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-
logical nature of the human situation […]. We play and know what we play,
so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.’9
In the third section I shall return to this stipulation by Huizinga. For now
it is to be noted that Huizinga’s concept of mind stands for an intangible
human power, which is independent of reason, and which ensures that
the human being at play neither acts upon nor is inf luenced by ‘physical
necessity’ or ‘moral duty’ (Homo Ludens, 3).
Tellingly, in Homo Ludens Huizinga does not ground his claim of the
freedom of man at play anthropologically. He positions his definition of
freedom in opposition to the then-current discourse of play, which in its
structurally rational interpretation of play focuses not on human freedom
but on determination. On the other hand, a glance at Huizinga’s oeuvre
reveals that his own postulate of freedom is grounded in his humanistic
8 See Homo Ludens, 54.

9 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 3. I have here left out Huizinga’s inclusion of animals as play-
ing beings. The fact that they are able to play shows that they are more than ‘mechani-
cal things’ (Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 4). The extent to which man nonetheless holds
a special position in play theory as homo Ludens remains to be examined.
idea of man, which surfaces within his theory of play.10 Huizinga himself
ref lects upon the problems concealed in, or rather revealed by, this part
of his theory of play when he demands that ‘obviously, freedom must
be understood here in the wider sense that leaves untouched the philo-
sophical problem of determinism.’11 Huizinga shifts the burden of proof:
human play is not made possible by a freedom that must first be proved,
but rather the reverse is true: the games existing worldwide both currently
and throughout history of fer evidence of human freedom.
This notion of man at play acting freely is closely connected to the
second characteristic of Huizinga’s concept of play: ‘play is not ‘ordinary’
or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere
of activity with a disposition all of its own’ (Homo Ludens, 8). The activity
of man at play is distinguished by standing ‘outside the immediate satis-
faction of wants and appetites, indeed it interrupts the appetitive process.’
According to Huizinga, one can thus speak of the ‘disinterestedness’ of play
(Homo Ludens, 9). Play as an end in itself corresponds to a voluntary human
activity that is played neither to further particular abilities or advantages
nor in reaction to feelings of longing or fear.
Huizinga identifies as the third characteristic of play ‘its secludedness,
its limitedness’ (Homo Ludens, 9) and the attendant repeatability and
rule-governedness. Playgrounds, whether arena, gaming table or cinema,
become ‘temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the
performance of an act apart’ (Homo Ludens, 10). The order of play thus
brings ‘a temporary, limited perfection’ into ‘an imperfect world and into
the confusion of life’ and this ‘profound af finity between play and order
is perhaps the reason why play … seems to lie to such a large extent in the
field of aesthetics’ (Homo Ludens, 10).
10 I do not know of any close examination of Huizinga’s theory of freedom; comments

on the idealistically and religiously inf lected basis of Huizinga’s ref lections can be
found (unfortunately not in systematic form) in Weber, Geschichtsauf fassung und
Weltanschauung Johan Huizingas.
11 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 7. On Huizinga’s estimation of the (relatively low) ef ficacy
of human decisions alongside his rejection of absolute determinism see the second
chapter of his 1935 work of cultural criticism, In the Shadow of Tomorrow.
Huizinga’s characterisation equates play with the concept of beauty

in terms of form and ef fect:
It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form,
which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of
play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the
ef fects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc.
Play casts a spell over us; it is ‘enchanting’, ‘captivating.’ (Homo Ludens, 10)
Play is here seen as analogous to beauty in two senses. First, there is a level,
as it were, of the aesthetics of production, at which play and beauty are
described as products of the creation of a limited and complete order,
set in opposition to the unlimited and incomplete nature of reality. It is
no coincidence that the above description of the ‘play-ground’ as its own
temporary world, ‘dedicated to the performance of an act apart’ (Homo
Ludens, 10), is reminiscent of the central definition of tragedy in Aristotle’s
Poetics. The Poetics presents tragedy as the emulation of a full and completed
act, whereby ‘full’ designates that which has a beginning, a middle and an
end.12 The decisive dif ference between Aristotle and Huizinga is, however,
that the latter views the creation of order not as mimesis of a real or meta-
physically existing order outside of art or play, but rather as a product that
is explicitly artificially created, and which constitutes an opposite to the
disorder of reality. The classic formula of the final verse in the prologue to
Schiller’s 1798 work Wallenstein also underscores the fundamental separa-
tion between life and art: ‘life is serious, art is light-hearted.’
At the same time, Schiller’s concept of light-heartedness expresses the
second central aspect of Huizinga’s analogy between beauty and play, as
Huizinga also appraises beauty and play as analogue phenomena in terms
of aesthetics of reception: both beauty and play bring tension and relaxa-
tion to human life in equal measure (‘tension’, ‘resolution’); both provide
variety (‘contrast’, ‘variation’) and equilibrium (‘poise’, ‘balance’). (Homo
12 Compare the beginning of the seventh chapter of Poetics as well as Arbogast Schmitt’s
insightful commentary in Flashar, Aristoteles, Werke in deutscher Übersetzung,
361–364.
Ludens, 10) According to Huizinga, these ef fects can be explained formally:

play, like beauty, ‘is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of
perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony’ (Homo Ludens, 10).
The ‘voluntary activity’ of man at play and this play’s interruption of
the process of ‘the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites’ appear
to result both from the formal aesthetics of production and the aesthetics
of ef fect that characterize play (Homo Ludens, 10).
This characterization of play as something that liberates the player from
duties and desires and thus gives rise to freedom, in fact the entire situat-
ing of this phenomenon as a part of the trio of beauty, play and freedom
shows a structural similarity to Schiller’s concept of play so astonishing that
it is worth pursuing even though Huizinga then takes Homo Ludens in a
direction that sharply diverges from Schiller.13 From the second chapter
onward, Huizinga describes the diversity and variety of the phenomenon
of ‘play’ as well as its fundamental significance as the basis and essence of
human culture, singling out examples from various realms of life. Schiller,
on the other hand, strikes a transcendental-anthropological path in order to
use the play-drive (Spieltrieb) to explain why ‘it is only through Beauty that
man makes his way to Freedom.’14 However, before we ask in how far the
reception of Schiller can be discussed in the light of Huizinga’s approach, I
would like to touch brief ly on some aspects of Schiller’s concept of play.
Play as the Basis of Freedom: Schiller
Schiller’s Aesthetic Education is imbued with Kant’s conviction that

the desire for beauty results from the free interplay of imagination and
reason. Schiller elevates this moment of interplay to the level of crucial
13 See for example the chapter headings Play and Law (IV), Play and War (V), Play
and Knowing (VI), Play and Poetry (VII).
14 Schiller, AE, 2, 9: ‘weil es die Schönheit ist, durch welche man zu der Freyheit
wandert.’
anthropological experience: where reason does not form concepts but rather
is in constant interplay with the imagination, man experiences himself not
in his physical needs or as a rational being but rather as a being that is free
and, in this freedom, unlimitedly determinable.15
The concept of freedom thus stands at the heart of Schiller’s theory of
play and is at the same time made more specific: the freedom of the aesthetic
state, which is addressed in regard to the play of the powers of the psyche,
is fundamentally dif ferent from the freedom that reason is able to lend to
man when he raises himself above his sorrows, his body and his feelings.
Reality, according to Schiller, demands not a model of reconciliation but
rather a model of self-discipline; the theory of the sublime corresponds
on the aesthetic side to this self-discipline.16
When, however, Schiller uses the concept of the play-drive in order
to think through and formulate a commonality between the formal drive
(Formtrieb) and the material drive (Stof ftrieb), he postulates a freedom
that is based on the ‘mixed nature’17 of humanity. In the fifteenth letter of
his Aesthetic Education, Schiller describes what happens when the formal
and material drives are simultaneously active:
The material drive, like the formal drive, is wholly earnest in its demands; for, in the
sphere of knowledge, the former is concerned with the reality, the latter with the
necessity of things; while in the sphere of action, the first is directed towards the
preservation of life, the second towards the maintenance of dignity: both, therefore,
towards truth and towards perfection. But life becomes of less consequence once
human dignity enters in, and duty ceases to be a constraint once inclination exerts
its pull; similarly our psyche accepts the reality of things, or material truth, with
greater freedom or serenity once this latter encounters formal truth, or the law of
necessity, and no longer feels constrained by abstraction once this can be accom-
panied by the immediacy of intuition. In a word: by entering in association with
ideas all reality loses its earnestness because it then becomes of small account; and
15 On the current state of research und for further literature see Zelle, Über die ästhetische
Erziehung, 424–437.
16 See Schiller, Über das Erhabene (On the Sublime), whose conception, with the aim
of educating (Erziehung zum Idealschönen), is clearly a part of the context of the
16th letter of Aesthetic Education.
17 Schiller, AE, 19, 373: ‘gemischte Natur’.
by coinciding with feeling necessity divests itself of its earnestness because it then
becomes of light weight.18
When the formal and material drives appear simultaneously, they are trans-
formed, according to Schiller, into a third drive, the ‘play-drive’ (Spieltrieb),
which is, however, to be understood not as a real third drive but simply
as the interaction, I am tempted to say the interplay, of the material and
formal drives.19
To counter the possible objection that beauty is here conceived as
‘mere play,’20 Schiller presents the formulation of his anthropology of a
mixed human nature that culminates in the initially cited postulation of
man as Homo Ludens:
But how can we speak of mere play, when we know that it is precisely play and play
alone, which of all man’s states and conditions is the one which makes him whole
and unfolds both sides of his nature at once? What you, according to your idea of
the matter, call limitation, I, according to mine – which I have justified by truth –
call expansion. I, therefore, would prefer to put it exactly the opposite way round
18 Schiller, AE, 15, 105. ‘Dem Stof ftrieb wie dem Formtrieb ist es mit ihren Forderungen
ernst, weil der eine sich, beym Erkennen, auf die Wirklichkeit, der andre auf die
Nothwendigkeit der Dinge bezieht; weil, beym Handeln, der erste auf Erhaltung
des Lebens, der zweyte auf Bewahrung der Würde, beyde also auf Wahrheit und
Vollkommenheit gerichtet sind. Aber das Leben wird gleichgültiger, so wie die Würde
sich einmischt, und die Pf licht nöthigt nicht mehr, sobald die Neigung zieht: eben so
nimmt das Gemüth die Wirklichkeit der Dinge, die materiale Wahrheit, freyer und
ruhiger auf, sobald solche der formalen Wahrheit, dem Gesetz der Nothwendigkeit,
begegnet, und fühlt sich durch Abstraktion nicht mehr angespannt, sobald die
unmittelbare Anschauung sie begleiten kann. Mit einem Wort: indem es mit Ideen
in Gemeinschaft kommt, verliert alles Wirkliche seinen Ernst, weil es klein wird, und
indem es mit der Empfindung zusammen trif ft, legt das Nothwendige den seinen
(Ernst) ab, weil es leicht wird.’
19 On the concept of play in Schiller’s ÄE see Nethersole, ‘… die Triebe zu leben, zu
schaf fen, zu spielen’, 167–188.
20 Schiller, AE, 15, 105: ‘bloßes Spiel.’
and say: the agreeable, the good, the perfect, with these man is merely in earnest;
but with beauty he plays.21
For Schiller, for Huizinga 150 years later, play thus stands for a temporally
and spatially limited, purposeless, that is, autonomous sphere in which
bodily and moral-logical determination of the individual human life are
nullified. Beauty, play and freedom are related to each other in Aesthetic
Education, just as they are in Homo Ludens, albeit in an inverse relation:
whereas for Huizinga the global existence of innumerable games indicates
that freedom is a form of being human beyond determination, for Schiller
the play of the powers of the psyche is the only basis of freedom amidst
the forms of determination to which we are always physically and mor-
ally subordinate. In Schiller’s anthropology, the aesthetic state fulfils an
indispensable function not only in the reception of art but also in enabling
rational action:
Man cannot pass directly from feeling to thought; he must first take one step back-
wards, since only through one determination being annulled again can a contrary
determination take its place. In order to exchange passivity for autonomy, a passive
determination for an active one, man must therefore be momentarily free of all deter-
mination whatsoever, and pass through a state of pure determinability.22
21 Schiller, AE, 15, 105. ‘Aber was heißt denn ein bloßes Spiel, nachdem wir wissen,
dass unter allen Zuständen des Menschen gerade das Spiel und nur das Spiel es ist,
was ihn vollständig macht, und seine doppelte Natur auf einmal entfaltet. Was Sie
(die Bedenkenträger) nach Ihrer Vorstellung der Sache, Einschränkung nennen, das
nenne ich, nach der meinen, die ich durch Beweise gerechtfertigt habe, Erweiterung.
Ich würde also vielmehr umgekehrt sagen: mit dem Angenehmen, mit dem Guten,
mit dem Vollkommenen ist es dem Menschen nur ernst, aber mit der Schönheit
spielt er.’
22 Schiller, AE, 20, 139. ‘Der Mensch kann nicht unmittelbar vom Empfinden
zum Denken übergehen; er muß einen Schritt zurückthun, weil nur, indem eine
Determination wieder aufgehoben wird, die entgegengesetzte eintreten kann. Er
muß also, um Leiden mit Selbstthätigkeit, um eine passive Bestimmung mit einer
aktiven zu vertauschen, augenblicklich von aller Bestimmung frey seyn, und einen
Zustand der bloßen Bestimmbarkeit durchlaufen.’
The state of ‘unlimited determinability,’23 which Schiller here conceives as

the play of the powers of the psyche in an aesthetic state, distinguishes itself,
unlike in the case of Huizinga, in that it need not be thought of as beyond
human determination, which remains ultimately unsatisfying within the
‘Commercium-Debatte’,24 but rather as a state in which physical and mental
determination act simultaneously and thus cancel each other out:
Our psyche passes, then, from sensation to thought via a middle disposition in
which sense and reason are both active at the same time. Precisely for this reason,
however, they cancel each other out as determining forces, and bring about a nega-
tion by means of an opposition. This middle disposition, in which the psyche is
subject neither to moral nor to physical constraint, and yet is active in both these
ways, pre-eminently deserves to be called a free disposition; and if we are to call the
condition of sensuous determination the physical, and the condition of rational
determination the logical or moral, then we must call this condition of real and
active determinability the aesthetic.25
This definition of freedom as mutually negating determination also makes

clear why Schiller’s play-drive does not, as one often reads, have to do with
the assumption of a third drive, but rather solely with a heuristic construc-
tion. With this construction Schiller is able to reveal the simultaneous
ef fects of the formal and material drives: the experience of freedom amidst
physical and logical determination.
23 ‘unbegrenzte Bestimmbarkeit’.
24 Within the debate on the question of how the connection between body and mind
is to be thought of, Huizinga’s placement of freedom beyond ‘the philosophical
problem of determinism’ (Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 7) remains unsatisfactory as he
thereby avoids the logical possibility of simultaneity of freedom and necessity, which
was formulated exemplarily in Kant’s resolution to the third antinomy and had stood
at the center of anthropological discourse since the late eighteenth century.
25 Schiller, AE, 20, 141. ‘Das Gemüth geht also von der Empfindung zum Gedanken
durch eine mittlere Stimmung über, in welcher Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft zugleich
thätig sind, eben deswegen aber ihre bestimmende Gewalt gegenseitig aufheben, und
durch eine Entgegensetzung eine Negation bewirken. Diese mittlere Stimmung, in
welcher das Gemüth weder physisch noch moralisch genöthigt, und doch auf beyde
Art thätig ist, verdient vorzugsweise eine freye Stimmung zu heißen.’
Preliminary Conclusions
Both Huizinga and Schiller use the concept of play within a triad: beauty,
play and freedom are closely connected in both concepts of play. In terms
of the aesthetics of production, the form that is made possible by the expe-
rience of order and harmony (seen in contrast to the chaos of life)26 leads
in terms of aesthetics of ef fect to a state of disinterest and activity27 and
of ‘lofty equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with power and
vigour.’28 Both authors characterize this state as the experience of freedom:
Huizinga names it play, as man acting in this state is released from all pur-
poseful action, while Schiller speaks of an aesthetic state in which the powers
of man’s psyche are directed neither to the acquisition of knowledge nor
to his livelihood but rather to play as an end in itself.
Along with these structural similarities there is a fundamental dif fer-
ence in the theory of freedom underlying the two concepts of play: to
provide a basis for the aesthetic state as a state of freedom, Schiller uses the
figure – taken from mechanics – of opposites cancelling each other out: a
balance is in equilibrium when both scales carry equal weight. Applied to
the determination of human beings, which can under no circumstances
be dismissed, this means that man experiences himself as free when one
form of determination is set in opposition to the other in such a way that
the two cancel each other out.29
26 With the exception of the twenty-second letter, in which he speaks of the nature of
the art work, of its ‘aesthetic organisation’ and the ‘harmony of the whole’ (AE, 22,
157), Schiller’s remarks on the aesthetics of production in the Aesthetic Education
remain few and far between. Of course, there are also numerous comments, for
instance, in his correspondence with Goethe, that resonate with Huizinga’s thesis
on the aesthetics of production, which sees play, like beauty, as distinguished by
‘rhythm and harmony’ (Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10).
27 Compare Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 16.
28 Schiller, AE, 22, 153. ‘Gleichmüthigkeit und Freyheit des Geistes, mit Kraft und
Rüstigkeit verbunden.’
29 Compare Schiller, AE, 20.
Huizinga, in contrast, foregoes such a physical proof of human freedom

and limits himself to demonstrating the evidence of freedom in the world’s
games. Why? Why does Huizinga, although he too works with the triad of
beauty, play and freedom and knows Schiller’s treatise,30 forego a positive
link to Schiller’s freedom-theoretical concept of play or of the play-drive,
which would of fer an argumentative basis for his own positioning of play as
freedom?31 Why does he, on the contrary, and despite having such similar
aims, deal explicitly with Schiller’s Aesthetic Education only at one point
and then highly critically?
Huizinga’s Criticism of Schiller’s Theory of Play
Huizinga’s critique of Schiller’s understanding of play operates on two

dif ferent levels: firstly, the direct engagement that is tellingly aimed only at
the concept play-drive; secondly, a broader and indirect argument against
the eighteenth century, the era of Enlightenment, and certain tendencies
of his own era. It should not be forgotten that Huizinga wrote his book
about the freedom of play as true human culture during 1938, in imminent
expectation of a second major European war and in the shadow of the
global financial crisis of the 1920s.32
Let us begin, however, with the explicit critique of Schiller’s Aesthetic
Education: in discussing the sacral quality of art, Huizinga turns, as if inci-
dentally, to the concept of the play-drive: ‘A theory designed to explain the
30 Compare Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 168. Considering the subject matter, it would
have to be assumed that the eminently erudite Huizinga would also engage with the
Aesthetic Education, even if there were no mention of Schiller’s treatise.
31 Compare Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 16.
32 Schiller too wrote his Aesthetic Education in politically dif ficult times, against the
backdrop of the terror of the French Revolution, to whose inhuman realisation of the
noble ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity Schiller proposes an aesthetic and humane
freedom.
origin of plastic art in terms of an innate “play-instinct” (Spieltrieb) was

propounded long ago by Schiller’ (Homo Ludens, 168). In the related foot-
note Huizinga refers emphatically and exclusively to the fourteenth letter
in Aesthetic Education, which is particularly astonishing because, although
Schiller speaks of the interaction of material drive and formal drive as well
as the possibility of experiencing human freedom in the play-drive, he does
not address the reception or production of art here.
When Huizinga ultimately emphasizes that it would be preposterous
to ‘ascribe the cave-paintings of Altamira, for instance, to mere doodling
– which is what it amounts to if they are ascribed to the “play-instinct”’
(Homo Ludens, 168), then it definitely is not Schiller committing this pre-
posterous act, as he certainly does not speak of any innate ‘play-instinct.’
We have seen that his use of the concept is solely heuristic, which in the
thirteenth letter, before the first appearance of the expression play-drive,
has already been pointed out clearly: the material and formal drives are
here defined as the ‘two drives which, between them, exhaust our concept
of humanity, and make a third fundamental drive which might possibly
reconcile the two a completely unthinkable concept.’33
But why does Huizinga deploy Schiller’s expression so falsely? It can
hardly be a simple misunderstanding, as Schiller does not speak of the
artist or the production of art in the passage cited. Huizinga’s concluding
sentence of the cited excerpt, however, of fers us a clue: ‘Though the pri-
mary importance of play as a cultural factor is the main thesis of this book,
we still maintain that the origin of art is not explained by a reference to a
“play-instinct”, however innate’ (Homo Ludens, 128). Given that Huizinga
understands his own approach as innovative precisely because he doesn’t
enquire into the wherefore of play but rather seeks to characterize, indeed
to secure, its autonomy as the free space of humanity, it becomes clear why
he must reject the concept of an ‘innate play-instinct’ (Homo Ludens, 168).
Were this concept to exist, it would threaten precisely that which Huizinga
33 Schiller, AE, 13, 85. ‘Die beyden Triebe, die die den Begrif f der Menschheit erschöp-
fen, und ein dritter Grundtrieb, der beyde vermitteln könnte, ist schlechterdings ein
undenkbarer Begrif f.’
seeks to prove in his book through a slew of individual observations: the

existence of human freedom, which appears only where ‘play marks itself
of f from the course of the natural process’ (Homo Ludens, 7).
Schiller’s use of the term ‘Spieltrieb’ should of course be exempted from
this suspicion, because he starts from the assumption not that the play-
drive is innate but that freedom is an act in the interplay of the material and
formal drives. The question remains: why does Huizinga so blatantly not
engage with Schiller’s grounding of freedom in the balance of two mutu-
ally contradictory forms of determination? This decision by Huizinga can
be seen from two dif ferent perspectives: on the one hand, he appears to
interpret Kant’s as well as Schiller’s discussion of the free play of the powers
of the psyche metaphorically. This is suggested, at least, by the comment in
Homo Ludens that an expression such as ‘to have free play’ indicates that
the concept of play is ‘becoming attenuated’ here; Huizinga adds, however,
that in this context Kantian expressions (such as ‘the play of imagination’,
‘the play of ideas’) also merit our attention, but unfortunately he does not
pursue this topic any further.34 In terms of Huizinga’s critique of Schiller,
this nonetheless makes clear that Huizinga does not conceive the play of
the powers of the psyche explicated in Aesthetic Education as real play that
counts among the games he discusses.
Beyond this evidence of a more or less direct engagement with Schiller,
Huizinga’s general critique of the eighteenth century, in my opinion, also
encompasses an engagement with Schiller, one which treats his own
approach as an alternative to Schiller’s understanding of play and the player.
The opening passage of Homo Ludens is programmatic in this regard:
A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo
Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable
after all as the Eighteenth Century, with its worship of reason and its naive optimism,
thought us; hence modern fashion inclines to designate our species as Homo Faber:
Man the Maker. But though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens it is, as a
name specific of the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many animals
too are makers. There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and
34 See Homo Ludens, 38 and 49.

animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making – namely, playing. It seems
to me that next to Homo Faber, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in
our nomenclature. (Homo Ludens, ix)
That the eighteenth century was marked by a relentless optimism about

enlightenment is a thesis typical of Huizinga’s era, one that we find not only
in his work.35 A critique of reason appears initially to be driving Huizinga
to suggest the term Homo Ludens in place of the species designation Homo
sapiens. And rightly so: throughout the book Huizinga continually points
out that the sphere of play is also the sphere of the irrational, as in the excla-
mation cited above: ‘We play and know that we play, so we must be more
than merely rational beings, for play is irrational’ (Homo Ludens, 4).
The fact that Huizinga, although he suggests the player as the term of
classification for the human species, repeatedly seeks to include animals in
his theory of play (Homo Ludens, 12), shows the extent to which he labours
to undermine not only the instrumental-rational interpretation of play but
also the interpretation of play as an occurrence dictated by reason. Play and
every civilization based on it, as we must read Huizinga’s argument given
the historical context of Homo Ludens, should be protected from all those
useful or logical-sounding explanations that seek to functionalize it for a
particular economic system or ideology.
In order to retain the realm of freedom, Huizinga must insist upon the
irrationality of play, as it is only purposelessness based on irrationality that
of fers protection against appropriation by, for example, Nazi Germany. To
put it dif ferently: Huizinga debunks the culture of the Nazis, with their
sport competitions at the 1936 Olympics, with their art and culture pro-
grammes, such as the Wagner festivals and massive midsummer propaganda
marches (to name only a small fraction of the National Socialist culture
of festivities and celebrations), as non-culture and as lack of freedom,
35 Recall, for instance, the arguments of Adorno/Horkheimer in Dialectic of

Enlightenment, or how long it took the study of German language and literature
to give the merited attention to the Enlightenment’s self-criticism, as expressed in
Sturm und Drang and by Rousseau and Schiller.
because its games are neither useless nor irrational, but rather calculating,
manipulative and authority-af firming.36
To conclude, it is therein that the decisive dif ference between Schiller’s
and Huizinga’s theories of play lies. Although we have seen that Schiller’s
theory demanded autonomy for play and the player, as well as promising
man freedom not as a rational being, but rather as a being of mixed nature,
who simultaneously thinks and feels, his evidence for the experience of free-
dom in the aesthetic state is a logical construct. When the scales are level
the balance is level; man automatically becomes free, as could be deduced
from the twentieth letter of Aesthetic Education, if only ‘sense and reason
are both active at the same time.’37
In view, however, of the mistrust of reason that we have seen Huizinga
to show, this equation cannot work out for him. Huizinga had served in
the First World War and had outlined the rising threat from Germany
very clear-sightedly in his 1935 work In the Shadow of Tomorrow. Given
the state of the world in the 1930s, he is mistrustful of the central role that
reason plays in the freedom-theoretical foundation of the concept of play
and thus also in Schiller’s aesthetics, however much he acknowledges and
describes the ‘play-forms in art’ (Homo Ludens, 173–174).
It is nonetheless clear that Huizinga limits himself to proclaiming
freedom for the sphere of actual games, as ‘none of these conditions entitles
us to speak of a play-element in contemporary art’ (Homo Ludens, 197).
In ‘contemporary civilization’ (Homo Ludens, 195) art has proven itself to
be not a place of aesthetic freedom but rather is
more susceptible to the deleterious inf luences of modern techniques of production

than is science. Mechanization, advertising, sensation-mongering have a much greater
hold upon art because as a rule it works directly for a market and has a free choice
of all the techniques available. (Homo Ludens, 202)
36 See also Huizinga’s critical analysis of his times in Im Schatten von Morgen (In the
Shadow of Tomorrow) of 1935.
37 Schiller, AE, 20, 375. ‘Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft zugleich thätig sind’.
Genuine play-grounds of the experience of human freedom, on the other

hand, appear to exist only beyond predictability and reason, in a sphere
that borders on the sacred or is at least closely connected to it.38
It is thus consistent that Huizinga explains man as Homo Ludens who
is only able to be free in his play, just as it is consistent that Schiller, despite
his elevation of the aesthetic state as free play of the powers of imagination,
does not, as the opening citation might suggest, make man exclusively into
Homo Ludens, but rather knows the morally rational freedom of Homo
Sapiens alongside the aesthetic freedom of Homo Ludens.39
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Spieltriebkonzeption aus heutiger Sicht’, H-J. Knobloch, ed., Schiller heute
(Tübingen: Staufenburg-Verlag, 1996), 167–188.
Ritter, J. ed. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 3 (Darmstadt: 1974), col.
1178.
Weber, H. R. Geschichtsauf fassung und Weltanschauung Johan Huizingas, PhD thesis,
University of Mainz, Germany, 1953.
Wetzel, T. ‘Spiel’, K. Barck et al., eds, Ästhetische Grundbegrif fe, Vol. 5 (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2003), 577–618.
Zelle, C. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1795),
M. Luserke-Jaqui, ed., Schiller Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2005), 409–445.
RANDALL K. VAN SCHEPEN
Two Hundred Years of Aesthetic Modernism:

Criticism, Abstraction and Revolution in
Schiller and Greenberg
Now that American hotels are decorated with abstract paintings […] and
aesthetic radicalism has shown itself to be socially af fordable, radicalism
itself must pay the price that it is no longer radical.1
Introduction
Separated by two centuries of time and aesthetic discourse, drastic redefi-

nitions of the work of art and a constantly unfolding re-articulation of
the revolutionary hope of aesthetic experience, Friedrich Schiller and the
American critic Clement Greenberg initially seem an unlikely pairing.
What relevance could an eighteenth-century German playwright/philoso-
pher have for a twentieth-century formalist American art critic? Despite
the obvious particular historical forces that determine dif ferences in their
aesthetic theories, there is a remarkable af finity to Schiller and Greenberg’s
critical development. A comparison of themes common to both, such as
their articulations of the binary relationship of form to content and espe-
cially their demonstrations of how aesthetic experience trains the modern
1 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 37. ‘da amerikanische Hotels mit abstrakten Gemälden […]
ausstaf fiert sind, der ästhetische Radikalismus gesellschaftlich nicht zuviel kostet, hat
er zu zahlen: er ist gar nicht mehr radikal’ (Ästhetische Theorie, 51).
160 RANDALL K. VAN SCHEPEN
subject to live more freely, will help illustrate the critical congruity of
Schiller and Greenberg.
The present study attempts to draw out these striking parallels in
order to investigate the contemporary relevance of the belief that the aes-
thetic contains the seeds of a potential political or social revolution. I will
suggest that Greenberg’s art criticism, as much a late manifestation of
Schillerian as Kantian aesthetics, may point to more than the demise of
his modernist commitments, but might also point forward to yet another
assertion of the transformative power of the aesthetic evident in recent
contemporary art.
The Problem of Greenberg and Formalism
By 1959, Clement Greenberg had given up hope in most of the artistic
production f lowing out of his formerly favored approaches. An imperious
critic of the post-World War II American art scene who was often accused of
being prescriptive, Greenberg reached such a point of critical exasperation
that he could no longer sanction the excesses of the Abstract Expressionist
painters. These artists had collectively wandered into regions that his critical
discourse could not follow, away from abstraction and into figuration and
away from self-imposed discipline into psychological depths; these paint-
ers and their second generation progeny became mired in a painterly mud
and were ‘choked with form, the way all academic art is.’2 As Greenberg
put it, de Kooning was a great painter, but he ‘led a generation […] to their
doom.’3 It was apparent to Greenberg that the only way that form could
carry the avant-garde forward was by further refining significant form
into chromatic Post-Painterly Abstraction. Greenberg’s dilemma thereby
amounted to much more than a shift in aesthetic delectation.
2 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. IV, 180.

3 Greenberg, Homemade Aesthetics, 128.
Two Hundred Years of Aesthetic Modernism 161
It was Greenberg’s second such falling back from revolutionary hope.

The first came in the 1930s when the New York Intellectuals became dis-
illusioned with Marxism after the authoritarian tendencies of the Soviet
system could no longer be explained away. Greenberg’s two earliest essays
for Partisan Review, written at the cusp of this shift, in 1939 and 1940,
nevertheless still contain the germs of a materialist view of history. Both
‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ and ‘Towards a Newer Laöcoon’ still contain
a belief in the connection between modern aesthetic development and
the revolution of society. Shortly after these pieces, however, Greenberg
becomes a working art reviewer and drops Trotskyite theorizing in favor
of an on-the-beat pragmatism.
After finding progressive aesthetic hope in the products of European
modernism and of the Abstract Expressionists throughout the 1940s and
early 1950s, Greenberg was profoundly disappointed that their vitality was
so short-lived. Greenberg systematizes his criticism to the point of codifying
it as an increasingly fossilized formalism over a decade or so in the 1950s. He
shifted his artistic allegiance from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field
Painting, adjusted his aesthetic theory to become more clearly Kantian,
and advanced Impressionism instead of Cubism as the most relevant art
historical lineage for modernist contemporary art. Such drastic changes
in critical allegiance made a more sophisticated philosophical justification
necessary, one that grounded Greenberg’s intuitive aesthetic judgment on
firmer critical footings.
There are multiple theories of why Greenberg shifted away from
Trotskyism to Kantian high modernism. By now, the most orthodox cur-
rent interpretations are those that follow the work of David and Cecil
Shapiro, Francis Frascina, Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, and Serge
Guilbaut. According to these mostly political interpretations, Greenberg
betrayed his early progressive principles, conspired to become a cultural
Cold Warrior, and thereby used his critical voice to assist in establishing
America’s hegemonic control over post-war, global cultural production.
As a reaction to Greenberg’s high-handed attempts to control aesthetic
discourse, such anti-formalist arguments did much to establish a new gen-
eration of critical voices and to advance arguments about the nature of
contemporary art in the 1970s and 1980s that was well beyond the reach
of Greenberg’s limiting terminology. But this necessary chastening of

Greenberg’s critical authority came at the cost of losing sight of the depth
of the intellectual traditions from which his criticism grew. Greenberg’s
extensive critical writings and theories had a conceptual drive of their own
that led to certain tendencies or conclusions. One could even suggest that
his criticism evinces a later day version of similar tensions at work in the
eighteenth-century philosophical tradition from which he draws.
Brief ly extracting oneself from the binary critical discourse that cur-
rently characterizes analyses of Greenberg’s modernist criticism allows
one to trace the remarkable parallels in Greenberg’s intellectual journey
through shifting aesthetic positions with those of figures foundational
to the articulation of the modern aesthetic, such as Kant and especially
Schiller. Greenberg readily claimed a working knowledge of Kant’s ideas;
the inf luence of Schiller, however, is not as explicit. Other than a passing
reference or two to Schiller’s plays, Greenberg only substantively mentions
Schiller once in a recorded conversation. Donald Kuspit, Thierry de Duve
and Mark Cheetham have thoroughly explored Greenberg’s forays into
Kantian theory. But I would suggest that, other than in the significant
issue of aesthetic judgment, which is something central to both Kant’s and
Greenberg’s critical projects, Schiller’s aesthetic theories pose an equally
compelling point of comparison.
In what follows I would like to trace the congruencies between
Greenberg’s criticism and Schiller’s for two reasons: one, to ground
Greenberg’s passionate, if f lawed, criticism in the intellectual heritage he
so obviously draws from; and, two, to raise the possibility that Greenberg’s
formalist weaknesses bear a remarkable similarity to those of eighteenth-
century Germanic philosophers who first dealt with the relation of the
social to the aesthetic. Both Greenberg and Schiller first justify art in terms
of its politically revolutionary potential only to later argue for its purely aes-
thetic justification. Can one account for such a critical similarity because of
the implications of certain foundational concepts? Or is it better explained
by living in comparably disappointing revolutionary times? Whether their
shifting crucial positions resulted from philosophical presuppositions or
from similar socio-political pressures, I think it will be fruitful to compare
Schiller’s and Greenberg’s notions of form and aesthetic experience along
two recurrent critical axes: the idea of freedom (articulated in individual
experience); and the degree to which the aesthetic experience of freedom
makes good on its promise by realizing some revolutionary potential.
The Aesthetic as Experience of Freedom
Schiller’s relationship to Kant is fascinating and somewhat tortured. Never

entirely comfortable distancing himself from the Königsberg master, Schiller
nevertheless departed from a strictly Kantian aesthetic on key points relat-
ing aesthetic experience to politics. These points of dif ference are found
most explicitly in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793–1794) and his
more historically specific articulation of forms of artistic expression in On
Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795–1796). But Schiller’s notion of the
centrality of freedom, while not entirely dif ferent from Kant’s free-play,
nevertheless more powerfully directs our attention to freedom as a goal
that shapes aesthetic purpose. For Schiller, freedom is the primary goal of
aesthetic experience, and man only truly understands freedom by experi-
encing it aesthetically.
Schiller proposed that modern man’s split selfhood could be repaired
to a state that he called ‘unconditional and disinterested appreciation of
pure semblance.’4 Like Kant, Schiller proposes two drives or impulses.
Instead of Understanding, Schiller proposes the ‘form drive’ (Formtrieb)
and instead of Imagination he proposes the ‘sensory drive’ (Stof ftrieb).
When the ‘form’ drive, propelled by our rational selves, is synthesized
with the ‘sensory’ drive, they bring us to a higher plane where the ‘play-
drive’ (Spieltrieb) allows a degree of freedom we are otherwise incapable of
4 ‘uninteressierte freie Schätzung des reinen Scheins’ (Schiller, Letter XXVII, 204–205).
References to Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters will
come from the Wilkinson and Willoughby parallel text translation with using the
letter and page numbers, unless otherwise noted.
producing. Aesthetic experience is the only ‘place’ or ‘state’ in which such

a complete and complementary coincidence of otherwise contradictory
human impulses is possible.
Importantly, Schiller was the first aesthetic theorist to locate a redemp-
tive hope for man in aesthetic semblance rather than in everyday life.
Aesthetic semblance, or beauty, can provide such hope of freedom because
vision is able to explore without external conditions:
In the case of the eye and the ear, she herself has driven importune matter back from
the organs of sense, and the object, with which in the case of our more animal senses
we have direct contact, is set at a distance from us. […] The object of touch is a force
to which we are subjected; the object of eye and ear a form that we engender. […]
Once he does begin to enjoy through the eye, and seeing acquires for him a value of
its own, he is already aesthetically free and the play-drive has started to develop.5
In Schiller’s hierarchy of the senses, vision and hearing are most abstracted
from natural response and are therefore more capable of expressing the
freedom of the subject. Schiller takes the Kantian aesthetic and makes it
self-justifying and autonomous. Even though Schiller’s is an autonomy
with social purpose, it is aesthetic autonomy first.
Greenberg had a consistent interest in Kant that ‘over time’, suggests
John O’Brian, ‘loomed progressively larger in [his] thinking.’6 In 1967,
Greenberg develops one of his most extensive passages drawing on Kantian
notions of aesthetic judgment and the verdict of communal taste. In it, he
suggests that ‘aesthetic judgments are immediate, intuitive, undeliberate,
and involuntary […]’. That qualitative principles or norms are there some-
where, in subliminal operation, is certain; otherwise aesthetic judgments
5 ‘In dem Auge und dem Ohr ist die andringende Materie schon hinweggewälzt von
den Sinnen, und das Objekt entfernt sich von uns, das wir in den tierischen Sinnen
unmittelbar berühren. […] Der Gegenstand des Takts ist eine Gewalt, die wir erleiden;
der Gegenstand des Auges und des Ohrs ist eine Form, die wir erzeugen. […] Sobald
er anfängt, mit dem Auge zu geniessen, und das Sehen fur ihn einen selbständigen
Wert erlangt, so ist er auch schon ästhetisch frei, und der Spieltrieb hat sich entfaltet’
(Schiller, Letter XXVI, 194–195).
6 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. III, xxii.
would be purely subjective, and that they are not is shown by the fact that
the verdict of those who care most about art and pay it the most attention
converge over the course of time to form a consensus.7 While Greenberg
had already used Kant’s aesthetics as the basis for a class he taught at Black
Mountain College in 1950, his explicit references to Kant increase dramati-
cally in the period that he codifies his critical approach, from 1955–70. As
Greenberg says in 1955, Kant gives us ‘the most satisfactory basis for aes-
thetics we have yet’, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.8
If Greenberg fancies himself a Kantian because he too is interested
in judgment and critical consensus, he nevertheless justifies modernist
abstraction on grounds that are more similar to those found in Schiller
than in Kant. Much as Schiller historically situates the dif ference between
naïve and sentimental forms of poetry, Greenberg argues that abstraction
develops as a historical response to particular contemporary subjective
needs rather than out of a categorical necessity. Like Schiller, Greenberg
believes that his audience needs the kind of aesthetic education that great
art provides in order to develop freedom, the freedom that the aesthetic
experience fosters and promises.
The key article indicating Greenberg’s turn to the Kantian tradition
is ‘The Case for Abstract Art’, which appeared in the Saturday Evening
Post in 1959. Greenberg’s choice of this middlebrow publishing venue
is particularly striking considering the fact that in 1939 he wrote ‘Avant-
Garde and Kitsch’, where he derided the popular art of Norman Rockwell’s
Saturday Evening Post covers in his very first line. Remarkably, Greenberg
addresses this magazine’s middle-class American readers by making an
argument for the relevance of abstract art on the basis of Kantian disin-
terestedness. Greenberg suggests that modernist art and especially abstract
art is an antidote to the ‘interested, purposeful activity’ which dominates
the life of the West, especially in the extreme case of America. Experience
in and for itself with no aim or purpose is what Greenberg has in mind
as an antidote to such a practical-mindedness: ‘I think a poor life is lived
7 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. IV, 256–266.

8 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. III, 249.
by anyone who doesn’t regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit
and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind,
simply for the sake of the satisfaction gotten from that which is gazed at,
listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.’9 Here, he suggests that,
historically, ‘traditional’ art (or, representational art) operated as the ‘self-
cure and self-correction’ to the hungers and desires fostered by Western
culture’s means/ends rationality. Arguing for disinterested form in this
essay, Greenberg supposes that, ‘traditional painting is like literature’ in
‘that it tends to involve us in the interested as well as disinterested by pre-
senting us with images of things that are inconceivable outside time and
action.’10 Schiller too believed that the formal quality of art held greater
potential for an experience of freedom in the subject than subject matter.
Schiller argues that, ‘in a truly successful work of art the contents should
ef fect nothing, the form everything; for only through the form is the
whole man af fected.’11 It is in this light that Croce suggests that Schiller
is ‘canceling content by form.’12
In ‘The Case for Abstract Art’, Greenberg argues that Western art
up to Impressionism was largely obsessed with eliminating distance and
detachment by depicting ‘things from which we cannot keep as secure a
distance for the sake of disinterestedness’, whereas works that have ‘abstract
decoration’ avoid engagement in a ‘practical’ way and prevent representa-
tion from shutting ‘out all other [pictorial] factors.’13 Aesthetic theorists
such as Schopenhauer separated responses to illusory representation from
responses to reality. But for both Greenberg and Schiller representation
necessarily taints the purity of aesthetic experience because it reminds us
of the experiences of life itself. Abstraction’s renunciation of subject matter
of fers freedom from the contingencies of personal response. Greenberg

11 ‘In einem wahrhaft schönen Kunstwerk soll der Inhalt nichts, die Form aber alles
tun; denn durch die Form allein wird auf das Ganze des Menschen […] gewirkt’
(Schiller, Letter XXII, 154–155).
12 Croce, Aesthetic, 312.
argues that abstraction challenges ‘our capacity for disinterested contempla-

tion in a way that is more concentrated’ and ‘more conscious than anything
else […] in art.’ It is the ‘arch-example of something that does not have
to mean, or be useful for, anything other than itself.’ The contemplation
demanded by every art is presented by abstract art ‘in quintessential form,
at its purest, least diluted, most immediate.’14
In his rather extreme form of aestheticism, Greenberg is virtually alone
in the history of the development of the notion of the disinterested aes-
thetic – with the exception of Schiller. Schiller too, suggests that ‘subject-
matter, then, however sublime and all-embracing it may be, always has a
limiting ef fect on the spirit, and it is only from form that true aesthetic
freedom can be looked for.’15 Modernist abstract paintings are entirely
made up of the kind of ‘form’ that Schiller mentions as providing ‘true aes-
thetic freedom,’ something that was only evident in traditional paintings
only through careful observation. Modernist aesthetic beauty is thereby
free and not determined by the manner in which a work might represent
a body according to societal norms of beauty – an external condition to
which past representational painting had to conform. In abstract works of
art, ‘true aesthetic freedom’ is released from such culturally conditioned
constraints and becomes more like what Kant calls ‘free,’ as opposed to
‘dependent’ forms of beauty – his most famous example of free beauty
being an abstract arabesque. Kantian ‘free’ beauty is the formal beauty of
purposiveness of form, whereas ‘dependent’ beauty considers how such a
representation relates to a pre-existing conceptual consideration of ends
and purposes.
Greenberg’s point in ‘The Case for Abstract Art’ is that abstract
paintings such as those of Post-Painterly Abstraction ‘pinpoint’ atten-
tion, ‘liberate’ and ‘concentrate’ it. But to what purpose is such pinpointed
attention put? Greenberg suggests that experiencing abstract art develops
14 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. IV, 77, 80, 82.
15 ‘Der Inhalt, wie erhaben und weitumfassend er auch sei, wirkt also jederzeit ein-
schränkend auf den Geist, und nur von der Form ist wahre ästhetische Freiheit zu
erwarten’ (Schiller, Letter XXII, 154–155).
an individual’s sense of autonomy and freedom, a goal that easily fits with
the developing mid-twentieth century liberal American ideology of indi-
vidual freedom, as embodied in Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center of
1949. Earlier, Greenberg and the leftist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s
argued for structural progressive changes in society. At the end of their
careers, both Greenberg and Schiller emphasize how works of art foster
individual transformation through aesthetic experiences of freedom; or,
as Greenberg put it, ‘how valuable so much in life can be made without
being invested with ulterior meanings.’16
A number of critics have identified Schiller as a key figure translating
the categorical Kantian tradition into a readily available critical tool. It
seems to me that the early revolutionary spirit present in both Greenberg
and Schiller lingers on in the manner that they each reformulate Kant for
their particular political moment. Schiller shifts judgment, Kant’s central
harmonizing faculty, and replaces it with the aesthetic experience itself.
Schillerian aesthetic experience is the lived experience of necessity and
freedom and sense and reason mediating each other and being resolved
in a unity of free play. Hegel, summarizing his understanding of Schiller’s
aesthetic, sees it as ‘actualiz[ing] unity and reconciliation in artistic
production.’17 Even if Greenberg explicitly justifies his critical judgments
on Kantian grounds, Schiller’s redemptive aesthetic is also clearly operative
in his mid-twentieth century criticism.
The Political Implications of Schiller’s Aesthetic Experience
Philosophers from Hegel through to the Frankfurt School gravitate toward

Schiller’s belief in the transformative power of the aesthetic experience.
They do so despite the fact that Schiller’s aesthetic is aimed away from the

17 Hegel quoted in Sychrava, Schiller to Derrida, 11.
communal implications of Kantian judgment and toward autonomous

individual experience. Schiller placed the aesthetic centrally in his overall
philosophy in order to suggest the importance of a level of experience
beyond mere material needs in modern culture. The aesthetic replaced the
kind of meaning-making activity formerly of fered by religion.
Kantian philosophy argues that the universality of aesthetic judgment,
which functions as evidence of common values beyond our unique individual
tastes, provides a redemptive antidote to the subject’s experience of moder-
nity. Reaching beyond the Kantian healing of the isolated modern subject,
Schiller’s Aesthetic Education recommends beauty as a corrective to a whole
society split asunder by divisions and specializations: ‘only the aesthetic mode
of communication unites society, because it relates to that which is common
to all.’18 This social corrective cannot be achieved, however, if social revolu-
tion becomes the explicit purpose of art or if such political statements are
presented in a didactic revolutionary subject matter. Transformation only
results from a truly free, undetermined, aesthetic experience.
For Schiller, writes Israel Knox, ‘aesthetic experience is an interval,
a sweet and lucid interlude, a free contemplation; it is a sacred moment
in which man is released from the servitude of the senses and is not yet
determined by reason and duty.’19 The aesthetic is at work ‘unnoticed, on
the building of a […] joyous kingdom of play and of semblance,’ releasing
the subject from circumstance and constraint in both ‘the physical and
the moral sphere.’20 It plays a vital role in reuniting society by giving it a
semblance of its former wholeness because the pleasure of sense and the
pleasure of knowledge are balanced one against the other. Sensual pleasure
is so individual that it cannot be universalized and conceptual pleasure is
18 ‘nur die schöne Mitteilung vereinigt die Gesellschaft, weil sie sich auf das Gemeinsame
aller bezieht’ (Schiller, Letter XXVII, 214–215).
19 Knox, The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, 73.
20 ‘Mitten in dem furchtbaren Reich der Kräfte und mitten in dem heiligen Reich
der Gesetze baut der ästhetische Bildungstrieb unvermerkt an einem dritten, fröh-
lichen Reiche des Spiels und des Scheins, worin er dem Menschen die Fesseln aller
Verhältnisse abnimmt und ihn von allem, was Zwang heisst, sowohl im Physischen
als im Moralischen entbindet’ (Schiller, Letter XXVII, 214–215).
so abstract and objective that it removes our individual response. In con-

trast, with ‘beauty alone do we enjoy at once as individuals and genus, i.e.
as representatives of the human genus.’21 Never before, and perhaps never
since, has the aesthetic played so central a role in harmonizing individuals
and society. Schiller asserts the validity of aesthetic experience – or rather,
its necessity – because of the following ironic situation: the only instru-
ment ‘not provided by the State […] the Fine Arts,’ is the only instrument
capable of transforming it.22 Remarkable in its similarity to Adorno and
Horkheimer’s critique of Enlightenment rationality, Schiller also suggests
that the only area of culture not reified and made part of the rule of the
State, and thereby the only realm capable of its transformation, is the realm
of the aesthetic.
The political implications of Schiller’s aesthetic have been subject to
vastly dif fering interpretations, with many recent analyses taking him to
task for abandoning progressive politics in favour of an autonomous aes-
thetic. At least since Lukács wrote ‘Schiller’s Theory of Modern Literature’
in 1947, Schiller’s aesthetic theory has often been understood as a gradual
retreat from his early revolutionary political passions.23 Accordingly, the
development of Schiller’s aesthetic was one crucial step towards enabling
the construction of the modern liberal subject within ideologically sanc-
tioned operations of cultural power. Critics such as Peter Bürger, Terry
Eagleton and Martha Woodmansee follow the main lines of Lukács’ cri-
tique. They argue that while Schiller initially theorizes a radical political
role for aesthetic experience, by the time he writes the Aesthetic Education
in the 1790s, he justifies a form of aestheticism that privileges aesthetic
autonomy over political principles.24
21 ‘Das Schöne allein geniessen wir als Individuum und Gattung zugleich, d. h. als
Respräsentanten der Gattung’ (Schiller, Letter XXVII, 216–217).
22 ‘Man müßte also zu diesem Zwecke ein Werkzeug aufsuchen, welches der Staat nicht
hergibt […] dieses Werkzeug ist die schöne Kunst’ (Schiller, Letter IX, 54–55).
23 See Lukács, Goethe und seine Zeit, 109.
24 On Schiller’s supposed shift from political engagement to aestheticism, see Bürger,
Zur Kritik der idealistischen Ästhetik, 64; Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic,
109–122; and Woodmansee, The Author, Art and the Market, 57–86.
In 1793, in the wake of the developing disappointments of the French

Revolution, Schiller wrote: ‘The attempt of the French people […] has
plunged, not only that unhappy people itself, but a considerable part of
Europe and a whole century, back into barbarism and slavery.’25 The con-
clusion so painfully drawn by Schiller and others at the time was that
this barbarism demonstrated that, although the French were inspired to
form a rational society, the revolutionaries were in fact constitutionally
ill-equipped to handle such freedom. In the wake of his disillusionment,
Schiller recognized the need for a significant adjustment in the role of
the aesthetic in his philosophy. Schiller consequently suggests that civil
and political freedom should follow rather than lead a demonstration of
moral freedom.
Peter Bürger, Terry Eagleton, Martha Woodmansee and many other
critics have noted how Schiller begins articulating the social role of the
aesthetic in the Aesthetic Education as being the way to a higher unified state
of the individual – moving from the sensuous to the rational. But later in the
text, Schiller comes to see the aesthetic as being a constituent of this higher
unified state. The aesthetic sets the individual free through a harmonious
balance of impulses. A truly rational reformation of society is only possible
through a continuous experience of the beautiful – an aestheticization of
life, because ‘beauty alone can confer on [man] a social character.’26 Such
a notion of a comprehensively experienced and transformative aesthetic
becomes significant to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
aesthetic movements such as Arts and Crafts, the Bauhaus and the Omega
Workshops as well as to the aestheticism of individuals such as Walter Pater,
James McNeil Whistler and Oscar Wilde. Each, in their own way, formu-
lates an aesthetic that encompasses all of life and revolutionizes individual
experience without directly addressing social conditions. But to critics
who wish to formulate a more active role for the aesthetic to play in social
25 Schiller in a letter dated 8 February 1793, quoted by Wilkinson and Willoughby in

their ‘Introduction’ to On the Aesthetic Education of Man, xvii.
26 ‘so kann die Schönheit allein ihm einen geselligen Charakter erteilen’ (Schiller, Letter
XXVII, 214–215).
transformation, Schiller’s late aesthetic unambiguously backpedals from a

politically functional autonomous aesthetic to what Martha Woodmansee
characterizes as ‘the kind of freedom to dream that is the consolation of
the subjects of even the most repressive regimes.’27
But I would follow Frederick Beiser’s more generous recent interpre-
tation, which suggests that Schiller’s ‘fallback’ position is in fact an asser-
tion of his deeply humanistic desires for social transformation. Equally
compelling counter-interpretations of Schiller’s aesthetic suggest that the
Schillerian aesthetic is capable of breaking free of repressive social norms
and of giving a noumenal vision of freedom in action. Interestingly, the
very facts that led some to question Schiller’s radical credentials are the
same ones that led Herbert Marcuse to embrace him as a friend of pro-
gressive causes. The very autonomy of Schiller’s aesthetic activity from
means-ends rationality caused Marcuse to suggest that Schiller’s aesthetic
autonomy frees one from ‘the exploitative productivity which made man
into an instrument of labor.’28
Schiller’s so-called critical retreat, his placement of morality before
political freedom and his assertion of the near absolute autonomy of aes-
thetic experience, look suspiciously like a form of cultural conservatism.
Beiser, Schiller’s most persuasive recent apologist, locates Schiller’s politics
within a broad swath of liberal republican thought, including Machiavelli
and Montesquieu, Rousseau and Ferguson. Schiller’s position within this
group is unique, however, in that he places his political hope in the aes-
thetic education of man: it is through beauty that one develops virtue, and
through a virtuous citizenry a just and free republic will arise.
Schiller’s aesthetic autonomy was therefore not posited at the sacrifice
of social or moral relevance. Beiser argues that Schiller avoids an inef fectual
autonomous aesthetic by ‘making the value of art reside in the self-awareness
of freedom; while freedom is the supreme moral value, it is not subservient
to specific moral or political ends.’29 In the second letter in the Aesthetic
27 Woodmansee, The Author, Art and the Market, 59.

28 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 154.
29 Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 4.
Education, Schiller makes the relation between experiencing beauty and

freedom a necessary one; because experiencing beauty leads to freedom, it
is also necessary that aesthetic transformation precede political revolution.
It also follows that because aesthetic experience is the only experience in
which the whole subject can be transformed, ‘it is only through Beauty
that man makes his way to Freedom.’30
This pursuit of beauty becomes the primary task of both the artist
and the responsible modern subject. Only by pursuing beauty is it pos-
sible to provide a transformative experience for the modern viewer. If an
artist’s first priority is to create a work that subscribes to the conditions
of its own rules of beauty, he will, as a side benefit, attain other (social)
goals which he seems to initially ignore. On the other hand, if the artist’s
first priority falls outside of aesthetic concerns into the social sphere, the
pursuit of this social transformation as the primary goal results in both
aesthetic and social failure.
The Political Implications of Greenberg’s Late Aesthetic
If Schiller’s Aesthetic Education was an attempt ‘to rescue the causes of
enlightenment and republicanism in the face of […] conservative criti-
cism,’ as Beiser suggests,31 how might this shift compare to Greenberg’s
late critical project? Greenberg was in the midst of the shifting political
allegiances on the Left from the 1930s to the 1950s. He famously said in
1961 that someday it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism which started
out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby
cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.’32 But even here, in his
30 ‘weil es die Schönheit ist, durch welche man zu der Freiheit wandert’ (Schiller, Letter
II, 8–9).
31 Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 248.
32 Greenberg, Art and Culture, 230.
notorious phrasing of historically critical self-ref lection and retrench-

ment, Greenberg dialectically f lips the lost revolutionary hope of Leftist
New York Intellectuals into the still ‘heroic’ cause of aesthetic modernist
abstraction. What could Greenberg still claim as ‘heroic’ and potentially
transformative in such ‘pure’ paintings?
Greenberg’s earliest criticism formulated the role of the avant-garde
in a strictly structural and historically materialist manner. The essays of the
1930s and 1940s conf late the mid-nineteenth century origin of the artistic
avant-garde with the revolutionary hopes of a ‘superior consciousness of
history,’ ‘a new kind of criticism’ – the contemporaneous birth of Marxism.33
Greenberg’s early materialist emphasis leads him to attend to the modern
art object’s physical nature by employing a pragmatically empirical approach
to the formally material character of artistic evolution. Early on, Greenberg
asserts that modern art de-cloaks the illusions of traditional representation
through its materiality. The disillusioning process of abstraction, literally
the removal of fictive illusionistic space from painting but also the symbolic
de-enchanting of the work of art from its embeddedness in ritual, seemed
capable of participating in the political unmasking of the pretensions and
illusions of capitalism.
However, by the mid-1950s Greenberg had shifted from this concern
with material reality to a more purely visual one. Instead of emphasizing the
physical properties of modern works, he now champions works that most
ef fectively deny or overcome their material nature in favor of sheer optical
ef fect. He also articulates his new theories around a small group of very
abstract painters, including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clif ford Still,
Morris Louis, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland. As Monet did in his late
Impressionist works, these Color Field abstractionists achieve the ef fect of
immateriality dialectically, by means of the unique physical properties of
paint. In contrast, traditional representation uses illusionism to overpower
its medium, by denying it. As Greenberg says in 1957: ‘Modernist paint-
ing, with its more explicit decorativeness, does call attention to the physi-
cal properties of the medium, but only in order to have these transcend
33 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. I, 7.

themselves. Like any other kind of picture, a modernist one succeeds when
its identity as a picture, and as pictorial experience, shuts out the awareness
of it as a physical object.’34
Rather than placing it in the history of the material medium, Greenberg
now justifies the visual character of modernist painting; the almost palpa-
ble push-pull pulsing of Cubist collage is been replaced by instantaneous
opticality. The cluster of terms that Greenberg uses around the concept of
‘visuality’ are ‘opticality,’ ‘visibility,’ ‘instantaneous unity,’ and ‘at-onceness.’
Each is a variation on or articulation of the unique purely visual experi-
ence of contemporary abstract painting that is ‘incorporeal, weightless and
exists only optically, like a mirage.’35 Even the formerly heralded material-
ity of the Abstract Expressionism ‘big painting’ is now transformed into
sheer visual field. Morris Louis’s large paintings of dif fuse color are said
to envelop the beholder to such an extent that their physical boundary,
the frame, no longer plays a significant role in their compositional char-
acter: ‘[the painting occupies] so much of one’s visual field that it loses its
character as a discrete tactile object and thereby becomes that much more
purely a picture, a strictly visual entity – an experience of boundlessness,
of anonymous and ambiguous space.’36
But to what purpose is this concentrated aesthetic attention put? If
Greenberg’s late aestheticism parallels Schiller’s changed moral role for the
aesthetic, what is his pinpointed aesthetic attention achieving? In some ways,
Greenberg’s late criticism follows Schiller directly in its theorization of the
immateriality of experience. After all, Schiller suggested that ‘this, precisely,
is the mark of perfect style in each and every art: that it is able to remove
the specific limitations of the art in question without thereby destroying
its specific qualities’.37 As tantalizing apt as Schiller’s comment might seem
as a description of late twentieth-century American abstract painting, it is

35 Greenberg, Art and Culture, 144.
37 ‘Darin eben zeigt sich der vollkommene Stil in jeglicher Kunst, daß er die spezifischen
Schranken derselben zu entfernen weiß, ohne doch ihre spezifischen Vorzüge mit
aufzuheben’ (Schiller, Letter XXII, 154–155).
more defensible to suggest that Greenberg and Schiller are both involved
in a progressive humanistic enterprise. Mark Cheetham uses the term ‘stra-
tegic humanism’ in relation to similar sentiments in Kant. In Kant, Art
and Art History, Cheetham argues that Kant’s third Critique should not
be considered in isolation from his more explicitly political contemporary
works such as ‘An Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment”’. As
a distinct argument and work, the third Critique thoroughly justifies art
on autonomous grounds. But when considered in the broader context of
Kant’s other writing, Cheetham suggests, Kant’s seemingly autonomous
aesthetic is a strategy for the preservation of that highest of all human
values for Kant, freedom as it is expressed in morality. If one extends this
logic to Greenberg’s criticism, his dogged defense of the independence of
the aesthetic, his increasingly doctrinaire formalism, and his disciplinary
myopia become similar strategic choices that attempt to preserve ‘human-
ity through the universality and purity of the aesthetic.’38
When Greenberg describes aesthetic experience as a ‘freedom of mind
and untrammeledness of eye,’ of being ‘summoned and gathered into one
point,’ becoming ‘all attention, which means you become, for the moment,
self less and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention,’39
it is clear that much more is at stake for him and for the art he supports
than mere pleasure. Contemporary subjects are so fully subsumed under
the rule of means-ends rationality that they can enjoy very little of experi-
ence for its own sake. Modernist painting trains the contemporary subject
for such an experience of freely enjoyed play. Greenberg says that, ‘this
pinpointing of attention, this complete liberation and concentration of
it, of fers what is largely a new experience to most people in our sort of
society.’40 In Greenberg’s late criticism, abstract art is not an antidote to
fascist or capitalist illusions, nor to any other social fantasy promoted to
draw people away from their material conditions; rather, aesthetic experi-
ence fosters a human need to experience freely.
38 Cheetham, Kant, Art and History, 91.

Conclusion: Greenberg and Schiller
Late in his career, from 6 to 22 April, 1971, Greenberg held a series of classes
called the ‘Bennington College Seminars’. Wide-ranging in themes, these
conversations were unruly and often tangential. They occurred at a stage in
his career in which he felt increasingly beleaguered by the most advanced
forms of art at the time, forms that did not adhere to the self-imposed
strictures of the modernist enterprise, such as Pop and Conceptualism.
In these seminars, Greenberg’s desire to explain himself and to defend
his modernist orthodoxy would have been touching, if it had not come
across as desperate. The following exchange, coming on the heels of a series
of observations on the relationship of artistic autonomy to social agency,
demonstrates Greenberg’s first-hand knowledge of at least one well known
element of Schiller’s aesthetic theory, the ‘play-drive.’
A questioner from the audience asks if it is possible to locate aesthetic
value (a value that Greenberg only discovers in autonomous art) in non-art
experiences such as games. Greenberg replies: ‘Friedrich Schiller was the
first to try to define art as a form of play or relate art to play, and he had
trouble with that. My own answer is I happen to think play is a form of art
and I would agree with Schiller in a way that would surprise and shock him.
But I would think [play] is a very low grade from of art form of art for the
most part.’41 Two things are clear from Greenberg’s anecdotal reference
to Schiller. First, he is familiar enough with the structure of Schiller’s three
faculties or states that he immediately calls this eighteenth-century aesthet-
ics reference to mind. He did so even though more contemporary references
to games and aesthetics were circulating, such as those by Wittgenstein
or Duchamp. Second, Greenberg doesn’t seem to know enough about
Schiller’s ‘play-drive’ to distinguish it from mere entertainment.
Such a comment allows us to do nothing more than to entertain the
possibility of proving a direct Schillerian inf luence on Greenberg. However,
as the above comparisons suggest, Schiller and Greenberg demonstrated
41 Greenberg, Homemade Aesthetics, 84.

a remarkably similar development towards an increasingly autonomous

aesthetic. Each transmuted a revolutionary hope in political change into a
belief that the aesthetic realm held the last best hope for the transformation
of individual consciousness, and thereby of society. The question remains
as to whether Greenberg or Schiller’s belief in a revolutionary aesthetic
experience is a belief in anything more than the political potential of a more
fully self-aware individual. The hope that each places in free, independent
aesthetic experience to train the modern subject to feel what freedom is
like can seem naïve. Schiller finds unity in subjective states when caught in
an aesthetic contemplation of beauty; Greenberg finds a reassuring expe-
rience of autonomous selfhood through an aesthetic experience of unity,
wholeness and instantaneousness. In the face of the disappointing political
developments of their time, each critic develops a strategy to resituate his
revolutionary hopes in the aesthetic experience. For each, this takes the
form of an increasing formalism that further removes the work of art from
any possibility of direct social ef fect. The historical position of these two
theorists, one at the very beginning and one at the very end of modernism,
determined that a moral or political dimension to aesthetic experience had
to be empty of content and had to instead reside in sheer aesthetic ef fect.
Neither could bring himself to compromise artistic integrity for moral or
political purpose.
Trying to articulate the relationship of aesthetic autonomy to progres-
sive political agency haunted both Greenberg and Schiller. The reception
of both of their aesthetic theories indicates that this haunting continues.
There has been a consequent bifurcation of the reception of both Schiller
and Greenberg. Supporters embrace them as articulating an aesthetic that
could possibly participate in individual and social transformation and break
out of cultural restraints. Critics point to how the immersive formal aes-
thetic is capable of reinforcing and supporting the machinations of cultural
power while being masked by a false integrity and adherence to principles
of aesthetic beauty. These positions on the relative merits of autonomous
aesthetics bear some resemblance to contemporary debates about beauty
and spectacle in contemporary art. Defensively critiqued by a generation of
critics weaned on conceptualist postmodernism and the poststructuralist
aesthetic theory of the journal October, artists now concerned with beauty
are said to have succumbed to the pressures of the market.
Artists as varied as Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Laib, Andreas Gursky,
Andy Goldsworthy and Olafur Eliasson move beyond Greenbergian for-
malist aesthetics without having to dismiss it. Their ef forts at constructing
powerfully sublime experiential art seem entirely in step with the notions
of aesthetic experience and beauty developed by Schiller and Greenberg,
even if they reach far beyond it. Using natural as well as technological means
to create spectacularly beautiful experiences, their work falls somewhere
between real life and artistic experience, nature and culture, object and
environment. As Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and Eliasson’s The Weather Project
demonstrate, this new form of aestheticism is capable of transforming not
just museum galleries but also civic space into a theatrical stage set on which
contemporary subjectivity is played out. The frequent critique of Schiller’s
transformation of Kant’s communal notion of taste into his individual
moral imperative suggests that he created an unbridgeable gap between
art’s appearance and reality. Freedom experienced aesthetically replaced
revolution in reality. The supposed gap that Schiller opens up between a
discrete aesthetic object or experience and reality, however, has very little
critical purchase when applied to contemporary works that refuse to be
held within the gallery or museum’s boundaries.
Even though new and spectacular forms of art are capable of bring-
ing forth such expansive experiences of freedom, experiences that seem
to stretch so far beyond the Greenbergian aesthetic frame as to make its
disciplinary strictures seem irrelevant, it is nevertheless time to look again
at critical theories that place some measure of hope in what aesthetic experi-
ence, rather than conceptual gamesmanship, has to of fer. If contemporary
art’s capacity to provoke and enthrall has so expanded its reach, is this not
a ref lection of our greater capacity to use the very aesthetic faculties that
each of these critics articulate in order to imagine a new reality that they
could not possibly conceive?
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Press, 1995).
JEROME CARROLL
Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and

Subjectivity from Kant to Charles Taylor
Introduction
In a 1987 essay called ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, the Canadian philoso-

pher Charles Taylor distinguishes between two approaches to the philoso-
phy of the individual subject, which he calls ‘disengaged’ and ‘engaged’. The
first approach is initiated by Descartes’ ‘ref lexive turn’, in which the self ’s
own mind is seen as the only source of certainty about the world.1 This
ref lexivity is not a problem per se for Taylor, indeed it is a defining feature
of man, but he objects to the sense in which it is seen to place a hard and
fast separation between the subjective and objective sides of reality. Man’s
‘ref lexivity’ leads to what Taylor calls a ‘modern representational episte-
mology’, which is to say a way of thinking about the world as something
that is external to us, and which we can know about in any certain way by
representing the features of its objects ‘objectively’. Objectivist or repre-
sentational accounts of the world clearly work at one level: they have been
successful because, firstly, we are capable of separating ourselves from the
world, and, secondly, because by objectifying the world we have made it
the object of predictive representations and gain ef fective instrumental
control over it.2 This instrumental relationship is problematic for Taylor
because it can easily become exploitative, encouraged by conceptions of
selfhood that foster an ‘atomistic construal of society as constituted by, or
1 Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, 468.

184 JEROME CARROLL
ultimately to be explained in terms of, individual purposes’.3 Moreover,

Taylor thinks that this separation of subject and object is not simply ethi-
cally problematic, but that in ontological terms it is a misleading way of
thinking about selfhood, giving rise to ‘distorted anthropological beliefs’
about the human subject which centre on a ‘certain notion of freedom,
and the dignity attaching to us in virtue of this’.4
The second, ‘engaged’, approach to the subject is characterized by the
sense that what we call reality is constituted in part by background under-
standings that cannot be made fully transparent, that cannot be rendered
in any straightforward way as objective facts. As Taylor puts it: ‘We cannot
turn the background from which we think into an object for us.’5 This is
because, Taylor wants to suggest, our thinking and acting is bound up
with and hard to separate from the manifold background understandings,
intentions and formulations that inform and articulate it. A primary task
for philosophy, in Taylor’s view, is to articulate these background under-
standings, a task that he thinks has been undertaken by a small group of
twentieth century philosophers, including Heidegger, Wittgenstein and
Merleau-Ponty. Respectively these thinkers have theorized our embedded-
ness in terms of our intentional attitude to the world around us, in the status
of language as that which constitutes rather than mirrors reality, and in the
sense that action is always embodied. Of these three, Taylor most frequently
aligns his thinking with Wittgenstein’s sense that language does not simply
reproduce meanings or objects that are already there in the world, but to
some extent constitutes these meanings and objects. Taylor refers to this
attitude as the ‘expressivist’ approach to meaning, a term which refers to
the idea that language does not only point to objects – which it does do
as well of course, in what Taylor calls the ‘designative account of mean-
ing’6 – but also expresses the thoughts, meanings, and beliefs we invest in
3 Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, 471–472.

4 Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, 479, 471.
6 Taylor, Human Agency and Language, 10.
Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and Subjectivity 185
the world. Another way he puts this, in this case inThe Sources of the Self,
is that meaning is not ‘lodged not in the universe an sich but aris[es] in
our experience of it’.7 This reference to meaning arising in the moment of
experience reminds us that the expressivist tradition is usually associated
with the thinking of the early German Romantics, and in particular the
emphasis of individual creativity, imagination, and feeling. This is a tradi-
tion that Taylor traces in Sources of the Self, and indeed it is this inwardness
that Taylor sees as the ‘modern’ quality of the expressivist attitude. The idea
that ‘access to […] meaning requires that we turn within’8 suggests that
making sense of the world is bound up with ideas of selfhood, as expressed
in conceptions of meaning as self-articulation and self-realization. This
causes Taylor to assert that expressivism is ‘closely tied to the idea of a self,
a subject’, not to say to ideas of ‘radical individuation’.9 This conception of
meaning is clearly at odds with an ‘objectivist’ or ‘naturalist’ ontology that
sees reliable meaning as generated by accurate representations of already
given states of af fairs. But the radical individuation also seems to be at odds
with Taylor’s ethical concerns noted above. At the same time, Taylor sees
the ‘inward turn’ as only apparent. He thinks expressivist meaning actually
‘[sets] human beings […] in a larger natural order’, albeit that ‘our access
to this order is primarily inward’.10
However, tracing the links and tensions between Taylor’s concerns and
the expressivist tradition is not the primary aim of this chapter. Rather I
want to suggest that Taylor’s ref lections on subjectivity and agency have
important features in common with the tradition in German letters called
‘philosophical anthropology’, and moreover that this tradition has already
taken important steps in theorizing man’s seemingly uniquely ‘internal’
access to the external world. Charles Taylor himself identifies his ideas as
belonging to the tradition of philosophical anthropology,11 though he is
not explicit about what this might mean. Certainly the question of how
7 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 342.

9 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 375, 376.
186 JEROME CARROLL
man relates to his ‘background’ world has been a central concern for those
writers and thinkers associated with philosophical anthropology, perhaps
second only to – and probably implicit in – the question of the ‘nature’
of the human being. The general issue of man’s place in the world is evi-
dently central to what is probably the most well known discourse of philo-
sophical anthropology, namely the twentieth century German tradition
to which Max Scheler and Helmut Plessner in the 1920s, Arnold Gehlen
in the 1940s and Hans Blumenberg in the 1960s have all contributed. This
tradition takes as its starting point what Axel Honneth and Hans Joas
call man’s ‘radical discontinuity’ with nature.12 This discontinuity might
be traced back to Herder’s reference to man’s paucity of instinct in the
‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772), or Kant’s insistence in his own
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) that man’s essence is
not to be found in his ‘natural’ aspect.13 Blumenberg historicizes this split
from nature, citing Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon (1620) as the book
that captures the decisive modern turn, whereby man’s relationship to the
rest of nature is thoroughly reconceptualized. Nature ceases to be viewed
as a model to be replicated – as it was in the imitatio model of antiquity
– or a cosmos which determines the limits of possible knowledge. Rather
it becomes an object against which man must pit himself, or is reduced
to raw material for man’s potentially limitless scientific knowledge and
technical innovation.14
But this question of man’s relation to the world is also thematized in
the writings associated with philosophical anthropology in the second half
of the eighteenth century and at the turn of the nineteenth century. These
discussions turn on questions of man’s dual nature, comprising body and
soul, and the relationship between his allegedly essential freedom and his
‘biological’ or ‘natural’ aspect and indeed the surrounding external world.
12 Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 44.

13 See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 3–4. Anthropologie in prag-
matischer Hinsicht, 119.
14 See Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 384–390, Legitimität der Neuzeit,
384–393, and Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, 12–18.
As regards the question of who contributes to this tradition, Honneth and

Joas see the origins of philosophical anthropology in Romanticism, as a
response to Kant, with Herder as an important forerunner.15 This is in part
true, and I will refer to Schleiermacher’s critique of Kant’s Anthropology
in what follows, but other now largely forgotten thinkers will also be seen
to contribute to a tradition of philosophical anthropology that exhibits
considerable parallels with Taylor’s recent concerns.
Anthropology as ‘Naturalism’
The first parallel to mention between Taylor’s concerns regarding engaged

subjectivity and the discourse associated with philosophical anthropology
at the turn of the nineteenth century is that both see meaning as ‘embodied’.
Philosophical anthropology – like its sibling of f-shoot from philosophy
in the eighteenth century, philosophical aesthetics – emphasizes the non-
conceptual or physiological dimension of how we relate to, know about,
or make sense of the world. For this reason philosophical anthropology,
in its enquiry about man’s qualities, is often associated with man’s ‘natu-
ral’ or ‘physiological’ aspect. As Honneth and Joas put it: ‘anthropology
in the German sense is interested primarily in ascertaining the human
being’s fundamental biological nature through scientific investigation’.16
Several of the proponents of anthropology in the late eighteenth century
were medical doctors or were at least medically trained (for instance Ernst
Platner, Friedrich Schiller, Paulus Usteri), which Roy Porter sees as giving
rise to a widespread adherence to the view that the firmest foundation for
a scientific understanding of man is physiological, not to say bio-medical.17

17 See Porter, ‘Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment’, 69.
188 JEROME CARROLL
At its most extreme this gives rise to an emphasis on man as essentially

mechanistic, with Herman Boerhaave’s mechanical conceptualization of
the body ‘easily the most inf luential medical schema of the first half of the
eighteenth century’.18 Its emphasis on man’s physiological aspect is seen
by Andreas Käuser to identify philosophical anthropology as part of an
‘anti-discourse’ to those traditional ‘enlightenment’ approaches to human
knowledge that emphasize our rational nature.19 Käuser claims that this
physiological focus gives anthropology its ‘modern’ quality, in comparison
to older rationalist or theologically grounded approaches to knowledge.
In particular it is seen largely as a means of emphasizing what Käuser calls
man’s ‘Immanenz’, which is to say the sense that he owes nothing in his
make up to theology.20
Kant and Heidegger: Naturalism versus Freedom
But this association of anthropology with man’s physiological aspects alarms

some thinkers whose work must be taken account of in any assessment of
philosophical anthropology, most notably Kant and after him Heidegger.
In the Preface to his Anthropology Kant rejects any emphasis on man as a
‘being of nature [Naturwesen]’, not only because he sees man’s essence, what
makes him dif ferent from other beings, as inhering in the freedom that
resides in his supersensory, rational faculties, but also because he refutes
the suggestion that it is possible to grasp and define the whole of man in
advance. This is a point he had already made in his review of the second
part of Herder’s ‘Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity’,
in which he refutes the physiological basis of Herder’s anthropology:
18 Porter, ‘Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment’, 57.

19 Käuser, ‘Anthropologie und Ästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert’, 198.
20 Käuser, ‘Anthropologie und Ästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert’, 200–201.
‘he is convinced that these materials [for an anthropology] may be sought

neither in metaphysics nor in the cabinet of natural history specimens by
comparing the skeleton of the human being with that of other species of
animals; […] that vocation can be found solely in his actions, which reveal
his character’.21 His concern is to leave a space for man’s freedom: man’s
essence is to be sought only in what he ‘as a free-acting being makes of him-
self – or can and should make of himself ’.22 Of course, rather than ending
the discourse on anthropology, Kant’s intervention here contributes to
one strand of philosophical anthropology, namely the tradition referred
to above that sets man radically apart from nature.
To the twentieth century contributors to this strand of anthropology
one must also add the name of Martin Heidegger, in spite of his disparag-
ing remarks about philosophical anthropology in Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics (1929).23 Heidegger follows Kant both in disparaging philo-
sophical anthropology because of its alleged ‘naturalism’ and in viewing
any substantive definition of man’s essence as problematic, because it pre-
sumes to set out in advance what man is, and thereby selling man’s dignity
short. In his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1947), he describes man as human
only insofar as he is ‘more than merely human’.24
21 Kant, ‘Review of J. G. Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity,
Parts 1 and 2’, 134. ‘So ist er überzeugt, daß sie [die Materialien zu einer Anthropologie]
weder in der Metaphysik noch im Naturaliencabinet durch Vergleichung des Skelets
des Menschen mit dem von andern Thiergattungen aufgesucht werden müssen […],
sondern daß sie allein in seinen Handlungen gefunden werden können, dadurch er
seinen Charakter of fenbart’ (Kant, ‘Erinnerungen des Recensenten der Herderschen
Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit’, 56).
22 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 3. ‘als freihandelndes Wesen, aus
sich selber macht, oder machen kann und soll’. (Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer
Hinsicht, 119)
23 See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 156–160, Kant und das Problem
der Metaphysik, 205–212.
24 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 260. ‘mehr als der bloße Mensch’ (Heidegger,
‘Über den “Humanismus”: Brief an Jean Beaufret, Paris’, 89).
190 JEROME CARROLL
Anthropology as Anti-dualist and Holistic
But in my view this ‘return to nature’ need not be taken as a privileging of
the physiological per se, but as an attempt to correct the perceived domi-
nance of accounts that defined man in terms of his rational faculties, as
well as the tendency to abstract human capacities for knowing from lived
experience, for which statements of our physiological nature may be taken
as a kind of shorthand. This significance of the physiological becomes
more apparent when one takes account of the context of the attempts by
anthropologists to define man in the second half of the eighteenth century,
which take place in the shadow cast by Cartesian dualism. That is to say,
this shadow is cast not by dualism per se, but by the sense that man’s dual
nature is somehow a problem; that man is made up of two dif ferent kinds
of substance – res cogitans and res extensa in Descartes’ terminology – that
do not add up. No one could dispute that we are both physical and mental
beings, but the question of how the two relate and combine has exercized
thinkers, then and now. This question of the interrelationship of man’s
physiological and supersensory capacities is a consistent thread in Friedrich
Schiller’s writings on culture. In the fourth of the Aesthetic Letters, which
he characterizes as an attempt at a ‘complete anthropological appraisal’ of
man, he assesses man’s unity as almost impossible to achieve, split as it is
between man’s reason and his natural aspect: ‘Reason does indeed demand
unity; but Nature demands multiplicity.’25 Carl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz
in 1800 refers to man as ‘the puzzling being, sensory and supersensory
bound into a unity’.26
But significantly not all proponents of philosophical anthropology in
this period see man’s dual nature as a problem. Numerous writers associated
25 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 19. ‘Einheit fordert
zwar die Vernunft, die Natur aber Mannigfaltigkeit.’ (Schiller, Über die ästhetische
Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 316)
26 ‘Das rätselhafte, in uns zu Einem Ganzen verbundene, Wesen, als sinnlich-über-
sinnlich’ (Pölitz, Popülare Anthropologie, 5).
with anthropology in that period explicitly absolve themselves of the task

of defining man theoretically in terms set out by this dualist orthodoxy.
Initially, this is not conceived as a specific challenge to dualism’s categories,
but rather is motivated by the conviction that even whilst these may be
retained, anthropology is the science that takes man as a unified whole.
Seen in these terms, anthropology’s ‘naturalism’ indicates a concern to
account for the ‘whole of man’, which was a major theme for philosophical
anthropology at the turn of the nineteenth century.27 This holistic attitude
informs one of the most widely read books on anthropology of the period,
both inside the university and beyond it, Ernst Platner’s Anthropology for
Physicians and the Worldwise (1772).28 Platner’s name became indissoci-
able from the term anthropology in that era,29 and he precisely defines
anthropology as that approach to man that studies the interactions of his
sensory and supersensory aspects.30
A similar attitude informs the remarks about the interwoven nature of
mind and body in many of the writings that appeared in the wake of Ernst
Platner’s work. Carl Christian Erhard Schmid in his Empirical Psychology
(1791) characterizes philosophical anthropology as an investigation of
the reciprocal relationship between man’s internal aspects (‘sensations,
thoughts, desires’) and external aspects (‘his body, and the matter that
is bound most closely to him’) of man, ‘in mutual interrelation with one
another.31 Johann Wezel (1804) describes anthropology as the ‘science
of the double nature of man in his connections and mutual relationships
and inf luences’.32 Heinrich Weber (1810) defines ‘true anthropology’ as
27 See Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 43.
28 See Košenina, Ernst Platners Anthropologie und Philosophie, 30–34.
29 See Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegrif f, 42, 53.
30 See Platner, Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise, xvi–xvii.
31 ‘In wechselseitigem Verhältnisse zu einander’ (Schmid, Empirische Psychologie, 11).
32 ‘Wissenschaft von der doppelten Natur des Menschen in ihrem Zusammenhange,
gegenseitigen Verhältnisse und Einf lüsse’ (Wezel, Grundriß eines eigentlichen Systems
der anthropologischen Psychologie, 13).
192 JEROME CARROLL
the ‘science of the whole, concrete person, a study of man’s internal and
external aspects together’.33
Others are more explicit in refuting the notion that man’s dual nature
is a problem, and asserting that if it were a problem it would not be one
that could be solved from one side of that dualist divide. Johann Georg
Heinrich Feder, Professor of Philosophy at Göttingen, insists that the inter-
connection of mind and body is a matter of everyday experience,34 which is
to say that it is not something that can be known ‘a prioristically’, or which
needs to be established theoretically. Likewise, in his Fundamentals of a
Pragmatic Anthropology (1807), Ernst Wenzel characterizes man as a citizen
of two worlds, the ‘supersensory’ and ‘visible’, but insists that no ‘theoreti-
cal proof ’ of the connection between mind and body is either possible or
required.35 Wilhelm Liebsch, in a work published in 1806, expresses this
equally strongly, dismissing the idea that the mind is separate and separable
from the body as an ‘erroneous and unprovable presupposition’.36 The key
issue here is not only that anthropology is seen to be a holistic discipline,
in a way that refutes any sense that the separation of mind and body is a
problem for anything other than the abstracting philosophical gaze, but
also that the investigation into the interconnections and mutual inf luence
of mind and body displaces the more theoretical concern of whether such
a connection is possible at all, as well as the academic question of which
aspect – physical or mental – man’s essential nature must ultimately be
ascribed to.
This approach has led some detractors to dismiss anthropology as
non-dialectical and without synthesis, and as failed attempt to solve the
mind-body problem.37 Some see it as a discipline forever split between man’s
33 ‘Wissenschaft des ganzen concreten Menschen, äussere und innere Menschenlehre

zusammen’ (Weber, Anthropologische Versuche zur Beförderung einer gründlichen und
umfassenden Menschenkunde für Wissenschaft und Leben, 7).
34 See Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegrif f, 42.
35 Wenzel, Grundzüge einer pragmatischen Anthropologie, 3; see also Linden, 192.
36 ‘Unverweisliche und irrige Voraussetzung’ (Liebsch, Grundriß der Anthropologie,
xxiii).
37 See Käuser, ‘Anthropologie und Ästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert’, 204.
‘natural’, physiological dimension and his ‘supernatural’, intellectually or

morally free self. Schleiermacher himself, in the introduction to his book
on ethics (1816), suggests that anthropology is split between its physical
and psychological aspects, and as such ‘should not be viewed as a science’.38
But as we shall see it is also precisely this hybrid quality that Schleiermacher
and others value in anthropology.
Man’s Internal Nature and the External World
These remarks need not just be taken as descriptions of man’s mental and
physical faculties – his ‘internal’ and ‘external’ nature – but might be under-
stood as a comment on the way he relates to the outside world. In my view it
is a small step from the anthropologists’ sensitivities to the connections and
mutual relationships and inf luences in man’s psycho-physical make up and
Charles Taylor’s sense that the world is not ‘external’ in any straightforward
way. Taylor’s point that our knowledge of the world is not ‘objective’, but
‘engaged’, is not a statement of our predominantly physiological nature, but
is also phenomenological – perception and understanding are interwoven in
a way that makes the boundary between internal mind and external world
less easy to draw definitively. Sometimes this phenomenological attitude is
made all but explicit in the writings at the turn of the nineteenth century
and after, as in Carl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz’s comment, in his Popular
Anthropology of 1800, that anthropology is the ‘study of the external phe-
nomena and internal perceptions of man, insofar as they are phenomena
and perceptions’.39 Sometimes it is more oblique, discernible for instance in
Schleiermacher’s conception of a dialectic of man’s internal self-relation and
38 ‘Darf man nicht als eine Wissenschaft ansehen’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Einleitung und
Güterlehre’, 543).
39 ‘Lehre von den äussern und innern bleibenden Erscheinungen an dem Menschen, in
wiefern sie Erscheinungen sind’ (Pölitz, Popülare Anthropologie, 6).
194 JEROME CARROLL
external involvement. In Dialectic (1822–23) he asserts that ‘real thought’

happens only where there is the ‘opposing of subject and object’.40 The
point is that this ‘Entgegensetzung’ is not to be understood as a substantive
opposition between two mutually exclusive entities. Rather Schleiermacher
refers to the ‘openness of man’s mental life to what is outside’, the content of
which is both our internal ‘complex of thinking’ but also the shared ‘world
of ideas that surrounds us’.41 Like Pölitz, he characterizes man’s faculties
as generating a ‘great puzzle’,42 but in Schleiermacher’s terms the puzzle is
how to draw the dividing line between man and world. It is in this respect
that Wilhelm Dilthey characterizes Schleiermacher’s conception of the
task of philosophy as raising man to understand his ‘mutual af fected by
and af fecting relationship with the world’,43 and Andrew Bowie places
Schleiermacher in a tradition of treating knowledge of the external world
in a way that absolves us of the ‘model that depends upon fixing separate
subject and object sides’.44
Schleiermacher makes no reference to anthropology in the Dialectic,
but his review of Kant’s Anthropology makes clear how central this dia-
lectic is to his sense of the value of anthropology. The task of analysing
the interrelations between inner and outer aspects might suggest a largely
empirical approach, in line with the revalidation of man’s physiological
or sensory qualities. Mareta Linden has discerned a shift during the eight-
eenth century, under the inf luence of French and English thinkers, from
a mathematical-deductive approach to an empirical-inductive approach
to the philosophical study of man,45 emblematic of which is Herder’s
40 ‘Das wirkliche Denken aufhört, wenn die Entgegensetzung von Subjekt und Objekt
aufhört’ (Schleiermacher, Dialektik, 33).
41 ‘Geöf fnetsein des geistigen Lebens nach außen’; ‘Komplex des Denkens’; ‘die gemein-
same Welt’ (Schleiermacher, Dialektik, 29, 33).
42 ‘Das große Rätsel’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Monologen: ein Neujahrsgabe’, 9).
43 ‘Denn die Philosophie erhebt den Menschen zum Begrif f seiner Wechselwirkung
mit der Welt.’ (Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, 347)
44 Bowie, ‘The Philosophical Significance of Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics’, 76.
45 See Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegrif f, 13.
methodological maxim in his ‘Plan for an Aesthetic’, ‘not rationalizing,

but collecting’.46 But in his Kant review Schleiermacher cautions that the
empirical, observational approach that anthropology is often identified
with can relegate it to being a mere ‘collection of trivialities’.47 He is not
particularly explicit about what might save anthropology from this fate,
but one can extrapolate from his scathing comments on Kant’s work that
empiricism is not the threat, but precisely the separation between ‘physi-
ological’ anthropology (associated with empirical method) and ‘pragmatic’
anthropology (associated with that which is moral or free), which in his
view is grounded in Kant’s ‘way of thinking’. This separation he refutes as
‘incompatible with any kind of anthropology’.48
At issue is not only Kant’s perceived failure to account for the sensu-
ous dimension of life, in an approach that privileges reason, intellect and
abstraction over man’s sensory or physiological dimension, but also the very
idea that one can separate one from the other. As opposed to Kant’s strategy
of separating man’s allegedly ‘rational’ aspects from those that are allegedly
‘natural’, Schleiermacher thinks that ‘anthropology should be the joining
together of them both, and only through this union can it exist’.49 Likewise
in his handwritten notes on hermeneutics in the ‘Nachlaß’, Schleiermacher
cites anthropology as a key component of the hermeneutic method of
synthesizing the speculative with the empirical,50 and he is not alone in
this respect. Wilhelm Liebsch, writing in 1806, describes Ernst Platner’s
anthropology as a ‘hybrid of physiology and psychology’,51 and as aiming
46 ‘Nicht Vernünfteln, sondern Sammeln’ (Herder, ‘Plan zu einer Ästhetik’, 672).

47 ‘Sammlung von Trivialitäten’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Rezension von Immanuel Kant’‚
300).
48 ‘Negation aller Anthropologie’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Rezension von Immanuel Kant’,
302).
49 ‘Aber Anthropologie soll eben die Vereinigung beider seyn, und kann nicht anders
als durch sie existieren’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Rezension von Immanuel Kant’, 302).
50 See Schleiermacher, ‘Hermeneutik’, 204.
51 ‘Mittelding zwischen Physiologie und Psychologie’ (Liebsch, Grundriß der
Anthropologie, xxi).
196 JEROME CARROLL
for ‘a normal psychology, though one in which the most heterogenous

materials are worked into a loosely interconnected mere semblance of unity’
(my emphasis).52 In these terms, rather than simply being undialectical, or
even rejecting man’s rational faculties in favour of a basically physiologi-
cal ‘nature’, philosophical anthropology’s ‘modern’ contribution might be
identified in its more subtle hybridity and inclusivity, its holism and the
concomitant critique of dualism and rejection of abstraction.
So what might this combination of the ‘moral’ and the ‘physio-
logical’ mean? One example might be the new environmentalism that
eighteenth-century medicine was alive to, which is to say the medicine
that was conceived under the umbrella term the ‘science of man’, or even
styled itself ‘anthropological medicine’. Roy Porter notes that during the
eighteenth century there was an increasing sense that one had to ‘know
the sick, not just their diseases’ and that one had to seek out the ‘laws
of health and sickness in wider contexts, examining climate, environ-
ment, the rhythms of epidemics over the historical longue durée’.53 In
the same vein, Elizabeth Williams refers to the eighteenth century ‘shift
in focus from individual to social pathology’, exemplified in the notion
that environmental factors can lead to moral degeneracy.54 This new envi-
ronmentalism even included the understanding that man’s physiological
make-up was subject to change over time, as Roy Porter indicates: ‘medi-
cal men were not merely proposing that disease had a cultural history,
but were suggesting, in turn, that physiology and pathology were, in a
sense, sedimented social history and hence essential for a wider grasp of
the dynamics of culture.’55
52 ‘Eine gewöhnliche Psychologie, in welcher aber die heterogensten Materialien

zu einem, nur locker zusammenhängenden, scheinbaren Ganzen verarbeitet sind’
(Liebsch, Grundriß der Anthropologie, xxii).
53 Porter, ‘Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment’, 61, 66.
54 Williams, The physical and the moral, 15.
55 Porter, ‘Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment’, 66.
Anthropology as a Discipline
On the face of it there may be something slightly paradoxical about the

conception of anthropology both as a ‘science of man’ and as a heterogene-
ous and inclusive discourse. On the one hand, anthropology is motivated
by the seemingly ‘philosophical’ aim of defining man’s essential features.
As such, it is conceived by some of its practitioners as the necessary basis
of all and any knowledge, such that Helmut Pfotenhauer can refer to the
idea of anthropology as the ‘royal science’ of the second half of the eight-
eenth century.56 On the other hand, some contributors to the discourse
on anthropology are motivated by the sense that man in particular can
only be defined with reference to the contexts in which he finds himself.
This latter concern touches on the status of philosophical anthropology
as a tradition and a discipline. The term ‘anthropology’ is problematic if it
is taken to indicate a coherent discipline, not least because the disparate
works of those thinkers associated with philosophical anthropology around
the turn of the nineteenth century do not add up to a body of discourse
that would stand up to any test of disciplinary coherence. In fact, avoiding
such a status is an aim for some of those who contribute to the discourse
on anthropology, who see it precisely not as a branch of science in its
own right, but as an approach to knowledge that aimed to work against
the separation of various domains of scientific enquiry that were subject
to increasing specialization in the eighteenth century. As Honneth and
Joas put it, ‘the intent to overcome disciplinary boundaries is constitutive
for most anthropological theories’, to the extent that they assert that ‘an
anthropology confined within the boundaries of a special branch of sci-
ence has no future’.57 Moreover, they report a widespread refusal to see
anthropology as either the ‘basis’ for other sciences, or as a synthesis of
other sciences. They do not of fer examples of writers on anthropology who
take up these positions, but Wilhelm Liebsch’s above-noted references to
56 ‘Königswissenschaft’ (Pfotenhauer, Literarische Anthropologie, 4).

198 JEROME CARROLL
anthropology as a hybrid science and to its ‘mere semblance of unity’ may

be a case in point.
This issue of disciplinarity also has an important philosophical dimen-
sion, in view of the fact that philosophy has traditionally styled itself as
providing the basis for other disciplines. Anthropology may be understood
in this respect to of fer a specific challenge to the traditional aims and focus
of philosophy, a suggestion first made by Johann Herder, who in an oblique
note towards the end of the unfinished 1765 essay refers to a ‘restriction
of philosophy to anthropology’.58 This call must be set in the context of
the critique of the nature of philosophy that makes up the main part of
Herder’s essay. He deplores the orientation of philosophy around abstracted
logic and rational and speculative analysis, allegedly divorced from need
or volition, unnecessarily and erroneously separated from psychology and
instrumental knowledge. The general point here seems to be that philoso-
phy fails to do justice to experience where it tries to, as Honneth and Joas
put it, ‘grasp cognitively the “essence” of the human beings by means of
abstract definitions’.59 They point out that the descriptor ‘philosophical’ in
the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ is very misleading, because ‘merely
philosophical definitions were precisely what [the tradition] did not aim
at’.60 Anthropology is conceived by numerous thinkers around the turn of
the nineteenth century as an approach to knowledge that takes issue with
philosophy’s traditional tendency to seek knowledge of the world by means
of a process of abstraction, evidenced for instance in the separating out of
man’s supersensory capacities from the perceptions that sustain them.
The inclusivity and methodologically relaxed approach associated with
anthropology goes some way to absolving anthropology of the obligation
to provide final and exclusive definitions of man and ultimate explanations
of the possibility of interrelation between his capacities. In particular this
ref lects directly on questions of philosophical ‘grounding’. We have seen
58 Herder, ‘How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit
of the People’, 27; ‘Einziehung der Philosophie auf Anthropologie’ (Herder, ‘Wie die
Philosophie zum Besten des Volks allgemeiner und nützlicher werden kann’, 132).
that Wenzel and others think that ‘theoretical proof ’ of the connection
between our ‘natural’ and our ‘free’ selves is not possible, but it is also
superf luous. Wenzel asserts precisely that that connection is the basis of
‘everything that our being experiences’.61
Moreover, the holism and environmentalism I have associated with
philosophical anthropology go a long way to undermine such traditional
‘philosophical’ dichotomies as biology/culture and nature/freedom, in
much the same way that Schleiermacher thinks is essential to the anthro-
pological attitude. This gives some weight to Honneth and Joas’ view of
anthropology as an attempt to ‘find a way out of traditional impasses’.62 As
suggested above, Schleiermacher is the thinker who develops the anthro-
pological attitude into a critique of philosophy that wants to treat subject
and object as fixed entities. To the same extent that he takes issue with
Kant’s compartmentalized thinking, it is the latter’s approach to the issue
of grounding any enquiry into human nature and knowledge that attracts
Schleiermacher’s criticism and underlies his assessment of Kant’s approach
as a ‘negation of all anthropology’.63
Philosophical Anthropology and Objectivity
Early on in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant himself

had remarked that any attempts to establish anthropology as a ‘science
with thoroughness’ encounter ‘considerable dif ficulties that are inher-
ent in human nature itself ’,64 because it requires a type of knowledge in
61 ‘Allen Erscheinungen unsers Gemüths’ (Wenzel, Grundzüge einer pragmatischen

Anthropologie, 4).
63 Schleiermacher, ‘Rezension von Immanuel Kant’, 313.
64 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 4. ‘mit Gründlichkeit’; ‘erhebliche,
der menschlichen Natur selber anhängende Schwierigkeiten’ (Kant, Anthropologie
in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 120–121).
200 JEROME CARROLL
which the subject and the object are one and the same. Kant here aspires
for objectivity, whereas for Schleiermacher this is precisely an example
of a ‘false claim to objectivity’,65 which Kant himself had exposed in his
broader critical-philosophical project. This issue of the relationship between
subject and object, and indeed the claim of objectivity, also makes the link
to Charles Taylor’s ideas apparent. For Taylor the self can never become
fully self-transparent, ‘background’ and all. Such transparency would place
a hard and fast separation between the subjective and objective sides of
reality in a way that Taylor, like Schleiermacher before him, thinks is not
possible. It is because of our prior involvement with the world that Taylor
rejects the search ‘for an impossible foundational justification of knowledge
or […] total ref lexive clarity about the bases of our beliefs’.66 His point seems
to be that ‘grounding’ and ‘engagedness’ are two sides of the same coin,
which is to say that the dif ficulties associated with establishing grounds for
objective knowledge of the world are an indicator of our embeddedness
in the world. At the same time, Taylor sees this failure of philosophy to
provide firm foundational grounding as an indicator of one of the sources
of specifically human meaning. That is to say, he thinks that the inability
to reach full clarity about the sources of human knowledge either leads to
or is a consequence of the sense in which human meaning is not simply
representational of an already given reality, but is worked out in a process of
self-articulation. Taylor refers to this ‘working out’ of meaning as a ‘quest’,67
which suggests that it is a process that is at least in part individual, in that
this idea of meaning is ‘closely tied to the idea of a self, a subject’. As Taylor
puts it, ‘[e]xpression was the basis for a new and fuller individuation’.68
Taylor himself refers approvingly to this expressivist notion of the
self-constitution of meaning, referring to Romantic artists like Shelley
and Wordsworth as creating the universe anew, lifting the veil of familiar
reality.69 But where things become problematic is that what one might
65 ‘Verborgener Realismus’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Rezension von Immanuel Kant’, 303).

66 Taylor, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, 479–480.
69 See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 378.
call a ‘strong’ reading of this conception of meaning as self-constituted

seems to foster precisely the kind of ‘distorted anthropological belief ’
whose ethical implications concern Taylor. In my view such a strong read-
ing appears in the work of Kant and Heidegger, who view any definition
of man’s essence as problematic insofar as it presumes to set out in advance
what man is, thereby selling man’s dignity short. Do Kant and Heidegger’s
remarks on man’s essential freedom represent the same privileging of free-
dom, defining man in terms of his freedom? Is this not the apotheosis of
disengaged subjectivity, divorcing man from the world by virtue of their
– man and world’s – thoroughly dif ferent natures? It certainly sounds like
what Schleiermacher in his review of Kant’s anthropology dismisses as
the ‘sheer glorification of willfulness’.70 Taylor himself is aware of the risk
of what he calls ‘radical doctrines of non-situated freedom’,71 which he
sees as the dominant model of the modern agent’s relation to the world.
Indeed, he sees this conception of freedom as precisely serving to conceal
the mechanism of ‘liberation through objectification’ by which freedom is
often gained in practice.72 But it is notable that this radical freedom should
be so prominent in Kant and Heidegger’s ref lections on anthropology,
two of the thinkers whom Taylor identifies as developing a more ‘engaged’
approach to meaning. Is this simply a coincidence, or is there an internal
connection between the ‘embeddedness’ by virtue of which we grasp things
‘as’ things and the rendering of the world as an object?73
Certainly Max Scheler and Hans Blumenberg, two key figures in
twentieth century philosophical anthropology, think that this is the case.
In Man’s Place in Nature (1928) Scheler characterizes our grasp of the
world as a succession of objective facts, which are informed by their his-
torical context, but whose objectivity clears the way for new inventions
70 ‘Reine Vergötterung der Willkühr’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Rezension von Immanuel Kant’,

303).
73 See Taylor, Human Agency and Language, 228–229.
202 JEROME CARROLL
and discoveries.74 Blumenberg likewise sees the prerequisite for man to

take on his potentially limitless and uniquely creative role – ‘das originär
Menschliche’ – as his capacity to see the world as a ‘fact’.75 In the Introduction
to this chapter, I noted Blumenberg’s view that this new relationship to
the world is first conceptualized by Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth
century, and inThe Legitimacy of the Modern Age he describes this process
as reaching an apotheosis in the modern scientific and technological age.
This connection between objectification and instrumentalization suggests
that we need to be careful with terminology: turning the natural world
into an object for our use, or in Blumenberg’s terms a ‘fact’, precisely does
not imply epistemological ‘objectivity’ – knowing the world ‘as it really is’.
Rather this ‘facticity’ suggests a form of ‘engagement’ with the natural world
that is not simply ‘disengaged’ or ‘objective’, but ‘objectified’, in the sense
that nature becomes a set of objectified or instrumentalized qualities and
capacities abstracted from any other context apart from, presumably, that
of their meaning or utility to us. This facticity might be taken to suggest
that Taylor’s sense of the ‘constituted’ nature of human meaning and his
notion that we are ‘embedded’ in a reality pre-invested with meaning do
not necessarily entail an imperative to think or act ethically, as his writings
often seem to suggest. If an engaged ontology seeks to describe how our
sense of the world is located in prior understandings and self-articulations,
then presumably these prior understandings must also include an instru-
mental grasp of reality, and the possibility of actions with outcomes that
are ethically problematic. The point is that, whether or not the atomistic,
74 ‘The reduction of the power of tradition is a continuous process in human history. It

is an achievement of human reason which, in one and the same act, objectifies the con-
tent of the tradition, thus throwing it back, as it were, into the past where it belongs
and, at the same time, clearing the ground for new discoveries and inventions in the
present.’ (Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, 27) ‘Die Abtragung der Traditionsgewalt
schreitet in der menschlichen Geschichte zunehmend fort. Sie ist eine Leistung
der ratio, die stets in ein und demselben Akte einen tradierten Inhalt objektiviert
und dadurch in die Vergangenheit, in die er gehört, gleichsam zurückwirft – damit
den Boden freimachend für je neue Erfindungen und Entdeckungen’ (Scheler, Die
Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 37).
75 Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, 35.
individualistic and self-interested subjectivity is ‘distorted’ per se, it clearly

provides a basis for one possible approach to relating to the world, and
moreover one that has evidently been rewarded with palpable returns.
Assessing it as ontologically incorrect is unlikely to dissuade people of its
other more practical benefits.
Anthropology and Expressivism
Philosophical anthropology has theorized numerous correctives to this dis-

engaged and individualistic ontology. Blumenberg focuses on the socially
binding force of human institutions, which Robert Wallace characterizes
as generating a ‘collective rationality’ in his introduction to Blumenberg’s
Work on Myth.76 Taylor is known for his communitarian ethics, and one
might fruitfully analyse the connection between Taylor’s ethics and the
communicative or intersubjective quality of human action that appears in
the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen.77 Taylor’s emphasis
elsewhere on the expressivist roots of human meaning, understood as self-
articulation, seems too individualist to of fer a basis for a less individualistic
conception of subjectivity. But, as indicated in the Introduction to this
chapter, Taylor suggests in The Sources of the Self that expressivism of fers
an account of human meaning that works against this radical individual-
ism, an account that ‘take[s] us beyond ourselves’ (390). He sees expres-
sivist meaning as setting human beings ‘in a larger natural order’ (369). In
particular, he cites external nature as the source for a kind of meaning that
is not simply imposed by human intention on inert nature (373). Taylor’s
concept of nature here is quite dif ferent to the ‘objective’ or ‘naturalist’ ren-
dering by the ‘disengaged’ natural sciences that starts to be conceptualized
in the seventeenth century. He recounts in similar terms to Blumenberg
76 Wallace, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, xxviii.

77 See Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 65.
204 JEROME CARROLL
the rendering of nature, since Bacon, into a ‘neutral domain’, which we

understand only in order to master (321). In contrast to this instrumental
relation to material nature, he thinks that nature can also be conceived of
as an ‘inner moral source’ (x). For Taylor the moral significance of this rela-
tion to nature seems to derive from the sense that we relate to nature in a
way that does not objectify or instrumentalize it. This relation ultimately
turns on our being aware of our ‘connection’ to nature, a ‘belief that think-
ing beings are part of a vast physical order’ (347). He also refers in similar
terms to the Romantics’ sense of man as being ‘linked with the larger cur-
rent of life or being’ (377) and to the ‘good involved in our immersion in
nature’ (317). Taylor does not spell out whether this moral motivation is
ultimately pragmatic, involving an investment in a nature to which we are
inseparably connected, or whether it claims a more altruistically-oriented
corrective to self-orientation. But in a way that is perhaps at odds with both
pragmatist and altruistic ethics, the key message of the expressivist tradi-
tion for Taylor seems to be that it is not possible to separate the internal
and external, or the subjective and objective aspects of experience in any
straightforward manner. My concern has been to show that this message
is a recurrent one in the philosophical anthropological tradition.
This is not to say that philosophical anthropology should be taken as
providing a theoretical resolution of ethical problems concerning questions
of agency and subjectivity in some way in advance. In my view it is impor-
tant to register that the tension between our inwardness or individualism
and our embeddedness in a larger order is one way of characterizing the
parameters of certain ethical questions, rather than being a means of resolv-
ing them. One strand of philosophical anthropology precisely emphasizes
man’s discontinuity with nature and privileges human freedom. If this were
the only story of philosophical anthropology it would indicate the limits
of a philosophy that takes man and his intellectual capacities as a starting
and end point. But my suggestion is that the other aspect of philosophical
anthropology, in particular its themes of holism and externality, already
of fers the resources to help us avoid such a one-sided, if not ‘distorted’,
anthropological belief.
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Sebastian Hüsch
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage:

Søren Kierkegaard’s Critique of Modernity
Introduction
As Odo Marquard rightly observes, Kantian philosophy represents a turning

point from which can be observed a remarkable epistemological revalori-
zation of aesthetics, which subsequently opens up access to philosophical
knowledge.1 The epistemological revalorization of aesthetics in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides the groundwork for
the very particular if not peculiar perspective on the status of aesthetics
introduced by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s.
Kierkegaard uses the epistemological ‘upgrade’ of aesthetics in order to
convert it from a theoretical philosophical discipline into a category of
existence or, to go even further, into a form of existence in its own right
which he calls the ‘aesthetic stage’. This does not primarily imply a stage
of existence with a particular af finity to aesthetics as a philosophical dis-
cipline or experience. Rather, Kierkegaard brings back the use of the term
to its Greek origin and defines the aesthetic stage as the stage of sensuality
where Man ‘is immediately what he is’.2
1 See Marquard, ‘Kant und die Wende zur Ästhetik’.

2 Kierkegaard, Either/Or. A Fragment of Life, 492. For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic stage
is thus to be understood as a mode of existence in which man is in his immediateness,
meaning that he is oriented towards sensual pleasure (see Pieper, Sören Kierkegaard,
35–36). This aesthetic stage is dialectically opposed to the ethical and, at a later point,
to the religious stage in which man becomes a Self in the strict sense. In designat-
ing the stage of immediateness ‘aesthetic stage’, Kierkegaard intentionally uses a key
210 Sebastian Hüsch
However, if Kierkegaard builds his aesthetic stage upon a revalorization

of aesthetics, his conversion of the aesthetic into a form of existence does
not have its origins directly in Kant but is rooted in another version of a
revalorized aesthetics which was developed by early German Romanticism
and, first and foremost, in the poetology of Friedrich Schlegel. If, however,
one were to try to find some trace of gratitude towards Schlegel, it would
be in vain. Kierkegaard is far from being thankful; instead he manifests
his dependence upon early German Romanticism in a highly polemic and
merciless criticism. In doing so he nevertheless clearly indicates his strong,
though highly ambivalent, af finity with Romantic3 thought in general and
with Schlegel’s thought in particular.4
What irritated Kierkegaard was above all the early Romantic postulate
demanding a poetization of reality. The project of a progessive Universalpoesie,
a ‘Progressive Universal Poetry’ which aims at bridging the gap between
poetry and real life as it is expressed in Schlegel’s provocative declaration
discipline of contemporary German philosophy in order to make it undergo a shift

of meaning in which the idea of aesthetic existence excludes any notion of the ethical.
Thus, Kierkegaard ironically puts distance between himself and concepts of aesthet-
ics which imply for instance that an aesthetic education could make man morally
better. As Kierkegaard illustrates namely in Either/Or, there is a fundamental and
insurmountable gap between the aesthetic and the ethical stage which, however, has
to be relativized insofar as the dialectical structure of Kierkegaard’s method has to be
taken into consideration, as André Clair emphasizes in Pseudonymie et Paradoxe. La
pensée dialectique de Kierkegaard (p. 34). For a detailed account of the Kierkegaardian
concept of the aesthetic stage but also of the other ‘stages of existence’, the ethical and
the religious existence, see Helmuth Vetter, Stadien der Existenz. Eine Untersuchung
zum Existenzbegrif f Sören Kierkegaards.
3 In the present article, the notions of early German Romanticism and Romanticism
are used as synonyms and all refer to what in German is called ‘Frühromantik’. Søren
Kierkegaard himself uses the term ‘romanticism’ and the adjective ‘romantic’ to make
reference to what today is called ‘Frühromantik’ and ‘frühromantisch’.
4 Research on Kierkegaard tends to overstress his hostility towards Romanticism at
the cost of underestimating his af finities. As one of the rare exceptions, André Clair
correctly notes: ‘Romantique, Kierkegaard l’est certes … [D]es morceaux entiers,
notamment de L’Alternative, constituent une expression de la vision romantique de
la vie’ (Clair, Pseudonymie et paradoxe, 53).
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage 211
‘No poetry … no reality’5 as well as in Novalis’ dictum ‘Poetry is the genu-

ine and absolute real’,6 was a provocation for Kierkegaard in that, in his
eyes, a fusion of poetry and reality would not, as Schlegel and Novalis
had hoped, bring forth a new and ‘higher’ reality, but rather lead to the
abandoning of reality once and for all, insofar as reality, from an aesthetic
viewpoint, cannot be but deficient. To put it dif ferently, one could also
say that, according to Kierkegaard, the poeticizing of reality is nothing
less than its betrayal.7
For Kierkegaard this idea of a poetization of reality is all the more
unacceptable as he himself felt its seductive power. Hence, Konrad Paul
Liessmann suspects Kierkegaard to ‘have himself, at times, succumbed
to a seduction by aesthetics which is mirrored in his own aesthetics of
seduction’.8 The veracity of this observation is confirmed most obviously
in Kierkegaard’s first literary writing, Either/Or, and first and foremost in
The Seducer’s Diary, which represents the acme and the turning point of the
work and leaves no ambiguity about where the idea of the seducer stems
from: ‘His life’, notes the fictive editor of the diary ‘has been an attempt to
realize the task of living poetically’ (Either/Or, 248). Johannes the seducer
is thus the literary incarnation of the romantic idea to live poetically in its
Kierkegaardian understanding. The introduction of a literary character
allows Kierkegaard the construction of the aesthetic as a mode of existence
and thus to illustrate what it could look like if one continually transposed
reality into poetry. In short, especially the first part of Either/Or represents
5 ‘Keine Poesie … keine Realität’. Quoted in J.-F. Angelloz, 107.

6 ‘Die Poesie ist das echt absolute Reelle’ (Angelloz, 107).
7 Schlegel was not unaware of this danger and thus notes that the opposition between
poetry and reality ‘leads naturally […] to the result that one disdains reality too much
[…]’. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Philosophische Vorlesungen 1800–1807’, 25, my translation.
See also G. J. Handwerk, 28. Concerning the question of betrayal, one might feel
inclined to ask after reading Either/Or, if this betrayal does not seem legitimate with
regard to a reality which indeed is prosaic and deficient. This is implied in Konrad
Paul Liessmann’s study Ästhetik der Verführung. Kierkegaards Konstruktion der Erotik
aus dem Geiste der Kunst.
8 ‘Einer […] Ästhetik der Verführung ist Kierkegaard aber auch zeitweilig wohl selbst
erlegen’ (Liessmann, 12).
a literary mise en scène of the Kierkegaardian interpretation of romantic

theory, and it represents at the same time and to the same extent a homage
to and polemical critique of Schlegelian poetology.9
If thus Kierkegaard brings literary theory into literary being, he does it
in his own way, which means that he uses the fictional character of Johannes
the seducer to push the idea of a fusion of reality and poetry to its very
extreme. This perfect implementation of theory, however, reveals itself to
be at least as frightening as it is seductive. The literary and thus psycho-
logical experience of letting Johannes ‘romanticize’ reality seems to have
scared Kierkegaard to the point that he immediately tries to ‘defuse’ what
he has done through the antithetical juxtaposing of an ethical existence to
the aesthetic one – a kind of rappel à l’ordre and counter-balance which,
in reality, addresses Kierkegaard himself at least as much as it addresses
the reader.10 This opposing of two antagonistic systems of thought intro-
duced through the opposition of an ethical perspective to the aesthetic is
very ‘Kierkegaardian’ in its radicalism. In reading Either/Or, there seems
to be no middle way between the ethical and the aesthetical, as the two
are mutually exclusive; to quote the Ethicist B, who tries in the second
part of the text to repair the damage caused by the aesthetic seductiveness
of the first part:11 ‘Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live
ethically.’ (Either/Or, 486)
9 Thus George Pattison claims that the Seducer’s Diary is to be understood as an

unmasking of the finally cynical character of Schlegel’s concept of poetry as Schlegel
himself tries to put it into practice in his Lucinde. See Pattison, 38.
10 In Either/Or, Kierkegaard has the aesthetician express this fright. Thus A states:
‘I cannot conceal from myself, can scarcely master, the anxiety which grips me at this
moment, as I resolve for my own interest to make a fair copy of the hasty transcript
I was able at that time to secure only in the greatest haste and with much disquiet’
(Either/Or, 247).
11 It is important to stress that the clear dichotomy, implied by the aestheticist A and
Johannes, and explicitly introduced through the ethicist B, must be reconsidered
in the light of Kierkegaardian methodology. In this paper, however, I will not be
able to give closer consideration to the dif ficulties of interpretation related to
Kierkegaard’s ‘indirect communication’. For more details on this question see Hüsch,
Needless to add that B’s emphasis of the perfect incompatibility

between the ethical and the aesthetic, at this point of the text, simply
puts into words a fact that the reader has already grasped perfectly well by
reading the first part of Either/Or. It suf fices to read the Seducer’s Diary to
understand that the aesthetic stage is explicitly constructed as the antago-
nist of the ethical stage in that the Diary demonstrates how the ethical
is replaced by the aesthetic as a criterion of value and how this change of
criteria imposes its own logic. This new, ‘aesthetic’ logic demands that the
reader judge the story of seduction the diary narrates not according to its
moral value but only and exclusively according to its aesthetic value. At the
same time, the reader recognizes that the aesthetic value system as well
as its appeal stem in large part precisely from the aesthetic’s antagonism
to the ethical. Thus, what constitutes the originality and the appeal of
Kierkegaard’s Either/Or is the fact that it does not construct the antagonism
of the ethical and the aesthetic as abstractions but that this opposition is
the starting point for the introduction of two distinct modes of existence,
or as Kierkegaard says, two distinct ‘stages’12 of existence insofar as this gap
‘Über die Bedeutung der Ironie bei Sören Kierkegaard mit ständiger Rücksicht
auf Entweder/Oder’.
12 Kierkegaard will later introduce an additional stage of existence, the religious stage,
which will complement the aesthetic and the ethical stages that are in the centre of
Either/Or. In the present context, the particularities of this third stage of existence
are of minor importance considering that this paper mainly focuses on the aesthetic
stage, which, in Either/Or, obtains its pertinence first and foremost through its
oppositions to the ethical stage. It is noteworthy, however, that Kierkegaard does
not imply a ‘theory’ of the stages of existence as is often suggested. The introduc-
tion of a Kierkegaardian ‘theory’ in this context which turns the religious stage into
the synthesis of the aesthetic and the ethical stage makes his concept of the stages
of existence take a strangely Hegelian turn, which is hardly convincing if one takes
into consideration Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel’s philosophy and especially of
Hegelian dialectics. See Max Bense, Kierkegaard und Hegel, 23. Bense stresses that
Kierkegaard opposes a disruptive dialectic to Hegel’s dialectic of synthesises. One
might add, and this is probably the most important objection against a Hegelian
reading of the stages of existence, that Kierkegaard remains profoundly sceptical
about any philosophical system insofar as it is impossible to generalize about human
existence as the existence of this concrete human being, because any truth that is of
between the ethical and the aesthetical unfolds its full momentum and
momentousness only in existential practice.
In the following, I would like to take the antagonistic construction
of the ethical and the aesthetic as a starting point in order to ask to what
extent the Kierkegaardian polemical (ab-)use of romantic poetology could
possibly be understood as an anticipation of a larger societal phenomenon
and thus serve as an interpretative grid applicable to certain tendencies in
the western societies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. To do so, I
will try to link the Kierkegaardian concept of the aesthetic to the main
idea developed in a study published in 1993 by the German sociologist
Gerhard Schulze and entitled: Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie
der Gegenwart.13 In his study, Schulze identifies a phenomenon which he
calls the ‘aesthetization of every day life’14 and which, according to the
author, constitutes a significant trait identifiable in all modern occiden-
tal societies. A closer consideration of the broad lines of his argumenta-
tion reveals that the aspects common to both Schulze’s observation of an
‘aesthetization’ of every day life and the Kierkegaardian construction of
an ‘aesthetic stage’ reach beyond a simple terminological parallel; rather,
these two concepts share much common ground and point both to the
very essence of modernity.
A comparative analysis of Schulze’s sociological phenomenology and
Kierkegaardian philosophy promises therefore a double insight. On the
one hand, Schulze’s ref lections shall help to demonstrate the topicality
of the Kierkegaardian concept of an aesthetic mode of existence; and on
the other hand, the harsh polemical dichotomization which characterizes
Kierkegaardian thought may help to elucidate certain aspects of Schulze’s
importance for the individual cannot be anything else but subjective truth. Thus, it
seems dif ficult to talk about a Kierkegaardian ‘theory’ of stages of existence because in
this context the very notion of ‘theory’ would imply the possibility of a generalization
where there is only subjectivity. For Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegelian dialectics see
his Concept of Anxiety; see also Röttgers, ‘Lügen(-)Texte oder nur Menschen’, 55.
13 Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart.
14 ‘Ästhetisierung des Alltagslebens’ (Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 3).
concept and allow at the same time to integrate Schulze’s analysis into the
larger horizon of the history of ideas, a step he himself does not undertake,
seemingly out of methodological cautiousness.
The Kierkegaardian Construction of the Aesthetic Existence

Based on the Romantic Revalorization of Aesthetics
Kierkegaard’s criticism of romantic ref lection
Either/Or is not the first of Kierkegaard’s works to deal with early German
Romanticism. In fact, he dedicates a large part of his PhD dissertation, enti-
tled The Concept of Irony with continual reference to Socrates, to a profound
critique of the romantic concept of irony. According to Kierkegaard, roman-
tic irony results in a loss of reality, bringing forth a total ‘de-realization’
which comprises not only the world surrounding the ironist but also his
own Self.15 This double loss of reality introduces the possibility to poetically
(re-)create both the world and the Self. The idea that the ironic undermin-
ing of reality does not only cause a distance towards the surrounding world
but comprises also the Self is highly fascinating for Kierkegaard the writer,
but profoundly disturbing for Kierkegaard the person, and perfectly unac-
ceptable for Kierkegaard the Christian. It is disturbing and unacceptable
in that the possibility of creating one’s own Self is inevitably linked to a
world lacking transcendental anchoring. Only a Self that does not need
to give account to a transcendental institution can be free to create itself.
The possibility of creating one’s own Self poetically is thus synonymous
with saying that there is no transcendental institution which would or
could guarantee the existence of such a thing as a Self in the sense of a Self
which is not merely arbitrary. Possessing the freedom to poeticize one’s
15 See Søren Kierkegaard, Über den Begrif f der Ironie mit ständiger Rücksicht auf Sokrates,
289, SV XIII 354.
own Self would thus imply a total transcendental rootlessness. So, if there
is freedom for the individual to invent himself – which is the seductive
part of the Kierkegaardian experiment of thought – there is also a price
to be paid: According to the ethicist B, the liberation from transcendental
accountability, which is at the same time a detachment from transcendental
embeddedness, will ultimately and necessarily bring about an existence in
despair. The dissolution of an authoritative and binding reality, B argues,
inevitably undermines the meaningfulness of existence.16
This apodictic assertion is all the more interesting in the light of the
Kierkegaardian interpretation of Socratic irony from which he distinguishes
the romantic understanding of it. In his dissertation, Kierkegaard defines,
following Hegel, irony as absolute and infinite negativity. This conception
of irony perfectly fits with the ethicist’s illustration of an aesthetic existence
as an existence in despair. However, when Kierkegaard discusses the case
of Socrates, even if he confirms this conception of irony as negativity, he
exempts Socratic irony from the destructive and annihilating consequences
he attributes to irony in its romantic form. He even stresses that Socratic
irony has to be understood as the expression of ‘the first and most abstract
determination of subjectivity’.17 Taking into consideration that Kierkegaard
can be regarded as the thinker of subjectivity, it is clear that his objections
are not to be read as a principal rejection of irony insofar as in its Socratic
form it does not induce the same annihilating consequences as modern
16 The idea of an existence lacking transcendence leading to despair is further developed

by Kierkegaard in Sickness unto Death where he attributes this to the fact that man
is a synthesis of finitude and infinity and thus inevitably aspires for transcendence.
17 ‘… die erste und abstrakteste Bestimmung der Subjektivität’ (Der Begrif f Ironie,
269). This ref lection linking Socratic irony and the concept of subjectivity allows
Kierkegaard to present Socrates as the philosopher who can be considered to stand
at the beginning of modern western subjectivity and individuality. It is very inter-
esting to note that this mise en parallèle finds its confirmation in a philosophy that
comes to the same conclusion, but from the opposite starting point and in a totally
dif ferent light: in the Nietzschean thought, too, Socrates represents individuality,
but in the context of a new and somewhat nihilistic principle of ‘Socratism’, which
is responsible for the degeneration of Athenian culture. See Nietzsche, ‘Die Geburt
der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik’, 18–19.
irony. Rather, Kierkegaard suggests that Socratic irony is an important and

indispensable step on the way towards the unfolding of modern subjectivity
whereas he sees in modern irony an over-stretched and hence unjustified
subjectivity.18 Under these circumstances, it becomes all the more impor-
tant for Kierkegaard to dif ferentiate between these two forms of irony.
Kierkegaard thus suggests a major dif ference separating the Socratic and the
early Romantic ‘type’ of irony. According to Kierkegaard, Socrates, through
the absolute negativity expressed in irony, alludes to something positive.
Socrates calls into question an actual and obsolete reality but through this
negation indicates that there is something new to come, though it might
still be undefined. In contrast, romantic irony remains pure and absolute
negativity insofar as it negates not only the actual historical reality but the
historical reality as a whole to make room for a new, self-created reality.19
Thus Kierkegaard can maintain his claim that the (romantic) ironist’s reality
loses its factuality and that there is henceforth nothing left in the world as a
function of which the ironist would or could define himself.20 He therefore
has at his disposal a double freedom which consists of the possibility to
poetically create himself and the possibility to poetically create the world
surrounding him. In his dissertation, Kierkegaard summarises this aspect
as follows: the ironist
18 See Begrif f Ironie, 281 (SV XIII 347), where he describes romantic irony as ‘eine
überspannte Subjektivität, eine zweite Potenz der Subjektivität. Daraus ersieht man
zugleich, daß diese Ironie durchaus unberechtigt gewesen ist’.
19 Unlike in Socratic irony, ‘[ging] es nicht darum, ein Moment der gegebenen
Wirklichkeit durch ein neues Moment zu verneinen und zu verdrängen; vielmehr
wurde die gesamte geschichtliche Wirklichkeit verneint, um Platz zu schaf fen für
eine selbstgeschaf fene Wirklichkeit.’ (Begrif f Ironie, 280). See also Feger, 373: ‘War
die sokratische Ironie noch dem Absoluten unter der Form des Nichts verbunden,
kehrt die romantische Ironie dieses Verhältnis um und verschreibt sich nun einer
Wirklichkeit, die sie unter die Form des Nichts stellt.’
20 This would thus just be the next step after showing ‘the impossibility of positing
any fixed centres at all’ which M. Finlay stresses as one of the main characteristics of
Schlegel’s ironic writing. See Finlay, 265.
does not only poeticize himself, he also poeticizes what surrounds him. Proudly with-
drawn the ironist stands there and lets […] the people pass by and does not find any
appropriate company. Thus, he continuously is in contradiction with the reality he
belongs to. That is why it is important for him to suspend what is at the origin of
reality, what regulates and carries it, to suspend thus ethics and morality. […] For
the ironist, all that exists in the given reality has only poetic validity in that he lives
poetically. However, if the given reality loses thus its validity, the reason for this is
not that it is a reality that has lost its legitimacy and thus would have to be replaced
by a truer reality but rather that no reality will ever be appropriate for him.21
According to Kierkegaard, for the modern ironist, reality as such is always

deficient. By principle, there is no appropriate reality for him, neither for
him as a Self, nor for the world surrounding him as his world. This feeling of
an insuf ficiency of reality that Kierkegaard attributes to the modern ironist
is the grounding for the ironist’s detachment from reality which confers him
the freedom to use the given reality for his poeticizing. What is remarkable
in the passage quoted above is that Kierkegaard connects the notion of
‘ethics’ with the notion of ‘reality’. If one is to follow this connection, the
suspension of reality in poetization must logically and inevitably result in a
suspension of the ethical. One can thus observe a double dichotomization
introduced by Kierkegaard. On the one hand, reality is opposed to possibil-
ity and, on the other hand, the ethical is antithetical to the aesthetic. Thus,
we find reality paired with the ethical and possibility with the aesthetic
– which implies an insurmountable incompatibility between ethics and
aesthetics, as insurmountable as, in Kierkegaard’s understanding, is the gap
21 ‘[Der Ironiker] dichtet nicht bloß sich selbst, er dichtet auch seine Umwelt. Stolz
verschlossen in sich selbst steht der Ironiker da, er lässt […] die Menschen an sich
vorüberziehen und findet keine ihm angemessene Gesellschaft. Dadurch gerät er nun
fortwährend in Widerstreit mit der Wirklichkeit, der er zugehört. Deshalb wird es
ihm wichtig, dasjenige, das da das die Wirklichkeit begründende ist, das sie ordnet
und trägt, nämlich Moral und Sittlichkeit, zu suspendieren. … Alles in der gegebenen
Wirklichkeit Bestehende hat für den Ironiker lediglich poetische Giltigkeit; denn er
lebt ja poetisch. Wenn nun aber die gegebene Wirklichkeit dergestalt für den Ironiker
ihre Giltigkeit verliert, so liegt dies nicht daran, daß sie eine überlebte Wirklichkeit
wäre, die von einer wahreren abgelöst werden muß, sondern daran, daß de[m] Ironiker
[…] keine Wirklichkeit die angemessene ist.’ (Begrif f Ironie, 289, my translation.)
between reality and possibility.22 This double antagonism results in the

evanescence of all actual (ethical) criteria of value for the Kierkegaardian
ironist insofar as the ironist incarnates the aesthetic stage and thus mere
possibility. If there is no reality, there can be no ethics. The evanescence
of moral values is thus inevitable if one follows the argumentation of B
in Either/Or; but if this is the case, this equally implies the possibility or
even the necessity of an arbitrary redefinition of values. An analysis of how
the Kierkegaardian aesthetician redefines value criteria would necessarily
conclude that this redefinition represents, basically, a revalorization of all
values, not in the least less radical than that which Nietzsche would call
for some fifty years later. It is highly interesting to note that the ironist’s
revalorization, in parallel and in absolute concord with Nietzsche’s pro-
gram, cannot mean the creation of new moral values.23 Instead, it has to be
aesthetic categories that will replace the dismissed ethical values. According
to the Kierkegaardian logic, this is necessarily and inevitably the case in that
ethical values always necessitate reality, a reality that the ironist lacks. The
literary mise en pratique of this dichotomy thus requires that the aestheti-
cian, in his poeticizing and in his actions, no longer follows the traditional
ethical categories. In fact, he replaces the moral values of ‘good’ and ‘bad’
with new, aesthetic categories: the antagonistic pair of ‘interesting’ and
‘boring.’24 The question of what is interesting constitutes then the leitmo-
tif of the Seducer’s Diary as illustrates a remark the aesthetician A makes
22 On Kierkegaard’s conception of the relation between possibility and reality see Hüsch,
‘Die menschliche Existenz im Spannungsfeld von Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit.
Überlegungen zum Möglichkeitsbegrif f bei Søren Kierkegaard mit ständiger
Rücksicht auf Entweder/Oder.’
23 In fact, Nietzsche speaks in favour of a new aesthetic approach in the tradition of
antiquity. For him, the arts have to accomplish what the ancient Greeks already had
a perfect mastery of but which has been lost through morality: ‘Oh diese Griechen!
Sie verstanden sich darauf zu leben: dazu thut Noth, tapfer bei der Oberf läche, der
Falte, der Haut stehen zu bleiben, den Schein anzubeten … Diese Griechen waren
oberf lächlich – aus Tiefe.’ (Nietzsche, ‘Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft’, 352)
24 The concept of the ‘interesting’ is of course a concept that is somewhat à la mode
in the nineteenth century and plays an important role also in Schlegel’s philos-
ophy. See Ostermann, ‘Das Interessante als Element ästhetischer Authentizität’
about Johannes the seducer: ‘With a keenly developed sense for what is
interesting in life, he had known how to find it’ (Either/Or, 248).
The consequences of this revalorization of values and of the replac-
ing of ethical categories by aesthetical ones become most apparent where
the ethical and the aesthetic ‘collide’. If traditionally – one might think
namely of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative25 – we learn that we
shall never regard a human as a pure means but always as an end in itself,
the reader discovers in the Seducer’s Diary what it looks like when the
ethical is demoted to second place. Here, Johannes the seducer uses the
ethical for the sake of a perfectly poetical seduction. Ethical behaviour and
values become a kind of ‘modelling clay’ at the service of an ever better
distillation and shaping of the interesting. For the sake of the aesthetic,
Johannes thus violates ever too willingly the traditional priority given to
the ethical. He resorts to the ethical only and exclusively with the aim
to increase the seductive power of the aesthetic. To put it dif ferently: he
does not subordinate the aesthetic to the absolute claim of the ethical but
holds the aesthetic as of absolute value and subordinates the ethical to the
aesthetic in a quest for the ultimately interesting. In parallel with this rela-
tivization of the ethical, Johannes dissolves the traditional connection of
the notions of ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’. Johannes explicitly defines the ethical
– and thus the good – as aesthetically inferior and notes: ‘The ethical is just
as boring in life as it is in learning. What a dif ference! Beneath the sky of
the aesthetic everything is light, pleasant and f leeting; when ethics come
along everything becomes hard, angular, and unending ennui.’ (Either/Or,
305) What is light, ironic, ephemeral, interesting is thus opposed to the
seriousness required by reality. What from an ethical standpoint would be
considered ‘bad’ can nevertheless fulfil the criterion of being ‘interesting’,
and aesthetic value is thus disconnected from goodness.
From the ethicist B’s perspective, A and Johannes’ orientation, which
aims at identifying what is aesthetically interesting in existence, is an
and Oergel, Culture and Identity. Historicity in German Literature and Thought
1770–1815, 29f f.
25 See Kant, Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 414–416.
orientation that is perfectly possible. He does not deny, then, that remain-
ing in the aesthetic stage is feasible, but what he tries to put forward is the
fact that A’s existence will reveal itself as essentially unsatisfying from a
transcendental perspective. He goes so far as to say that an existence which
follows the criterion of the interesting must be, ultimately, an existence in
despair. The quest for what is interesting and the poetic creation of the
own Self, which detach the individual from transcendental embeddedness,
signify at the same time an existence in the present, thus lacking narratabil-
ity over the whole lifespan. Such narratability, however, is indispensable
if one is to speak about ‘personality’. Without an identity, acquired in a
life lived in reality and in accordance with a somehow homogenous being
in the world, the construction of a Self, of a personality is impossible. By
trying to poetically create himself, the ironist finally fails to become who
he ought to become, he fails to seize himself as the one he is. His personal-
ity disintegrates in both arbitrariness and lacking of necessity.26 These two
aspects – the replacing of ethical principles by aesthetic principles and the
loss of personality, of one’s own Self – are thus interdependent and ulti-
mately lead to an erosion of meaningfulness.
Gerhard Schulze’s ‘Erlebnisgesellschaft’
The question of meaningfulness connects the Kierkegaardian ref lections

on the aesthetic existence to those Gerhard Schulze develops in his study
Die Erlebnisgesellschaft – Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart. Although depart-
ing from quite a dif ferent starting point, Schulze comes to astonishingly
similar observations and unveils a fundamental crisis of meaningfulness
in modernity. According to Schulze, at the origin of the erosion of mean-
26 See ‘Equilibrum between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of
Personality’ (Either/Or, 475–590).
ingfulness lies the phenomenon of an ‘aesthetization of everyday life’27 he

holds to be one of the predominant characteristics of modernity.
As has been shown above, Kierkegaard emphasized a redefinition of
the principal categories applied to the human world view which goes hand
in hand with the idea of poeticizing, of aestheticizing existence. ‘Good’ and
‘bad’, the central categories of the ethical existence, are replaced as references
of value by ‘interesting’ and ‘boring’. This redefinition is paralleled by posit-
ing the aesthetic as the absolute and thus according only a relative role to the
ethical. In a very similar way, this idea of an interpretational grid orientated
to the aesthetic is described in Schulze’s Erlebnisgesellschaft. If Kierkegaard
linked this orientation to the category of the ‘interesting’, the same phenom-
enon finds its expression in what Schulze calls Erlebnisorientierung,28 the
quest for exciting experiences. If there is a major dif ference between Schulze
and Kierkegaard, it primarily concerns the derivation of the aesthetic which,
in Schulze’s case, finds its starting point not in a philosophical-dialectical
opposition with the ethical, but rather in a historical-sociological phe-
nomenology. In fact, Schulze opposes the (aesthetic) Erlebnisgesellschaft
to a traditional Überlebensgesellschaft (society of survival), a society char-
acterized by the struggle for the most basic material goods, in other words:
the traditional type of society primarily preoccupied with providing its
members with what is indispensable for mere survival. If Kierkegaard and
Schulze depart thus from very dif ferent perspectives, it is important to note
that these dif ferences by no means imply an incompatibility of the two
approaches, the categories of the ‘ethical’ in Kierkegaard and of ‘survival’
in Schulze only designating dif ferent epistemological horizons; whereas
Kierkegaard considers the question of meaningfulness from the perspective
of the individual in his or her Geworfenheit to use a Heideggerian term,
Schulze tries to understand the same phenomenon at the societal level. It
is crucial to stress that the Kierkegaardian idea of an opposition between
the aesthetic and the ethical does not suggest any kind of ‘original’ ethical
society from which the aesthetic society has deviated. Kierkegaard does
27 Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 33.

28 Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 34.
not posit that societies have been ‘better’ in the past and have lost a moral
orientation in the process of modernization. In fact, in his conception
of the aesthetic existence, Kierkegaard is not preoccupied with societal
phenomena. Instead, what only and exclusively interests him is the indi-
vidual. The dif ference between the aesthetic and the ethical stage is thus
a dif ference at the level of the individual; and according to Kierkegaard,
the individual’s existence is originally always, qua existing, an aesthetic
one. The possibility of an ethical existence occurs only a posteriori through
ref lectivity. Ref lectivity indicates possibilities of existence and thus the choice
between an aesthetic and an ethic way of existing; but ref lectivity always
comes second, that is after the individual’s mere existence which, as such,
is aesthetical. There is thus no idealising of a former, presumably ‘better’
society but an exclusive focus on the individual who finds himself facing
a choice, the absolute Either – Or introduced in the opposition of the
aesthetician A and the ethicist B. Kierkegaard criticizes the aesthetic exist-
ence – or rather has it be criticized through B –, only insofar as remaining
in the aesthetic stage after one has, through ref lection, access to the ethical
stage, is considered as leading to guiltiness, as the individual thus refuses
to become who he ought to be.29 However, this guiltiness is guiltiness
only from the ethicist’s point of view and only after the aesthetician has
had a glance of the ethical. The Kierkegaardian focus on the development
of the individual and on individual responsibility is therefore not at all
in contradiction with Schulze’s phenomenology of society, but seizes the
same phenomenon from a dif ferent angle.
To come back to Schulze’s conceptualizing of an Erlebnisgesellschaft,
his main thesis is then that a distinction can be made between a traditional
type of society, which is oriented toward survival, and the contemporary
occidental societies, characterized by Erlebnisorientierung. Schulze wants
thus to stress the fact that in modern Western societies, societal life is no
longer mainly a struggle for mere material survival, and that the focus on
survival which has lost its importance thanks to the relative richness of
modern occidental societies has been replaced by a new orientation which
29 See Either/Or, 475.

is primarily aesthetic. Schulze illustrates this reorientation that has taken

place in the West through a very telling formula. The reigning imperative
of modernity, according to Schulze, is henceforth: ‘Erlebe Dein Leben’.30
His explication of this new categorical imperative shows great similarity
with what Kierkegaard observes for romantic poetology when he criticizes
that the poetization of existence leads inevitably to the abandoning of the
quest for a ‘good’ life in the ethical sense to the benefit of the quest for
an ‘interesting’ life. The idea of an auto-creation of the Self is ref lected in
Schulze’s remark that life itself has become an ‘Erlebnisprojekt’:
Life itself has become the project of experiencing excitement (Erlebnisprojekt). More

and more, the everyday choice between possibilities is based upon the degree of posi-
tive experience attributed to the alternative ultimately selected: consumer goods,
[…], partners, habitations, children or childlessness.31
Thus, the essential choices in life follow an aesthetic pattern. However, as it

is the case in Kierkegaard’s ref lections on the aesthetic stage, a problem of
meaning is also apparent in Schulze’s study. If Kierkegaard lets his ethicist
state that a life oriented to the aesthetical cannot be anything but despair,
Schulze evokes the question of meaning through a rhetorical question:
‘In what respect should it be dif ficult’ asks Schulze, ‘to have a good life if
one has suf ficient resources?’, before answering himself: ‘One thinks that
Erlebnisorientierung marks the beginning of the end of all dif ficulties. In
truth, the dif ficulties continue on a dif ferent level. What is threatened is
30 This formula is dif ficult to translate as there is no English word covering the meaning
of the German ‘erleben’. It could be translated as: ‘Make an event out of your life’,
which goes beyond ‘enjoy your life’, a formula that does not include the aspect of an
aesthetic mise en scène of life.
31 ‘Das Leben schlechthin ist zum Erlebnisprojekt geworden. Zunehmend ist das
alltägliche Wählen zwischen Möglichkeiten durch den bloßen Erlebniswert der
gewählten Alternative motiviert: Konsumartikel, … Berufe, Partner, Wohnsituationen,
Kind oder Kinderlosigkeit.’ (Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 13) All English versions of
Schulze’s text are my own translations.
no longer life itself but the meaning of life.’32 Schulze insinuates the same
fundamental problem which shines through in the writings of the aestheti-
cian A – first and foremost the relativity of that upon which the aestheti-
cian as well as the modern man observed by Schulze build their existence,
insofar as the interesting remains necessarily an immanent category and
cannot relate to anything transcendental. Hence, one could claim with
the ethicist B in Either/Or that the aesthetician as well as the man who
chases an eventful life, from a transcendental perspective, commit a logical
‘error’ which has existential consequences: they posit something relative
as an absolute.33
Every attempt to call into question what has been inaugurated as
values of reference in an aesthetic thought system is therefore potentially
an existential undermining of meaning as it brings to light that every deci-
sion taken on the basis of that same value system could always also have
been taken dif ferently. It is not unimportant to note that the aesthetician
himself is perfectly aware of this dif ficulty and therefore always aims at
undermining his own maxims and principles by ironizing them in his essays
and ref lections and by emphasizing that his propositions are completely
arbitrary.34 Through these remarks he shows a greater lucidity than the
32 ‘Was soll schon schwierig daran sein, sich ein schönes Leben zu machen, wenn man
halbwegs die Ressourcen dafür hat? … Man meint, Erlebnisorientierung sei der
Anfang vom Ende aller Schwierigkeiten. In Wahrheit setzen sich die Schwierigkeiten
auf einer neuen Ebene fort. Bedroht ist nicht mehr das Leben, sondern sein Sinn’
(Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 68).
33 If this is one of the main aspects of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Schlegel, Schulze prefers
to remain almost too explicitly implicit on this point for the reader not to make this
link himself.
34 See for example his ‘ecstatic lecture’: ‘My practical wisdom is easy to understand,
for I have only one principle, which is not even my starting point’ (Either/Or, 54).
Or see the following ref lection: ‘All classic works … rank equally high because each
one ranks infinitely high. Nevertheless, if one tries to introduce some order into this
procession, it is evident that one can base it on nothing essential’ (ibid., 65), which
undermines the whole development of the following argument trying to ‘prove’ that
Mozart’s Don Giovanni has to be ranked highest.
modern aesthetician analyzed in Schulze’s study who is unaware of the

contradictions inherent in his world view. As the criterion of the ‘interest-
ing’ always remains a relative criterion, it must finally capitulate before the
countless possibilities it has to choose from.
There is, then, another major – and perfectly unexpected – dif ficulty
that occurs in an existence aspiring to the ‘interesting’. The choice between
countless options of only relative value finally reveals that man, without
sustainable criteria, does not even know – cannot even know – what he
should want. All decisions of life disintegrate given the arbitrariness they
are based on. All decisions become ‘equi-valent’, in the word’s most literal
meaning, when confronted with the inf lationary multiplication of pos-
sibilities, which, according to Schulze, are a main characteristic of moder-
nity.35 In the same sense, Helmut Vetter summarizes with regards to the
Kierkegaardian aesthetician: ‘As soon as he [the aesthetician] has made a
choice, the other possibility comes into focus; if he chooses the latter, it
will appear indif ferent in the face of another possibility he could yet seize.
This equivalence, however, causes ennui.’36 Schulze confirms this diagnosis
in his analysis of the modern Warenwelt, the world of merchandise:
The proliferation of the number of symbols is already the sign of collective disap-
pointment. […] The overdose of new objects generates ennui, what is exceptional
becomes banal, the symbols f loat by too fast, leaving us unable to construct deeply
felt significations for them.37
35 See Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 54, where Schulze stresses the ‘Vermehrung der
Möglichkeiten’ as a major trait of modernity.
36 ‘Hat sich der Ästhetiker für die eine Wahl entschieden, drängt sich die Möglichkeit
der anderen auf, wählt er diese, erscheint sie ihm gleichgültig angesichts einer weiteren,
noch zu ergreifenden. Die Gleichgültigkeit ruft aber Langeweile hervor’ (Vetter, 57;
emphazis by Vetter). The English translation of Vetter is my own.
37 ‘Das Wuchern der Zeichenmenge ist bereits ein Ergebnis kollektiver Enttäuschung.
… Die Überdosis des Neuen lässt Langeweile aufkommen, das Ungewöhnliche wird
alltäglich, die Zeichen treiben schneller an uns vorbei, als wir intensiv empfundene
Bedeutungen dazu konstruieren könnten’ (Schulze, 117).
If Schulze does not go so far as to consider the necessity of a transcenden-

tal anchorage – which would be beyond the scope of his approach – he
nevertheless shows a undeniable proximity to a philosophical perspective
as stresses Gerard Visser,38 and like Kierkegaard, comes to the conclusion
that an orientation towards aesthetic aspects bears the risk of the increas-
ing feeling of meaninglessness.
Conclusion
To conclude, I would like to suggest a two-fold summary. First, one could

say that in Either/Or Søren Kierkegaard ironically puts into practice early
romantic poetology through the construction of the aesthetic stage and
first and foremost through the poetic creation of aesthetic seduction. The
romantic dream of a poeticised, more ‘real’ and thus also more appealing,
reality is transformed into cynical aestheticism. It is clear that Kierkegaard
does not do justice to Schlegel in his interpretation. Rather than represent-
ing the idea of a progressive universal poetry as the attempt to come to a
more complete grasp of reality, as was Schlegel’s intention,39 Kierkegaard
turns it into the betrayal of an aesthetically deficient reality. This distor-
tion of early romantic theory can be explained through a somewhat biased
reading that allows Kierkegaard to maintain the claim of a fundamental
gap between poetry and reality, which he needs to be able to dialectically
oppose the aesthetic stage to the ethical – and later – to the religious stage.
This antithetical classification of the ethical and the aesthetic is purely
Kierkegaardian and by no means a conclusion that one must necessarily
38 Visser correctly notes that Schulze clearly uses the term ‘Existenz’ in a philosophical
sense. See Visser, 273.
39 See Oergel, 78f f.
draw from romantic theory.40 However, this injustice seems excusable in

that it allows him to bring to light the main point he wants to put forward.
Kierkegaard sees in the result of romantic ref lection a perfect illustration
for the metaphysical Haltlosigkeit of pure immanence.41
Secondly, it seems possible to conclude that in a certain way the
Kierkegaardian criticism of romantic ref lection anticipates what has since
become – in a trivialized version – a predominant trait of modern occi-
dental culture. Foucault, for example, stresses the eminent impact of early
German Romantic thought on twentieth-century society. Thus he notes
that the Romanticism of Jena can be understood ‘in substance, as a particu-
larly lucid formulation of a way of thinking largely dif fused for two centuries
or even two centuries and a half. We think like the romantics.’42
Most probably, Friedrich Schlegel would not have been all too happy
with this evolution, insofar as the trivialization of a very complex, multi-
layered, and overtly elitist thought brings along a world that most likely
does not correspond at all to his vision of aestheticized reality. However,
this does not invalidate Foucault’s conviction, which is also confirmed by
Schulze who shows in his study that the attempt of a mise en scène of one’s
own existence, as exemplified by Kierkegaard in the Seducer’s Diary, has
40 Twentieth-century authors such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (‘Ethik und Ästhetik sind

eins’, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, proposition 6.421) and Robert Musil (‘Ich habe
von Jugend an das Ästhetische als Ethik betrachtet’, Tagebücher, 777) for instance
take very dif ferent paths to dissolve the dif ference between aesthetics and ethics.
41 Kierkegaard does of course neither take into account that the early romantic project,
even though it stresses that the act of poetic ref lection has to be immanent, still
maintains a paradoxical link to transcendence (see Feger, Die umgekehrte Täuschung,
383/84: ‘In ihrem Bestreben, den bedeutungslegenden Akt der poetischen Ref lexion
rein immanent zu halten und ihn auch in keiner Weise interpretativ zu überformen,
dennoch aber durch ihre paradoxe Form einen Bezug zur Transzendenz aufrecht zu
erhalten, markieren die Frühromantiker einen Widerspruch, der immer wieder in
der Schwebe gehalten und fortgeschrieben wird.’), nor the fact that Schegel himself
came to very similar conclusions at a later point.
42 Romanticism is ‘en substance, une formulation singulièrement lucide d’un mode de
pensée qui est très largement répandu depuis deux siècles, voire deux siècles et demi.
Nous pensons comme les romantiques’ (Foucault, 202).
outgrown the closed circle of a social elite and become a Lebensprojekt

for mass society. This would also explain the fact that in modernity the
ethical, if it wants to be seen or heard, has to wear an aesthetic disguise
to appear like the multitude of seductive products of fered to the erlebnis-
orientated consumer. However, if this is the case, we should not neglect
the fact that the ethical has a major competitive disadvantage which is
explicitly evoked by Johannes in his diary: The ethical, considered through
aesthetic categories, is boring. This brings me, in conclusion, to a warning
pronounced by the Ethicist B, which seems to express a rather clear sighted
perception. He writes: ‘It takes much ethical seriousness not to consider
Evil in aesthetical categories.’43
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—— ‘Über die Bedeutung der Ironie bei Sören Kierkegaard mit ständiger Rücksicht
auf Entweder/Oder’, Conceptus 89/90 (2006), 105–130.
Liessmann, K. P. Ästhetik de Verführung. Kierkegaards Konstruktion der Erotik aus
dem Geiste der Kunst (Wien: Beltz Athenäum, 2001).
Marquard, Odo. ‘Kant und die Wende zur Ästhetik’, Zeitschrift für philosophische
Forschung 14 (1962), 231–243.
Oergel, M. Culture and Identity. Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770–
1815 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006).
Ostermann, E. ‘Das Interessante als Element ästhetischer Authentizität’, in J. Berg,
H.-O. Hügel, H. Kurzenberger, eds, Authentizität als Darstellung (Hildesheim:
Universität Hildesheim, 1997), 197–215.
Pattison, G. Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith (London: SPCK, 1997).
Pieper, A. Sören Kierkegaard (München: Beck, 2000).
Röttgers, K. ‘Lügen(-)Texte oder nur Menschen’, in K. Röttgers and M. Schmitz-
Emans, eds, Dichter lügen (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 2001), 37–60.
Schulze, G. Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am
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Untergangs (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005).
NICHOLAS SAUL
The Dark Side of Modernity: Wilhelm Bölsche,

Darwinism, Evolutionary Aesthetics and Spiritualism
This chapter takes up one thread of the discussion about modernism,
Silvio Vietta’s theory of aesthetic modernity as a macro-epoch, which
begins not (as conventional wisdom suggests) around 1900, but 1750. It
thus encompasses Enlightenment, Romanticism, and several varieties of
Realism as well as what we normally consider Modernist.1 Our major
cognitive interest is however less theory than the literary achievement of
a neglected modernist, Wilhelm Bölsche. In particular my paper breaks a
lance for the aesthetic quality of his novel The Noonday Goddess (1891)2
and attempts to reposition it in the modernist tradition. In what follows
I recall who Bölsche was and what he wrote, outline his Darwinian evo-
lutionary aesthetic, make explicit the definitions of literary modernism
here deployed, and finally focus from that angle in detail on The Noonday
Goddess. I argue not only for its relation to Schiller (surely the punctum sali-
ens of the modern movement), but also for The Noonday Goddess to be seen
in aesthetic terms as a hybrid novel. As such, contrary to received wisdom,
it transcends Naturalism, displays in addition to typical Naturalist features
many characteristic style features of full-blown fin-de-siècle aestheticism
and so signals Bölsche’s imminent move in that direction. This currently
non-canonical work thus merits more scholarly attention.3
A fact to start: Willi Bölsche (1861–1939) sold no fewer than 2.7 mil-
lion books during his writing career,4 which must place him near the top
1 See Vietta, Literarische Moderne.

2 Die Mittagsgöttin. Cited from the 3rd edn, 1905.
3 Vide infra a list of major scholarship on Die Mittagsgöttin.
4 See Kelly, 190–191.
234 NICHOLAS SAUL
of the absolute best- and longseller lists of the day. A committed monis-
tic Darwinist, Bölsche made his name in the grand German tradition of
scientific popularization inaugurated by Carl Vogt and Ludwig Büchner.
Darwinism was in several f lavours surely the most powerful cultural as well
as scientific force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany,
the dominant discourse in the public sphere.5 Demonized as a socialistic
ideology by Rudolf Virchow in controversy with Ernst Haeckel in 1877,6
Darwin and Darwinism had to be read under the table in Kulturkampf
Germany, for the teaching of biology in Prussian schools was banned.
And this is just what Bölsche did in Cologne, like his later friends the
Hauptmanns and Alfred Ploetz in Breslau and the Harts in Münster. He
became the friend and ally of the monistic anti-Pope Ernst Haeckel in
October 1892, and Haeckel thought of him as the chief popularizer after
himself of what became the monistic doctrine. If Haeckel is of course
known for his hugely popular Natural History of Creation (1868) and best-
selling Riddles of the Universe (1899),7 Bölsche is perhaps best known for
his extraordinary Love and Life in Nature (1898–1902).8 This presents
the Darwinian evolutionary history of nature in three characteristic ways:
first, as a teleological process tending towards increasing complexity and
perfection both physiological and psychological; second, in an argument
derived from Darwin’s sexual selection, as a process motivated by and
culminating in erotic love; third, as a process best expounded in aesthetic
discourse, exploiting figures like prosopopœia and metaphor to promote
a consciousness of harmonious totality bordering on religious experience.
By way of illustration, its first chapter leaps from the collective orgasmic
love-death of the mayf ly, to the annual mass sex orgy and self-sacrifice
of herrings of f the Norwegian coast (Love and Life, I, 20), to Raphaël’s
5 See on the prestige of Darwinian discourse in late Wilhelmine culture and society
Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics.
6 See on this Virchow, Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft; Haeckel’s ripostes from the same
year are ‘Über die heutige Entwickelungslehre’ and ‘Freie Wissenschaft und freie
Lehre’, in E. H., Gemeinverständliche Vorträge.
7 Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschichte; Die Welträthsel.
8 Das Liebesleben in der Natur. Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe.
The Dark Side of Modernity 235
Madonna and Child as the present culmination of the evolution of love
in its struggle with death (I, 10–43) – all intended poetically to construct
that familiar oceanic fin-de-siècle sense of the fundamental unity of nature
and culture and inner identity of all things.9
Perhaps less well known is Bölsche’s other life as a literary writer. This
was never less Darwinian than his popular scientific writings. Bölsche was
a member of Durch!, the early modernist theory group around the Harts
and others. He moved in 1888 to Friedrichshagen on the Müggelsee at the
southeastern periphery of Berlin, where arose a bohemian writers’ colony.
When he went there Bölsche was already the author of two novels, Paulus
(1885) and The Enchantment of King Arpus (1887), both f luent produc-
tions in the seriously outdated idiom of the Wilhelmine historical novel.
The Noonday Goddess (1891), as we shall see, was a dif ferent kettle of fish
altogether. But Bölsche was in addition to his other gifts a well-qualified
literary critic. He edited the Freie Bühne with success from August 1890 to
September 1893, but in 1887 had already published perhaps the most signifi-
cant work of Darwinian literary theory in Germany before Max Nordau:
The Natural-Scientific Foundations of Literature.10 Most important for our
cognitive interest, this poses an issue central to the modernism debate then
and still virulent in scholarly debate: the legitimation of aesthetic discourse
in a culture dominated by the discourse of natural science.
In brief, Bölsche’s first move here is a frank concession. He recognizes
without further ado ‘the position of immense power occupied by modern
natural sciences’11 in contemporary German culture, and advises support-
ers of a more realistic aesthetic in place of poetic realism and historicism
to find their platform in ‘consensus with the natural sciences’.12 That does
mean the experimental novel in the style of Zola (7), if only to the extent
that like other German naturalists he rejects Zola’s a priori pessimism and
9 On this the frankly unsympathetic Kolkenbrock-Netz, 252–285; and the even less
sympathetic Gebhard, 330–428.
10 See W. B., Naturwissenschaftliche Grundlagen der Poesie.
11 ‘die gewaltige Machtstellung der modernen Naturwissenschaften’ (Bölsche, Natur
wissenschaftliche Grundlagen, 1).
12 ‘Fühlung mit den Naturwissenschaften’, 1.
236 NICHOLAS SAUL
milieu aesthetic of grime. The novelist must know scientific theories and
facts – in particular evolutionary theory, the deterministic laws of physi-
cal and psychological inheritance, the nature of the psyche as a relation of
material molecules in terms of the law of psychophysical parallelism (31),
and the origin of all beauty in Darwinian sexual selection. Thus he should
invest his imaginative resources as thought experiments in support of the
human dimension of that larger, natural-scientific cognitive enterprise (25).
Art has a strictly Darwinian purpose. Just as there is something in those
animal species which adapt physiologically and behaviourally to condi-
tions better than others and are therefore successfully selected (55), so in
human life in particular new ideas arise and fight in public discourse for
survival (56). The vehicle of this process are cultural media and literature
in particular. Here, then, Bölsche postulates something like Dawkins’s self-
ish gene or, better, selfish meme. Ideas battle for survival and reproduce
independently of their authors (56).
Now this is interesting for two reasons. It anticipates today’s debate,
launched by Daniel Dennett and conducted by Joseph Carroll, Karl Eibl13
and others, about the value of ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’14 for the practice
and study of literature. If that idea is a universal, it must relate to litera-
ture. Yet its utility is dif ficult to define and has still to of fer more than
commonplace insights into literary meaning (The Iliad and Pride and
Prejudice as rehearsals of mating rituals). But Bölsche’s essay is also inter-
esting, because it posits in nineteenth-century avant-garde terms one of
the chief issues in aesthetic modernism: the legitimation of the social and
cultural role of literature in what Werner von Siemens defined as the age
of science. Now Bölsche seems in The Natural-Scientific Foundations of
Literature to abandon the sacred received doctrine of aesthetic autonomy,
recognize science as master discourse and designate literature as its servant.
But there is more to it. He is in fact keen to reserve some cognitive added
value for the aesthetic mode. Hence, curiously, we find him talking in his
13 See Carroll, Literary Darwinism; Eibl, Animal poeta. Forthcoming, with an overview
of the discussion: Saul and James, eds, Evolution of Literature.
14 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.
section on Darwinian evolution, of the ‘Genie’ (‘genius’) of animals which

adapt innovatively (Natural-Scientific Foundations, 54–55.) to survive; and
of course it is precisely this ‘Genie’ which expresses itself too in human
intellectual and medial evolutionary struggle. Clearly Bölsche, despite his
blank assertion of the death of metaphysics (48) is here smuggling into the
process of evolution an idealist notion: the intellectualization of matter.
Elsewhere in the same essay we find him suggesting disingenuously that
our perceptual organs are adapted to function only in particular way (he is
thinking of Helmholtz on the eye),15 so that we must recognize that natural
scientific cognition is not the whole truth (30f f.). ‘Poesie’, however, by con-
trast to natural science ‘constantly (has) the whole, the universal, in view’,
and so, provided it does not contradict established science, can speculate
‘behind the physical world’.16 This, clearly, is something which would have
appalled Darwin: the trace in modern, exact natural science of Romantic
Naturphilosophie. Despite Bölsche leaving the historical novel behind and
evolving a radical Darwinian realism, it will leave a big footprint behind
in The Noonday Goddess.
As for the intellectual framework used to treat Bölsche’s texts, I follow
Vietta, who sees modernity as manifesting some or all of a cluster of defining
characteristics: 1) the rise in the late eighteenth century to absolute cogni-
tive authority of secular reason and its corollary, the claim of cognitive and
ethical authority for the subject; 2) the dialectic of wanted and unwanted
consequences thereof, especially the alienation from itself of the feeling
subject and the subjugation of physical nature by instrumental reason (mass
urban society, technology); 3) immediately conditional thereon, the yearn-
ing for a secular religion or utopianism and the rise of art – Vietta’s ‘aesthetic
modernism’ – as its vehicle, with its own, corresponding principle of total
autonomy and increasingly esoteric referentiality. Aesthetic modernism,
then, is seen here as the counter-discourse of rationalist modernity and
co-eval with it, both together expressing the inner, conf lictual structure of
15 See Helmholtz’s classic texts of psychophysiology: ‘Optisches ueber Malerei’ and

‘Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung’ (1878).
16 ‘(hat) stets das Ganze, das Allgemeine im Auge’; ‘hinter der physischen Welt’ (33).
238 NICHOLAS SAUL
our centreless, fragmented modern culture. As for textual interpretation,

I define the modern through rupture, innovation, paradox. Gumbrecht
noted long since the existence as it were of a pre-modern concept of the
modern, which considered the modern merely to be the latest emergence of
a smooth, continuous f low of intellectual or cultural development, as a wave
from the sea.17 That definition is superseded by today’s concept of radical
rupture, where the modern is defined by the leap, the unbridgeable gap
between now and then. Thus I follow not only the emphasis Grimminger
places on corresponding techniques of the found, montage and semantic
resistance,18 but also Japp’s more explicit notion of the modern as the radical
rejection of all normative aesthetics and installation as highest value of the
new or shocking (or sudden, etc.).19 There is thus a tradition of modernist
literature, which however consists paradoxically in its constitutive tradi-
tionlessness, its discontinuous continuity (etc.). Perhaps Japp’s strongest
move is his recognition of modernism’s fundamental self-ref lexivity and
imperative to experiment in received language – intertextually, then, in
allusive, creatively destructive, constitutively provisional works.
And so to The Noonday Goddess. This has intellectual and aesthetic
merits which are rarely recognized20 and is too often reduced to a creed
of banal materialistic naturalist scepticism. The novel is a fictive autobiog-
raphy, the exploration of a dramatic and intellectually sophisticated inner
journey, aimed, with its sensational spiritualist theme, duelling, murder,
suicides and stridently sexualized love interest, at success in the mass market,
but also, as with all the better nineteenth-century writings, of fering the
cultivated reader another level of more aesthetic and philosophical inter-
est. The central figure is a writer by the name of Wilhelm, who bears more
than a passing resemblance to the author, and is exploring in writing recent
experiences which have disconcerted his understanding of self and world,
in order to make new sense of them. It is, then, an experimental (re-) con-
17 Gumbrecht, ‘Modern, Modernität, Moderne’.

18 Grimminger, ‘Aufstand der Dinge’.
19 Japp, Literatur und Modernität.
20 See the otherwise instructive works of Pytlik, Okkultismus und Moderne, and P. P.,
ed., Spiritismus und ästhetische Moderne.
struction of self. Thus it opens with Wilhelm on his thirtieth birthday, at

the symbolic noonday time of his life, taking a balance of its significance
(Noonday Goddess I, 24f.), smoking a lonely cigar on the Oriental sofa of
his tiny fourth-f loor bachelor apartment in Moabit, and searching the
inscrutable arabesque patterns of the smoke as if they could explain the
riddle of his existence (I, 3). Apart from a completed Dr. phil. in biology
and philosophy, he looks a lot like Bölsche. He has a firm friendship with
his Doktorvater, clearly the accepted authority in the natural sciences at the
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, who even writes to congratulate Wilhelm
on this day. (He looks rather like Helmholtz, then of course Rektor.) He
has even forgiven Wilhelm, who is a committed Darwinist (I, 8) and has
great talent for natural science, for abandoning the scholarly career that
beckoned and preferring a successful career as a journalist, specializing both
in the popular science (16) and literature. Although he has an understand-
ing to marry the pale, emblematically named Therese, sister of his friend
Edmund Thäler, there is little passion here. Life is otherwise explained, if
not saturated in significance, by a bleak, possibly Büchnerian version of
Darwinism. His self is but a ‘locus of energy’ (‘Kraftzentrum’), there merely
to energize the f leshly material of his body and generate money for survival
in the struggle for existence (5). The big city, as he views the rising, half-
built tenements from the miniature apartment of Edmund and Therese
on the Schillingstraße, is (in authentically Darwinian imagery) like a vast
structure of coral, or a giant mechanical body built brick on brick like the
cell-on-cell structure of a complex organism (30f.).
Into this receptively bleak psychological environment, as well set up
by Bölsche in Wilhelm in The Noonday Goddess as by any other recognized
author in protagonists of the Bildungsroman tradition (where there is at
least one other Wilhelm), comes the redemptive promise of spiritual-
ism, then an extremely widespread and controversial social phenomenon,
imported into Britain and the Continent from the USA in the 1850s.21
21 See Pytlik (Note 20) and Linse, ‘Der Spiritismus in Deutschland’; also Braungart,
‘Spiritismus und Literatur um 1900. Instructive on the British angle: Owen, The
Darkened Room. Bölsche’s knowledge of spiritualism was very extensive and his
240 NICHOLAS SAUL
Spiritualism is the practice in which mediums (usually women) purport

to have occult powers. No formation is required, indeed mediums more
often than not came from the lower classes, and historians often associate
spiritualism with emancipatory movements. Spiritualists posit a dualistic
universe, the dark or spiritual side of which is however able to communi-
cate with the light side, our empirical-material world. What we think of
as death is an error. On the dark side live the spirits, the souls of our dear
departed, who retain the intellectual form of development attained imme-
diately prior to material death. It is possible for the medium to channel
the spiritual energy of disembodied persons on the other side in various
ways: visible or invisible, physical or psychological. Invisible communica-
tion manifests itself as inner, describable visions, as writing or speech, when
the psyche of the entranced medium is colonized and instrumentalized
by the spirit. Visible, physical communication was far more highly prized,
far more dif ficult and risky. Given the psychophysical commercium mentis
et corporis of human nature, it is possible for spirit to manipulate matter.
Molecules of objects can be as it were thinned out so far, that they may
pass through walls and be reconstituted elsewhere. Or they may be con-
densed, the spiritual energy of the medium and others at the séance being
channelled either to exert inf luence on physical objects (table rapping) or
– most prized of all – manifest as ectoplasm the presence of the lost loved
one. Interruption of the process, for example by scientific investigators, can
be dangerous, since the manifestation depends on drawing the spiritual
f luid as it were hydraulically from the entranced body of the medium. To
break the chain may cause the spirit permanently to escape, so killing the
unfortunate medium. Thus spiritualism is an alternative, unconstituted
religion, with no formal leaders or followers, and an elastic doctrine. Most
importantly, the doctrine is presented as compatible with modern, empiri-
cal, exactly measurable, mechanical, controllable and demonstrable natural
science. In the age of the X-ray and the emerging theory of the identity
sources of spiritualist lore very numerous, but include (qv. Die Mittaggsöttin II, 399)
the anonymous Confessions of a Medium and the neo-Kantian philosopher Schultze,
Grundgedanken des Spiritismus, on which what follows is based.
of matter and energy, the age when philosophers such as Friedrich Albert
Lange pointed to inconsistencies in atomistic materialism and the expan-
sion of the concept of matter,22 spiritualism was able to present itself up to
a point plausibly as the religion of the scientific age. Hence it welcomed
scientific investigation. Mediums readily acquiesced in being tied up with
sealed knots, placed in sacks or locked cages. The prestige of spiritualism
was certainly in 1891 still high inside and outside the scientific community.
Frauds were frequently exposed, notably Henry Slade, who was famously
condemned at London in 1876. (Darwin sent £10 to support the prosecu-
tion.) On the other hand Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the classic
theory of evolution, was a persuaded and unrepentent spiritualist,23 and the
members of the Society for Psychical Research (1882) included FRS William
Crookes, Francis Galton and two leading Germans, the pioneer psycho-
physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner, and the German Wallace, Friedrich
Zöllner, Professor of Astrophysics at Leipzig, author of a theory to explain
Slade’s feats through his access to a postulated fourth dimension of space,
and witness for the defence at his trial.24 Zöllner’s works feature in The
Noonday Goddess.
Back in Berlin, Wilhelm encounters the mediator of his spiritualism,
a figure known only as the Spreewaldgraf, a highly educated and uncon-
ventional, socialist aristocrat. In fact, his entry into the spiritualist world
is cunningly mediated through not one but two false starts. The first is
his meeting with the Graf at a séance, to which he has been invited by
Edmund. The medium is a fraud, and the evening ends in farce. But it turns
out that the Graf is both a believer in the new positivistic science, a fierce
sceptic and determined exposer of frauds, and a committed spiritualist;
so much so, that he keeps his own medium, an American girl called Lilly
E. Jackson. Her role is to keep him in spiritual contact with his beloved
late wife Nelly. Intrigued by this unique combination of scepticism and
22 Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 139–309.

23 Wallace, On Miracles and Spiritualism.
24 See Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik; also Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nacht
ansicht. By Zöllner see inter alia ‘Zur Vertheidigung des Amerikaners Henry
Slade’.
242 NICHOLAS SAUL
belief Wilhelm (now entirely forgetting Therese) spontaneously accepts

the invitation to visit the Graf in the Spreewald and explore the phenom-
enon of spiritualism anew. This is the second retardation. There at last
Wilhelm learns about the ancient myth of the Wendish noonday god-
dess Pschipolniza, a cornf lower-garlanded beauty with a golden sickle,
who visits labourers as they rest during the midday sun, and kills or spares
them according to whether they have done their duty. She is the obvious
symbol of his nemesis. But he also – or so he thinks – exposes Lilly as a
fraud by unmasking her as she parades in muslin at a séance pretending to
be Nelly. To his consternation, the spiritualists are wholly unmoved. They
counter that she, as they knew all along, was merely being manipulated by
the spirit. Only now does the plot thicken. His scepticism reinforced after
this dual ritardando, back in Berlin – and the novel now oscillates regu-
larly between metropolis and forest – Wilhelm himself has a life-changing
experience, much in the manner of a Wilkie Collins sensation novel. In his
apartment he has a manifest vision of Edmund, his shirt stained in blood,
apparently shot dead in a duel in Magdeburg. Intrigued by the undeniable
plasticity of the vision,25 the scientist in him records the exact time and
circumstances, and seals the Protokoll in an envelope. He is astonished
to learn almost immediately from Therese, that Edmund is indeed dead,
killed in a duel after an absurd argument over seats in an Eisenbahncoupé.
This, then, seems like shocking proof after all of the truth of spiritualism.
Turning for counsel to his father-figure, the authoritative scientist at the
University, and beneath the portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm
is insensitively dismissed as another Zöllner. But now converted as it were
by the weight of empirical-observational evidence, which so conveniently
satisfies his yearning for meaning in the rebarbative Darwinian cosmos,
he migrates back to the Spreewald. There at last some apparent proofs of
his new creed appear, not least a spirit communication in automatic writ-
25 A Halbschlafbild, the physiological manifestation by nerves in the eye first described

by Johannes Müller in 1826 (Ueber die phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen, 3–39).
ing by Alexander von Humboldt himself.26 The final twist comes from his
ensuing erotic infatuation with Lilly. As this culminates in an af fair (II,
253f f.), so her mediumistic powers decline. Her intended ultimate proof,
the manifestation of the noonday goddess herself, is also exposed as a trashy
theatrical illusion. A search reveals her box of tricks. Indeed she herself
admits that has been exploiting the Graf vampirically (I, 110; 141; II, 390),
merely pretending to manifest his beloved Nelly, as revenge for his refusing
to take her as a lover. The last intellectual prop of his existence gone, the Graf
shoots her and then himself. Little the wiser, Wilhelm returns permanently
to metropolitan Berlin. He commits once more to the struggle for life in
the concrete jungle, a commitment symbolized by Bölsche’s superlatively
lyrical rendering of the kiss that awaits him from Therese at the Anhalter
Bahnhof, as two thundering and hissing locomotives whistle greetings at
each other and veil the lovers in steam, Bölsche’s aesthetic reinvention of
love in the age of technology. The cigar smoke which concealed the riddle
of Wilhelm’s life at the start has metamorphosed by the end into the halo
of steam around his embrace of Therese.
Now The Noonday Goddess is often dismissed as a one-dimension-
ally Naturalistic text. Yes, it features Naturalistic elements. Unusually for
German Naturalistic novels (even Carl Hauptmann’s grim Mathilde), which
avoid the city milieu, there are impressive descriptions of disorientating, yet
intoxicating experience of streets choked by swaying masses, and intensely
evocative lyrical tracings of the novel sensual experience of fered by the
vast, kaleidoscopic electric light panoramas of Potsdamer and Leipziger
Platz. But Bölsche’s skilful evocation of the spirit of place serves more
than just a Naturalistic end. He searched out authentic evocative settings
for the action in Berlin, from Rathenowstraße in Moabit, to the litter-
polluted Grünewald and the Teufelssee. One can map them much like
Poldy Bloom’s movements in Dublin (even if one cannot remap them
onto Homer’s Mediterranean Sea). But these descriptions are not of fered
merely to evoke the new determinations of the psyche by the new modes
26 Much fun is had with the role of a spirit Humboldt by Fritz Mauthner in his satire
Die Geisterseher.
244 NICHOLAS SAUL
of life. They in fact of fer contrast in the scheme of the novel as the sym-
bolic psychogram of a nervous and sensitive modernist self, projected onto
not one, but two chronotopes. Of course the action also takes place in the
Spreewald, perhaps 100km SE of the city. This unique place (where the
delicious Spreewaldgurken are indeed mentioned in passing; I, 152) is the
symbolic site of the positivist’s confrontation with his Other, in the form
of the plausible ‘facts’ of spiritualism. The Spreewald is just as Wilhelm
describes it, a huge f lat territory, which by contrast to the sand, conifers,
brick and stone of Berlin and the Mark, possesses a rich, dark soil, is covered
by luxurious deciduous forest with opulent undergrowth, teeming with life,
and intricately veined throughout with hundreds of shallow channels of
the upper reaches of the Spree. If transport in Berlin is by Pferdebahn and
the new-fangled Stadtbahn, then in the Spreewald it is by pole and punt.
Wilhelm is struck by the strange Wendish dialect, the ancient Tracht of
the women, and the archaic, pear-shaped haystacks (still to be seen), which
remind him of the dwellings of those survivors of prehistory, the native
Australians (I, 175). Berlin is thus the metropolis, site of modernity. But
the Spreewald, as its domination by the spirit of Pschipolniza and the other
hints suggest, is not only the mysterious East, it is the past, and not only
the past, but also the symbol of the unconscious structures of the psyche.
It is no coincidence that Wilhelm consummates his sexual relationship
with Lilly after a labyrinthine voyage into the darkest reaches of the river
system (II, 243). The Noonday Goddess, then, stands in the tradition inau-
gurated by Bulwer-Lytton in The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), or, better,
its productive literary and psychological reception in Germany by Jensen
and Freud, which posits the existence of deep structures of the psyche,
links them with evolution, and images their exploration as the archæologi-
cal recovery of buried or preserved strata in ancient topographies. In this
Bölsche prefigures not only Jensen and Freud,27 but also Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice (1911) and Hofmannsthal’s Andreas (1907–30), both of
27 See Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens ‘Gradiva’; also Rohrwasser, Freuds
pompejanische Muse.
which of course image the regression to atavism of disintegrating modern

nervous consciousness as a voyage into the canal system of Venice.
Now Bölsche does indeed have Venice in mind as the archetype of
his Spreewald chronotope. The border of this archaic landscape is explic-
itly marked by the ‘Venetian […] village’ (I, 355),28 and it is here he first
encounters the pull of Lilly’s sexual charisma. But Bölsche is hardly the
first to elaborate this cognitive metaphor. That honour, of course, belongs
to Friedrich Schiller. Schiller is mentioned twice in the text. At its head
stands an ironic citation from ‘Polykrates’ Ring’ (I, 2). Later The Maid of
Orléans features in the library of the Graf as Schiller’s purported contri-
bution to the grand esoteric tradition of occult literature (II, 40–41). But
the true hypotext of this episode is of course one that is not named: The
Spirit Seer (1786–1789).29
To be positivist for a moment, there are beguiling parallels, notably
between Schiller’s Prinz and Wilhelm. Wilhelm has been well educated and
the Prinz has not. But apart from the obvious search for occult knowledge,
both are learned in science, theology and philosophy. Both are motivated
by the oppressive consciousness of living in a scientistic age which believes
in a deterministic and materialistic universe, both are unimpeachable seek-
ers after truth (The Spirit Seer, 60), both possess keen, sceptical, analytical
intellects, both demand elaborate proof of the facts they merely appear to
have observed (59f.), both relish the humiliating exposure of the charlatans’
theatrical tricks, and both resist Romantic (or Gothic) contaminations of
their analytical rigour for as long as possible. In both cases, most persua-
sively, their intellectual strength, so far as it goes, is also their weakness. So
strong and undirected is their analytic scepticism, that paradoxically neither
will accept a common-or-garden exposure of fraud as final repudiation of
the spiritualist enterprise. There is thus a telling parallel in the construction
of their pathways to error. In both cases this quality is exploited, as they
are mis-led, after a ritardando, into the spiritualist enterprise by a guide –
the Armenian and the Spreewaldgraf – who gains credence and trust from
28 ‘d[as] venetianische[…] Dorf[…]’. Compare I, 155.

29 Der Geisterseher. On this see Mahoney, ‘Der Geisterseher’.
246 NICHOLAS SAUL
the unwilling, yet willing acolyte with incredible tactical subtlety, by first
seeming to share their scepticism and satisfaction at the debunking of a
false spirit seer, only then to lead them deeper into the water. Most obvi-
ous: Schiller’s Prinz, like Wilhelm, first encounters a world which is more
than it seems in Venice on the canals, and it is a trip along the Brenta by
gondola, culminating in a sensationally theatrical fraudulent séance, which
symbolizes the emergence of his unconscious landscape (55–56, 70). We
must not overdo the parallels. In the Schiller, it would seem, the Prinz is
destroyed and the power of the lie triumphs, which is clearly not so in the
optimistic Bölsche. In the fragmentary Schiller the power of the Armenian,
his conjurations of seemingly genuine spirits, is never exposed. And the
Graf is of course an honest seeker after truth, rather than a dæmonic and
guileful manipulator. The Noonday Goddess lacks the brooding atmosphere
of intrigue which Schiller so superbly achieves. Finally, of course, Bölsche
has nineteenth-century advances in the physiology of the senses on his
side. Wilhelm’s vision is ultimately exposed as unwitting self-deception, the
power of the unconscious to accept suggestion and of the optical nerves
to construct an overpowering inner hallucination (Noonday Goddess II,
419f f.). And this dethroning of the apparently sovereign ego is a chief
lesson of The Noonday Goddess.
One could go on positivistically detecting sources. Schiller and Wilhelm
Meister apart, I for one have not missed the equally obvious ironic rewriting
of Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, which this story of a young scientist’s abandon-
ment of his bourgeois lover and encounter in the forest with an archaic
goddess represents.30 Whatever about that, it is clear that The Noonday
Goddess stands self-consciously in that tradition of literary rewritings of the
compensatory encounter with the dark side in modernity which runs from
Schiller to Kleist’s ‘Bettelweib’, Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der
Naturwissenschaft, Hof fmann’s ‘Magnetiseur’, Brentano’s Emmerick writ-
ings, Kerner’s Seherin von Prévorst, Fechner’s Die Tagesansicht gegenüber
30 Die Lehrlinge zu Sais one can certainly see as a self-ref lexive allegory about Poesie in
Poesie. And surely Schiller’s Geisterseher should also be interpreted as a self-ref lexive
allegory about the ambivalent sensual cognitive power of the theatre.
der Nachtansicht, and many others. The Noonday Goddess clearly appro-
priates and experimentally re-writes these earlier, equally modernist and
experimental self-rewritings. It thus exemplifies not only the Naturalist
Großstadtroman and the sensation novel, but also the practice of liter-
ary modernism as defined by Uwe Japp: as an aesthetic experiment in
reconstruction of the threatened modern self which creatively destroys the
monuments of the literary tradition to perform that task.
In this context one quintessentially modernist dimension of The
Noonday Goddess has been overlooked: the sense in which it is only at
one level about spiritualism. For what can the desire as it were magically
to manifest and physically to touch the absent body of the lost loved one
actually signify, if not the primal urge of Pygmalion?31 And so the treat-
ment of spiritualism is more than a dead letter, it is a codified ref lexion
in art on art, coupled with a ref lexion on art and desire. As Hans Richard
Brittnacher memorably showed in his study of the chapter ‘Fragwürdigstes’
in Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg, the spiritualist séance habitually encodes
censored or forbidden love. There it reveals rather more about Hans Castorp
than he cares to know, namely his repressed gay passion for poor Joachim
Ziemßen, whose spirit form unexpectedly materializes.32 But it also codi-
fies heterosexual love, as is suggested to those with eyes to see in the bla-
tant mirroring of both birth and sexual ecstasy by the description of the
Danish medium Elly’s physical strugglings and pantings at the climax of the
séance (396–398). In The Noonday Goddess this encoding is equally clear.
Wilhelm’s relationship with Therese, as her saintly name suggests, is from
the outset desexualized, and so surely plays its part in the making of his
existential unrest at the start of his spiritualist adventure (Noonday Goddess
I, 18–19). The same is true of Lilly. After their sexual union, Lilly’s creativity
as a medium dissipates dramatically, so that Wilhelm worries that carnal
knowledge is responsible for the decline in spiritual energy (255). But that
is neither Wilhelm’s nor Bölsche’s final answer. Lilly, it turns out, is really
German, from a theatrical family, which still performs in a Friedrichstraße
31 See Neumann, ‘Der Körper des Menschen’.

32 Brittnacher, 398–404; Mann, 907–947.
248 NICHOLAS SAUL
music hall. After the death of her lover, an American medium, she has for
sheer material need picked up and duped the Graf in Paris, and since then,
rejected by him as a lover, systematically and vampirically (I, 110; II, 390)
deployed her theatrical talent to bleed him through the vessel of his desire.
Her failure as a medium after consummation of the af fair with Wilhelm
thus suggests that it was all along – tragically33 – conditioned by sublimated
desire. If there be any doubt about the intended identification of desire
for the spiritualist body with a woman’s sexuality in this novel, then this
description at the end of an automatic writing session of Lilly’s ecstatic
trance – inspiration for Thomas Mann’s Elly, perhaps? – may remove it:
But while (Walter) was still speaking and our eyes remained on the movements of
the pencil, Lilly’s face suddenly puckered, her hand sank limply down, – there was
a muf f led scream, an arching and bending of her body as if a wave of nervous ref lex
energy were running down her spinal column, so that her blond plait was brutally
jammed for some seconds against the wooden rest, then a second scream, louder and
stronger, and at the same time both arms jerked upward, so that the pencil f lew in
a broad arc from her outstretched fingers, – and her eyes opened, huge, transfixed,
with an expression of nameless terror. […] In its savagery the paroxysm was more
frightening than anything which had passed before, it was as if all of us had com-
pulsively witnessed the entire hurricane raging inwardly through the young girl’s
nervous system. (My translation, NDBS)34
33 Lilly is throughout linked with the tragic muse Euterpe (Mittagsgöttin II, 201; 281;
307; 400; 413–414; 419), and her existential predicament is suggested by Bölsche
to be rooted in the suspect aesthetic power of theatre to dupe us (414).
34 Aber während (Walter) noch sprach und unsre Augen auf die Bewegungen des Stiftes
harrten, zuckte Lillys Gesicht plötzlich zusammen, die Hand sank schlaf f hin, – ein
matter Aufschrei, ein Beugen und Krümmen des Körpers, als laufe eine erregende
Ref lexwelle das Rückenmark entlang, wobei der blonde Zopf sich mehrere Sekunden
lang scharf an die Holzlehne einklemmte, dann ein zweiter lauter und kraftvoller
Schrei, mit dem zugleich beide Arme so emporzuckten, daß der Bleistift in weitem
Bogen aus den gespreizten Fingern ins Gemach hinausf log, – und die Augen öf fneten
sich, groß, starr, mit einem Ausdruck namenlosen Entsetzens. […] Der Paroxysmus
hatte mehr noch als alles Voraufgehende etwas Beängstigendes in seiner Wildheit,
man glaubte unwillkürlich den ganzen Orkan mit anzusehen, der das Nervensystem
des jungen Mädchens innerlich durchtobte (II, 59f.; compare 416).
Bölsche, finally, is just as serious about the more philosophical codification

of spiritualism as a metaphor for the aesthetic enterprise of modernity.
Lilly’s theatrical training apart, the comparisons of the dark room of the
séance with the gaze through a camera obscura (I, 198–199, 227),35 and the
obvious clues thrown out by the automatic writing sequences, the novel
is full of arch meta-level hints. Particularly rich is the foregrounded allu-
sion to the novel’s position in the Schubertian tradition of the dark side
of science, when Lilly in her séance purports to confirm the astrophysicist
Peter Andreas Hansen’s hypothesis of 1854 of the possibility of atmosphere
and therefore life on the dark side of the moon (II, 53–54.). Or when Lilly
herself is compared to the moon of knowledge (II, 307). Equally rich is
Lilly’s veiled confession of the truth to Wilhelm right at the start of their
af fair, in the Teufelssee episode, when she tells Wilhelm the story of a
novel – no doubt Gustav Freytag’s The Lost Manuscript (1865)36 – about
the moral consequences for those who channel their artistic creativity into
the falsification of documents (II, 163f f.), so that we can see The Noonday
Goddess in this dimension as a re-write of the Freytag too.37 Finally there is
Bölsche’s placement of a colony of failing artists in the Schloß of the Graf,
all using art to pursue the ectoplasmic body. In particular the artist Peter
Frey, like the Munich painter Gabriel von Max with the seeress of Prévorst,
sees the acme of realistic art as capturing the ultimate truth hidden in the
transcendental face of Lilly Jackson, cannot capture this trace of the spirit
world in the world of matter, and yet also cannot stop trying to do so (II,
33–37). After Lilly’s final exposure he ridiculously kills himself, as the only
way to find out the truth (II, 328f f.). This is surely a satire of Max, himself
obsessed with women and death (and whose image of the beautiful, cruci-
fied Saint Julia inspired Bölsche’s first novel); but it is also a negative foil
and a transparent foregrounding of the novel’s own cognitive enterprise.
What remains as source of cognitive authority is thus neither Darwinism,
which has proved wanting, nor spiritualism, which has also failed, but art
35 See Sternberger, Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert.

36 Die verlorene Handschrift.
37 Bölsche knew it, certainly in 1917. See W. B., Neue Welten, ‘Einleitung’, XVIII.
250 NICHOLAS SAUL
itself. The novel itself embodies e contrario the aestheticist triumph of the
transfigurative cognitive power of modern art in the experimental search
for the true self: as Lilly’s and Frey’s art is false, so the novel itself is true.
The lesson of The Noonday Goddess is that self-ref lexive, experimental art
is the discourse of truth finding beyond both Darwinism and spiritualism.
Bölsche of course does not abandon Darwinism. But The Noonday Goddess
reveals him at a crucial stage of his career, and typical of his age, as passing
from evolutionary aesthetics to evolutionary aesthetics.
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Bram Mertens
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism:

Walter Benjamin’s Epistemological Exercise Book
It has become something of a cliché to state that Walter Benjamin’s doc-

toral dissertation Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik is a
dif ficult text. In any case, in view of the man’s oeuvre, which includes such
challenges as the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede to his Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels, Zur Kritik der Gewalt and of course the Theologisch-politisches
Fragment, it is hardly surprising that he started as he meant to go on: in
dense, grammatically supremely convoluted (one could say baroque) prose,
a penchant for strategic circumlocution rather than the direct, program-
matic statement, and with a definite predilection towards the esoteric.
Secondary sources tend to echo the view that the Kunstkritik essay, as it is
usually known, had and to a point still has a considerable inf luence on our
understanding of the early German Romantics. Most scholars also concur
that the essay is evidently not so much a sober explanation and assessment
of the early German Romantics, but chief ly a strategy for Benjamin to
expound his own emergent views on epistemology, art and the work of art.
According to Lieven De Cauter, Benjamin’s reading of the Schlegel and
Novalis in particular sketches a pre-emptive portrait of his own work, a
very Benjaminian method which he will continue to use in his later writ-
ings: ‘He anticipates, as it were, the outline of his own as yet unwritten
oeuvre. It is typical of his method that, when writing about other authors
[…] he will often give a “Darstellung” of his own thoughts and intellectual
physiognomy.’1 What not many authors have agreed on, however, is that
Benjamin’s Kunstkritik essay is occasionally or even frequently muddled,
1 De Cauter, 34n.
256 Bram Mertens
unjustifiably selective in its quotations and arguably often mistaken, as

Andrew Bowie and Rodolphe Gasché have suggested.2
Yet all of these statements are not only defensible, they are part and
parcel of what makes the Kunstkritik essay – and the majority of Benjamin’s
writings – so interesting and thought-provoking and so frustrating and
resistant to a straightforward interpretation in equal measure. It is certainly
true to say that Benjamin’s refusal and inability to write a direct, axiomatic
statement on and of truth is an entirely logical consequence of his own
epistemology, and it is certainly the case that we see this ref lected in the
writing style and form of his own texts. We see it very clearly in Ursprung
des deutschen Trauerspiels, in the aforementioned Theologisch-politisches
Fragment and of course, ironically and unashamedly directly – albeit that
it was not published in his lifetime – in the famous note for the Passagen-
Werk: ‘Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say, only
to show.’3 However, this assessment benefits quite heavily from critical
2 Gasché insists that although ‘there is no doubt that his dissertation continues to
give us a correct and fruitful view of the early Romantic conceptions […] it also
remains true that the dissertation is thoroughly f lawed, not only for philological,
but for discursive-argumentative reasons as well’ (Gasché, 50–51). Andrew Bowie
goes even further, stating that ‘some of what Benjamin wrote has turned out to
of fer little which can be said to stand up to methodological scrutiny’ (Bowie, From
Romanticism to Critical Theory, 193). It is dif ficult to disagree with the latter when
one is confronted by a considerable corpus of secondary literature, particularly on
the Kunstkritik essay, which mostly succeeds in making murky waters murkier still.
Rebecca Comay’s essay on Benjamin’s dissertation, for instance, however astutely
written, is singularly unhelpful if the reader is after a degree of clarity on the work
in question (Comay, 134–151). Similarly, even Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s famous
introduction to the French translation of the dissertation fails to shed any light on
its contents, chief ly because it again seeks to speak the same mystical language as
the original text, thereby ef fectively masking the methodological shortcomings that
Andrew Bowie referred to (Bowie, ‘Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s The Concept
of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’, 421–432). A very clear and helpful, if brief,
discussion of some aspects of Benjamin’s reading of Fichte and Schlegel can be found
in Fred Rush, ‘Jena Romanticism and Benjamin’s Critical Epistemology’, 127–130.
3 ‘Methode dieser Arbeit: literarische Montage. Ich habe nichts zu sagen, nur zu zeigen.’
(Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, 574. Henceforth cited as GS plus volume
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism 257
hindsight, as Benjamin’s epistemology and its concomitant methodology

was not always as mature, carefully considered and consistent as it is, or
at the very least may appear, in the Passagen-Werk. In his earlier writings,
particularly those never meant for publication such as the Theologisch-
politisches Fragment, Benjamin can often be seen to be struggling with the
consequences of what he himself instinctively feels and believes to be the
only possible epistemological position to take. In a nutshell, he believes
that any attempt to grasp (a) truth in a straightforward, discursive way is
bound to fail and could, at best, only lead to the discovery of something
that may well be instrumentally valuable, but cannot have a deeper meaning.
Obviously, if this is indeed the case, the truth, Benjamin must avoid at all
costs stating as much directly, and as such, he frequently boxes himself into
a corner from which he then attempts to escape with a lapidary paradox
or a mystical sleight of hand. In my view, it is therefore equally true that
part of the resistance to interpretation of the Kunstkritik essay in particular
stems from the fact that Benjamin’s reasoning is not entirely sound, that he
does fall victim to the same siren call of conceptual mysticism for which he
reproaches Schlegel. From a methodological perspective, the gaps which
he leaves between the dif ferent stages of his arguments, the Hölderlinian
caesurae which are meant to generate a certain revelatory truth, are simply
too large. In his later work, Benjamin fares markedly better with this strat-
egy, but even then it can be argued that he is never entirely successful. It
remains eminently possible that the epistemological path on which he set
out is in fact incapable of yielding the absolute result which Benjamin may
have been hoping for, but his untimely death, before he had the chance
to finish his monumental Passagen-Werk, robbed him of the challenge
to confront those dif ficult questions. However, the first steps Benjamin
takes towards formulating something approaching his own epistemology
can be traced to the time when he was deciding on a topic for his doctoral
thesis. They are enormously revealing not only in terms of the form and
number. Translations are my own unless stated otherwise.) There is an interesting

ambiguity in the German original here, which could also be translated as ‘I don’t
have to say anything, only to show something’.
258 Bram Mertens
the content of the kind of epistemological system Benjamin ends up using

and, to a lesser degree, defining, but also in terms of its predisposition, its
predilection, its Gesinnung, so to speak. In this essay, I will reconstruct
these initial steps and seek to root them in the wider context of Benjamin’s
work, thereby clearing at least one path through the dense forest that is
Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik.
Conceived in the autumn of 1917, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik in der
deutschen Romantik is Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation which he wrote
under the supervision of Richard Herbertz, a professor at the philosophy
faculty at the University of Berne, where Benjamin had moved to earlier
that year. He had begun his philosophy studies in 1912, spending the first
two years going backwards and forwards from Freiburg to Berlin, before
relocating to Munich for a year and finally ending up in Switzerland. Partly
because of this circuitous route to the doctoral dissertation, Benjamin was
exposed to the philosophy of Plato, Kant and the neo-Kantian Marburg
School, and Husserl, alongside which he developed an interest in German
literature and art history. The convergence of these interests explains how he
came to write his dissertation on the early German Romantics and their con-
cept of literary critique, as he puts it in one curriculum vitae: ‘Gradually, I
became more interested in the philosophical content of literary writing and
art forms, and this found its expression in the subject of my dissertation.’4
‘Gradually’ is most certainly the operative word here, as the first dissertation
topic Benjamin had in mind was a more straightforwardly philosophical
one. Initially, and after a period of sustained interest in various aspects of
Kant’s philosophy, he suggested in a letter to Scholem that he would begin
working on Kant and history, although at that stage he was unsure whether
this would be a suitable topic for a dissertation, ‘since I haven’t yet read the
relevant writings by Kant’.5 A mere six weeks later, after having read the
4 ‘Allmählich trat das Interesse am philosophischen Gehalt des dichterischen Schrifttums

und der Kunstformen für mich in den Vordergrund und fand zuletzt im Gegenstand
meiner Dissertation seinen Ausklang’ (GS 6, 218).
5 ‘Denn ich habe den betref fenden Schriften von Kant noch nicht gelesen’ (Walter
Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1, 391. Henceforth cited as GB plus volume
number).
relevant texts, Benjamin has come to the conclusion that Kant’s philoso-
phy of history would not be a fruitful avenue to explore, and instead f loats
the idea of discussing the concept of the ‘infinite task’, again in a letter to
Scholem, asking him in a marginal note: ‘what do you think of this?’6 A
further two weeks after that, the decision has clearly been made, as Benjamin
has come to the conclusion that Kant’s thought is ‘entirely unsuitable […]
as a point of departure or as an actual subject of an independent critique’.7
Benjamin’s disappointment stems from what he perceives or believes to
be Kant’s reductive assessment of history and historical knowledge, using
a methodological perspective which is modelled on the natural sciences,
and defines as inaccessible the ethical side of history in which Benjamin
is interested most of all. His chief objection, in other words, is epistemo-
logical. Towards the end of 1917, at the same time as he is considering his
dissertation topic, he commits these epistemological musings to paper in
what would become Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. In
this exploratory piece, Benjamin praises Kant’s project for being the first
and only one after Plato to take up the necessary task of seeking to ground
and justify all knowledge, but criticizes it for reducing this knowledge as
well as the reality with which he sought to ground it to ‘a reality of a low,
perhaps even the lowest order’.8 The reason why Benjamin believes this
to be the case is that the Weltanschauung of the Enlightenment, of which
Kant’s philosophy is both part and partial origin, takes the mathematical
model of Newtonian physics as the gold standard for its conception of
experience, excluding a good deal of the spectrum of human (and non-
human) experience and entrenching a religious and historical blindness
which has persisted to his day.9 The task of Benjamin’s future philosophy
is therefore ‘to establish the epistemological foundation of a higher concept
6 ‘Was meinen Sie dazu?’ (GB 1, 403).

7 ‘Ganz ungeeignet […] als Ausgangspunkt oder eigentlichen Gegenstand einer selb-
ständigen Abhandlung’ (GB 1, 408).
8 ‘Eine Wirklichkeit niedern, vielleicht niedersten Ranges’ (GS 2, 158).
9 GS 2, 159.
260 Bram Mertens
of experience according to the typology of Kantian thought’.10 It is inter-

esting to note that at this point Benjamin is particularly insistent that it is
primarily the religious dimension of human experience which cannot be
accommodated satisfactorily in the Kantian system, and not so much – or
at least not yet – the artistic dimension. Nor does Benjamin’s interest in
this religious or theological dimension appear to wane in the Kunstkritik
essay, as he hints several times at the ‘romantic messianism’ which he claims
is central to the work of Schlegel and Novalis.11
However, from his earlier letters to Scholem it quickly becomes clear
that Benjamin had in fact been expecting great things from his reading of
Kant, led more by his own hopes and desires, one suspects, than by the typi-
cally less accommodating reality. Yet it is not so much the detail of Kant’s
work which meets with Benjamin’s approval, as the system itself, the urge
to ground and justify knowledge and to do so comprehensively:
Without having any particular evidence to hand for this, I am firmly convinced that,
talking about philosophy and of the Lehre to which it belongs, if indeed it is not
the whole of it, it can never be about a shake-up, a collapse of the Kantian system,
but more about setting it in stone and developing it universally. […] Indeed I only
see the task clearly before me as I have just described it, namely that the essence of
10 ‘Unter der Typik des Kantischen Denkens die erkenntnistheoretische Fundierung

eines höhern Erfahrungsbegrif fes vorzunehmen’. (GS 2, 160). See also Benjamin,
‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, 102.
11 Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, 13n and 100. In a
letter to Ernst Schoen from April 1919 Benjamin even goes so far as to say that mes-
sianism is ‘das Zentrum der Romantik’, which he was nevertheless unable to address
directly as it would have been impossible to do so within the confines of the ‘konven-
tionellen wissenschaftlichen Haltung’ required of a dissertation (GB 2, 23). In spite
of this, he adds ‘daß man diesen Sachverhalt von innen heraus ihr entnehmen könne
möchte ich in dieser Arbeit erreicht haben’ (GB 2, 23). It will not be the last time
that Benjamin claims there to be a hidden, esoteric meaning in his work which can
only be extracted by those in the know: he made similar claims of his Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels and of course famously wrote that his entire work was infused
with a hidden theology: ‘Mein Denken verhält sich zur Theologie wie das Löschblatt
zur Tinte. Es ist ganz von ihr vollgesogen. Ginge es aber nach dem Löschblatt, so
würde nichts was geschrieben ist, übrig bleiben’ (GS 5, 588).
Kantian thought is to be retained. What this essence consists of and how one would
have to establish his system anew in order to let this come to the fore, I do not know
as yet. Yet it is my conviction: whoever does not sense the oscillation of the think-
ing of the Lehre itself in Kant and whoever does therefore not consider him and his
every letter with the utmost reverence as a tradendum, as something to be handed
down (however much he would have to be reorganized afterwards) knows absolutely
nothing about philosophy.12
This passage is not only very revealing about Benjamin’s own nascent epis-
temology, it also goes a long way to explaining why, in spite of his initial
enthusiasm, he ended up writing about Fichte, Schlegel and Novalis rather
than Kant. By his own admission Benjamin does not have any evidence to
support his conviction that the essence of Kant’s philosophy is part of this
elusive Lehre, nor indeed does he have a clear idea of what the essence of
12 ‘Ohne bisher dafür irgend welche Beweise in der Hand zu haben bin ich des festen
Glaubens daß es im Sinne der Philosophie und damit der Lehre, zu der diese gehört,
wenn sie sie nicht etwa sogar ausmacht, nie und nimmer um eine Erschütterung,
einen Sturz des Kantischen Systems handeln kann, sondern vielmehr um seine gran-
itne Festlegung und universale Ausbildung. […] In der Tat sehe ich nur die Aufgabe
wie ich sie eben umschrieben habe klar vor mir daß das Wesentliche des Kantischen
Denkens zu erhalten sei. Worin dieses Wesentliche besteht und wie man sein System
neu gründen muß um es hervortreten zu lassen weiß ich bis heute nicht. Aber es
ist meine Überzeugung: wer nicht in Kant das Denken der Lehre selbst ringen fühlt
und wer daher nicht mit äußerster Ehrfurcht ihn mit seinem Buchstaben als ein
tradendum, zu Überlieferndes erfaßt (wie weit man ihn auch später umbilden müsse)
weiß von Philosophie garnichts’ (GB 1, 389; Benjamin’s emphasis). In the same letter,
Benjamin singles out the philosophy of history as the locus where ‘die spezifische
Verwandtschaft einer Philosophie mit der wahren Lehre am klarsten hervortreten
müssen [wird]; denn hier wird das Thema des historischen Werdens er Erkenntnis das
die Lehre zur Auf lösung bringt, auftreten müssen.’ With a certain degree of foresight,
he adds that it is ‘nicht ganz ausgeschlossen daß in dieser Beziehung Kants Philosophie
noch sehr unentwickelt wäre’, but even if it were the case that not enough could be
extracted from Kant’s work, he would find himself ‘ein andres Arbeitsgebiet’ (GB
1, 391). This would appear to support the view that Benjamin came to his disserta-
tion with certain preconceived notions about what he was going to write, and that
it was never going to be a case of faithfully describing and analysing what certain
authors actually wrote, but more about finding subjects whose thought would fit
into Benjamin’s philosophy with as little resistance as possible.
262 Bram Mertens
Kant’s philosophy may be, but this does not appear to make his conviction
any less firm. Indeed, reading these very early descriptions and discussions,
it is dif ficult to avoid the impression that what came first to Benjamin was
unquestionably the feel, the Gesinnung, of his Lehre, which he would only
later attempt to pour into a more or less discursive mould.
The Lehre, inevitably and slightly unsatisfactorily translated as ‘doc-
trine’, is a concept whose importance to Benjamin’s work really cannot
be overestimated, as it is both the keystone and the summary of his epis-
temology.13 Significantly, it emerges in the autumn of 1917 in Benjamin’s
correspondence with Scholem on the topic of education and the role of
tradition, when he writes with his by now familiar conviction: ‘I am con-
vinced: tradition is the medium in which the learner continuously changes
into the teacher […]. These relationships are symbolized and summarized
in the development of the Lehre.’14 He goes on to describe the Lehre as
an undulating sea in which individuals are the rising and falling waves,
emerging from the tradition they are part of and disappearing back into
it without a trace, their individual subjectivity subsumed into the Lehre.
The concept makes another appearance in Über das Programm der kom-
menden Philosophie, this time again explicitly in connection with Benjamin’s
thoughts on Kant. Aside from the historical blindness and a reductive
concept of experience, Benjamin criticizes Kant’s epistemology for what
he terms the subject nature of the knowing consciousness, with its con-
comitant vision of the object world as objecta, standing opposite or even
opposed to the subject. Rather than focusing his epistemology on what
could be termed a predatory subject, which sees a more or less passive
13 As such I have always found it baf f ling that this concept was left out of Opitz and
Wizisla’s otherwise fine collection of essays entitled Benjamins Begrif fe. For a more
extensive discussion of the word and concept Lehre in Benjamin’s work, see my Dark
Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition, 169f f.
14 ‘Ich bin überzeugt: die Tradition ist das Medium in dem sich kontinuierlich der
Lernende in den Lehrenden verwandelt […]. Symbolisiert und zusammengefaßt
werden diese Verhältnisse in der Entwicklung der Lehre’ (GB 1, 382; Benjamin’s
emphasis). This letter is dated on and before 6 September 1917, his next letter to
Scholem, dated 22 September, contains the remarks on Kant quoted above.
object world in front of itself and seeks the power of knowledge over it,
Benjamin attempts to shift the emphasis to the process or the sphere of
knowing itself. Just as both teacher and learner become subordinate to and
even subsumed into tradition, the subject and object in Benjamin’s future
philosophy become part of the ‘autonomous and very own sphere of knowl-
edge’, constructed along a ‘pure, systematic continuum of experience’.15 This
pure and systematic continuum of experience would be able to encompass
and accommodate all manner of experience overlooked or even outlawed
by the Enlightenment, including of course religious experiences, but also
those experiences which Benjamin says are termed primitive, pathologi-
cal or insane. In calling it a continuum, he suggests that the qualitative
dif ference between all these experiences is less stark than the reception of
Kant’s philosophy has led us to believe: ‘The knowing human being, the
knowing empirical consciousness is a form of insane consciousness.’16 And
in establishing an autonomous sphere of knowledge, Benjamin performs
a kind of Copernican turn away from the subject and towards the act and
process of knowing, in which the subject appears to take part on an equal
footing with the object, thereby transcending the subject-object distinction
itself. In conclusion, Benjamin writes that the task of future philosophy
should be, ‘to create a concept of knowledge on the basis of the Kantian
system to which corresponds a concept of experience, of which the knowl-
edge is Lehre’, before adding a terse Lehrsatz of his own: ‘Experience is the
homogeneous and continuous multiplicity of knowledge.’17
It is clear now that Benjamin’s reading of Kant in preparation for his
doctoral dissertation led him to form his own epistemological thoughts
and formulate some of them more or less systematically, if brief ly, in his
15 ‘Autonome ureigne Sphäre der Erkenntnis’ (GS 2, 163); ‘reines systematisches

Erfahrungskontinuum’ (GS 2, 164).
16 ‘Der erkennende Mensch, das erkennende empirische Bewußtsein ist eine Art des
wahnsinnigen Bewußtseins.’ (GS 2, 162).
17 ‘Auf Grund des Kantischen Systems einen Erkenntnisbegrif f zu schaf fen dem
der Begrif f einer Erfahrung korrespondiert von der die Erkenntnis Lehre ist […]
Erfahrung ist die einheitliche und kontinuierliche Mannigfaltigkeit der Erkenntnis’
(GS 2, 168).
264 Bram Mertens
correspondence and in Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. He

now knew exactly why he no longer felt able to write about Kant himself,
which aspects of Kant he thought were in need of reorientation and why.
As he writes in a letter to Scholem on 30 March 1918: ‘The development
of my philosophical thoughts has arrived in a central point.’18 This sug-
gests that Benjamin embarked on his dissertation project with a number
of epistemological bees in his bonnet, which he was obviously quite eager
to let out. Indeed, just over a year later he writes a letter to Ernst Schoen
confirming this suspicion, stating that he wrote an ‘an esoteric epilogue’ to
his dissertation, ‘[…] for those to whom I would have to present the work
as my own’.19 The two issues that were at the forefront of his mind were the
position of the knowing subject and its relationship to the object world on
the one hand, and the experiential and epistemic processes on the other
hand, and these are exactly the questions which he will address in Der Begrif f
der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik. Even though the title would
indicate that this is to be primarily a study in aesthetics, Benjamin insists
in the opening pages of the dissertation that a discussion of the concept of
criticism is unthinkable without turning to epistemological questions and
presuppositions first of all, and in fact keeping them in mind throughout
the book: ‘The concept as such exists […] on epistemological presuppo-
sitions. In what follows, these are therefore to be discussed first and we
should never lose sight of them.’20 Beginning his exposition in medias res,
Benjamin bypasses Kant altogether and opens with a discussion of the
development of Kant’s Lehre in the Idealism of Fichte and its reorientation
by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. The ‘Grundbegrif f ’, ‘Grundkonzeption’
18 ‘Meine philosophische Gedankenentwicklung ist in einem Zentrum angelangt.’ (GB

1, 441). It is in this very letter that Benjamin announces his intention to write about
romantic concept of art and criticism.
19 ‘Esotherisches Nachwort […] für die […], denen ich sie als meine Arbeit mitzuteilen
hätte’ (GB 2, 26; Benjamin’s emphasis).
20 ‘Der Begrif f als solcher besteht […] auf erkenntnistheoretischen Voraussetzungen.
Sie werden daher im folgenden zuerst darzustellen und niemals aus den Augen zu
verlieren sein.’ (Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, p. 12). See also Benjamin, ‘The Concept
of Criticism in German Romanticism’, 117.
and ‘Grundtatsache’ of both Fichte’s and the early Romantics’ epistemology

is the concept of ref lection, from which they develop all other concepts
and which is therefore quite naturally the subject of the first part of the
dissertation.21 Ref lection is a kind of tremendum fascinans that founds and
haunts Romantic epistemology, philosophy and aesthetics, a Denkbewegung
which they will come to see mirrored in practically all aspects of their
thought and writing, in terms of content, style and method. It is of course
partly the ubiquity of this pattern which so pleased Benjamin, and partly
the sense that once this pattern has been recognized, it will ‘reproduce’,
so to speak, independently of any intention on the part of the subject. As
such, it seems to be a perfect candidate for the ‘autonome ureigne Sphäre
der Erkenntnis’ which Benjamin had called for in Über den Programm der
kommenden Philosophie.
In the Kunstkritik essay, Benjamin starts with a discussion of the con-
cepts of Setzung and Ref lexion in Fichte, where he claims Friedrich Schlegel
and Novalis found their inspiration too. In the following brief discussion
of Fichte, Schlegel and Novalis, it goes without saying that this is how
Benjamin presents the arguments of the three philosophers and not nec-
essarily how their arguments actually run.22 After Kant had banished the
subject as the ground of all knowledge into the unknowable transcendental,
Fichte tried to rescue the I as a knowable epistemological foundation by
claiming that it posits itself as a thinking I, as consciousness (the Setzung)
and that this consciousness was necessarily conscious of itself and there-
fore self-ref lexive (the Ref lexion). Fichte is at pains to stress that Setzung
and Ref lexion are mutually inclusive concepts, which cannot exist without
21 Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 17–19.

22 For a very lucid account in English of the epistemology of German Idealism and
Romanticism, see Andrew Bowie’s Introduction to German Philosophy from Kant to
Habermas. Fichte’s concepts of ref lection and positing are discussed in some detail
in Rolf-Peter Horstmann, ‘The early philosophy of Fichte and Schelling’, pp. 121–
127. Schlegel’s critique of Fichte in particular is addressed in Frederick Beiser’s The
Romantic Imperative, pp. 119–123. For an analysis of Benjamin’s reading of Fichte,
see Winfried Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Exposition of the Romantic Theory
of Ref lection’.
266 Bram Mertens
one another and which describe a combined and simultaneous process:

‘the action is a positing ref lection or a ref lected positing, “… a positing
itself as positing … but in no way a simple positing”.’23 In doing so, Fichte
attempted to avoid a radical disjunction between the thinking I and its
awareness of itself as a thinking I, since this would entail the possibility
that the I temporarily steps out of itself in order to become self-ref lexive,
leading to the obvious question of where it goes to at that point of disjunc-
tion. However, once this Cartesian paradox has been avoided, Fichte now
finds himself confronted with another problem: as soon as there is think-
ing, which is always already thinking of thinking, there will inevitably be
the awareness of this self-ref lexivity, and therefore thinking of thinking
of thinking. The I posits a non-I before subsuming this non-I into itself,
but it cannot avoid a moment of objectification, of non-identity, which
it will create again with the next ref lection. Nor would it necessarily stop
there, as ref lection would go on ad infinitum, ‘into an empty infinity’, as
Benjamin says.24 Fichte’s slightly mystical solution to this problem was to
state that the awareness of thinking is identical with self-consciousness, and
that they appear to us immediately, without a mediating moment where
a disjunction of object and subject would occur. At the point where the
self-ref lexive I is given to us immediately, it is not perceived, experienced
or known in the same way as we relate to the world around us, it comes to
us as an intuition: ‘Because of its immediacy, it is called an intuition. In
this self-consciousness, in which intuition and thinking, subject and object
coincide, ref lection is reined in, confined and stripped of its infinity with-
out being destroyed.’25 However, even though the infinite regress appears
to have been avoided, the undeniably mystical manoeuvre by which it has
23 ‘Die Tathandlung ist eine setzende Ref lexion oder ein ref lektiertes Setzen, “… ein
sich Setzen als setzend … keineswegs aber etwa ein bloßes Setzen”.’ (Benjamin, Der
Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 23).
24 ‘In eine leere Unendlichkeit’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 33).
25 ‘Wegen seiner Unmittelbarkeit wird es eine Anschauung genannt. In diesem Selbst
bewußtsein, in dem Anschauung und Denken, Subjekt und Objekt zusammenfallen,
ist die Ref lexion gebannt, eingefangen und ihrer Endlosigkeit entkleidet, ohne ver-
nichtet zu sein.’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 26–27).
been done seems rather unsatisfactory for a philosophy which sought to

establish the I as a firmly knowable ground of all knowledge. Even Schlegel
rejects Fichte’s intuition as a solution to the perceived problem of the
infinite regress in the I, speaking of the ‘dif ficulty, even … impossibility of
a certain grasping of [the I] in intuition’.26 He considers the intuition of
the I to be impossible, but accepts the earlier step in Fichte’s argumenta-
tion that thinking the I is possible, and indeed also infinite: ‘We cannot
see ourselves, the “I” always eludes us. We can, however, think ourselves.
We then appear, to our amazement, to be infinite, even though we feel so
thoroughly finite in our everyday existence.’27
The Romantics took issue with Fichte’s conception of the knowing
subject for a number of reasons. Part of the problem to them was that,
in giving total primacy to the intuition of the I as the unconditioned
founding moment of his epistemology, Fichte had actually ended up
allocating a role of secondary importance to the concept of ref lection,
which was now only possible and valid after the initial intuition of the I.
Because of this, and perhaps unsurprisingly for a philosopher who came
to be seen as the founding father of Idealism, Fichte’s philosophy also
demoted the object world to a position of lesser importance, as it became
subordinate to the solipsistic I. The Romantics, on the other hand, were
more interested in restoring a measure of dignity to the object world,
seeing the subject firmly as a being in this world, rather than an instance
fundamentally divorced from it. This more respectful focus on the object
world was very attractive to Benjamin, who maintained a similar position
almost throughout his work, treating objects with the utmost reverence
and empathy, and seeking to shield them from the attention of a preda-
tory subject. Nowhere is this summarized better than in his verwunderte
26 ‘Schwierigkeit, ja … Unmöglichkeit eines sicheren Ergreifens desselben in der

Anschauung’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 34).
27 ‘Anschauen können wir uns nicht, das ich verschwindet uns dabei immer. Denken
können wir uns aber freilich. Wir erscheinen uns dann zu unserm Erstaunen unend-
lich, da wir uns doch im gewöhnlichen Leben so durchaus endlich fühlen’ (Benjamin,
Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 34).
268 Bram Mertens
Notiz on the human gaze: ‘How things withstand our gaze!’28 Another
reason why the Romantics found fault with Fichte’s philosophy is because
they wanted to restore the endlessly fruitful concept of ref lection at the
heart of their thought. By shifting the focus away from the intuited I back
towards the subject as part of the object world, and by fully rehabilitating
ref lection, the Romantics changed the emphasis of their epistemology
from individual and fixed entities to the process, removing the fixedness
of the entities in the process:
Whereas Fichte thinks he can locate ref lection in the original positing, in the original
being, this particular ontological distinction which lies in the act of positing falls
away for the Romantics. Romantic thought sublates being and positing in the act
of ref lection. The Romantics assume a pure thinking-it(s-) self as a phenomenon; it
is proper to everything, because everything is a self. To Fichte, only the I is granted
a self, that is to say ref lection exists only and exclusively in correlation to a posit-
ing. To Fichte, consciousness is ‘I’, to the Romantics it is ‘self ’, or, in other words: in
Fichte, ref lection is related to the I, in the Romantics it is related to thinking itself,
and it is exactly in this relationship […] that the actual romantic concept of ref lec-
tion is constituted.29
Unlike Fichte, the Romantics were not daunted by the prospect of ref lec-
tion as an endless process, indeed they welcomed it as an inexhaustible
source of knowledge in the broadest possible sense of the word. In the
words of Schlegel quoted above, thinking ourselves makes us appear
infinite, as finite as we are in real life. But to the Romantics, ref lection
28 ‘Wie die Dinge den Blicken standhalten!’ (GB 4, 416).

29 ‘Während Fichte die Ref lexion in die Ursetzung, in das Ursein verlegen zu können
meint, fällt für die Romantiker jene besondere ontologische Bestimmung, die in der
Setzung liegt, fort. Sein und Setzung hebt das romantische Denken in der Ref lexion
auf. Die Romantiker gehen vom bloßen Sich-Selbst-Denken als Phänomen aus; es
eignet allem, denn alles is Selbst. Für Fichte kommt nur dem Ich ein Selbst zu, d.h.
eine Ref lexion existiert einzig und allein korrelativ zu einer Setzung. Für Fichte ist
das Bewußtsein ‘Ich’, für die Romantiker ist es ‘Selbst’, oder anders gesagt: bei Fichte
bezieht sich die Ref lexion auf das Ich, bei den Romantikern auf das bloße Denken,
und gerade durch diese letzte Beziehung wird, […], der eigentliche romantische
Ref lexionsbegrif f konstituiert’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 30–31).
clearly also happened in objects, not just in the subject. The object world
partakes of ref lection as much as the thinking subject, and both come
together in the medium of ref lection. Rather than remaining entirely
passive in the epistemic process, the object is itself a centre of ref lection
which is raised to higher power when it collides with the centre of ref lec-
tion that is the subject. Nor is the subject entirely active in this process,
as this too is af fected by the contact with the object: ‘in the medium of
ref lection, the thing and the knowing entity morph into one another.
They are both only relative units of ref lection.’30 It would not be a stretch
of the imagination to see this coincidence of subject and object in the
medium of ref lection as the very Denken der Lehre which Benjamin
was convinced he could see in Kant’s philosophy. It contains the same
emphasis on the process, on das bloße Denken, and on the resulting truth
not so much as a fixed object which can be manipulated, but as an activ-
ity which may enrich, enhance and serve as a prompt for further ref lec-
tion, but which can never be pinned down without being destroyed. As
Benjamin summarizes it in a letter to Scholem: ‘Truth is not so much
thought, rather it thinks.’31
To the romantics, the process of ref lection culminates in art and criti-
cism, in which the critic and the work of art as distinct centres of ref lection
come together in the ‘ref lexive medium of art’.32 Benjamin stresses that the
critical process is governed by the same laws that apply to the perception
and knowledge of the object world. Rather than issuing a value judgement
on a work of art, it is the task of the critic to awaken the self-ref lection of
the work of art, and in doing so bring it to awareness and knowledge of
30 ‘Im Medium der Ref lexion gehen das Ding und das erkennende Wesen ineinander
über. Beides sind nur relative Ref lexionseinheiten.’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der
Kunstkritik, 62–63).
31 ‘Die Wahrheit wird ebensowenig gedacht als sie denkt’ (GB 1, 409). Benjamin
would return to the concept of truth in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, where
he describes it famously as ‘ein aus Ideen gebildetes intentionsloses Sein’ and ‘der
Tod der Intention’ (GS 1, 216).
32 ‘Ref lexionsmedium der Kunst’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 70).
270 Bram Mertens
itself.33 Just as was the case with previous levels of ref lection, the result of
this process should be the (self-)knowledge of the work of art, not a verdict
as to whether a given work is good or bad. Therefore, just as Benjamin had
predicted, the aesthetic process of criticism is in its very essence an epistemic
process, in which both artwork and criticism are intimately intertwined.
The critique completes and fulfills the artwork, and as such becomes part of
it, raising both to a higher power of ref lection and awareness, and inviting
yet further ref lection in an endless process of creation and criticism. This
infinite critical process is the ref lexive medium of art, creating the infinity
of art itself, much as the infinite number of rising and falling waves create
the endlessness of the sea itself, to reprise Benjamin’s earlier image. Both
the artwork and the critic are part of this ref lexive medium, and in their
reciprocal ref lection, they are consumed by it and subsumed in it, sacri-
ficing their individuality to the greater glory of art itself, which is how it
should be: ‘The individual work of art should be dissolved into the medium
of art, but the only way that this process can properly unfold through a
multitude of successive critics is if these are not empirical intellects, but
personified stages of ref lection.’34 The emphatically secondary role given
to the subject compared to the process, both in Romantic epistemology
and Romantic aesthetics, is something which Benjamin clearly values, and
which echoes concerns he wrote about a good two years before finishing
his dissertation.35
In the closing chapter, Benjamin turns to the Romantic conception
of art itself, and this reveals an even more tantalising insight into why he
devoted his dissertation to Schlegel and Novalis rather than Kant. Having
33 ‘Kritik ist also gleichsam ein Experiment am Kunstwerk, durch welches dessen
Ref lexion wachgerufen, durch das es zum Bewußtsein seiner selbst gebracht wird’
(Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 70).
34 ‘[E]s soll das einzelne Kunstwerk im Medium der Kunst aufgelöst werden, dieser
Prozeß kann aber durch eine Vielheit einander ablösender Kritiker nur dann
sinngemäß dargestellt sein, wenn sie nicht empirische Intellekte, sondern personifi-
zierte Ref lexionsstufen sind’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 73).
35 It is this predilection which leads Menninghaus to characterize Benjamin’s disserta-
tion as ‘a theory of the “I”-less structures of ref lection’ (Menninghaus, 50).
brought together the critic and the artwork in the ref lexive medium of art
and made an immanent critique an essential part of the artwork itself, art
will necessarily change from a static collection of immutable, canonical
works to a process of aesthetic cross-fertilisation in which the boundaries
between artwork and critique become blurred. And it is not just this dis-
tinction which becomes less stark, as traditional definitions of which forms
of expression should be seen as art are also questioned. Quoting the famous
116th Athenaeum Fragment, Benjamin states that the task of Romantic
aesthetics to Schlegel was ‘to reunite all separate genres of poetry […] it
encompasses everything so long as it is poetic, from the greatest systems
of art which contain further systems within themselves to the sigh, the
kiss, which is uttered in the artless singing of a child’s imagination […]’.36
This concept of art as a sliding scale of all expressions is what Benjamin
himself calls the ‘continuum of forms’ or ‘continuum of art forms.’37 True
to the manner of its construction as a ref lexive medium, this continuum
of forms is an organic whole, uniting all forms and works of art into one
single totality. This, Benjamin says, leads Schlegel to the mystical thesis
‘that art is a work of art itself ’.38 It is obvious that this vision of art as an
all-encompassing process in which meaning and knowledge are endlessly
created is an answer to Benjamin’s own call for a new philosophy in Über
das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. The Romantic ‘continuum of
forms’ is nothing less than the ‘pure systematic continuum of experience’
he claimed a new epistemology would have to establish if it were to lie at
the basis of a philosophy that was worthy of the name. This would be the
Lehre which is not limited to a depleted concept of experience and is thus
free to explore and explain the ‘the integrated and continuous multiplic-
ity of knowledge’, which should be the task of a true philosophy. In his
36 ‘Alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen … sie umfaßt alles, was
nur poetisch ist, vom größten wieder mehrere Systeme in sich enthaltenden Systeme
der Kunst, bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Kuß, den das dichtende Kind aushaucht in kunst
losen Gesang […]’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 95).
37 ‘Kontinuum der Formen’ and ‘Kontinuum der Kunstformen’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f
der Kunstkritik, 95).
38 ‘Daß die Kunst selbst ein Werk sei’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 98).
272 Bram Mertens
conversations with Gershom Scholem around the time, Benjamin was

pressed on the question as to what kind of experience would have to be
included in such a continuum, and he responded with a typically lapidary
and ‘extreme formulation’: ‘A philosophy which does not include and
cannot explain the possibility of divination from tea leaves, cannot be a
true philosophy.’39
These ideas would continue to play a major role in Benjamin’s thought
for years to come, transcending the oft-claimed, but in my opinion never
definitively proven, rupture in his thinking between his early theolog-
ical and metaphysical period and his later marxist-materialist period.
We see them emerge again in Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels, his
Habilitationsschrift of 1925, they appear in many guises throughout the
Haschisch-Protokolle, detailing his experiments with intoxicants between
1927 and 1934, and are still there in the late thirties when Benjamin com-
piles his notes for the unfinished Passagen-Werk. The fact that we can
trace Benjamin’s discussion of the subject-object relationship and the
continuum of experiential forms to his correspondence as early as the
autumn of 1917 indicates that he was forming his own thoughts about
them well before he decided to write about these issues in Der Begrif f
der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik. As such, we can indeed say
with a certain degree of confidence that Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation
was more than just an academic treatise on the philosophical aesthetics
of the early Romantics, but that it was also an attempt to systematize his
own embryonic thoughts on knowledge, experience and perception, that
it was, in fact, his epistemological exercise book.
39 ‘Extreme Formulierung’: ‘Eine Philosophie, die nicht die Möglichkeit der Weissagung
aus dem Kaf feesatz einbezieht und explizieren kann, kann keine wahre sein’ (Scholem,
77; Scholem’s emphasis). When Benjamin addresses the concept of art itself in the
context of the continuum of forms in the Kunstkritik essay, he also includes ‘die
geistige Weisekunst’ and ‘die Divinationskunst’, adding that Schlegel himself saw
criticism as a divinatory art (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 97).
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STEVE GILES
Realism after Modernism: Representation and

Modernity in Brecht, Lukács and Adorno
Introduction
The theme of this chapter – Realism after Modernism – will no doubt seem
to many to be both otiose and obsolete in our postmodern era, and with
good reason. The modernist critiques of realist conceptions of reality and
realist representations of that reality blew apart the metaphysical and aes-
thetic frameworks underpinning nineteenth-century realism and plunged
the post/modernist artist into a mise-en-abîme of self-conscious images and
self-deconstructing mirages.1 As Terry Eagleton observed in a review essay
on Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, ‘We cannot compare an artistic representation
with how the world is, since how the world is is itself a matter of representa-
tion. We can only compare artistic representations with non-artistic ones,
a distinction which can itself be a little shaky.’2 Not surprisingly, socially
critical and politically committed artists in particular were faced with a
seemingly intractable dilemma, namely: how can advanced capitalism and
late modernity be represented if modernist critiques of realism are valid?3
1 See Sheppard, ‘The Problematics of European Modernism’, 1–51, and Sheppard,
Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism, 31–70.
2 Eagleton, ‘Pork Chops and Pineapples’, 17. Eagleton’s argument here reproduces
the idealist/modernist fallacy that reality is constituted – rather than mediated – by
language/representation.
3 Although advanced capitalism and late modernity overlap, they are not equiva-
lent or identical. The advanced industrial societies of the former Communist bloc
in Europe and contemporary China cannot be categorized as capitalist, and late
276 STEVE GILES
This dilemma was particularly acute for Marxist aesthetic theorists, and my
aim in this discussion is to revisit the various ways in which Brecht, Lukács
and Adorno engage with the possibility of realism after modernism, in the
context of their broader ref lections on representation and modernity. I shall
suggest that Brecht, Lukács and Adorno are rather closer theoretically than
is often assumed, not least as all three accept that classic realism is in crisis
because of the increasing abstraction and reification of late modernity,4
which undermines the Hegelian notion that essence must be mediated
in appearance. At the same time, they continue to be advocates of artistic
realism, sharing the view that realist art must reveal what Adorno terms
the ens realissimum of advanced capitalist society.
In order to substantiate these possibly contentious claims, I first present
a systematic critique of Lukács’s classic essay ‘Narrate or Describe’,5 which
provided a template for discussions of realism and modernism in Marxist
aesthetics and has been described as possibly the most convincing rep-
resentation of Lukács’s theoretical position.6 After noting significant
parallels between Lukács’s opposition of Narration and Description and
Brecht’s distinction between dramatic theatre and epic theatre, I move
modernity tends to be defined not just in socio-economic terms but also in relation
to a fundamental restructuring of time and space since the late nineteenth century
that had a drastic impact on modes of cultural representation: for further discussion
see Giddens, Harvey and Kern, and the discussion of Giddens and Harvey in rela-
tion to modernism in Giles, ‘Avant-Garde, Modernism, Modernity: A Theoretical
Overview’. Brecht’s critique of representation in The Threepenny Lawsuit draws on
key features of both advanced capitalism and late modernity.
4 Previous research in this area in the past four decades – from Bürger’s Vermittlung
– Rezeption – Funktion and Lunn’s Marxism and Modernism, through to Jameson
in Brecht and Method and Gerz in ‘Die Expressionismusdebatte’ – has tended to
focus on the oppositions between Brecht/Lukács, Lukács/Adorno, and Adorno/
Brecht, rather than their sometimes surprising theoretical af finities. A key aim of
my discussion is to provoke a reconsideration of that orthodoxy.
5 Lukács, ‘Erzählen oder Beschreiben?’ (first published in Internationale Literatur, 11
(1936) 100–118 and 12 (1936) 108–123).
6 See Bürger, 35. The most convincing critical accounts of Lukács’s position may be
found in Bürger, 31–43, and Jameson, Marxism and Form, 191–205.
Realism after Modernism 277
on to analyse Brecht’s radical reconceptualization of realism in the 1930s

in relation to his critique of Lukács, referring to his ref lections on realist
representation from The Threepenny Lawsuit through to his ‘Notes on the
Realist Mode of Writing’.7 And I conclude by discussing two crucial but
neglected essays by Adorno, on modernist narrative and on Balzac, where
in a particularly pleasing though unexpected dialectical reversal Adorno
finally reveals himself to be a closet Brechtian.8
Lukács
Although Lukács describes ‘Narrate or Describe?’ as a contribution to the

ongoing discussion on naturalism and formalism in Marxist circles in the
mid 1930s, it is in fact nothing less than a theory of the development of the
European novel from its realist heyday in the earlier part of the nineteenth
century through to the experiments of modernism in Lukács’s own day.
The essay’s central thesis is that in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury, a fundamental change occurs in the art of novel writing, and Lukács’s
explanatory model can be seen as working at two levels. At the level of the
individual work, Lukács wishes to account for the occurrence of particular
narratological structures and strategies rather than others, while at a more
generalized level he seeks to theorize a fundamental shift in the nature of
literary production (from Narration to Description, and from classic real-
ism to naturalism and modernism). Lukács uses the terms Narration and
7 Brecht, Der Dreigroschenprozeß; ‘Notizen zur realistischen Schreibweise’.

8 Adorno, ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’; ‘Standort des
Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman’; ‘Reading Balzac’; ‘Balzac-Lektüre’. Somewhat
surprisingly, even Jameson does not refer to the Adorno/Brecht connection in his
discussion of the representability of capitalism in Brecht and Balzac (see Brecht and
Method, 154–155). The only critic to identify similarities in Brecht and Adorno’s
conceptions of realism, albeit in a footnote, appears to be Zmegac, ‘“Es geht um den
Realismus”’, 88–89.
278 STEVE GILES
Description as both narratological and historical categories, in a manner

which can be rather confusing: the term Description, for example, can des-
ignate descriptive passages in any novel, a particular category of novelistic
writing, and literary modernism. His basic argument is that in the first half
of the nineteenth century, the European novel continues the great tradi-
tion of epic composition and so embodies the principles of Narration, as
exemplified in the work of Scott, Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy. In the wake
of the 1848 revolutions, however, with writers such as Flaubert and Zola,
the novel moves in the direction of Description, and so becomes incapable
of ref lecting the true nature of society.9
This crucial distinction between adequate and inadequate ref lection
lies at the heart of Lukács’s critique of the modern novel, and is under-
pinned by Marx’s dif ferentiation between the material transformation of
the economic conditions of production and the artistic and philosophi-
cal forms through which that transformation is appropriated by human
consciousness. For both Marx and Lukács, structural and stylistic features
of the literary text are ultimately to be accounted for not on the basis of
an autonomous evolution of artistic forms, but in causal terms, with refer-
ence to the writer’s socio-economic and political position on the one hand
and overall societal developments on the other.10 At the same time, how-
ever, it is important to note that Lukács does not wish to view the human
subject as a mere plaything of historical processes. The relatively abstract
Marxian account of conf lict between productive forces and relations of
production, and base and superstructure, is given a Hegelian turn, in the
sense that Lukács insists on the importance of the actions of individual
agents, however circumscribed these may be by their position in the class
9 Although Lukács does not cite specific modernist writers, key features of the
Descriptive text are clearly present in the work of – for example – Conrad, Joyce,
Kafka and Proust. Lukács’s model also applies to D. H. Lawrence: see Giles, ‘Marxism
and Form: D. H. Lawrence, St Mawr’, 54–64.
10 As Bürger notes in Vermittlung – Rezeption – Funktion, 41–42, Lukács’s account
of the relationship between narrative form and the socio-political position of the
author is inconsistent and problematic, and in my view is further undermined by
Lukács’s contentious conf lation of author and narrator.
struggle and the predominance of capitalism. Indeed, I would suggest

that it is precisely this insistence on the viability of human agency in late
modernity that constitutes a key distinguishing feature of Lukács’s socio-
logical aesthetic in comparison to Brecht or Adorno.
The most striking feature in Lukács’s account of Narration, as instan-
tiated in the ‘narrative’ text, is his use of the metaphor of drama, which
he construes in specifically Hegelian terms.11 The race in Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina is characterized as a nodal point in a great drama, which presents
events rather than static images in a sequence of highly dramatic scenes
that constitute turning points in the action – or Handlung – of the novel
as a whole. Unlike other theorists of the novel, however, Lukács construes
the dramatic not as a technique of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’, but as a
structural category, as a way of characterizing the tightly knit and highly
integrated relationship of the parts to the whole embodied in the authentic
self-contained work of art. However, this structural criterion can only be
satisfied if certain other conditions are met. The causal interconnected-
ness and hierarchical organization central to the epic art of narrative can
only be realized if the events depicted are grounded in the dynamics of
concrete human praxis, and are set in the past. Lukács emphasizes the role
of concrete human praxis because the driving forces of societal develop-
ment, which the epic artist seeks to discover and depict, can only manifest
themselves in the palpable deeds and actions of human beings. And the epic
artist must set human action and interaction in the past, because the past
is his basic means of artistic organization. This, Lukács argues, is because
complex interrelations in life can only be perceived retrospectively, as can
the essential rather than the accidental in society in general. Retrospection
therefore grounds the author’s omniscience and his knowledge of the sig-
nificance of each detail in the work for the work as a whole, so that although
the reader is encouraged to share in the experiences of the characters from
whose standpoint events are narrated, the overall contextualization of
those experiences is never lost. As a result, the reader is enabled to feel at
11 On Hegel’s theory of drama, see Giles, The Problem of Action in Modern European
Drama, 11–18.
280 STEVE GILES
home in the work, secure in its poetic projection of life in all its breadth
and wholeness.
The distinctive features of Description, as embodied in the ‘descrip-
tive’ text, radically distance it from the narrative text. While descriptions
in the narrative text are tightly integrated into the work as a whole, in the
descriptive text they function as padding and are only loosely related to the
overall action of the novel. The descriptive text thus becomes episodic, the
causality and sequentiality of the narrative text degenerates into chance
and mere succession or juxtaposition, and events give way to occurrences.
A crucial reason for this tendency to atomization and disintegration is
that the non-human world of nature and inanimate objects is no longer
closely interwoven with human praxis. Any intrinsic significance they
might have had disappears, and the author is compelled to impose poetic
significance on them from without. Furthermore, human beings themselves
are reduced either to the level of inanimate objects, or to a chaotic succes-
sion of moods or states of mind that are only tenuously connected with
their actions. Rather than interacting with the world in a dynamic fashion,
human beings seem to be mere spectators of their own lives, and the reader
too is forced into the position of an observer. However, as observers are
contemporaneous with the occurrences they are observing, they must soon
become lost in a welter of information whose significance is as yet unknown,
and are therefore incapable of correctly identifying events and explicating
their relationship to society as a whole. The same principle applies in the
novel, where the retrospection of the narrative text is superseded by the
contemporaneity of mere description. The author/observer is no longer
omniscient, loses all sense of proportion, sinks down to the level of his
characters’ perspectives, and simply mediates shifting points of view that
are unrelated to any overall epic context. As a result, the descriptive text
produces not a correct ref lection of objective reality, revealing its inner
dynamism grounded in the driving forces of human society, but a superficial
and distorted ref lection of the seemingly amorphous surface of life.
The notion that loss of intrinsic significance or immanent meaning is
a defining feature of late modernity is one that Lukács shares with other
major social and cultural theorists of the modernist era – one thinks imme-
diately of Durkheim, Simmel, Weber and Kracauer. Lukács suggests that
loss of immanence is entailed by the fundamental nature of capitalist devel-

opment, specifically its increasing inhumanity and the obliteration of the
inner poetry of human praxis in the alienated world of prose, and once
again Lukács founds his argument on Hegelian aesthetics.12 In Hegel’s view,
concrete works of art, which permit life to be felt as a totality and yet allow
us to relate to them at the level of individual human experience, can only be
produced in societies whose elements are intrinsically meaningful to their
members. Any loss of immediate comprehensibility in society has crucial
aesthetic consequences: for Hegel, the impossibility of epic writing, and
for Lukács, the impossibility of Narration, which is compensated for in the
descriptive writer’s recourse to extrinsically imposed symbolic meaning.
Hegel and Lukács both relate this loss of immediate comprehensibility to
the emergence of modern industrial society, which is essentially prosaic
and abstract.13 From Lukács’s point of view, this loss is intensified under
capitalism, as the products of human labour are no longer felt to be the
result of immediate, sensuous human activity. At the same time, however,
Lukács insists on the continuing centrality of human praxis as mediated
by action – or Handlung – in individual, social and aesthetic terms, and it
is this that dif ferentiates his perspective on representation and modernity
from that of Brecht.
There is a remarkable congruence between key aspects of Lukács’s
Narration/Description model, and Brecht’s classic opposition of (tra-
ditional) dramatic theatre and (modern) epic theatre in his ‘Notes’ to
Mahagonny.14 First, the position of the reader or spectator is identical,
characterized by empathetic identification in the case of Narration/dra-
matic theatre, and distanced observation in Description/epic theatre.
Secondly, Lukács and Brecht concur on the typical structural features
12 See Hegel, Aesthetics, Volume II, 1046–1053; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 330–341.
See also Jameson’s discussion of Hegel in Marxism and Form, 352–354. Both Bürger
and Jameson provide particularly helpful discussions of Lukács’s indebtedness to
Hegel.
13 See Hegel, Aesthetics, volume II, 1053; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 341.
14 Brecht, ‘Notes to the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’, 68; ‘Anmerkungen
zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’, 78–79.
282 STEVE GILES
of their two basic modes of artistic representation: integration, organic

growth and sequential causality in Narration/dramatic theatre, as opposed
to decentring, montage and discontinuity in Description/epic theatre.
And thirdly, Lukács and Brecht define Narration/dramatic theatre with
reference to the Hegelian category of Handlung – a point reinforced by
Brecht in his ‘Notes’ to The Threepenny Opera, when he observes that in
traditional dramatic theory everything the playwright wishes to say must
be embodied in the action (or Handlung) of the play.15 Brecht and Lukács
dif fer fundamentally, however, in that each endorses the artistic categories
that the other rejects, and their responses to Hegel’s aesthetics – especially
his theory of drama – are also diametrically opposite. Crucially, Hegel’s
action-centred dramatic theory construes the human subject as an auton-
omous moral agent whose inner self is actualized in praxis, but whereas
Lukács wishes to cling on to this notion, it is radically incompatible with
Brecht’s structuralist model of late modernity, his fascination with behav-
iourism, and his understanding of the Marxist dictum that social being
determines thought.16
Brecht
Although Brecht’s classic essays on realism were written between 1938 and
1940,17 he had formulated the core precepts informing his critique of real-
ism in his 1931 monograph The Threepenny Lawsuit. His primary target was
15 Brecht, ‘The Literarization of the Theatre’, 44; ‘Anmerkungen zur Dreigroschenoper’,

58–59.
16 See Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory, 63–79, 167–186.
17 These essays were not published at this time. The majority did not appear in
German until ten years after Brecht’s death in 1966, and most were not translated
into English until 2003, in Brecht on Art and Politics. With the notable exception
of Lunn, Marxism and Modernism, scholarly discussion in the English-speaking
world has therefore tended to be restricted to a small number of anthologized
essays (see, for example, Aesthetics and Politics), while German scholarship has
that photographic approach to representation which took a realist text to

be a direct copy of reality as it presents itself to our senses. Brecht argues
that in the modern world of advanced capitalism, it is no longer the case
that a simple reproduction of actuality, such as a photograph of the Krupp
munition works or of a power station belonging to the General Electric
company, can really say anything significant about reality. One reason for
this is that human relationships have become reified, so that they are only
visible to us in the outward form of the factory, for example. At the same
time, social reality as such has become functional and abstract. Whereas
the expressive theory of art had assumed that the author’s individual expe-
riences were the touchstone of reality, Brecht maintains that any notion of
art based on ‘experience’ is now obsolete, because in late modernity reality
must be construed as a totality of structures and relations that lie beyond
direct, immediate experience.18
His argumentation here, as he himself notes, was strongly inf luenced
by his discussions with the Marxist sociologist Fritz Sternberg.19 Sternberg
had suggested that there was a fundamental dif ference between the late
medieval/early modern era, and contemporary industrial society. Whereas
in the sixteenth century, key societal relationships were visible to the naked
eye (and thus amenable in principle to photographic representation), in the
twentieth century such relationships have to be rationally reconstructed,
thus rendering their photographic representation inadequate or impossi-
ble.20 This line of argument is at the core of Brecht’s theory of representation
in late modernity, and underpins his advocacy of a cognitive or abstract
type of realism from 1931 onwards.21 At the same time, his reconceptuali-
zation of realist representation is also indebted to the anti-illusionist and
defamiliarizing techniques of modernist art. It is this synthesis of Marxist
focussed on Brecht’s interventions in the ‘Expressionism Debate’ (see Gerz, ‘Die

Expressionismusdebatte’).
18 See Brecht, The Threepenny Lawsuit, 164–165; Der Dreigroschenprozeß, 469.
19 See Brecht, ‘Durch Fotografie keine Einsicht’.
20 See Sternberg, Der Dichter und die Ratio, 14–15, 47.
21 See Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory, 175–177.
284 STEVE GILES
socio-economic theory and modernist aesthetics that constitutes a defin-

ing feature of Brechtian realism from now onwards.
The determining context for Brecht’s later essays on realism and for-
malism was the impact of the work of Georg Lukács. In the course of the
1930s, Lukács had written three seminal essays in Marxist aesthetics, deal-
ing with the respective merits of realist and avant-garde modes of writing.
The first of these, ‘Greatness and Decline of Expressionism’22 formed the
backdrop to an intense and acrimonious debate on Marxism and modern-
ism conducted in the pages of The Word in 1937–1938, to which Lukács
contributed ‘Realism in the Balance’.23 In the interim period, as we have
seen, he had published his most cogent and compelling account of these
issues in ‘Narrate or Describe?’. Although Brecht’s response to these essays
was intensely critical of Lukács’s theoretical and historical approach to real-
ism and modernism, there are also crucial similarities in their positions.
Lukács would have had little dif ficulty, for example, in broadly assenting
to Brecht’s specification of realism in ‘Popularity and Realism’, not least
because he shares the view that realist writing must go beyond a photo-
graphic or naturalistic reproduction of actuality so as to uncover the con-
tradictory currents of historical development at work beneath the visible
surfaces of social life.24
22 Lukács, ‘Größe und Verfall des Expressionismus’.

23 Lukács, ‘Es geht um den Realismus’.
24 See Brecht’s much quoted characterization of realism in ‘Popularity and Realism’:
‘Realistic means: revealing the causal complex of society/unmasking the ruling view-
points as the viewpoints of the rulers/writing from the standpoint of the class that
has in readiness the broadest solutions for the most urgent dif ficulties besetting
human society/emphasizing the factor of development/concretely and making it
possible to abstract.’ (‘Popularity and Realism’, 82; translation corrected by SG.)
‘Realistisch heißt: Den gesellschaftlichen Kausalkomplex aufdeckend/die herrschenden
Gesichtspunkte als die Gesichtspunkte der Herrschenden entlarvend/vom Standpunkt
der Klasse aus schreibend, welche für die dringendsten Schwierigkeiten, in denen die
Menschheit steckt, die breitesten Lösungen bereithält/das Moment der Entwicklung
betonend/konkret und das Abstrahieren ermöglichend’ (‘Volkstümlichkeit und
Realismus’, 409).
At the same time, Lukács could not have accepted Brecht’s advocacy
of abstraction, for two main reasons. First, he would have been highly
critical of Brecht’s structuralist approach to sociological analysis, with its
focus on functions and relations, because Lukács consistently emphasizes
the importance of the actions of individual agents. Secondly, whilst Lukács
insists that the reader must feel at home in the authentic realist narrative,
secure in its illusory projection of life in all its breadth and wholeness and
sharing in the experiences of the characters from whose standpoint events
are being narrated, Brecht’s more abstract conception of realism – which I
shall refer to as cognitive realism – is radically anti-empathetic. As Brecht
explains in The Threepenny Lawsuit, instead of motivating action in terms
of the individual’s character or inner life, cognitive realism should concen-
trate on the typical external behaviour of figures performing specific func-
tions. Cognitive realism does not seek to establish a bond of identification
between audience and work or audience and author, but wishes instead
to enable its audience to derive causal relationships inductively from the
behavioural attitudes presented in the work, and thus to make abstract
judgements. The audience must be given the opportunity to adopt a criti-
cal perspective on the political and economic relationships that underlie
observable social reality. For only then will it be possible for the audience
to see that human beings are conditioned by specific societal relationships,
yet are also capable of changing them.
Brecht’s interventions into the debate on realism and formalism imme-
diately question the hackneyed and confused premises that underlie it. In
the 1930s, the term formalism had come to be used in orthodox Marxist
circles in a decidedly pejorative fashion in order to condemn purely formal
or stylistic modes of innovation associated with modernist art. In his 1938
essays on Expressionism,25 Brecht points out that this approach ultimately
misconstrues the relationship between form and content, which in his view
is dynamic and symbiotic. If seeking new forms for an unchanging con-
tent exemplifies formalism, Brecht continues, then so does retaining old
25 Brecht, ‘The Expressionism Debate’, ‘Die Expressionismusdebatte’; ‘Practical Thoughts

on the Expressionism Debate’, ‘Praktisches zur Expressionismusdebatte’.
286 STEVE GILES
or supposedly universal forms when confronted by new content. In other

words, if the social environment constantly changes, then so must artistic
form. Brecht’s argumentation derives directly from Marx’s view that, in
order to be authentic, a form must be appropriate to its content. Brecht
concludes that artistic form must be radically historicized, so that – contra
Lukács – one can no longer speak of aesthetic structures and techniques
which are universally valid. Nor does it make sense to praise the content
of a work and reject its form, or vice versa: any critique of an artwork’s
politics must engage with its formal dimension, just as formal analysis
must be politically grounded. By the same token, narrative techniques
developed to represent early nineteenth-century capitalism, which were
valid in their own day, cannot simply be taken over by writers attempting
to come to grips with the complexities of advanced industrial capitalism
in the twentieth century.
This contention is at the heart of Brecht’s critique of Lukács. Lukács
had recommended that contemporary realist writers should adopt the
representational techniques of the early nineteenth-century novel, notably
as exemplified in the work of Balzac. For Brecht, however, Lukács’s recom-
mendation is both anachronistic and dogmatic: one cannot take the formal
procedures associated with one realist writer or one particular period of
realism and present them as the uniquely valid mode of realist writing.
Brecht also rejects the neo-Stalinist view, predominant in orthodox Marxist
circles at the time, that socialist content should simply be transposed into
bourgeois form.26 Socialist writers, he argues, cannot blithely incorporate
the technical devices associated with nineteenth-century realism, because
the ideological underpinnings of those devices are incompatible with an
authentic Marxist critique of contemporary capitalism. The bourgeois
realist novel had concentrated on representing psychologically complex
individuals with whom the reader is encouraged to identify, but this mode
of writing has been rendered obsolete by the emergence of mass politics
and the structural complexities of societies at a radical and advanced stage
of modernity.
26 See Brecht, ‘On Socialist Realism’, ‘Über sozialistischen Realismus’.

Brecht therefore calls for an expanded and expansive view of realism,

which focuses on the variety of ways in which realist writers may inf luence
reality by producing accurate reproductions of reality. The most striking
instance of Brecht’s more comprehensive approach to realism is his pro-
posal, in ‘Breadth and Variety of the Realist Mode of Writing’,27 that the
Romantic poet Shelley is a greater realist than the realist novelist Balzac.
This is because Shelley’s class sympathies lay with the lower orders of society,
and because he better enables his audience to draw abstract conclusions.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that contemporary realist writers should
now take Shelley as their model: their relationship to the great realists of
the past should be eclectic and pragmatic.
Brecht’s own specification of realism highlights its sociological and
epistemological dimensions. The primary aim of realism is to display causal
structures at work in society, and Brecht welcomes any formal devices or
techniques that will enable the writer to achieve that aim, irrespective of
whether they have been categorized as realist or modernist. At the same
time, Brecht is by no means uncritical of modernism, and in his essay ‘On
Non-objective Painting’28 he is particularly scathing about avant-garde
painters who construe modernist abstraction as an end in itself. While
he shares the view that making strange is a legitimate aesthetic tactic, he
insists that the process of estranging objects and experiences in order to
enable the audience to ‘see dif ferently’ must be embedded in a specific social
or political strategy. ‘Seeing dif ferently’ must be the precursor of ‘seeing
correctly’, just as ostensibly realist depictions must be checked against the
realities they purport to represent.
Brecht’s most substantial account of realism at this time, the ‘Notes
on the Realist Mode of Writing’ drafted in 1940, elaborates on many of
the issues discussed in Brecht’s shorter essays from 1938 and 1939, but also
yields further insight into his historical analysis of realism in the context
of his more general views on aesthetic theory. Brecht insists that restrictive
notions of art must be abandoned in favour of a more expansive conception
27 Brecht, ‘Weite und Vielfalt der realistischen Schreibweise’.

28 Brecht, ‘Über gegenstandslose Malerei’.
288 STEVE GILES
of art. He therefore rejects a series of propositions characteristic of modern

aesthetics, namely: that art can only deal with universal features of human
nature; that creation in art is deeply and intensely personal, so much so
that technical considerations of, say, narrative structure are inimical to
art; that originality in art is grounded in the artist’s unconscious, so that
the insights embodied in art transcend those generated by the intellect;
and that art must be strictly demarcated from science. For Brecht, on the
other hand, a comprehensive conception of art should include the arts of
engineering, of medical surgery, of lecturing and public speaking. Similarly,
artists are enjoined to produce representations of reality that are as useful
and as practicable as those of scientists.
Contemporary artists are confronted by a major dilemma, however, in
that, like contemporary physicists, they must represent forces that underlie
actuality and are not immediately visible to us. But, in depicting such hidden
realities, they run the risk of lapsing into modernist subjectivism when
moving beyond the realm of phenomenal experience. Brecht’s solution to
this dilemma is to propose that art must be firmly grounded in (Marxist)
social science, which identifies and explains political and economic proc-
esses that are hidden from view. Realist writers must concentrate on reveal-
ing the dynamic forces that underpin everyday social life, basing their texts
not on intuition but on the careful study of the laws of nature and society,
so as to expose the contradictions that emerge when those forces come into
conf lict with pre-existing patterns of belief and modes of action.
Adorno
Adorno’s basic premise in his 1954 essay ‘The Position of the Narrator in
the Contemporary Novel’ is that the very process of narration has become
problematic, for two main reasons. First, life-experience, especially under
the impact of twentieth-century warfare, is no longer intrinsically coher-
ent and continuous, and can therefore no longer provide a firm basis for
traditional story-telling. And secondly, the all-pervasive standardization

and uniformity of contemporary society erases the possibility of having
anything special to say, which is essential to traditional story-telling. In
other words, the crisis in narrative form that Adorno identifies is rooted
in a crisis of late modernity. The narratological mediation of that crisis
is best exemplified in modernist writing, with its disintegration of the
omniscient and objective narrative perspective of classic realism, which
has been replaced by the radical subjectivism of Proust, Kafka and German
Expressionism. At the same time, while Adorno describes modernist nar-
rative in a manner remarkably similar to Lukács, his account of the posi-
tion of the reader or audience is analogous to Brecht’s. Adorno suggests
that the reader’s structural identification with the represented world of
the traditional nineteenth-century novel replicates the positioning of the
audience in relation to the picture-frame stage of illusionist theatre, based
on fixed-point perspective. But, he continues, the twentieth century has
seen a drastic attenuation of the aesthetic distance between narrator, reader
and represented reality, as modernist narratives have adopted the multi-
perspectival focalization associated with film – and, one might add, Brecht’s
theory of epic theatre.
Although Adorno is primarily concerned in the ‘Position of the
Narrator’ essay to provide a theoretical account of the crisis in contempo-
rary narrative form, he also emphasizes the realist heritage of the modern
novel. Adorno insists that the modern bourgeois novel is intrinsically real-
ist, but argues that classic realism too has become unviable. One reason for
this is the increased subjectivism of narration highlighted earlier, which
undermines the realist writer’s commitment to the objective facticity of
represented reality, while the other is the impact of photography, report-
age and cinema on art forms that purported to provide objective images
of reality. At the same time, Adorno does not wish to consign realism as
such to the dustbin of cultural history: in the contemporary world, the
seamless surfaces of social life ineluctably conceal its real nature, and so
Adorno insists that it is crucial for the novel to retain its realist cutting
edge and reject the beguiling superficiality of mimetic illusionism: ‘If the
novel wants to remain true to its realistic heritage and tell how things
really are, it must abandon a realism that only aids the facade in its work
290 STEVE GILES
of camouf lage by reproducing it.’29 In other words, Adorno’s commitment

to realism entails a mode of novelistic composition whose fundamental
aim is to be realist and demystificatory, lifting the veil of reification so as
to reveal those essential societal relations that would otherwise remain
hidden from view.
Adorno suggests that the inexorable processes of dehumanization,
alienation and reification, which by the mid twentieth century have become
all-encompassing and all-pervasive, have their origins in the development
of industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth century. The novelist who
engages most convincingly with that epochal moment on the threshold of
high capitalism is, of course, Balzac, and Adorno’s essay ‘Reading Balzac’,
written a decade after the ‘Position of the Narrator’ essay, presents both
a compelling critique of Balzac and a more comprehensive account of
literary realism. Like Lukács, Adorno takes the view that the crucial aes-
thetic problem confronting Balzac was how to depict the dynamic totality
of society, how to represent its dialectic of abstract socio-economic and
political functions and the palpable deeds of individual agents. From a
realist perspective, the key epistemological and aesthetic issue concerns
the relationship between the visible surfaces of society and its impercep-
tible inner workings, as simply gazing at the world cannot generate insight
into reality:
If the world is to be seen through, it can no longer be looked at. One can cite no
better witness to the fact that literary realism became obsolete because, as a represen-
tation of reality, it did not capture reality, than that same Brecht who later slipped
into the straitjacket of realism as though it were a costume for a masked ball. He
saw that the ens realissimum consists of processes, not immediate facts, and they
cannot be depicted.30
29 Adorno, ‘Position of the Narrator’, 32. ‘Will der Roman seinem realistischen Erbe
treu bleiben und sagen, wie es wirklich ist, so muß er auf einen Realismus verzichten,
der, indem er die Fassade reproduziert, nur dieser bei ihrem Täuschungsgeschäfte hilft’
(‘Standort des Erzählers’, 64).
30 Adorno, ‘Reading Balzac’, 128. ‘Um durchschaut zu werden, kann die Welt nicht mehr
angeschaut werden. Dafür, daß der literarische Realismus überholt ward, weil er als
Darstellung der Realität diese verfehlt, ist kein besserer zu zitieren als derselbe Brecht,
In order to clarify his reference to Brecht, Adorno cites Brecht’s critique of

photographic representation in The Threepenny Lawsuit referred to earlier
in this discussion,31 and he clearly shares Brecht’s view that in advanced
capitalism social reality has become functional and human relations have
become reified – and so cannot be adequately represented with the tech-
niques of classic realism. Furthermore, Adorno also observes that in Balzac’s
day, Brecht’s insight into the workings of advanced capitalism would have
been impossible. The key issue for Adorno, as for Brecht, is the non-vis-
ibility of real societal relations, as ref lected in Adorno’s deployment of
metaphors of visibility throughout his Balzac essay. As we have already
seen, he suggests that if the world is to be ‘seen through’, it cannot simply
be ‘looked at’; that although the deeds of individual agents may be visible,
the abstract societal processes that underlie them are not; that we can only
see through to the essential processes that drive society if the surface of
society is not too tightly knit; and that Balzac’s prose does not bow down
to empirical data, but stares at them until they become transparent, so that
we can see through to society’s horrors. At the same time, that potential for
transparency is compromised by the fact that even Balzac was unable to
break through the veil of money when depicting early nineteenth-century
capitalism, and as in the ‘Position of the Narrator’ essay Adorno’s striking
der dann in die Zwangsjacke des Realismus schlüpfte, als wäre sie ein Maskenkostüm.
Er hat gesehen, daß das ens realissimum Prozesse sind, keine unmittelbaren Tatsachen,
und sie lassen sich nicht abbilden’ (‘Balzac-Lektüre’, 147).
31 The passage which Adorno quotes, using the 1960 edition of Bertolt Brechts
Dreigroschenbuch, is as follows:
‘The situation becomes so complicated because the simple “reproduction of reality”
says less than ever about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp factories or the AEG
reveals provides virtually no information about these establishments. True reality
has slipped over into functional reality. The reification of human relations, that is,
the factory, no longer delivers human relations to us’ (‘Reading Balzac’, 128).
‘Die Lage wird dadurch so kompliziert, daß weniger denn je eine einfache “Wiedergabe
der Realität” etwas über die Realität aussagt. Eine Fotografie der Kruppwerke oder
der AEG ergibt beinahe nichts über diese Institute. Die eigentliche Realität ist in
die Funktionale gerutscht. Die Verdinglichung der menschlichen Beziehungen, also
etwa die Fabrik, gibt die letzteren nicht mehr heraus’ (‘Balzac-Lektüre’, 147).
292 STEVE GILES
epistemological, aesthetic and socio-economic metaphor seems to owe as

much to Schopenhauer’s veil of Maya as it does to Marx’s critique of com-
modity fetishism.
Adorno’s account of the historical development of realism also picks
up on another key metaphor from the ‘Position of the Narrator’ essay,
that of the illusionist façade. In the course of the nineteenth century, from
Balzac through to Zola, realism is said to move further and further away
from social reality, from the ens realissimum correctly identified by Brecht.
The end-point of this process is naturalist realism which, like philosophi-
cal positivism, strives for greater and greater accuracy in surface depiction,
characterized by Adorno as faithfulness to the façade. He then suggests
that a similar naturalist aesthetic informs mid twentieth-century socialist
realism, whereas what is actually required in the contemporary world is
a mode of artistic representation that breaks through the encrusted and
alienated façade of empirical reality so as to transfix and capture society’s
horrors.
Although Adorno endorses Brecht’s critique of photographic realism,
and – like Brecht – argues for a realist art that takes full account of mod-
ernist critiques of mimetic illusionism, he also suggests in the passage cited
earlier that Brecht himself was constrained by the straitjacket of realism.
Not only is Adorno’s metaphor rather odd, not to say contradictory – the
straitjacket seems to be a garment which Brecht can don at will, presumably
at the Berliner Ensemble’s annual Fasching party – but Houdini Brecht was
never so aesthetically confined. Like Adorno, Brecht took the view that
there was no constant or invariant norm for realist writing, anticipating
Adorno’s imputation that Lukács’s static conception of realism is undia-
lectical even though it is grounded in Hegelian aesthetics. Furthermore,
Adorno could hardly have dissented from Brecht’s proposals in ‘Notes on
the Realist Mode of Writing’, where in the context of his critique of Balzac
he encourages realist writers to adopt the experimental techniques of Joyce,
Döblin, Dos Passos and Kafka. This, though, is precisely the point at which
Adorno should have engaged more systematically with Brecht’s heterodox
conception of realism, endorsing Brecht’s strategic view of the epistemologi-
cal function of realist writing, yet also exploring his less dogmatic if rather
eclectic perspective on the modes and methods of artistic representation.32

Perhaps it was Bertolt Brecht – rather than Siegfried Kracauer – whom
Adorno should have designated the ‘curious realist’;33 and, rather than
misrepresenting Brecht, perhaps Adorno might have been better advised
to ref lect on Kracauer’s conclusion regarding the mass ornament – ‘The
process leads directly through Brecht, not away from him.’34
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Martin Travers
‘Ek-Stasis’: Away from a Theory of the Lyrical Subject

in Adorno and Heidegger
The lyric poem, Theodor Adorno tells us in his essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and
Society’ (1956), is ‘the aesthetic test of the dialectical proposition’ that
‘subject and object are not rigid and isolated poles but can be defined only
in the process in which they distinguish themselves from one another and
from change’. And that change is history, whose pressures and defining
clauses shape the lyric and lyrical subject alike. In short, the poem, accord-
ing to Adorno (in one of his more memorable phrases), ‘is a philosophical
sundial telling the time of history.’1
The modest poetic text must, then, in Adorno’s essay bear the brunt
of an analysis that is both phenomenological in its focus and historical in
its ambit. The terms of the equation are dif ferent in Martin Heidegger’s
‘The Nature of Language’, published one year later in 1957. And yet in spite
of their radically diverging philosophical positions, both theorists pose
the same questions: ‘what does the aesthetic look like as a written form
of subjectivity?’ and ‘how does written subjectivity position itself in the
world?’ Given the shared priorities of these two essays, it seems appropri-
ate to consider them and their authors together.2
1 ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44 and 46, translation modified. ‘Subjekt und Objekt
[sind] überhaupt keine starren und isolierten Pole, sondern könnten nur aus aus dem
Prozeß bestimmt werden, in dem sie sich aneinander abarbeiten und verändern, dann
ist die Lyrik die ästhetische Probe auf jenes dialektische Philosphem’. And Adorno
sees ‘das Gedicht als geschichtsphilosophische Sonnenuhr.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft’, 86–87 and 92)
2 For a recent comparative study, see Schwarte, Die Regeln der Intuition, in particular,
38–63 and 88–96. Gandesha brings the two philosophers together under the cen-
tral concept of ‘Gelassenheit’ in his ‘Leaving Home: On Adorno and Heidegger’.
298 Martin Travers
Prior to the publication of his Aesthetic Theory (Ästhetische Theorie,

1970), ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’ constituted Adorno’s most wide-rang-
ing discussion of the social status of the poetic text, and it has, consequently,
attracted much scholarly attention.3 Adorno begins his essay by articulat-
ing a clear thesis or desideratum: ‘lyric works are not to be abused by being
made objects with which to demonstrate sociological theses. Instead the
social element in them is to be shown to reveal something essential about
the basis of their quality.’4 In particular, he dismisses the concept of ide-
ology, which these days is ‘belaboured to the point of intolerability’. ‘For
ideology is untruth, false consciousness, deceit.’ On the contrary, Adorno
asserts, ‘the greatness of works of art consists solely in the fact that they
give voice to what ideology hides. Their very success moves beyond false
consciousness, whether intentionally or not.’5
In refusing the claims of ideology, Adorno clearly had in mind the
work of Georg Lukács.6 Lukács had two years earlier given a series of
lectures at the Deutsche Akademie der Künste on the respective merits of
Modernist and Realist literature, which he was to publish in book form
Walker, however, loses much in specificity by framing his comparison of Adorno and
Heidegger against the tradition of Hegelian aesthetics in his ‘Adorno and Heidegger
on the Question of Art: Countering Hegel?’.
3 See, for example, Kaufman, ‘Adorno’s Social Lyric’; Caygill, ‘Lyric Poetry before
Auschwitz’; and Aviram’s ‘Lyric Poetry and Subjectivity’.
4 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 37–38. One can only achieve a satisfactory
interpretation ‘wenn lyrische Gebilde nicht als Demonstrationsobjekte soziologischer
These mißbraucht werden, sondern wenn ihre Beziehung auf Gesellschaftliches an
ihnen selber etwas Wesentliches, etwas vom Grund ihrer Qualität aufdeckt.’ (‘Rede
über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 74)
5 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 39. ‘Denn Ideologie ist Unwahrheit, falsches
Bewußtsein, Lüge. Sie of fenbart sich im Mißlingen der Kunstwerke, ihrem Falschen
in sich und wird getrof fen von Kritik’. ‘Kunstwerke jedoch haben ihre Größe einzig
daran, daß sie sprechen lassen, was die Ideologie verbirgt. Ihr Gelingen selber geht,
mögen sie es wollen oder nicht, übers falsche Bewußtsein hinaus.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik
und Gesellschaft’, 77)
6 See ‘Extorted Realism’ where Adorno subjects Lukács’ ‘subsumptive modus operandi’
to scathing criticism. Adorno, ‘Extorted Realism’, 218–219; ‘Erpreßte Versöhnung’,
153–154.
‘Ek-Stasis’ 299
in 1958 as The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Here, in a chapter called

‘The Ideology of Modernism’, Lukács argued that Modernist writers (and
as examples he summatively cites the work of Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot,
James Joyce and Gottfried Benn) had ‘surrendered to subjectivity’ in their
attempts to find an area of authenticity beyond the ugly and depraved
culture of (capitalist) modernity. Such attempts were, however, a mistake,
for what such writing led to was the dissolution of personality and a f light
from the objective world that Lukács saw as part and parcel of that the
‘glorification of the abnormal, an anti-humanism’ that led (and ultimately
had to lead) to fascism.7
What Adorno seeks to do in his essay is to elaborate an alternative to
Lukács’s model, one that will retain the social but will connect it to the for-
mation of the lyrical subject within its historical context.8 We should ‘not
focus directly on the social perspective or the social interests of the works or
their authors’, Adorno argues. Instead, ‘we must discover how the entirety
of a society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity, is manifested
in the work of art [and we must determine] in what ways the work of art
remains subject to society and in what ways it transcends it’.9
Certainly, Adorno’s model is not without its own master narrative,
and that is called modernity. As he says, ‘the lyric spirit’s idiosyncratic
opposition to the superior power of material things is a form of reaction
to the reification of the world, to the domination of human beings by
7 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 32; ‘die Verherrlichung des
Abnormalen; einen Antihumanismus’ (Wider den missverstandenen Realismus,
32).
8 ‘Lyrical subject’ refers to the constellation of values, attitudes, psychological dis-
positions that appear in a poem even in the absence of a clear persona or speaking
subject. The term corresponds to the notion of ‘implied author’ in narrative works
of fiction.
9 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 38–39. This approach ‘darf danach nicht
unvermittlelt suf den sogenannten gesellschaftlichen Standort oder die gesellschaft
liche Interessenlage der Werke oder gar ihrer Autoren Zielen. Vielmehr hat sie aus-
zumachen, wie das Ganze einer Gesellschaft, als seiner in sich widerspruchsvollen
Einheit, im Kunstwerk erscheint; worin das Kunstwerk ihr zu Willen bleibt, worin
es über sie hinausgeht.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 76)
300 Martin Travers
commodities that has developed since the beginning of the modern era,
since the industrial revolution became the dominant force in life’.10 The
historical moment of the lyrical poem lies in its resistance to such forces:
‘the lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in society when it does
not chime in with society’.11
As an instance of this, Adorno cites Eduard Mörike’s poem ‘Auf einer
Wanderung’ (‘On my Wanderings’, 1838), which relates an epiphany-like
experience registered by the poet as he wanders through a small town in
rural Germany. Adorno’s analysis fits in neatly with the theoretical priorities
that he has developed so far in his essay. The poem is, Adorno argues, a work
of historical compensation. In the face of an increasingly commercial world,
the subject has turned inwards. Nature is redeemed and art (represented by
the image of the bell in the poem, whose ‘Goldglockentöne’ tell not of real
sounds but of intangible transcendence) is posited as a substitute for the
aesthetic totality missing from the reality of nineteenth century German
bourgeois life. Mörike’s poem gives ‘signs of an immediate life that prom-
ised fulfilment precisely at the time when they were already condemned
by the direction that history was taking’.12 The lyrical subject in the poem
is where history registers itself as a form of regret, but that regret contains
within itself the seeds of protest. For Mörike’s poem shows us that ‘in the
lyric poem, the subject, through its identification with language, negates
10 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 40. ‘Die Idiosynkrasie des lyrischen Geistes
gegen die Übergewalt der Dinge ist eine Reaktionsform auf die Verdinglichung der
Welt, der Herrschaft von Waren über Menschen, die seit Beginn der Neuzeit sich
ausgebreitet, seit der industriellen Revolution zur herrschenden Gewalt des Lebens
sich entfaltet hat.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 78)
11 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 43. ‘Darum zeigt Lyrik dort sich am tiefsten
gesellschaftlich verbürgt, wo sich nicht der Gesellschaft nach dem Munde redet.’
(‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 85)
12 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 50. ‘Zeichen eines unmittelbaren Lebens, die
Gewährung verhießen, als sie selber von der historischen Tendenz eigentlich schon
gerichtet waren.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 96–97)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 301
both its opposition to society as something merely monadological and its

mere functioning within a wholly socialized society’.13
In fact, the lyric poem is always the expression of social opposition,
however muted it may be, as in the case of Mörike. Its idealism, precisely
because it is so naïve, possesses a socially radical moment. But Adorno
warns us, ‘the more the latter’s [the material impingement on the ideal]
ascendency over the subject increases, the more precarious the situation
of the lyric becomes’, and he cites here Baudelaire as an example.14 It is in
his approach to Baudelaire that Adorno seems to return to the Lukácsian
model that he began by rejecting, for midway through his essay he now tells
us that in Baudelaire ‘lyric poetry became a game in which one went for
broke’.15 Faced with the bleak objectivity of history, the lyrical self turns in
upon itself, locks itself into its own private mythology, becomes hermetic.
In this mode, ‘language both distances itself from the objectivity of spirit,
of living language, and substitutes a poetic event for a language that is no
longer present’. This turning in upon itself of the poetic act, which leads to
‘the elevated, poeticizing, subjectively violent moment in weak later lyric
poetry’ (and it is clear from the context that Adorno is talking about the
work and inf luence of the French Symbolists here) ‘is the price it [the lyri-
cal poem] has to pay for its attempt to keep itself undisfigured’.16 Adorno
13 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44. ‘Im lyrischen Gedicht negiert, durch
Identifikation mit der Sprache, das Subjekt ebenso seinen bloßen monadologischen
Widerspruch zur Gesellschaft, wie sein bloßes Funktionieren innerhalb der verges-
ellschafteten Gesellschaft.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 87)
14 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44. ‘Je mehr aber deren Übergewicht übers
Subjekt anwächst, um so prekärer die Situation der Lyrik.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft’, 87)
15 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44. In this situation ‘wird all Lyrik zum va-
banque-Spiel.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 87)
16 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44. In this process, the lyric poem ‘zugleich
sich entfernt von der Objektivität des Geistes, der lebendigen Sprache, und eine nicht
mehr gegenwärtige durch die poetische Veranstaltung surrogiert. Das poetisierende,
gehobene, subjektiv gewalttätige Moment schwacher späterer Lyrik ist der Preis,
den sie für den Versuch zu zahlen hat, unverschandelt, f leckenlos […] und erhalten’
[zu bleiben]. (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 88) Adorno castigates Rilke, in
302 Martin Travers
then deepens this observation into a full-blown critique whose terms are
known to all who are familiar with those critics who see literary production
in terms of the politics of class: ‘poetic subjectivity is indebted to privilege’,
it is the expression of ‘the refinement and gentility of those who can af ford
to be gentle’.17 The way forward for today’s poet is to discover the ‘collec-
tive undercurrent’ that sustains the artistic, allowing the poet to transcend
mere individuality in a positive way. And Adorno finds such work in two
poets in particular: Bertolt Brecht and Frederico García Lorca. Both writ-
ers remained in touch with the popular voice and the broader sweep of
human concerns, and thereby achieved linguistic integrity in their poetry
without degenerating into ‘esoteric’ formalism.18
There is, then, a fundamental tension in Adorno’s essay: the lyrical
poem may retain the historically positive moment of its articulation but
only by losing that which has made that moment possible: its aesthetic
particular, who ‘attempts to assimilate even alien objects to pure subjective expres-
sion’, which his part of his ‘obscurantist demeanour’. ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’,
40; ‘als Versuch, noch die fremden Dinge in den subjektiv-reinen Ausdruck hein
einzunehmen.’ This is simply a ‘geheimnistuerische Gestus’. (‘Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft’, 78) But what are ‘alien’ (‘fremd’) objects. Does Adorno mean strange
or non-familiar? But what does that mean? I suspect he means non-social, i.e. not a
part of either the good or bad notions of society that he works with, which focus on
the economic, the political, the industrial. If this is this is the case then it is Adorno
and not Rilke who is the victim of reification, because it is precisely the function of
the ‘Dinggedicht’ to identify the non-functional moment of aesthetic completion
that lies for example, in vase of f lowers or a sculpture (two noted objects of study
for Rilke). Once again, it is the pull of the Frankfurt school on Adorno, which leads
him at certain moments in his essay to define the real as something that must exist
beyond the personal.
17 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 45. ‘Die dichterische Subjektivität verdankt
sich selber dem Privileg’. The lyrical poem can only be written out of the ‘Feinheit
und Zartheit dessen, der es sich leisten kann.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’,
89)
18 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 46. This is a positive type of poet ‘dem sprach-
liche Integrität zuteil ward, ohne daß er den Preis des Esoterischen hätte entrichten
müssen’. (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 90) This is a strange judgement, given
the thoroughgoing Surrealism of much of Lorca’s verse.
‘Ek-Stasis’ 303
self-immersion (or, more accurately, its self-immersion as distance). This

tension in Adorno’s model emerges most clearly in the final pages of his
essay where he of fers an extended reading of a poem by Stefan George,
‘Im windes-weben’ (‘In the weaving of the wind’) from Der Siebente Ring
(The Seventh Ring, 1907). Seen against Adorno’s preceding remarks on
Baudelaire, and his comments on the social privilege that lies at the heart
of the ‘wrong’ sort of lyrical poem, his criticisms of George are not unex-
pected. This is the poetry of an ‘imperious individual’, who has retreated
into a quasi-medieval mode (the ‘idea of nobility’) in the face of the debase-
ment of language in the modern world. ‘This poetry can speak from no
overarching framework other than the bourgeois’, and he adds ‘the subject
is allied with the status quo in its innermost core’.19
But now Adorno turns to look more closely at the text itself, and here
something remarkable happens. In the final pages of his essay, Adorno
voices his experience of reading. In charting that experience he brings to
bear the theoretical categories he has used throughout his essay. But what
is ultimately important about these final pages is the experience and not
the categories. As his analysis of the poem proceeds, the latter are revised,
qualified, brought to bear in a marginal way, even at times suspended, or
at least allied in a way that resists their unification in theory. Adorno, it is
true, emphasizes the historically anachronistic, the irrelevance, of George.
But once he moves away from the lyrical subject as an historical reality to
the lyrical subject as voice, as the medium of language, matters change. For
in George’s poetry, the ‘subject has to step outside itself by keeping quiet
about itself; it has to make itself a vessel, so to speak, for the idea of pure
19 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 51. George’s poetry is that of ‘eines herrischen
Einzelnen’, who takes ‘das Ideal des Edlen’ from the medieval period. His poetry is
both unreal and reactionary ‘weil diese Lyrik aus keiner anderen Gesamtverfassung
als der von ihr nicht nur a priori und stillschweigend, sondern auch ausdrücklich
verworfenen bürgerlichen reden kann.’ This is poetry ‘die dem lyrischen Subjekt die
Identifikation mit dem Bestehenden und seine Formenwelt verweigert, während
es doch bis ins Innerste dem Bestehenden verschworen ist.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft’, 98–99)
304 Martin Travers
language’.20 We have, however, already been told that such a thing does not
exist, that language is essentially social, but Adorno seems to have forgotten
this, or if not forgotten, at least mentally relegated it to another less press-
ing area in his discourse. Now, in the final pages of his essay, language is
granted an empowerment that seems to make the social/asocial taxonomy
of his preceding analysis redundant. For Adorno is pulled up by four short
lines from the poem: ‘Nun muss ich gar/ Um dein aug und haar/ Alle tage/
In sehnen leben’ (‘now I must entirely/ for your eye and hair/ every day/
live in longing’) which Adorno finds ‘some of the most irresistible lines in
German poetry.’ In George’s poem, ‘language’s chimerical yearning for the
impossible becomes an expression of the subject’s insatiable erotic longing,
which finds relief from the self in the other’.21
Adorno concludes with a triumphal endorsement of George, and one
that is far from the terms of his previous model: ‘the truth of George lies
in the fact that his poetry breaks down the walls of individuality through
its consummation of the particular, through its sensitive opposition both
to the banal and ultimately also to the select’. And he adds, ‘this very lyric
speech becomes the voice of human beings between whom barriers have
fallen’.22 What has previously been perceived as a weakness now becomes
a strength, for ‘great works of art are the ones that succeed precisely where
they are the most problematic’.23 This is not simply analysis. What Adorno
20 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 52. ‘Das Subjekt muß aus sich heraustreten,
indem es sich verschweigt. Es muß sich gleichsam zum Gefäß machen für die Idee
einer reinen Sprache.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 101)
21 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 53. Adorno praises these four lines ‘die ich zu
dem Unwiderstehlichsten zähle, was jemals der deutschen Lyrik beschieden war.’ And
he concludes: ‘die schimärische Sehnsucht der Sprache nach dem Unmöglichen wird
zum Ausdruck der unstillbaren erotischen Sehnsucht des Subjekts, das im anderen
seiner selbst sich entledigt.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 101 and 103)
22 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 54. ‘George hat seine Wahrheit daran, daß
seine Lyrik in der Vollendung des Besonderen, in der Sensibilität gegen das Banale
ebenso wie schließlich auch gegen das Erlesene, die Mauern der Individualität durch-
schlägt.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 103)
23 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 53. ‘Die großen Kunstwerke sind jene, die
an ihren fragwürdigsten Stellen Glück haben.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’,
102)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 305
is finding his way to here is a certain empowerment of perception made

possible by the uncovering of the semantic reverberations of the text. He
is, in short, attempting to demarcate a certain quality of the text that, for
want of a better word, I will call ‘aesthetic’.24
Midway through his essay, Adorno argues that ‘language should not
be absolutized as the voice of Being as opposed to the lyric subject, as
many of the current ontological theories of language would have it’.25 It
is an argument against made against an unspecified foe, but its clear from
the context and Adorno’s other writings that this foe is Martin Heidegger.
Adorno and Heidegger? They are normally thought of antithetical figures
in theory and practice.26 In terms of literary aesthetics, it is an opposi-
tional configuration that is largely due to Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger’s
appropriation of the poetry of Hölderlin.27 And yet they have much in
24 For an entirely dif ferent interpretation, one that sees only the critical in Adorno’s
reading of George, see Caygill, ‘Lyric Poetry before Auschwitz’, 78–81. Caygill seems
to overlook the discursive morphology of Adorno’s essay, the fact that it articulates
two competing methodologies, ef fecting a transition from one model (which we
might loosely call that of the Frankfurt School) to another, founded on a revaloriza-
tion of the aesthetics of reading. My argument is closer to that of Ross Wilson who
points out (in a dif ferent context) that ‘the trace of aesthetic pleasure [in Adorno]
is to be discerned precisely where it is refused’. Wilson, 271.
25 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 43. ‘Anderseits aber ist die Sprache auch
nicht, wie es manchen der heute geläufigen ontologischen Sprachtheorien gefiele, als
Stimme des Seins wider das lyrische Subjekt zu verabsolutieren.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik
und Gesellschaft’, 86)
26 See, in particular, Mörchen, Adorno und Heidegger, and Ouattara, Adorno et
Heidegger. Neither, however, address the exact relationship between the literary
aesthetics of the two philosophers.
27 See Adorno, ‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry’. Adorno attacks Heidegger on
all fronts: stylistically (‘his pseudo-poetry testifies against his philosophy of poetry’),
methodologically (‘Heidegger’s sentences [ref lect] the will to detemporalize the truth
content of philosophy and literary works’), and politically (through the imputa-
tion that Heidegger is contributing to ‘the right-wing German cult of Hölderlin).
Adorno ‘Parataxis’, 114, 121 and 119. ‘Die Afterpoesie zeugt gegen seine Philosophie
der Dichtung’; ‘Heideggers Sätzen birgt sich der Wille, den Wahrheitsgehalt von
Dichtungen und Philosophie […] zu entzeitlichen; ‘der Hölderlin-Kultus der
306 Martin Travers
common. Both focus on the impingements made upon the articulation

of the poetic self by historical contexts and forces, techno-rationality and
the levelling ef fect of the culture industry, and both, ultimately (in their
dif ferent ways) posit the aesthetic as form of opposition to this. But what
above all enjoins them is the fact that they converge on a fundamental
principle of literary poetics that seeks to link subject and object through
the agency of language, an agency that resists absorption into the coherence
of a single theoretical paradigm.28 Adorno says at one point in his essay ‘the
highest lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace
of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a
voice. The unself-consciousness of the subject submitting to language as to
something objective, and the immediacy and spontaneity of that subject’s
expression are one and the same.’29 These are words could well have been
written by Heidegger, whose essay ‘The Nature of Language’ was one of
a number of essays that he published during this time in which sought to
define the nature of the poetic subject and its relationship to what he calls
the ‘word’.30
deutschen Rechten.’ (‘Parataxe: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins’, 163, 173 and 170)
Adorno deepened his criticism of Heidegger in his Jargon of Authenticity. ( Jargon
der Eigentlichkeit, see particularly 98–136.)
28 I follow Paul de Man here in seeing theory as ‘a screen of received ideas that often
passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge’. See de Man, ‘Return to
Philology’, 23. In a further essay, de Man targets those ‘methodologies that call them-
selves theories of reading but nevertheless avoid the function they claim to of fer’. See
his de Man, ‘Resistance to Theory’, 15. De Man mentions (strategically) no names,
but he is clearly targeting those methodologies that reduce all to base realities such
as ‘class’, ‘gender’ or ‘race’.
29 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 43. ‘Die höchsten lyrischen Gebilde sind
darum die, in denen das Subjekt, ohne Rest von bloßem Stof f, in der Sprache tönt,
bis die Sprache selber laut wird.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 85)
30 The others were ‘Die Sprache’ (1950), ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’ (1952), ‘Aus einem
Gespräche von der Sprache’ (1954), ‘Das Wort’ (1958), and ‘Der Weg zur Sprache’
(1959). They have been collected as Unterwegs zur Sprache. The secondary literature
on Heidegger’s poetics is vast. Seminal studies are Kockelmans, On Heidegger and
Language, and Foti, Heidegger and the Poets. For a work that focusses exclusively
‘Ek-Stasis’ 307
If we were looking for a closer bond between Adorno and Heidegger,

we could say that what Heidegger is trying to do in his essay is answer the
question: ‘when Adorno says that he finds certain lines in George’s poem
“irresistible”, what does he mean by that word’? In the original German, it
is ‘unwiderstehlich’, literally that which you cannot stand against. Indeed,
at this crucial point in his essay, Adorno seems both to stand in and beyond
the text. Certainly, Adorno’s response to George’s poem emerges from a
theoretical matrix, but at the same time it moves beyond that matrix. As
such, his response clearly has af finities to Heidegger’s notion of ‘ek-stasis’.31
It involves an immersion in the text that engages the subject directly but in
a way that is mediated through what Heidegger calls ‘the being beyond the
self ’ (‘das Ausser sich sein’).32 If we can read ‘unwiderstehlich’ in that spirit,
then we can recognize this moment of dislocation in Adorno’s experience
of reading as a movement that does not allow any ultimate stable point of
decipherment or privileged position. The totalizing moment of theory as
an inclusive paradigm is occluded.33
on Heidegger’s later poetics, see Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements, particularly

99–122.
31 As a philosophical tool, the concept goes back to Being and Time (Sein und Zeit,
1927) where Heidegger attempted to define his multivalent notion of Zeitlichkeit
as an immediate configuration of temporal phenomena. He says, ‘the phenomena
of the “towards …’, the “to …”, and the “alongside …”, make temporality manifest as
the ekstatikon pure and simple. Temporality is the primordial “outside-of-itself in
and for itself ”’. Heidegger, Being and Time, 377. ‘Die Phänomene des zu …, auf …,
bei … of fenbaren die Zeitlichkeit als ekstatikon schlechthin. Zeitlichkeit is das
ursprüngliche “Außer sich” an und für sich selbst.’ (Sein und Zeit, 329) The concept
is not unique to Heidegger. J. P. Sartre uses it in his Being and Nothingness to analyse
the various relations of the ‘For-Itself ’ to ‘Being’, defining the ‘ecstatic’ as ‘a distance
from the self ’. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 137.
32 Heidegger, Das Wesen der Sprache, 60.
33 Albrecht Wellmer puts it even more forcefully: ‘philosophy cannot really tell the
aesthetic experience what it is trying to say; bound to the medium of “identifying”
concepts, philosophy can only circumscribe the absolute (as something nonexistent,
but which is yet nothing), it can only point toward it and try and make it visible’. See
Wellmer, ‘Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime’, 156. In (ancient) Greek, ‘ekstasis’ is
308 Martin Travers
Adorno goes no further in his essay. It is not until he came to write

the further essays of the Notes to Literature that the broader implications
of his ‘unwiderstehen’ motif became clear. ‘Valéry’s Deviations’ (1960), in
particular, expands upon the brief insight of displacement in the earlier
‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, and refashion it in the direction of a new
aesthetic. The essay is ostensibly a review of a recent translation of Valery’s
writings into German, but it lays down the premises of an aesthetic that
is clearly forming in Adorno’s thinking. Valéry’s ‘deviations’ chart a move-
ment away from aesthetics as a totalizing model (‘Schulphilosophie’), the
historical origins of which Adorno explicates. What Valéry does is subvert
that model by stressing the aleatory, the unexpected, the energy of the text
(and he is thinking of Mallarmé here) which embodies ‘a remembrance
of what cannot be accommodated within it and is eliminated by it – the
non-identical’.34 It enacts a rejection of instrumental thought in favour of
an articulation of the ‘subject’s self-alienation’.35 For the reader, coming to
terms with such texts means identifying with its aesthetic. As Valéry explains
‘the intellectual’s job is to juggle with all things under their signs, names or
symbols without the counterpoise of real action. That is why the intellec-
tual’s remarks are startling, his politics precarious, his pleasures superficial.’36
And Valéry concludes ‘a work endures insofar as it is capable of looking
quite dif ferent from the work the author thought he was bequeathing to
the world’.37 Valéry’s aesthetics resist closure: they remain open to the unsaid
defined as ‘any displacement, entrancement, astonishment’, and in the New Testament

as ‘trance’. See Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English, 244.
34 Adorno, ‘Valéry’s Deviations’, 147. ‘Das Eingedenken dessen, was in ihm nicht aufgeht
und was er eliminiert; eben das Nichtidentische.’ (‘Valérys Abweichungen’, 56)
35 Adorno, ‘Valéry’s Deviations’, 153. The ‘Selbstentfremdung des Subjekts’ (‘Valérys
Abweichungen’, 65).
36 Adorno, ‘Valéry’s Deviations’, 151. ‘Das Geschäft der Intellektuellen ist es, mittels
Zeichen, Namen, Symbolen alles aufzurühren, ohne das Gegenwicht wirklicher
Handlungen. Das macht ihre Reden verblüf fend, ihre Politik gefährlich, ihr Ver
gnügen oberf lächlich.’ (‘Valérys Abweichungen’, 62)
37 Adorno, ‘Valéry’s Deviations’, 160. ‘Ein Werk dauert gerade insofern es ganz anders
zu erscheinen vermag, als es sein Verfasser geplant hat.’ (‘Valérys Abweichungen’,
75)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 309
and the unsayable and hence ‘deviate’ from the totalizing discourses that
would seek to close down meaning in the cause of explication. In the final
analysis, it goes without saying that the deviations of Paul Valery are also
the deviations of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno.
The aesthetics of displacement also inform Heidegger’s project in
‘The Nature of Language’, where he attempts ‘to seek out the neighbour-
hood of poetry and thinking – which now means an encounter of the two
facing each other’.38 Initially, Heidegger approaches his task in terms of
poetic subjectivity and its relationship to language, using the poem ‘The
Word’ (‘Das Wort’, 1919) by Stefan George as a catalyst for his investigation.
George’s poem charts the venture of the poet into distant lands in search of
material for his poetry. He returns home, but the treasures he has brought
with him disappear at once. The poem ends with the lines ‘so I renounced
and sadly see:/ Where word breaks of f no thing may be.’39 The poem is a
self-ref lexive meditation on the impossibility of attaining poetic insight
by experience alone. As Heidegger notes, ‘the poet has learned renuncia-
tion. He has undergone an experience. With what? With the thing and its
relation to the word.’40 ‘The renunciation which the poet learns is of that
special kind of fulfilled self-denial to which alone is promised what has
long been concealed and is essentially vouchsafed already.’41 Certainly, the
lyrical subject likewise is within the formation of the text and is connected
to a real author (a connection that allows us to assert ‘Eduard Mörike says
this in his poem’; ‘Stefan George has written that’), but the nature of that
formation has been f luid, a process that Heidegger calls eundo assequi (to
38 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 82. His goal is ‘die Nachbarschaft von Dichten
und Denken aufzusuchen, d.h. jetzt: das Gegen-einander-über der beiden’ (‘Das
Wesen der Sprache’, 187).
39 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 60. ‘So lernt ich traurig den verzicht:/ Kein
ding sei wo das wort gebricht’. (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 163)
40 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 65. ‘Der Dichter hat den Verzicht gelernt. Er
hat eine Erfahrung gemacht. Womit? Mit dem Ding und dessen Beziehung zum
Wort.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 168)
41 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 66. ‘Der Verzicht, den der Dichter lernt, ist von
der Art jenes erfüllten Entsagens, dem allein sich das lang Verborgene und eigentlich
schon Zugesagte zuspricht.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 169)
310 Martin Travers
obtain something along the way). In Heidegger’s words, ‘to undergo an

experience with something means that this something, which we reach
along the way in order to attain it, itself pertains to us, meets and makes its
appeal to us, in that it transforms us into itself.’42 It is a concept that allows
the aesthetic to be seen for what it is: an activity rather than a discourse.
What is it the poet reaches? Not mere knowledge, if we understand
that as the often dogmatic resolution that theory of fers. The poet according
to Heidegger enters into a complex relationship between word and thing,
a relationship that is not always explicable in terms of a formal metalan-
guage. ‘Something comes to pass for him, strikes him, and transforms his
relation to the word.’43 Since the poet is positioned between language and
world, seeking to mediate that gap, the authentic attitude is a listening to
what Heidegger calls ‘the grant’ (‘die Zusage’), ‘the promise of what is to
be put in question’.44 And he adds ‘questioning is the piety of thinking’.45
It is a process that opens itself to the reverberations of language, what
others would later call the ‘free play of signification’. The poem points to
something thought-provoking and memorable. It shows what is there,
and yet ‘is’ not.
42 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 73–74. ‘Mit etwas eine Erfahrung machen, heißt,
daß jenes, wohin wir unterwegs gelangen, um es zu erlangen, uns selber belangt, uns
trif ft und beansprucht, insofern es uns zu sich verwandelt.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’,
177) Heidegger here echoes Adorno’s reading of Valery’s notion of the ‘subject’s self-
alienation’, seeing in the de-centring of the subject (both within and beyond the text)
as the essential moment in the articulation and engagement with poetic language. If
I understand Heidegger (and possibly Adorno via Valéry) correctly this involves the
withholding of the need to clarify understanding before understanding has taken
place. Indeed, for the reader all that may be possible is the internal charting of the
process of understanding, leaving the results of that process unspecified.
43 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 67. ‘Es schickt sich ihm etwas zu, trif ft ihn und
verwandelt sein Verhältnis zum Wort.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 170)
44 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 71. ‘Das Hören der Zusage dessen, was in Frage
kommen soll.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 175)
45 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 72. ‘Das Fragen ist die Frömigkeit des Denkens.’
(‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 175)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 311
As the subsequent sections of Heidegger’s essay make clear, poetic

enunciation stays within the word, but also in the darkness that surrounds
the word, a state to which the poet must accommodate himself. Meaning
is always there but only in posse not in actu. The poet cannot rely upon
an interpretative community: this does not exist in Heidegger’s poetics.
Approaching the word is a solitary experience with and within language.
It is an encounter that goes beyond interpretation. Indeed, language resists
interpretation. As Heidegger notes, ‘the essential nature of language f latly
refuses to express itself in words’.46 As Heidegger’s essay progresses, its
tenor moves increasingly towards an attempt to map the shifting semantic
force-field of the poem.47 Heidegger once more: ‘the word for the word can
never be found in that place where fate provides the language that names
and so endows all beings, so that they may be radiant and f lourishing in
their being.’48
At one point in his essay, Heidegger attempts through a series of spatial
metaphors to map out the terrain of the word, attempting to find terms for
what he knows ultimately is a reality that cannot be discursively described.49
He sees it as ‘country’ (‘Gegend’), with a related ‘region’ (‘Nachbarschaft’).
‘For ref lective thinking’, Heidegger tells us, ‘is the country, that which
46 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 81. ‘Manches spricht dafür, daß das Wesen der
Sprache es gerade verweigert, zur Sprache zu kommen.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’,
186)
47 Gosetti-Ferencei eloquently describes them as ‘formal strategies of indirection’
in her Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language, 99. In her read-
ing of Heidegger, Gosetti-Ferencei quite rightly implies af finities with Post-
Structuralism.
48 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 86. ‘Das Wort für das Wort läßt sich dort
nirgends finden, wo das Geschick die nennend-stiftende Sprache schenkt für das
Seiende, daß es sei und als Seiendes glänze und blühe.’ (Das Wesen der Sprache’, 192)
Adorno puts it even more succinctly. In the poetic text, ‘language itself speaks’. See
Adorno, ‘Charmed Language: On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt’, 193. ‘Sprache
selber redet’ (‘Die beschworene Sprache’, 63).
49 See Malpas, J. Heidegger’s Topology. Heidegger’s spatial topoi equate to ‘concepts
of unity, limit and bound’, 2. They also frequently have for Malpas a geo-ethical
significance.
312 Martin Travers
counters, is the clearing that gives free rein, where all that is cleared and
free, and all that conceals itself, together attain open freedom.’50 What the
‘Gegend’ contains is the hidden riches of language, the contents of which
Heidegger leaves unspecified, but in his own writing it is clear that he is
referring to the poetic fund of language, its semantic force field, its forever
unclosing connotative potential. The poet enters this world without ever
definitively arriving. The process is one of reception rather than interpreta-
tion: the opening rather than the closing down of the promise of the word.
This is why the key term ‘unterwegs’ appears and reappears throughout
Heidegger’s discourse. The poet must remain in darkness, because that is
where being, for him, dwells. It is not he but language that is the dynamic
agent: logos, which is, as Heidegger says drawing upon the thoughts of Tao,
‘the mystery of mysteries of thoughtful saying’.51
It soon becomes clear that the poet’s exploration of language is also
that of the reader. Coming to terms with the poem means coming to terms
with the presence of language, what is says and what is doesn’t say. Indeed,
in Heideggerian terms, the two are coterminous: the richness of language
hides itself through silence. As he notes:
When does language speak itself as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot
find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or
encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly
giving it thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and f leet-
ingly touched us with its essential being.52
50 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 91. ‘Andeutend gesagt, ist die Gegend als
das Gegnende die freigebende Lichtung, in der das Gelichtete zugleich mit dem
Sichverbergenden in das Freie gelangt.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 197)
51 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 92. ‘Das Geheimnis aller Geheimnisse des
denkenden Sagens.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 198)
52 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 59. ‘Wo aber kommt die Sprache selber als
Sprache zum Wort? Seltsamerweise dort, wo wir für etwas, was uns angeht, uns an
sich reißt, bedrängt oder befeuert, das rechte Wort nicht finden. Wir lassen dann,
was wir meinen, im Ungesprochenen und machen dabei, ohne es recht zu bedenken,
Augenblicke durch, in denen uns die Sprache selber mit ihrem Wesen fernher und
f lüchtig gestreift hat.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 161)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 313
The reader’s experience of language can only be an experience with language

that fuses the said and not-said: the light of day and dreams, and it is this
we pursue in our reading.53
What, then, does the poetic experience with the word reveal as our
thinking pursues it? After all, Heidegger provocatively announces at one
point in his essay: ‘thinking is not a means to gain knowledge’ (and this
would include the seemingly definitive readings that theory of fers).54 The
self-ref lective use of language cannot be guided by the common, usual
understanding of meanings; rather it, it must be guided by the hidden
depths that emerge in our contact with these. Our experience with language
means following the contours of this movement. As Heidegger explains,
‘we must be careful not to force the vibration of the poetic saying into the
rigid groove of a univocal statement, and so destroy it’.55 ‘Ek-stasis’, then, is
a movement away from theory (if we see the latter as a paradigm where the
answer is already known before the question has been asked). Encountering
the text (Heidegger does not talk about ‘interpretation’) means to hold
the text open rather than seek ways of closing it; in Heidegger’s parlance,
it is to work through a ‘neighbourhood’, ‘that place that gives us room to
experience how matters stand with language. Anything that gives us room
and allows us to do something gives us a possibility, that is, it gives what
enables us. ‘“Possibility” so understood, as what enables, means something
else and something more than mere opportunity.’56
53 As Thomä notes, ‘Es geht hier nicht um den Inhalt des Gehörten, sondern um die
Tatsache des Hörens selbst’ (‘It is not a question here of the content of what is heard,
but of the fact of hearing itself ’. My translation). See Thöma, 309.
54 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 70. ‘Das Denken ist kein Mittel für das
Erkennen.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 173)
55 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 64. ‘weil wir darauf achten müssen, daß die
Schwingung des dichterischen Sagens nicht auf die starre Schiene einer eindeutigen
Ausssage gezwungen und so zerstört werde’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 167).
56 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 92–93. ‘Wir vermuten die genannte
Nachbarschaft als die Stätte, die es versattet, zu erfahren, wie es sich mit der Sprache
verhält. Was uns etwas verhaftet und erlaubt, gibt uns Möglichkeit, d.h. solches, was
ermöglicht. Die so verstandene Möglichkeit, das Ermöglichende, besagt anderes und
mehr als die bloße Chance.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 199)
314 Martin Travers
This is not a matter of ‘Wortmystik’ (of which many of Heidegger’s
critics have complained), of a purely irrational grasping of the text through
feeling and ‘sensibility’, which is put into language without clear semantic
boundaries. On the contrary, Heidegger makes it clear that the engagement
with language is also an exertion of the mind. As he showed elsewhere, he
was fully capable of sophisticated technical analysis.57 As he says, ‘poetry and
thinking are not separated if separation is to mean cut of f into a relational
void.’58 His argument is that by appropriating the poetic text exclusively in
their own terms conventional metalanguages close down rather than open
up the text as a fund of language; they are too eager to translate the f luid
and indeterminate into statements that are unequivocal, are, in short, ‘true’
within their own frames of reference.59 With Heidegger we never reach
a definitive or ‘true’ word. This does not mean for Heidegger a surrender
to indeterminacy, but the chance to retain a sense for the presence of the
object and a feel for the cognitive processes involved in experiencing this
presence.60 For those who need to establish firm interpretations, it is a frus-
trating experience. But the truth (as both Heidegger and Adorno might
well have said) lies in the frustration.61
57 As in the debate with Emil Staiger in 1951 where radically dif fering interpretations
of Mörike’s poem ‘Auf eine Lampe’ (‘To a Lamp’) involved a rhetorical investigation
of the poem and most notably of the single word ‘scheint’ (‘appears’). See Staiger,
‘Zu einem Vers von Mörike’.
58 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 90. ‘Dichten und Denken sind nicht getrennt,
wenn Trennung heißen soll: ins Bezuglose abgeschieden.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’,
196)
59 As Joughin and Malpas explain ‘aesthetic specificity is not, however, entirely expli-
cable, or graspable, in terms of another conceptual scheme or genre of discourse.’
See Joughin and Malpas, ‘The New Aestheticism’, 3.
60 Nor is it for Adorno. Their shared goal is ‘to think through and therefore beyond
the division of subject and object without merely assenting to their dissolution. See
Wilson, 276.
61 Malpas notes ‘that the task of reading Heidegger will indeed involve a certain “strug-
gle” both with Heidegger, and sometimes against him, seems to me an inevitable
result of any attempt to engage with Heidegger as a “live” thinker rather than a mere
“text”’. See Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 2.
‘Ek-Stasis’ 315
The poet’s naming of the poem involves us too in the naming of that
naming, although that naming may often go unnamed but remains some-
thing that is largely process. We register what is there, the formal rich-
ness, thematic complexities, resonance of imagery, the posing of questions
(through irony and paradox, for example), and launch ourselves into a
resolution of those questions. But we also register what is not there; not
there in the poem, but also not there in us, in terms of our failure or limita-
tions of understanding. We stand within the empowerment of interpreta-
tion, but also to one side of it. Our experience (our learning experience)
is that of Adorno’s ‘unwiderstehlich’, the displacement of ‘ek-stasis’. What
Heidegger is doing in ‘The Nature of Language’ is to work through (often
with repetition, sometimes with obscurity) that act of ‘unwiderstehen’. In
doing so, he explicates a conceptual terrain that precedes analysis, and this
surely is where the aesthetic (rather than the literary-theoretical) dwells. It
is here that Heidegger finds his own fore-grounding, in demarcating the
terrain where the possible remains possible, before it become impossible
in the final act of interpretation.
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ERIC S. NELSON
Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno
Introduction: Habermas’s Critique of Adorno’s Aesthetics
In response to Jürgen Habermas’s negative assessment of the import of

Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics, I revisit Adorno’s thought in light of the issue
of whether and to what extent there can be an aesthetics of nature, and
its potential ethical and social-political import.1 For philosophers from
Hegel to Gadamer and Habermas, there can be no ‘aesthetics of nature’
as the aesthetic in modernity primarily concerns human expressions and
products, whereas nature is contrasted with Geist (spirit or human social
activity) that overcomes it. Habermas continues the Neo-Kantian tradi-
tion separating facticity and validity, and value-free nature from culturally
formed value, such that aesthetic judgments consist of intersubjectively
redeemable validity claims about authenticity, genuineness, sincerity, and
taste. As these categories do not apply to the natural world, there can be at
best an indirect aesthetic appreciation of natural phenomena. Likewise, the
radical separation of moral from aesthetic validity claims entails that it is a
confusion of spheres or languages to consider their mutual entwinement.
In this context, Habermas has criticized Adorno’s ‘utopian aestheticism,’
i.e. the connection between art, emancipation and the promise of happi-
ness in Adorno’s works, and Adorno’s use of unsystematically articulated
1 Habermas summarizes his critique in Habermas and Dews, Autonomy and Solidarity,
152–154.
320 ERIC S. NELSON
speculative concepts, such as mimesis and non-identity, which have both

aesthetic and social-political dimensions for Adorno.2
Habermas’s critique of Adorno is pursued in the name of rational-
izing and redeeming the critical social theory of the earlier generation of
the Frankfurt School. This revision of critical theory indexes the degree to
which the critical significance and implications of non-identity, dissonance,
mimesis and sensuous responsiveness have been lost and constitutively
excluded from playing a role in critical theory as reconstructed though the
theory of communicative action. This loss is an impoverishment of the aes-
thetic and of critique to the extent that both require a reference – however
indirect and transient, as it is not an appeal to essence or substance – to
sensuousness, nature, and materiality in their non-identity and dissonance
with human projects and constructions.
If there were no aesthetics of nature, which is articulated – often indi-
rectly – in an alternate aesthetic tradition in modern philosophy from
Kant’s Critique of Judgment through Nietzsche to Adorno and Heidegger,
even the most formal and avant-garde art nonetheless involves experimen-
tal and empirical moments of non-identity. In sensuousness, perception,
materiality, empiricity, and consequently non-identity with the conceptual
and constructed, the aesthetic reveals that it has a broader context and sig-
nificance than a discourse concerning validity claims about the authentic-
ity and sincerity of states-of-mind and character to which Habermas has
condensed it.3
Art can be an expression of sincerity and the human spirit, as Habermas
describes; it can also confront and be confronted by its sensuous and mate-
rial conditions and contexts. Aesthetic experience and ref lection can engage
the inhuman and non-human. Encounters with nature and animality can
disorient and perhaps reorient human anthropomorphism even as they
2 This argument is unfolded in chapter five of Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity, and in Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action I: Reason and the
Rationalization of Society, 382–390. See also Pensky, The Actuality of Adorno, 7.
3 See Fleming’s discussion of Habermas’s aesthetics in Emancipation and Illusion,
191.
engage human capacities and organs. There are such moments, e.g., in free
natural beauty and the sublime, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Whereas
the Kantian sublime shakes the subject yet issues in a renewed apprecia-
tion of human dignity, nature is inevitably encountered in human social-
historical terms that at times challenge those very terms in Adorno.4 Insofar
as experience has mimetic (imitative), sensuous, and material dimensions
that move toward the object as something non-identical to the subject,
however conditionally this might occur, natural events and phenomena
are potentially more than their intersubjective construction and concep-
tualization. They are ‘wordless’ but not thereby as powerless and mute as
Habermas suggests.5
It is the aesthetic that opens up non-human natural and animal worlds
in Adorno’s writings, and this element is lost in the reduction of the aes-
thetic to the expression of authenticity. Natural phenomena and animals
are shaped through human discourses and practices, especially normative
ones of beauty and use, yet nevertheless resist them. Such resistance and
irreducibility is illustrated in Adorno’s works on Wagner and Mahler. While
nature as represented in Wagner’s music is analyzed as ideology, i.e. as a
celebration of the aura and irrational power of nature that perpetuates the
domination of nature and humans in authoritarianism and racism, nature
as intimated in Mahler’s Song of the Earth suggests a ‘promise of happi-
ness’ in the aesthetic reconciliation of humanity, animals, and the natural
world. Music expresses human life, yet it potentially indicates more than
human worlds that extend beyond and potentially disrupt the injustice and
suf fering formed in the human world. This is because artistic and aesthetic
links with nature, joined to the sensuous and non-conceptual, are linked
with happiness or – at least – its promise.
4 On the historicity and racial context of Kant’s aesthetics of nature, see Nelson, ‘China,
Nature, and the Sublime in Kant,’ 333–346.
5 Habermas and Dews, Autonomy and Solidarity, 152.
322 ERIC S. NELSON
Nature, Enlightenment and Domination
The claim that Adorno of fers indications of an indirect – indirect to the

extent that the reification and substantializing of its alterity can be coun-
tered – ‘aesthetics of nature’ is itself controversial and contested, since
Adorno is a thinker of the unending mediation of phenomena and is
critical of appeals to the immediacy of nature or primordial experience.
Accordingly, suspicious of appeals to primordial experiences of nature or
being that he found at work in Heidegger’s ontology, Adorno remarked:
‘The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature,
the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to
be nature, primordial experience.’6 In reply to the celebration of nature
and life in German irrationalism and fascism, Adorno argued that the
more nature is called upon, the more reified it is, and the more ideologi-
cal is its function.
Discourses of nature are not innocent, as they ref lect the conditions
and structures of social-historical life and of domination. Such discourses
are ideological in that the appeal to nature is often an expression of the
‘domination of nature,’ which for Adorno is not merely a metaphor. To
this extent nature is a social construct. Yet is it only this, such that we
cannot question anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism? Adorno’s
works should be read in light of their materialist and anti-teleological
dimensions; nature is materially more than its construction by human
individuals, groups, or even the species. Contrary to the thesis of Vico
and Hegel that the ‘true is the made,’ Adorno presents human and artistic
making with the truth-content of the unmade, and the negativity of what
is not, which crystallizes in historical works and products.7
Adorno’s description of the domination of nature presupposes some-
thing that is to be dominated and – more noteworthy – something beyond
6 Critical Models, 7; compare the similar formulation in Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,

126; Ästhetische Theorie, 191.
7 Aesthetic Theory, 133; Ästhetische Theorie, 200.
and other than that domination, which resists, escapes, interrupts, and
potentially challenges such domination. That is, ‘nature’ is not only a con-
struct for Adorno but aporetically an alterity to human constructs and
practices:
For our knowledge of nature is really so preformed by the demand that we dominate
nature (something exemplified by the chief method of finding out about nature,
namely the scientific experiment) that we end up understanding only those aspects
of nature that we can control. In addition there is also this underlying feeling that
while we are putting out our nets and catching more and more things in them, there
is a sense in which nature itself seems to keep receding from us; and the more we take
possession of nature, the more its real essence becomes alien to us.8
As Horkheimer and Adorno argued in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the

domination of nature is a real process at work in the history of civiliza-
tions from myth to rationality, and it is most fully realized in the project
of modernity and the Enlightenment.9
Because of Horkheimer and Adorno’s confrontation with the totalitar-
ian, regressive, and destructive aspects of the Enlightenment and modern
rationalization, and their narratives of historical progress through increasing
democracy and prosperity that can serve ideology-critique and ideological
self-deception, Habermas contends that Adorno and Horkheimer’s analy-
sis abandons possibilities for ‘hope,’ rational discourse, and social action.
The converse is true to the degree that furthering critical self-ref lection
and action requires critically diagnosing the regressive moments of the
Enlightenment, modernity, and progress under capitalist and socialist
regimes rather than immunizing them as sacrosanct.10 From the French
Revolution to the present situation, appeals to norms such as justice, free-
dom, and democracy can disguise their manipulation and self-destruction
in external colonization and wars and internal control.
8 Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 176.

9 I explore this work in relation to contemporary environmental philosophy in Nelson,
‘The Dialectic of Environment: Nature as Ideology and Ethics in Adorno and the
Frankfurt School’.
10 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 92/141 (cited by section and page).
324 ERIC S. NELSON
Just as progress is simultaneously mythical and ‘inherently anti-myth-

ological,’ embodying the magical spell of domination and the prospect of
transformation, it is, according to Adorno: ‘Only reason, the principle of
social domination inverted into the subject … would be capable of abol-
ishing this domination.’11 Such non-identical and an-archic inversion,
which has its own ‘hopefulness’ even without a pre-determined ‘hope,’
can orient theory and praxis more f lexibly and appropriately than a ter-
minus such as the ‘modern Enlightenment project’ prescribed to history
by Habermas.
Nature, Mimesis and the Priority of the Object
By rejecting the possibility of being oriented by ‘the impossible,’ which

Adorno introduces ‘for the sake of the possible,’ Habermas is in this respect
not formal or Kantian enough.12 In subjecting the Enlightenment, and
its implicit modes of domination, to critique, Adorno and Horkheimer
are closer to Kant’s striving for enlightenment as a self-given regulative
project; progress as an action-orienting if unrealizable ref lective idea; and
his notion of purposiveness without a purpose in the Critique of Judgment.
Kantian purposiveness without a purpose intimates for Adorno both the
senseless brutality of purposeless work without end and the freedom of a
non-administrated playful relating to the object. And there are, as Adorno
also indicates, moments such as tenderness that transcend purposiveness
even as such purposiveness without a purpose cannot completely rid itself
of the question of purpose or ‘what for?’13 In non-identity thinking, the
11 Critical Models, 150 and 152.

12 Minima Moralia 153/247.
13 Minima Moralia 20/41 and 145/226.
aporetic structures of Kant’s thought are radicalized rather than coercively

resolved.14
As opposed to Kant’s account of the Enlightenment as a ‘not yet’
demanding self-criticism, and Marx’s ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists,’
Habermas suggests that criticizing the Enlightenment is to reject the
achievements of modern egalitarianism and democracy. Yet one can af firm
moral and political egalitarianism while rejecting his reasoning, which
restricts post-metaphysical thought to the symmetrical interaction of exclu-
sively human subjects. First, his analysis conf lates symmetry and equality.
Acknowledging asymmetrical ethical relations with animals and environ-
ments can be compatible with maintaining the equality of sentient beings,
as in Buddhist or in Peter Singer’s utilitarian animal ethics, or the equality
of persons, as in eco-feminism and eco-socialism. Second, Habermas’s ethics
perpetuates the division between the natural as material and the human as
spiritual inherited from Christianity and German Idealism, ignoring the
potential for an aesthetics and ethics of nature. The non-identity of nature
contests the reification of nature in ideological images and fetishes as well
as the marginalization and exclusion of nature in a world constituted by
social power and discourse.
A critical hermeneutics of nature is more adequately articulated in
Adorno’s non-identity of nature, which is a naturalism that challenges
doctrinal naturalism; i.e. the reified images and timeless norms of nature
articulated in Romanticism and scientism, and vitalism and positivism.15
Such doctrines of nature preclude being responsive and answerable to the
object, without either dictating to it or being absorbed in it as mimicry;
that is, a spontaneous an-archic mimesis toward the natural that – through
14 Whereas Habermas takes the transcendental constructivist Kant as his point of

departure, Adorno proceeds from the paradox of the integrating power of conscious-
ness and the aporetic moment of non-identity in Kant: see Adorno, Kant’s Critique,
176–179.
15 See Adorno, ‘Spengler after the Decline’, Prisms, 67.
326 ERIC S. NELSON
the acknowledgment of non-identity – challenges a return to nature or

identification with the fetish that inevitably betrays it.16
The fetishistic ‘ideologies of primitivism and return to nature’ in music,
for instance, reproduce domination – and enforced childishness rather than
spontaneous childlikeness – rather than furthering resistance.17 Adorno
controversially extended this analysis to both elite and popular music, as
in his account of the dominance of capitalist exchange and the commodity
form in the ‘jazz business’ (Culture Industry, 33). The archaic, original, and
primordial is itself a product of fixation and reification. Even if one wants
to exclude varieties of jazz and popular culture from the thoroughness of
Adorno’s analysis, the appearance of immediacy, intimacy, naturalness,
and spontaneity can be a central element of the commodity character and
exchange value of cultural goods (Culture Industry, 34, 37).
The aura is ‘the presence of that which is not present’ (Culture Industry,
88). Against the aura of the ideological image, reproduced through pro-
duction, media, and consumption, Adorno’s immanent critique fractures
the prison of pure immanence in which all is perceptible and calculable
in order to free the object. Freeing the object, whether human, animal,
or material thing, is to engage its expressiveness and particularity while
not being absorbed or enthralled by it insofar as this is possible in current
societies in which humans are ‘in thrall to the world of things’ (Culture
Industry, 88). Such receptivity oriented to the particularity, corporeality,
and alterity of each thing is indispensable, as: ‘No theory, not even that
which is true, is safe from perversion into delusion once it has renounced
a spontaneous relation to the object.’18
In his devotion to the particularity and suchness of objects, or the
materialist commitment to the ‘primacy of the object’ that is not ‘the
supposedly pure object, free of any added thought or intuition’, Adorno
challenges reductive doctrinal forms of materialism and naturalism with
16 This argument is primarily based on Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, Prisms,
29–31.
17 Adorno, The Culture Industry, 30; on the dif ferent senses of being like a child, see
41 and 45.
18 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, 33.
a phenomenological-hermeneutical moment of encounter and exposure

to things.19 He did not reject the phenomenological aspect of perception
and cognition in his critique of what he considered to be the reification
of receptivity and the ideology of the originary and the given in Husserl
and Heidegger.20 Adorno’s practice of immanent critique involves both a
destructuring of ideology and reification and a phenomenological or per-
ceptual dimension when he claims: ‘Such criticism does not stop at a general
recognition of the servitude of the objective mind, but seeks to transform
this knowledge into a heightened perception of the thing itself.’21
The intensification of a free identification moving toward the particu-
lar involves a mimesis that is liberated from magic and rituality. This non-
reductive mimesis, in which identification breaks with identity through
the freedom of the object, is intimated in art, just as the critical and more
responsive concept can be at times articulated in philosophy.22 Art can
encourage the explication of the af finities and dif ferences of the human
and the non-human. Adorno’s descriptions of such mimetic recognition
are environmentally suggestive since they entail the otherness of material
nature without relying on one particular image of nature. This is a hopeful
alternative to a paradigm that excludes things, others, and creatures that
cannot be reduced to symmetrical equivalence, which is a vision of equality
rooted in the dif ferentiation of the division of labour and the equivalences
of exchange-value.
Mimesis is a mediated and hence complicated concept in Adorno’s
writings. On the one hand, it can be mere imitation understood as copy-
ing, mechanical reproduction, and the repetition of a universal medium
of sameness. Such mimesis reproduces the existing order of things, as it
is riveted in the connectedness and ef ficacy of myth, ritual, and magic or
ideology, media, and consumption. On the other hand, mimesis and the
pictorial character of thought speak to the entanglement of human life with
19 Critical Models, 249–251.

20 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 81–82; Negative Dialektik, 88–90.
21 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, 32.
22 On the convergence of art and philosophy, see Critical Models, 14.
328 ERIC S. NELSON
its world, and of reason with nature. Artworks in particular are enigmas in
their configuration of the mimetic and the rational.23 Mimesis binds to
the singular in experience; it is a necessary moment to art and to rationali-
ty.24 Reason, despite itself, is a moment of nature that has separated itself
from – without being free of – nature.25 Likewise, when image-oriented
thinking is freed from its absorption in immanence without losing con-
tact with it, and while not being eliminated in abstract conceptual think-
ing, it takes on an altered significance that is inherent in it from the start.
Mimesis is in this sense the promise of a playful and receptive spontaneity
of sensuous freedom not absorbed in the conformity and discipline of
social integration. Adorno described the latter aspect of mimesis as the
primal form of love.26
As such, mimesis is expression, eros, and moving toward what is
desired and loved.27 Mimetic expression is always more than communica-
tion.28 Mimesis can be a compulsive and possessive repetition of identity,
a coercive reconciliation with the object, yet it need not be an enemy of
the object as human activity and art – in abandoning reconciliation with
nature – can be reconciled with it.29 In contrast to the false appearance
of reconciliation, when it is imposed upon the subject, there is another
modality to mimesis. As a non-identical or transformative repetition, it is
a metamorphosis proceeding from the felt contact with and bodily nearness
to its objects. This involves sensuous and material freedom, playfulness,
and responsiveness toward objects or the things themselves. The an-archic
mimetic play, free from purposiveness in contrast with ‘the repetition of

24 Aesthetic Theory, 30, 64; Ästhetische Theorie, 52, 101.
25 In contrast to their radical separation, and consequent reification, Adorno explicitly
stressed the dialectical relation and tension of nature and reason: ‘Reason is other
than nature yet still a moment of nature’ (Negative Dialectics, 289), ‘Daß Vernunft
ein anderes als Natur und doch ein Moment von dieser sei …’ (Negative Dialektik,
283).
26 Minima Moralia, 99/154; Philosophische Terminologie, 81.
27 Philosophische Terminologie, 81–84.
28 Aesthetic Theory, 112–113; Ästhetische Theorie, 171–172.
29 Aesthetic Theory, 133–134; Ästhetische Theorie, 202–203.
prescribed models’, discloses the possibility of transforming the compul-

sive and habitual repetition of identity and sameness into spontaneity and
creative individuation.30 Adorno notes, in a comment on Altenberg, that
‘humanity’ indicates individuation rather than being ‘a comprehensive
generic concept,’ even if ‘the particularity of happiness’ cannot be mistaken
‘for realized humanity.’31 Given the multiple modifications of mimesis, as
servitude and freedom, it – like ‘progress’ and every philosophical con-
cept– is equivocal for human freedom.32 Rodolphe Gasché has accord-
ingly argued that it is precisely the indeterminacy of nature for Adorno
that indexes nature’s interconnectedness with mythical violence and the
promise of freedom from such violence.33 Nature concurrently threatens
violence and destruction while promising liberation from it in satisfaction,
happiness, and f lourishing.
Adorno’s non-reductive indirect thinking of the non-identity of mate-
riality, a thinking that recognizes the singularity of things rather than
reducing them to an image or concept of what should count as nature,
commits him to an animal-human continuum, which also plays a role in
a number of revealing passages in Aesthetic Theory.34 There is no reified
apartheid between the human and non-human, as reductive rationalism
and spiritualism envision in their prohibition on mimesis and human
animality, embodiment, and sexuality.35 Through this taboo on mime-
sis, art becomes ‘the organ of mimesis’ and a castrated ‘pleasure without
pleasure.’36 The holy family ref lects earthly families, and humans are much
nearer to animals than idealism and its current incarnations imagine. Due
to their dif fuse mimetic capacities, which allow them to playfully create
and ethically respond as well as reactively conform, humans are materially
30 Culture Industry, 50; Critical Models, 151–152.

31 Critical Models, 151–152.
32 Critical Models, 143, 150.
33 Gasché, ‘The Theory of Natural Beauty and its Evil Star: Kant, Hegel, Adorno’.
34 Aesthetic Theory, 112–113, 119–120, 123–124; Ästhetische Theorie, 171–172, 181–182,
187–188.
35 Aesthetic Theory, 11, 115–117; Ästhetische Theorie, 24, 176–178.
36 Aesthetic Theory, 110–111, 11; Ästhetische Theorie, 168 and 25.
330 ERIC S. NELSON
interconnected with environments and animals. Whereas for Aristotle

mimesis distinguishes the human from the animal, it brings them into a
non-homogeneous relation in Adorno. As interconnected, humans can be
responsive and ethically responsible even in their dif ference.37
Bodily and sensuous continuity provides a more rigorous starting
point for recognizing animal suf fering and recognizing it as an ethical
problem. Animal otherness counts ethically since we are animals too and
animals are like us. They perceive and use concepts – to the extent that
all concepts involve the mimetic and pictorial – as Hegel noted in the
Phenomenology of Spirit.38 The human gaze considers itself above that of
the animal, unresponsively and irresponsibly lifting its eyes away from the
suf fering animal in the laboratory that is reduced to a mere exemplar of
universal fungibility.39 In its presumed superiority and dignity, humans
do not consider that the human gaze is itself animal and the animal gaze
already a human one.
Art and Nature between Suf fering and Happiness
Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussions of animal suf fering and human cru-

elty to animals, although unsystematic, entail the possibility of a non-deriva-
tive animal ethics. The suf fering of the animal demands ethical recognition,
despite its asymmetry, and beyond subjective feelings of anthropomorphiz-
ing empathy and identification. In this way, an asymmetrical yet relational
37 The simultaneous thinking of dif ference and continuity distinguishes Adorno from

Derrida, who af firms dif ference while denying continuity as homogeneous in Derrida,
The Animal that therefore I am, 30. For Adorno, there can be non-homogeneous,
asymmetrical continuities.
38 Hegel hierarchically sublimates animality and the organic yet does not fully eliminate
them in spirit, as spirit is life grasping itself: see Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes,
178–262, especially 262.
39 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7.
mimetic ethics of fers a wider moral perspective than the reduction of the
ethical to the communicative symmetry of reason-giving human agents.
Nevertheless, to consider an objection to my thesis, there are additional
statements in their works that seem to limit the ethical status of animals
and nature for which I am arguing. In what might seem an excursus, I will
consider how these apparently contrary arguments do not undermine the
ethical character of human relations with animals and nature, but are rather
aimed at their ideological misuse in perpetuating injustice towards other
humans. These criticisms occur particularly in the context of assessing
discourses advocating the prevention of animal cruelty and the preserva-
tion of nature in some varieties of romantic, proto-fascist and National
Socialist ideologies.
Adorno notes of the romantic and fascist reification of animals, ‘The
prevention of cruelty to animals becomes sentimental as soon as compas-
sion turns its back on humanity.’40 Adorno’s attention to this sentimen-
tality about animals and indif ference toward other humans, which is still
found today in some animal rights discourses, refers to the strange fact that
National Socialism condemned the Jewish people for their supposed cruelty
to animals, while attempting to reduce them to less than animals, and for
their so-called rootless distance from nature even as National Socialism
uprooted and destroyed their existence. This concern with animal suf fering
and the ‘destruction’ of German blood, soil, and natural environments
masked the intensification of human suf fering and annihilation while
concurrently intensifying the technological domination of nature.
The National Socialist aesthetic of ‘returning to nature’ resulted in the
utmost exploitation and ruination of humans, animals, and environments,
and accordingly has been analyzed as the mythic and self-destructive fulfil-
40 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 146; compare Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 104–105.

On the rhetoric of animal and environmental protection in some tendencies of
National Socialism, see Brüggemeier, Cioc, Zeller, How Green were the Nazis?, and
chapter five of Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature. On the realities of and intercon-
nections between National Socialist treatment of humans and animals, see Patterson,
Eternal Treblinka.
332 ERIC S. NELSON
ment of instrumental rationality and Enlightenment mastery.41 Because of a

narrow interpretation of this historical context, some statements by Adorno
– especially in the context of his responses to Heidegger and the emergent
new age tendencies of the 1960s – and by leftist anti-environmentalists
reductively condemn animal rights, environmentalism, and vegetarianism
as eccentricities and modish fashions inherently connected with fascism,
anti-humanism, and irrationalism. This rhetoric suppresses the ethical claim
of animal suf fering, established via the af finities of human and animal
beings, and excuses the exploitation of nature as a mere resource.
Instead of being merely rhetorical or an incoherent moment in his
thought, Adorno demonstrates both the destructive impulse as well as the
interruptive force inherent in discourses about animals and nature.42 This
interpretation is strengthened by the connections Adorno drew between
dehumanization and animalization in racism, which subtracts all ethical
status from its victims. In a significant passage from Minima Moralia,
Adorno relates racist dehumanization to the distancing abjection of ani-
mals. As totally other, dehumanized humans and devalued animals do not
ethically interrupt the sameness of the gaze.
The sub- and non-human is categorically separated from the norma-
tively human, and the ‘possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment
when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being’ as
‘those in power perceive as human only their own ref lected image, instead
of ref lecting back the human as precisely what is dif ferent’, so that the stir-
rings and suf ferings of the other ‘can no longer refute the manic gaze.’43
Despite the vulnerability and defencelessness characteristic of all organic
life, and not solely the human face, the animal is not simply the passive
object of destruction, a pure construct and product of human calculation,
discourse, and power. The animal can disrupt and awaken the human as
Adorno emphasizes in his account of Mahler: ‘Through animals humanity
41 See, for instance, Schoolman, Reason and Horror, 30–31.

42 See Adorno’s account of Schopenhauer on animal suf fering in Problems of Moral
Philosophy, 145.
43 Minima Moralia, 68/105.
becomes aware of itself as impeded nature and of its activity as deluded

natural history; for this reason Mahler meditates on them. For him, as in
Kafka’s fables, the animal world is the human world as it would appear from
the standpoint of redemption, which natural history itself precludes.’44 It
is not the romantic celebration of the blind and violent forces of nature
in a musician like Wagner but Mahler and Kafka who hint at an altered
ethical relation between the human and the animal. The claim that ethics
is confined to symmetry blinds ethical ref lection to the actual and exist-
ing asymmetries between humans and between humans and animals. The
ethical reduction to the equality of rational beings brackets the ethical in
activities that subordinate and destroy that which is asymmetrical and thus
other and non-identical.
Reintroducing asymmetry and a dif ference that is not merely an
exchange of dif ferent reasons extends ethical ref lection beyond what is
categorized as human and therefore considered intrinsically valuable. The
logic of equivalence involved in exchange relations, whether in speech or
the market, excludes and justifies the subjugation of those beings – however
dif ferent from one another – who do not exchange.45 Asymmetry chal-
lenges this powerful model. Such asymmetry is by itself insuf ficient for
ethics insofar as it codifies inequalities, as in Confucian ethics in which each
human and animal has a hierarchically generated ethical status; or it remains
neglectful or hostile to animals and the natural world, as in Kierkegaard
and Levinas, where humans anthropocentrically receive absolute priori-
ty.46 The ethical recognition of the asymmetrical and dif ferent should be
distinguished from their asymmetrical non-recognition in anti-egalitarian
political movements rooted in the domination of nature.
44 Adorno, Mahler, 9.
45 Adorno associates dif ference with resistance, for example, in Culture Industry, 96;
compare also Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, 53.
46 By potentially risking conf lating nature and fascism, Levinas recapitulates its ideo-
logical portrait of nature as war and pseudo-Darwinian struggle for existence: see
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21–30, and essays such as ‘Heidegger, Gagarin and Us’
in Levinas, Dif ficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 231–234.
334 ERIC S. NELSON
The recognition of the asymmetrical and non-identical is connected

to mimesis through the category of the aesthetic, which has an ethical
character via its connection with happiness. Whereas Habermas condemns
Adorno for an ‘aestheticism’ that identifies emancipation with art, the
aesthetic need not be restricted to asserting validity claims about taste.
The aesthetic is in its richer significance not exhausted in the validity of
communication for Adorno, as even formal and experimental art involves
perception and materiality. This is an alterity without which there is no
art, even as the ‘inner historicity of artworks’ is the ‘dialectic of nature and
the domination of nature.’47 Art mirrors the existing order of society and
its reification and commodification of things, persons, and cultural and
spiritual products. The culture industry is dominated by a logic of exchange-
ability, which consumers imagine they resist through the ‘uniqueness’ of
the exchangeable object.48
There is in art a remnant and moment of non-identity, of sensuous
freedom and the responsiveness of the mimetic, such that art is not nec-
essarily the fetishism, idolatry, and myth condemned by moralists from
Plato to Levinas.49 Mimesis is not a merely aesthetic phenomenon of
imitation. It is the basis of identity and conformity as well as the condi-
tion of the possibility of open and playful imitation, appropriation, and
interaction for Adorno; that is, of tenderness and, to adopt a phrase from
Hegel, ‘freedom toward the object’.50 In freeing oneself toward the object,
de-reifying it by displacing its domination and exploitation, a transforma-
tive movement occurs in which one is addressed by the subject-matter or
the empirical life of the object.
47 Aesthetic Theory, 5, 7; Ästhetische Theorie, 15, 18.

48 Aesthetic Theory, 135, 226–228; Ästhetische Theorie, 203, 335–337.
49 Adorno articulates the non-identity of freedom and dependence in mimesis, and
identifies a moment of enlightenment in myth, rejecting the reactionary archaism
that never finds what it seeks – an origin uncontaminated by ref lection. Levinas
perceives this moment as inherently regressive, evaluating poetry as magic and art
as idolatry, in Unforeseen History, 88–90.
50 Negative Dialectics, 213; ‘Freiheit zum Objekt’, Negative Dialektik, 213.
At the same time, Adorno dialectically indicates a danger in the move-

ment toward the primacy of the object: the freedom of the thing threatens
the enslavement and helplessness of the subject.51 In the aura of the object
and the power of the other, the subject and the self are mimetically spell-
bound and the capacities for ref lection and transformation – the critical
transformative moment in autonomy – weakened. Scattered in the non-
identity of consumable heterogeneity, resistance becomes impossible and
the repressive tolerance of indif ference the norm.
Just as art is not pure responsiveness to things but also complicit with
the domination of nature, the experiment can be another instance of instru-
mental rationality and nature’s domination. Nevertheless, Adorno can also
speak of the experimental and the empirical as more than the compul-
sive repetition and pre-programmed calculation of the functional total-
ity of the existing order.52 In contrast with the empirical order of things,
the experimental-empirical can indicate the capacity and willingness to
encounter the object.53 In the free mimesis toward the object, there is an
encounter.54 In that encounter, rationality is mimetic in being responsive
to the object and, accordingly, to the new and the dif ferent that it might
indicate.55 In this context, the artwork and natural beauty are intercon-
nected. As Espen Hammer notes; ‘untrammeled nature provides an image
of the non-identical’ for art, and the ‘artwork’s truth content can be viewed
as a mimesis of the beautiful in nature.’56
Such a perceptual shift occurring through the encounter constitutes
a dialectical empiricity insofar as the dialectic between subject and object,
or the perceiver and the perceived, is not solely conceptual in remaining
bound to the materiality and specificity of things. As Kant noted of the
aesthetic in the third Critique, Adorno argues that the mimetic requires
the conceptual and the discursive to come to word, even though it is not
51 Negative Dialectics, 48; Negative Dialektik, 58.

52 Aesthetic Theory, 134–135; Ästhetische Theorie, 203.
53 Aesthetic Theory, 2, 4–5, 37–38; Ästhetische Theorie, 10, 14, 64.
56 Hammer, ‘Metaphysics’, 74.
336 ERIC S. NELSON
identical to the concept.57 Art works through conceptualization without

providing concepts. Critique is analogous to some extent for Adorno, as
‘no critical theory can be practiced in particular detail without overesti-
mating the particular; but without the particular it would be nothing.58
Stefan Müller-Doohm noted how Adorno emphasizes the thing, object,
or matter over communication, and the specific above the general and
schematic, since the latter categories should be developed for the sake of
the former.59
There is much, however, which prevents such mimesis – interpreted
as bodily and sensuous responsiveness – from occurring. Adorno analyzed
the habitual and customary reproduction of power in our very senses in the
context of music as a retrogression in hearing as listeners are transformed
into consumers.60 The everyday transformation of hearing into consump-
tion is all the more coercive, since it is not merely superimposed by an
external system upon the ‘innocent’ lifeworld, and hence easily correct-
able through a new consensus, but already ingrained in the social-material
fabric of the lifeworld itself.
Conclusion
Nature is relentlessly mediated by human activity and practices, which

transform – but do not transcend – their material and natural conditions.
Mediation and totalization are as a consequence inevitably incomplete
and uneven, such that nature is never fully identical with one mode of its
social-historical mediation. This is indicated in the horrifying and terrible

58 Critical Models, 278.
59 Müller-Doohm, Adorno-Portraits, 122.
60 See Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’.
in nature as well as in natural beauty and its joy.61 Such experiences are
sources of the irrational in human life, of the supernatural and fatalistic;
but also, as mimetic responsiveness, of the formation of meaning in aes-
thetics, ethics, and rationality.
Word and thing, experience and the experienced, are dialectically irre-
ducible yet intertwined moments; in their tension, neither moment can be
grasped or ‘intuited’ in an immediate or originary way without one-sidedly
missing the other.62 In contrast to much twentieth-century philosophy
and its dogmatic semanticism, which still informs contemporary critical
social theory – particularly Habermas – and is being increasingly prob-
lematized in the contemporary revival of materialism, Adorno maintained
both the centrality of language, as a medium in which words and concepts
are inseparable, and of physicality, as words cannot be separated from the
nexus and material relations of things.63
It is this materiality – or what Adorno described as the dynamic
non-identity that remains in tension with fixated words and concepts64
– of specific things that displaces and interrupts the logic of integration.
These moments of aporia, contradiction, and resistance are not limited to
inter-human relations. They extend to all human comportments, even in
regard to animals and environments, which are concepts that contain their
own conf licting tendencies. The dominant human discourse, according to
Derrida, ‘imagines the animal in the most contradictory and incompat-
ible generic terms.’65 Animals and environments are put to instrumental
use, exploited as resources, eliminated and exterminated and, conversely,
there are various ways – whether aesthetic or moral, emotional or concep-
tual – in which humans encounter and recognize them as other than this
prevailing discourse.
A potential opening-up of the medium of language in experimental
openness and receptivity to the thing for its own sake occurs in ‘freedom

62 Philosophische Terminologie, 85.
63 Philosophische Terminologie, 1–2.
64 Philosophische Terminologie, 41.
65 Derrida, ‘The Animal that I therefore am’, 64.
338 ERIC S. NELSON
toward the object.’ This assertion of the object’s freedom indicates a dif ferent
basis for considering the irreducible or additional significance of things,
which is necessary for a non-instrumental environmental and animal ethics
that refuses to appeal to reified essences.66 The texture, multiplicity, and
contingency of the material world resists its dwindling to an instrumen-
tal product and teleological purpose, not due to its having an inviolable
essence, substance, or natural law, but as the prospect of the inexhaustible
‘not yet’ that Adorno raises in his Aesthetic Theory. In the breakthrough and
interruption of the ‘not yet’ in mimesis, there is the trace of a memory and
an anticipation of what lies beyond the division of self and other, subject
and object.67 The ‘still not’ of nature, as something more and other than
social-historical constructions of nature and their sedimentation, is a mate-
rialist challenge to the idealism and social constructivism of contemporary
critical theory. The aporia of mimesis and construction, sensibility and
rationality, is not resolved in either direction without the diminishment
of human experience.68 Such non-identity is the condition of critique and,
as non-identity that is dialectically other to itself, challenges rather than
presupposes an underlying essence or substance of nature – much less some
mystical absorption in it.69
Whereas dissolving the natural material world in rationality and com-
munication is the goal of much contemporary theory, Adorno argued that
the loss of nature is a diminishment of the human and its possibilities.
It is a denial of the hedonistic promise of happiness without which art
and ethics lose their life and critical import. The loss of the object is the
impoverishment of the subject, and the loss of natural beauty is not merely
66 Negative Dialectics, 5–6, 25–26; Negative Dialektik, 17–18 and 36. See the excellent
discussion of freedom toward the object in Kern, ‘Freiheit zum Objekt: Eine Kritik
der Aporie des Erkennens’.
68 Compare Aesthetic Theory, 115; Ästhetische Theorie, 176.
69 My account thus provides an alternative to Vogel’s argument for the elimination of
nature and critique of Adorno as overly attached to nature in Vogel, Against Nature,
86–87.
an aesthetic issue.70 It is an impoverishment of human sensibility, sensu-

ous life, and consequently of rationality itself.71 Instead of constituting
two distinct spheres of validity claims, the aesthetic and ethical are tied
together in the possibility of the good life in the midst of the facticity of
damaged life.72
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1997). Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1973).
——Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. H. W. Pickford (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005).
—— The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).
—— In Search of Wagner, trans. R. Livingstone (London: Verso, 1981).
—— Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. R. Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford
—— Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
—— Minima Moralia: Ref lections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. Jephcott (London:
Verso, 1974).
—— Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).
—— ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, A. Arato and
E. Gebahrdt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum,
70 Ästhetische Theorie, 52, 101.

71 Ästhetische Theorie, 101.
72 One can accordingly stress the primacy of life – even in the guise of the damaged life
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die negative, niemals das letzte Wort’ (Müller-Doohm, Adorno-Portraits, 43). On
Adorno’s notion of life as bio-aesthetic and bio-ethical, compare Bernstein, Adorno:
Disenchantment and Ethics, 40. On damaged life and the pathologies of power, see
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340 ERIC S. NELSON
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—— Problems of Moral Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
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MA: MIT Press, 2004).
—— Theory of Communicative Action I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society
(Boston: Beacon, 1984).
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(London: Verso, 1992).
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Acumen Publishing, 2008).
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1986).
Horkheimer, M. Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum Books, 1974).
—— and Adorno, T. W. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002).
Kern, A. ‘Freiheit zum Objekt: Eine Kritik der Aporie des Erkennens’, in A. Honneth,
ed., Dialektik der Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).
Levinas, E. Dif ficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
—— Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
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—— ‘The Dialectic of Environment: Nature as Ideology and Ethics in Adorno and
the Frankfurt School, Telos 155 ( June 2011).
—— ‘Priestly Power and Damaged Life in Nietzsche and Adorno’, in A. U. Sommer,
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349–356.
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(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
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Individuality (London: Routledge, 2001).
Vogel, S. Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996).
Martin Swales
Tragedy and the Aesthetic Dialectic
Introduction
The subtitle of the conference from which this volume derives is ‘From
Schiller to Marcuse’; and German writers and thinkers figure overwhelm-
ingly in the schedule of topics covered. Why should this be so? The answer,
I would suggest, has to do with the fact that, from the late eighteenth cen-
tury on, German culture produces a consistent and coherent tradition of
philosophical aesthetics that is, as far as I am aware, simply without equal
in the rest of Europe. If, to invoke the title of the conference, aesthetics
and modernity enter into some urgent and revelatory interplay, they do
so with particular force in the German-speaking lands.
Before sketching in this tradition, I want to ref lect brief ly on the term
I have just used – philosophical aesthetics. By that I mean a particular intel-
lectual enterprise in which aesthetics is more than the systematic theory
of that particular branch of human activity known as art. Rather, I am
concerned with a tradition which sees aesthetics as the central philosophi-
cal activity bar none. I am thinking of a line that begins with Baumgarten
and Lessing and can be traced through Kant, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse,
Heidegger and Gadamer.
A. G. Baumgarten lays the foundation for the serious study of aes-
thetics in 1750. As Willoughby and Wilkinson put it: ‘What he wanted
to investigate was neither mere taste – individual likes and dislikes – nor
mere sensations – the feeling registered by a subjective response to a stimu-
344 Martin Swales
lus – but a mode of knowledge.’1 The grand claim – to uncover ‘a logic of
the imagination’ that would illuminate ‘the mental operations involved in
grasping promptly and undividedly, as wholes, the complex structures of
the sensible world’2 – is central to the German aesthetic project from the
word go. Kant, in his theory of knowledge, had focussed attention not
on what we know but on how we know it. A similar emphasis extends to
his aesthetics, in which the mode of judgment, in its disinterestedness,
runs parallel to the disinterestedness of the morally pure judgment. For
Schiller the aesthetic condition is one in which the complex range of
human faculties come together in the freedom of play. Schopenhauer
sees art as promising redemption from the desperate tumult of blind,
Will-driven living by of fering men and women the chance to contem-
plate, in a condition of aesthetic detachment, the workings of the Will.
For Nietzsche art is the one and only justification of the world, a jus-
tification that is as fragile as it is valuable. Benjamin, in his inspired
essay on art in the age of technical reproducibility, sees art as centrally
implicated in the value-structures of modern living. Adorno denounces
the mendaciousness of the culture industry. And so on. I do not want
to prolong this list of brief summaries of the aesthetic theories of major
philosophers; all I want to highlight is the presence, in their thinking,
of what one might call a totalizing tendency, whereby art provides the
key definition of value and purpose in a post-religious, individualist, sci-
entific – in a word, modern, culture. I use the term ‘totalizing tendency’
in a value-free way. I am seeking to draw attention to – and not to judge
– a particular propensity, in this tradition of thinking, to make art and
the aesthetic the litmus test in the quest for existential meaning in the
secularized modern world.
1 Wilkinson and Willoughby in Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series

of Letters, xx.
2 Wilkinson and Willoughby, xxi.
Theory of Tragedy
There is a subset of these ruminations on the aesthetic which, as one might

colloquially put it, punches above its weight – and it is the theory of trag-
edy.3 Just as aesthetics, in the modern world, becomes the locus of the
quest for existential meaning, so, within the aesthetic realm itself, tragedy
becomes recognized as the make-or-break (and tragedy is very much about
making or breaking) test case. Much aesthetic theory is concerned with
the ability of art to re-shape, re-express, and, conceivably, thereby to justify
materiality. That is – and always has been (ever since Athens of the fifth
century BC) – a hazardous enterprise and it impinges directly on the theory
of tragedy.4 At one level tragedy must be about bodyliness, about pain
and death. And at another level it holds out the promise of some kind of
transcendence. I am reminded of the old schoolboy joke that recounts how
a man went into a tailor’s shop in ancient Athens with a dreadfully torn pair
of trousers. The tailor is appalled and cries out ‘Did you rip these?’ (or, to
quote his actual utterance, ‘Euripides?’). To which the man coolly replies
that he expects the tailor to make good the damage, to mend them (after
all: that is what tailors are for, and that profession figures in a particularly
desolate existential parable in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame): ‘Eumenides’, he
says. It may not be a profound joke. But it does, perhaps, enshrine the coex-
istence of two strategies, strategies both thematic and stylistic – of rending
and mending, and of the dialectical relationship between the two. Tragedy
has always depended upon that dialectical aesthetic. Aristotle’s definition of
catharsis partakes of both visceral and spiritual significations. At one level,
the emotions of fear and pity are unleashed and purged in an almost medi-
cal, bodily sense. But at another level, these emotions are cleansed, purified,
made good. Here we confront one of the profoundest problems posed by
3 On tragic theory see Gelfert, Die Tragödie, Silk, Tragedy and the Tragic, and Szondi,
‘Versuch über das Tragische’.
4 On Greek tragedy see Aylen, Greek Tragedy and the Modern World and Vickers,
Towards Greek Tragedy.
346 Martin Swales
European tragedy. Is the liberation of intense emotion itself cleansing? Or

is it the case that emotions triggered are emotions overheated? Or is that
which feels like cleansing mere wallowing? The troubling implications can
be felt most urgently if we recall tragedy’s thematic closeness to suf fering,
violence, death. To put the matter most brutally: does tragedy make sadists
or metaphysicians of us all? Are we turned on, or uplifted, or (most wor-
ryingly) both? To this troubling, paradoxical legacy German theoreticians
of the tragic and the tragic dramatists of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
twentieth centuries remain true.5
Lessing worries at the dialectic enshrined in the notion of ‘Mitleid’; it
can signify both visceral empathy (on the one hand) and cognitively, morally
energized compassion on the other – to say nothing of the human propen-
sity for self-pity. It is no accident that his ref lections on dif ferent aesthetic
representations of pain focus on the Laokoon group – which portrays, in
graphic detail, three naked bodies in torment.6 Schelling sees tragedy as
grounded in the impossible collision of two sets of clashing duties; behind
that dialectic there vibrates a larger one, anchored in Protestantism, of
the enslavement of the body on the one hand and the freedom of the soul
on the other. Schiller constantly worries at (and about) the all-important
stylizations of tragic theatre, without which the whole spectacle of human
grief would be unendurable. For Hegel (and Antigone is a key example for
him) tragedy deals with the inescapable clash of two sets of values, both
of which can claim to have right on their side.7 Tragedy is grounded in
those historical junctures where and when the human mind, intent upon
self-realization, generates the forces of countervailing opposition, thereby
unleashing the full expressive force of tragic conf lict. The ‘Versöhnung’
which results is a brief juncture of reconciliation which will, in its turn,
be sundered by new antagonisms. In Schopenhauer’s world, tragedy is
the unmasking of the Will as a tale full of sound and fury which signifies
5 On the tradition of German tragic drama since the eighteenth century, see Hart,
Tragedy in Paradise and Wiese, Die deutsche Tragödie von Lessing bis Hebbel.
6 See Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain.
7 On Hegelian theory of tragedy, see A. and H. Paolucci, eds, Hegel on Tragedy.
nothing.8 That pessimistic quietism is anathema to Nietzsche, who endeav-

ours to roll back a century of Winckelmannian notions of noble simplicity
and calm greatness by insisting on the tumultuous, Dionysian ground of
all true tragedy.9 Walter Benjamin highlights the broken significations of
baroque tragedy’s attempts at consoling, redemptive allegory.10 In mani-
fold ways, then, encompassing issues of both theme and style, these com-
mentators on tragedy re-enact the central issue of German philosophical
aesthetics: how far is art complicit in the material weightiness of human
being in the world? How far is it a liberation from that weightiness? How
far is it, dialectically, both those things?
Why should it be the case that aesthetics as a whole (and the aesthetics
of tragedy in particular) play such a central part in the self-understanding
of modern European – especially German – culture? The answer is one that
we have in part heard from Walter Benjamin. With the waning of religious
faith, the immortal longings of theology attach themselves to art, which is
entrusted ever more urgently in the course of the nineteenth century with
providing the higher signification for lives bereft of metaphysical uplift.
Benjamin defines the two major ideological groupings of the first half of the
twentieth century – Fascism and Communism – in terms of their ability
to draw on artistic validations: Fascism aestheticizes politics, Communism
politicizes art.11 The aphorism is beguiling. Whether it is true or not, what
is important (in my view) about Benjamin’s aperçu is his perception of art’s
all-important role in the corporatist movements of the age. Tragedy partakes
of those traf fics of signification – not least because, by tradition, tragedy is
the one literary genre that bears larger spiritual significations in its purpose.
It conjoins images of suf fering with a kind of theodicy, with intimations
of spiritual value. In post-1800 Europe that theodicy largely withdraws
from tragic drama, leaving in its wake a threnody for its passing.12 This is
8 See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea.

9 See Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, and Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy.
10 See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
11 See Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’.
12 See Giles, The Problem of Action in Modern European Drama, Steiner, The Death of
Tragedy, and Williams, Modern Tragedy.
348 Martin Swales
nowhere more apparent than in the concluding phase of a tragic drama

where, by tradition and by virtue of the expectation that is engendered by
that tradition, a moment of insight or recognition is vouchsafed both to the
tragic protagonist and to us the audience. As Terence Cave points out in his
superlative book Recognitions, at one level what is at stake is a threadbare
device, one depending on long-lost relatives whose identity is discovered
by the revelation of a scar, a birthmark, or whatever. But at another level,
the issue is one of knowledge, of retrospective interpretation, of anagnorisis
that brings meaning and insight, even a revelation of the world order in
some kind of higher purposiveness. Anagnorisis is privileged knowing, an
instance of a particular kind of poetic truth, a meta-statement in respect of
the dramatic conf lict that has gone before. In invoking the issue of poetry
I have in mind F. R. Leavis’s essay ‘Tragedy and the Medium’. He begins by
disagreeing with George Santayana, who takes the ‘Tomorrow and tomor-
row and tomorrow’ speech from Macbeth as expressing the philosophical
truth, the message, as it were, of the play. Leavis by contrast argues that
the speech is not the medium for some pre-existing philosophical scheme,
but is, rather, a more volatile thing, a moment of poetry. For Leavis that
poetry is grounded in the person of the speaker, but somehow manages
to go beyond the personal, to become a kind of meta-personal truth, but
not a window upon a systematic philosophy. In a secular age, one in which
tragedy has to get by without theodicy, the ambivalence of tragedy, the
aesthetic dialectic which is part of its birthright becomes ever more prob-
lematic, ever more fraught and more painfully truthful. The quest for some
kind of redemptive intimation founders in the omnipresence of horror and
cruelty. The ghostly presence of anagnorisis can be felt; the uplift of a kind
of meta-personal poetry haunts the closing statement of many modern
tragedies – but we are uncertain as to how to respond to these moments,
how much weight and value to give them – just as we are uncertain as to
how on earth (or perhaps in heaven) they should be performed on stage.
The loss of theodicy serves to compound the aesthetic dialectic of tragedy,
as we shall see in the following section in which I wish to touch base with a
number of instances of German tragic drama. What is crucially important
about all these dramas is that they inhabit the dialectic of tragedy; they
do not resolve it.
Modern German Tragic Drama
Schiller speaks of one of his aims being to give ‘as it were to his protagonist
or to his reader the whole full load of suf fering’13 – an intensity of visceral
and visible emotion. Yet, as his theory makes clear, tragedy thematically
of fers sublimity by the emergence of knowledge, of privileged insight; and
stylistically it achieves aesthetic distance by foregrounding the very artifice
of art – for example by the use of the chorus. Schiller’s dramatic praxis of fers
us not a reconciliation of this dialectic, but the dramatic – often visceral –
statement of the constant currents of tension that f licker back and forth
between the two poles. Think of Maria Stuart, of Elizabeth’s worldly vic-
tory which is a pyrrhic victory, ashes and dust, of Maria’s transfiguration at
the end, a transfiguration disturbed by her confusing Leicester’s arms with
the outstretched arms of the crucified Saviour. Or take Wallenstein: the
moments of human dignity and profundity – Thekla’s grief, Wallenstein’s
lament for the dead Max – are all swept aside by history as one damn thing
after another. Let us remember Hegel’s outrage at the play: ‘Unbelievable,
revolting! Death triumphs over life! That is not tragic but horrifying.’14
For Hegel, Sophoclean tragedy is the great paradigm in which both horror
and redemption are eloquently expressed, whereas Wallenstein is all horror
and no redemption.
In the closing scenes of Kleist’s Penthesilea we have something approxi-
mating to (or a grotesque travesty of ) anagnorisis as the protagonist comes
to herself and realizes that, in her sexual and military frenzy, she has with
her teeth torn the f lesh from Achilles’s body:
13 ‘gleichsam seinem Helden oder seinem Leser die ganze volle Ladung des Leidens’
(Schiller, Werke und Briefe, 8, 424). On Schiller’s theory of tragedy see Janz, ‘Af fekt-
modellierung nach antiken Vorbildern? Schillers Wallenstein’.
14 ‘Unglaublich, abscheulich! Der Tod siegt über das Leben! Dies ist nicht tragisch
sondern entsetzlich.’ Quoted in Schiller, Werke und Briefe, 4, 912.
350 Martin Swales
So – it was a mistake. Kissing – biting –

Where is the dif ference? When we truly love
It’s easy to do one when we mean the other.
[…]
How many a girl, her soft arms fast entwined
About her man’s neck, says that she loves him so
Beyond words she could eat him up for love.
And then, poor fool, when she would prove her words,
Sated she is of him – sated almost to loathing.
Now, my beloved, that was not my way.
Why look: when my soft arms were round thy neck,
I did it word for word; it was no pretending.
I was not quite so mad as they would have it.15
In this speech she comes close to the kind of higher, meta-personal poetry
of which Leavis speaks; she formulates a key theme of the play, the inter-
play of metaphorical and literal significations in human cognition. Yet
somehow these intimations of wisdom amount to little more than an eerie
travesty of anagnorisis.
A similar sense of forfeited insight, of theodicy slithering into mad-
ness haunts Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Towards the end of Act III the
following exchange occurs:
Philippeau: So what do you want?

Danton: Peace.
Philippeau: Peace is in God.
Danton: In nothingness. What of fers more peace, more oblivion, then, than
nothingness? And if ultimate peace is God, then doesn’t that mean that God is
nothingness? But I am an atheist! How I curse the dictum that ‘something can’t
15 Kleist, Plays, ed. W. Hinderer, 265–266. ‘So war es ein Versehen. Küsse, Bisse, / Das
reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt, / Kann schon das eine für das andere
greifen. … Wie manche, die am Hals des Freundes hängt, / Sagt wohl das Wort: sie
lieb’ ihn, oh, so sehr, / Dass sie vor Liebe gleich ihn essen könnte; / Und hinterher,
das Wort beprüft, die Närrin! / Gesättigt sein zum Ekel ist sie schon./ Nun, du
Geliebter, so verfuhr ich nicht. / Sieh her: als ich an deinem Halse hing, / Hab’ ich’s
wahrhaftig Wort für Wort getan; / Ich war nicht so verrückt, als es wohl schien’
(Kleist, Dramen 1808–1811, 254–255).
become nothing!’ And I am something, that’s the misery of it! – Creation’s so

rank and rampant that no void is left, there’s a seething and swarming wherever
you turn. Nothingness has killed itself, creation is its wound, we are the drops
of its blood, the world the grave in which it slowly rots. – It sounds mad. But
there’s truth in it.16
Throughout the play Danton is tormented by feelings of guilt for the part he
played in unleashing the bloodletting that has led to and been compounded
by the Reign of Terror. Yet at times he finds that he can comfort himself
by invoking the notion of historical determinism – the Revolution was
inevitable, he was merely one of its contingent agents. Such an argument
provides the comfort of negating any sense of human responsibility and
autonomy. But that comfort is so cold as to be unendurable. One can hear
this dilemma in the above quotation which expresses a drama of being and
non-being. Peace is to be found only if – in Schopenhauer’s sense – the
ceaseless cycle of material existence can be held at bay; but that possibility
depends on there being a first cause, a maker who brought creation into
being in the first place and who can therefore take back what he has made.
But Danton is an atheist; he believes neither in first things nor in last things
– but merely in things, in obscenely creative omnipresent matter from
which there is no escape. This last-ditch attempt at anagnorisis of fers little
meaning or comfort, little uplift. It sounds mad, but there is some truth
to it. How is one to play this moment of philosophical stocktaking in the
theatre? As manic, desperate grasping at straws? As a discursive statement
about possible intimations of meaning in the world? Well, perhaps as both.
And this is the measure of our inability, in a post-theological world, to
know where we stand on the sliding scale between Being and Nothingness.
16 Büchner, Complete Plays, 58. ‘Philippeau: Was willst du denn? Danton: Ruhe.
Philippeau: Die ist in Gott. Danton: Im Nichts. Versenke dich in was Ruhigers als
das Nichts, und wenn die höchste Ruhe Gott ist, ist nicht das Nichts Gott? Aber
ich bin ein Atheist. Der verf luchte Satz: Etwas kann nicht zu Nichts werden! Und
ich bin etwas, das ist der Jammer! – Die Schöpfung hat sich so breit gemacht, da ist
nichts leer, alles voll Gewimmels. Das Nichts hat sich ermordet, die Schöpfung ist
seine Wunde, wir sind seine Blutstropfen, die Welt ist gas Grab, worin es fault. – Das
lautet verrückt, es ist aber doch was Wahres daran’ (Büchner, Dichtungen, 72).
352 Martin Swales
The truth that Penthesilea and Danton come to know, as they themselves
perceive, is uncomfortably close to madness.
My last example is taken from Bertolt Brecht. Despite all his fond-
ness for dialectics of one kind or another, Brecht, as a theoretician, can be
remarkably undialectical. John J. White stresses Brecht’s fondness for a ‘not
A but B’ pattern of thought.17 While the positive advocacy (‘but B’) – epic
theatre – allows for much dif ferentiation and subtlety, that which is repudi-
ated (‘not A’) remains pretty much constant and undif ferentiated through-
out his creative life. It is, in a word, Aristotelian drama (as constructed for
polemical purposes by Brecht). Speaking through the (admittedly conserva-
tive) voice of the Dramaturg in the Messingkauf Dialogues, Brecht writes
that cathartic identification has been seen, for ever and a day, as the essence
of theatre itself: ‘Since Aristotle wrote that, the theatre has gone through
many transformations, but not on this point. One can only conclude that
if it changed in this respect it would no longer be theatre.’18
Brecht’s aversion to Aristotelian-tragic-cathartic-culinary theatre was,
to put it mildly, implacable – and totalizing. He disliked the implied meta-
physic of tragedy, notions of inevitability, necessity, of the Immutability
of the World Order (rather than the historical specificity, and therefore,
changeability of any particular social world). He also distrusted ideas of
heroism, believing that they def lected attention from the questionability
of a social world in which being human required great reserves of courage.
Moreover, he resented the sheer prestige of tragedy, in aesthetic theory and
practice, during the preceding centuries; and he wanted to re-align privi-
leged knowing, anagnorisis, towards critical ref lection and intervention.
Yet, in spite of all these reservations, Brecht on occasion came very
close to writing tragedy. Mother Courage is a case in point. And in the great
scene that depicts the death of Kattrin, Brecht finds a moment of both
thematic and stylistic redemption that has more than a little to do with the
17 White, Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory, 111.

18 Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, 16. ‘Das Theater hat sich, seit Aristoteles dies
schrieb, oft gewandelt, aber kaum in diesem Punkt. Man muß annehmen, daß es,
wandelte es sich in diesem Punkt, nicht mehr Theater wäre’ (Brecht, Werke, 22.2,
779).
traditions of tragedy. The thematic redemption comes from the shattering

eloquence he gives to her, a creature who cannot speak. She is determined
to warn the nearby town of the imminent attack being planned by the
soldiers; having pulled the ladder up after her, she climbs onto the roof of
a barn with a drum which she beats. She pays with her life: at the end of
the scene she is shot by the soldiers, but the sound of the gun adds to the
battering produced by her drumming and awakens the town. In the final
line of the scene – ‘She’s made it.’19 – the soldier acknowledges her victory.
It may be only a small victory, an irrelevant one in the dreadful attrition of
the war. But it is one all the same. And the unforgettable statement made
by the sheer theatricality of the scene – the immense, bruising clamour of
her drum – makes us, too, bear witness to her victory. The stage directions
that portray Kattrin’s actions give us the miniature drama of her assertion
of moral autonomy. She weeps as the wagon, her home, is threatened by
the soldiery; she emits cries of anguish, but she continues her drumming.
Thematically, then, the scene expresses her victory over the determining
forces of the endless war. And, remarkably, Brecht comes close to recon-
ciling the dialectical aesthetic of tragedy by finding an eloquence for her
that is both realistic and symbolic. Kattrin cannot speak – the result of
an injury done to her by a soldier some years previously. But she is able to
borrow a voice from her antagonists; she takes the drum, the very emblem
of regimentation and brutality and military oppression and makes it the
conduit for and agent of her tumultuous resistance. Here, in this great
scene, a moment of something close to anagnorisis is achieved (I say ‘close
to’ because I am aware that sceptical spirits see Kattrin’s motives as merely
emanating from her desperate, instinctual need to protect the children of
the town). Moreover, it is important to remember that Mother Courage ends
not with Kattrin’s moment of glory but with Mother Courage’s doomed
attempt, touched by not a hint of anagnorisis, to get back into business.
Perhaps what makes the scene both thematically and stylistically convinc-
ing is the fact that it does not depend on language, Brecht does not have
19 Brecht, Mother Courage, 86. ‘Sie hat’s geschaf ft’ (Brecht, Werke, 6, 84).
354 Martin Swales
to spell out Kattrin’s moment of insight; he simply batters us with her

drumming.
I have already drawn attention to the realism of this scene. Elsewhere
in his oeuvre Brecht has recourse to other stylistic means – to those of
‘Verfremdung’ – in order to embody what one might call moments of
privileged cognition. At one level, he never loses his commitment to the
realistic statement that highlights the entrapment of the characters in
their material, that is to say, economic, political and socio-psychological
circumstances. He is clear-sighted enough to know that so many of them
cannot find the will or the voice to protest. But, at another level, he refuses
to allow the theatre to be just a stenography of their entrapment. Hence
he constantly puts the realistic statement on hold in order to move into
a meta-statement which allows the actor or chorus figure to say what the
character, realistically, can neither know nor say. In other words, Brecht
goes into a kind of meta-personal mode where the play speaks on behalf
of the characters. Frequently this entails the prose of the play’s mimetic
statement being interrupted by a moment of stylization, often by a pas-
sage of verse or song – an instance of Leavis’s poetry of another kind of
speaking. And thereby the notion of tragic inevitability is challenged by
the intimation of other possibilities.
Tragedy and Music Drama
I have been trying to suggest that, in terms of any understanding of aesthet-

ics and modernity, more precisely of the contribution made by aesthetics
to modernity, the German tradition of philosophical aesthetics, and, as an
all-important subset, the particular tradition of tragedy, in both theory and
practice, have an essential contribution to make. I want, by way of conclu-
sion, to of fer a glimpse of the key issues as embodied in a tradition that
runs parallel to that of the theatre which has been my chief concern in this
paper. I have in mind that form of drama in the musical mode which we
know as opera. There are, I think, three ways in which the musical form
interlocks with my argument.20 Firstly: I have been concerned to explore the
aesthetic dialectic at work in tragedy, one which I understand as a perilous
oscillation between (as one might put it) physicality and metaphysicality.
As one of the key philosophers whom I have mentioned, Schopenhauer,
saw, music may of its very nature (as both unleashing the Will itself and
as pure abstraction) embody that dialectic with particular urgency. For
him (to spell out the implications of his argument in a way that he does
not), music is, at one level, pure drive, pulse, energy; and at another it
is akin to pure maths, a nexus of structures and relationships that are of
their very nature insubstantial, disembodied even. There is one key work
of the European tradition of tragic drama, Goethe’s Faust, which engages
supremely with the philosophy of tragedy, with the two souls within human
selfhood, the impulsion towards both materiality and spirituality. And,
perhaps for that reason, it has, more than any other tragic fable, attracted
the attention of composers. From Gounod, Schumann and Berlioz via
Busoni to Schnittke, narrativity and ref lectivity, energy and abstraction
have conjoined in musical exegesis of the Faust legend. Secondly: there is
a weighty argument about the origins of tragic drama (and Nietzsche is
the all-important witness here) that sees it as emerging from and grounded
in corporate, choric utterance. Music – and opera is an obvious example
of this – is supremely able to blend one voice into an ensemble of any size
(duet, trio, quartet. full chorus etc). One could think here of the ‘Bella
figlia’ quartet in the final act of Verdi’s Rigoletto. There four voices – the
Duke, Maddalena, Gilda, and Rigoletto – can be clearly heard as they
express four dif ferent facets of the experience of love and desire. We hear
seductiveness from the Duke, f lirtatiousness from Maddalena, anguished
betrayal from Gilda, and vengefulness from Rigoletto. Yet, for all their
dif ferences, these four voices cohere musically. The overall ef fect is both
visceral and, in its stylized beauty, consoling. Or one could think of the
20 The discussion that follows is indebted to Bowie, Music, Philosophy, Modernity,

on the implications of music for and the implication of music in the philosophical
contours of modern subjectivity.
356 Martin Swales
role of the chorus in opera. The famous ‘Va pensiero’ from Verdi’s Nabucco
became the unof ficial anthem of the Italian aspiration for national unity
in the nineteenth century; significantly the voices are in unison almost
throughout. The presence of the choric as part of that interrelationship
we know from Greek tragedy between the tragic victim, the scapegoat on
the one hand and the corporate world on the other can be heard in the
choric intensity of Moussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanchina. Boris
Godunov expresses the horrific vicious circle of historical turmoil. There
are few, if any, moments of ref lectivity or anagnorisis. The moments of
stocktaking vouchsafed to the major characters are vitiated by ambition or
raw guilt; time and again the music prefacing the entry of the voice begins
with swelling tremolo strings, and one has the sense that the characters are
driven, hounded at every turn by the f lux and tumult of their psychologi-
cal and political situation. (One is perhaps reminded of Hegel’s repudia-
tion of Wallenstein). The only moment that comes close to anagnoris is
the plangent, eerily circular lament for the vanity of all historical striving
expressed at the end of the opera by the Holy Fool. Or one could think of
the wordless chorus at the end of Janacek’s Katja Kabanova. Such choric
ef fects can rarely be replicated in modern worded drama, although there
are exceptions – T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and, more recently,
Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman come to mind.
Thirdly and finally (and this is a point to which I attach particular
importance): opera has at its disposal, in addition to the human drama
which it sets before us, the all-important dimension of the orchestra.
Through the nineteenth century, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni via Weber’s
Der Freischutz to Verdi, Wagner and beyond, one can register how opera
moves away from the action/reaction pattern of recitative and aria to a more
symphonic condition where the orchestra provides a constant stream of
articulation and ref lection. One issue is salient as regards the all-important
issue of anagnorisis: opera has the possibility that, even if the characters do
not come to a point of privileged knowing, the orchestra may express the
insights that are beyond the grasp of the characters themselves. In Act II of
Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, King Mark asks why Tristan has betrayed him.
Tristan cannot answer; but the orchestra responds with the motif of irresist-
ible longing that is the first statement the opera makes in its unforgettable
prelude. At the end of Rhinegold, the first part of the Ring tetralogy, the
gods enter Valhalla to a blaze of orchestral sound that feels triumphalist
rather than heroic. In Act I of The Valkyrie, Sieglinde tells Siegmund of the
mysterious stranger who planted the sword in the tree. Neither of them
knows the identity of that stranger, but the orchestra does; it sounds the
Valhalla motif which is utterly identified with Wotan’s ambition and the
curse which steadily destroys all his works. In the closing scene of Twilight
of the Gods Brünnhilde sings of her knowingness:
He, truest of all men,

Had to betray me,
That I, a woman, in grief might grow wise.
Now I know what must be.
All things, all things,
All I know now;
All to me is revealed.21
And at this point the orchestra does more than simply accompany
Brünnhilde’s voice; rather, it embodies the totality that she knows – it
brings back the harmonies and textures of the sound world of the Rhine
to which restitution will now be made. The orchestra confirms that the
insight truly is a moment of anagnorisis. The Ring ends with Brünnhilde’s
self-immolation, with the destruction of Valhalla, and with the gold of
the ring being returned to its original home, the Rhine. The orchestra has
the last word; it sounds the great soaring phrase that has been associated
with the redemptive value of human love. The Wagner orchestra is always
the repository of profound memory, or recurrence, repetition and knowl-
edge. Thereby it enshrines one of the key motifs of European tragedy – the
notion of the past returning to haunt the present. At one level it expresses
entrapment, then. But recurrence can also produce insight, even, at times,
anagnorisis. The presence of the orchestra as a kind of meta-voice which
expresses an insight beyond that vouchsafed to any of the characters can
21 Wagner, The Ring, 358. ‘Mich musste/der Reinste verraten, / dass wissend wuerde ein
Weib! / Weiss ich nun, was dir frommt? / Alles, alles, / alles weiss ich / Alles ward
mir nun frei!’ (Wagner, The Ring, 357).
358 Martin Swales
be found in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. At the end, after the murder of Marie,
Wozzeck wades into the lake in order to get rid of the knife. In response to
the news of the murder the children go on playing on their hobby horses.
In Berg’s world no one can say with Brünnhilde ‘all to me is revealed’. Yet,
in the unforgettable interlude that comes between the last two scenes,
Berg allows the orchestra to know, to know it all, and to grieve for it all.
Even in a deeply blighted world, anagnorisis, or its ghostly memory, makes
itself heard. The tragic issue will not go away, and it can be sensed in the
moments of insight vouchsafed in the orchestral intermezzi of (to look
beyond Germany for a moment) Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mitsensk
or Britten’s Peter Grimes. Opera then, in its varying ways, can still manage
to enshrine the animating dialectic of tragedy, the inherent drama of our
material entrapment and our yearning for spiritual freedom, the drama
of (to borrow and vary a phrase from T. S. Eliot) our knowing and partly
knowing.22
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Notes on Contributors
Michael Bell, FBA, is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English

and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. His publications
cover themes in European fiction and thought from Cervantes onwards,
and include studies of D. H. Lawrence and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His
latest book is Open Secrets: Literature, Education and Authority from J.-J.
Rousseau to J. M. Coetzee.
Jerome Carroll is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham.

He works on German history of ideas, aesthetics and modern German
theatre, and his major publication is Art at the Limits of Perception: The
Aesthetic Theory of Wolfgang Welsch (Peter Lang, 2006). He is currently
preparing a monograph on the German tradition of philosophical anthro-
pology from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
Gustav Frank is Assistant Professor in the German Department,

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. His research interests include
the Enlightenment, modernism/modernity, aesthetics, visual culture,
and media. His most recent book (with B. Lange) is Einführung in die
Bildwissenschaft. Bilder in der visuellen Kultur.
Steve Giles is Emeritus Professor of German Studies and Critical Theory

at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on modernism
and modernity in cultural theory and on Brecht. His most recent book is a
translation and edition of Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
(Methuen, 2007).
Sebastian Hüsch is Maître de Conférences in German Studies at the

Université de Pau (France). His research interests are German and French
Literature and Philosophy from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century,
362 Notes on Contributors
and his most recent publication is Philosophy and Literature and the Crisis
of Metaphysics (Würzburg, 2011).
Norman Kasper is research assistant to the chair for general and com-
parative literature, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany).
His main research interest is in aesthetic theory from the perspective of
cultural studies, visibility and mediality in the Enlightenment and German
Romanticism, and he has published on Ludwig Tieck, A. W. Schlegel, J. A.
Eberhard, Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld and Wolfgang Hilbig.
Robert Leventhal is Associate Professor of German Studies at The

College of William and Mary (Virginia, USA). He researches the intersec-
tions between literary history, theory, and the history of psychology; the
modern case history; aesthetics; the Enlightenment; Spinoza and German
literature of the late eighteenth century; German Romanticism; literature
of the Holocaust and contemporary German-Jewish culture.
Bram Mertens studied German, English, philosophy and literary theory

in Leuven, Keele and Nottingham and is currently lecturer in German and
Dutch at the University of Nottingham. He has published a number of
articles on Walter Benjamin and is the author of Dark Images, Secret Hints:
Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition (Peter Lang, 2007).
Eric S. Nelson is Associate Professor at University of Massachusetts,

Lowell. His main research interests are in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century European philosophy, ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of nature.
He has co-edited two anthologies, Addressing Levinas and Rethinking
Facticity.
Maike Oergel is Associate Professor in German at the University of

Nottingham. Her research interests include Anglo-German intellectual
relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Enlightenment stud-
ies; Romanticism; translation theory and theories of cultural transfer. Her
most recent book is Culture and Identity. Historicity in German Literature
and Thought 1770–1815 (de Gruyter, 2006).
Notes on Contributors 363
James Parsons is Professor of Music History at Missouri State University.

He is volume editor and contributor of two essays to the Cambridge
Companion to the Lied (2004). His work is published in Beethoven Forum,
Early Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Analysis,
Music & Letters and Telos.
Nicholas Saul is Professor of German at the University of Durham. He

has published widely on literature and philosophy, literature and science,
literature and homiletics. His latest books are Gypsies and Orientalism in
German Literature and Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century (2007)
and The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (2009).
Martin Swales is Emeritus Professor of German at University College

London. He has published widely on German literature from the late eight-
eenth century to the twentieth. His publications include monographs on
Goethe, Stifter, Thomas Mann and Schnitzler and on the German Novelle,
the Bildungsroman and German realism.
Martin Travers was educated at the universities of East Anglia,

Tübingen and Cambridge, and teaches in the School of Humanities at
Grif fith University, Brisbane. He has published widely on German and
European literature and is at present completing The Hours That Breaks, a
biography of Gottfried Benn.
Randall K. Van Schepen is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural

History at Roger Williams University. His areas of research and publication
include modern and postmodern theories of art, the formalist art criticism
of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, as well as studies of artists such
as Ilya Kabakov, Gerhard Richter and Marcel Duchamp.
Marie-Christin Wilm is a researcher at the Institut für Religionswissen

schaft of the Freue Universität, Berlin. Her main interests are in literature,
anthropology and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and tragic theory. She has published on Schiller’s aesthetics and on the
Aristotelian concept of tragedy after 1800.
Index
Abel, J. F. 70–73, 80 n, 84–87 Brittnacher, H. R. 33 n, 247

Adorno, T. W. 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 155 n, 159, Brüggemeier, F.-J. 331 n
170, 276–277, 279, 288–293, Bruns, G. 307 n
297–309, 310 n, 314, 315, 319–339, Büchner, G. 350–351
343, 344 Büchner, L. 234, 239
Alt, P.-A. 45 n, 46 n Bührmann, M. 140 n
Angelloz, J.-F. 211 n Bürger, G. A. 104, 106
Aristoteles 11–12, 145, 330, 345, 352 Bürger, P. 170, 276 n, 278 n, 281 n
Armstrong, I. 9
Attridge, D. 9 n Carlyle, T. 98
Aviram, A. F. 298 n Carroll, J.
Aylen, L. 345 n Literary Darwinism 236
Art at the Limits of Perception 135 n
Barner, W. 127 n Cave, T. 348
Baumgarten, A. G. 27, 28–29, 123, 343 Caygill, H. 298 n, 305 n
Beethoven, L. van 4–5, 93–100, 103–111 Cheetham, M. 162, 176
Behler, E. 57 n, 59 n, 60 n Clair, A. 210 n
Beiser, F. C. 73–74, 76, 172, 173, 265 n Comay, R. 256 n
Bell, M. 14 n, 20 n Cooper, A. A. 13
Benjamin, W. 2, 3, 31 n, 40 n, 255–272, Corneille, P. 12–13, 20
343, 344, 347 Croce, B. 166
Bennett, B. 77 Cronegk, J. P. F. von 96
Bense, M. 213 n Crookes, W. 241
Bernstein, J. M. 339 n
Bestegui, M. de 358 Dainat, H. 74 n
Blackbourn, D. 331 n Darwin, C. 3, 129, 233–237, 239, 242,
Blumenberg, H. 26 n, 186, 201, 202–203 249–250, 333
Bölsche, W. 2, 233–250 d’Alambert, J. le R. 27
Bowie, A. 72, 194, 256, 265 n, 355 de Balzac, H. 277 n, 278, 286, 290–292
Brandl, E. 33 n de Cauter, L. 255
Braungart, G. 239 n de Duve, T. 162
Brecht, B. 6, 276–277, 279, 281–289, de Man, P. 306 n
291–293, 302, 352–354 de Sade, D. A. F. 26, 38
Brinkmann, R. 45 n Dennett, D. 236
366 Index
Derrida, J. 14, 330 n, 333 n, 337 Goodman, N. 128 n

Dewhurst, K. 70 n Gosetti-Ferencei, J. 311 n
Dickens, C. 278 Greenberg, C. 2, 6, 128, 159, 160–162,
Diderot, D. 27, 28 164–168, 173–179
Dilthey, W. 26, 40 n, 194 Grey, T. S. 105
Grimminger, R. 238
Eagleton, T. 170, 171, 275 Guilbaut, S. 161
Eberhard, J. A. 123 Gumbrecht, H. U. 238
Eibl, K. 236
Eliot, T. S. 19, 299, 356, 358 Habermas, J. 3, 108, 111, 319–325, 334,
337
Fechner, G. T. 241, 246 Haeckel, E. 129, 131, 135, 234
Feger, H. 217 n, 228 n Hagedorn, F. von 96
Fichte, J. 3, 46, 57–58, 256 n, 261, Halsall, F. 9 n
264–268 Hammer, E. 335
Fink, G.-L. 74 n Hammer, S. 358 n
Finlay, M. 217 n Handwerk, G. 211 n
Fischer, B. 46 n Hart, G. 346
Fleming, M. 320 n Hart, H. and J. 234–235
Foti, V. 307 n Harvey, D. 276 n
Foucault, M. 69, 228 Hegel, G. W. F. 28, 46, 57 n, 170, 213–214
Frascina, F. 161 n, 216, 276, 278–279, 281–282,
Freud, S. 141, 244 292, 298 n, 319, 322, 330, 334, 346,
Freyhan, M. 99 n 349, 356
Frank, G. 30 n Herder, J. G. 27, 30, 48, 49 n, 73, 186, 187,
188–189, 194–195, 198
Galilei, G. 26 Hermand, J. 119 n
Galton, F. 241 Heidegger, M. 6, 184, 188, 189, 201, 222,
Gandesha, S. 297 n 297–298, 305–315, 320, 322, 327,
Gasché, R. 256, 329 332, 343
Gautier, T. 19 Helmholtz, H. von 237, 239
Gebhard, W. 235 n Hewitt, M. 46 n
Gehlen, A. 186, 203 Honneth, A. 186, 187, 191 n, 197, 198, 199,
Gelfert, H.-D. 345 n 203 n
George, S. 303–305, 307, 309 Horkheimer, M. 155 n, 170, 323, 324, 330,
Gerz, R. 276 n, 283 n 331 n
Giddens, A. 276 n Horstmann, R.-P. 265 n
Giles, S. 276 n, 278 n, 279 n, 282 n, 283 Huizinga, J. 4, 140–146, 149–157
n, 347 n Hume, D. 26, 96 n
Glaser, B. 128 n Hüsch, S. 219 n
Gombrich, E. H. 128 n Hussey, C. 128 n
Index 367
Imdahl, M. 119 n, 128 Leavis, F. R. 21–22, 348, 350, 354
Imorde, J. 135 n Lessing, G. E. 28–29, 40, 41, 343, 346
Levinas, E. 333–334
Jameson, F. 276 n, 281 n Liddell, H. G. 308 n
Janz, R.-P. 349 n Liebsch, W. 192, 195, 197–198
Japp, U. 238, 246 Liessmann, K. P. 211
Jauss, H. R. 45 n, 49 n Linden, M. 191 n, 192 n, 194
Joas, H. 186, 187, 191 n, 197, 198, 199, Linse, U. 239 n
203 n Lorca, F. G. 302
Johnson, S. 12 Lotman, J. M. 34
Joughin, J. 314 n Lukács, G. 6, 170, 276–282, 284–286,
Joyce, J. 19, 278, 292, 299 289, 290, 292, 298–299, 301
Lunn, E. 276, 282 n
Kafka, F. 278 n, 289, 292, 299, 333
Kant, I. 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 14, 16, 17, 30, 31, Mahoney, D. F. 245 n
39, 46, 57, 58, 74, 75, 96, 98, 101, Malpas, J. 311 n, 314 n
119–120, 134, 146, 150 n, 154, Mann, T. 244, 247, 248
160–165, 167–169, 176, 186–189, Marcuse, H. 8, 172, 343
194–195, 199–201, 209, 210, 220, Marquard, O. 209
258–265, 269, 270, 319–321, 324, Mauthner, F. 242 n
325, 335, 343, 344 Meier, G. F. 26 n, 28, 29
Kaufman, R. 298 n Menninghaus, W. 265 n, 270 n
Käuser, A. 188, 192 n Mergenthaler, V. 41 n
Kelly, A. H. 233 n Mertens, B. 3, 31 n, 262 n
Kerman, J. 109 Mörchen, H. 305 n
Kern, A. 338 n Müller, J. 242 n
Kern, S. 276 n Müller-Doohm, S. 336 n
Kierkegaard, S. 3, 209–229, 333 Musil, R. 228 n
Kittler, F. 41 n
Kittrow, J. 98 n Naschert, G. 58–60 n
Kleist, H. von 246, 349–350 Nelson, E. S. 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 321 n, 323 n,
Knight, R. P. 122 n, 124, 126, 132, 135 339 n
Knox, I. 169 Neumann, G. 247 n
Kockelmans, J. 306 n Neumeyer, H. 74, 82 n, 88
Kolkenbrock-Netz, J. 235 n Newman, B. 134, 174
Kondylis, P. 26 Nietzsche, F. 10, 16, 19–22, 94, 95, 216 n,
Košenina, A. 74, 81 n, 82, 83 n, 191 n 219, 320, 343, 344, 347, 355
Kracauer, S. 280, 293
Oergel, M. 4, 5, 6, 46 n, 47 n, 49 n, 220
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 256 n n, 227 n
Lange, F. A. 241 Oettinger, K. 74 n
368 Index
Opitz, M. 262 n 57, 61–62, 65, 70–76, 80–84,

Orton, F. 161 85, 89, 93–111, 115–116, 118–123,
Ostermann, E. 219 n 125, 127, 129, 132–135, 139, 141,
Ouattara, B. 305 n 146–154, 156, 159–160, 162–173,
Owen, A. 239 n 175–179, 233, 245–246, 343–344,
346, 349
Paolucci, A. 346 n Scheler, M. 138, 186, 201, 202
Parsons, J. 2, 4, 5, 95 n Schlegel, F. 62–65, 74, 210–212, 225,
Patterson, C. 331 n 227–228, 255, 257, 260, 261, 265,
Pattison, G. 212 n 267, 268, 271
Paul, J. 103, 107 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 74, 193–195,
Pensky, M. 320 199–201
Pfotenhauer, H. 197 Schmid, C. C. E. 191
Platner, E. 73, 187, 191, 195 Schmitz-Emans, M. 41
Plessner, H. 186 Scholem, G. 258–260, 262, 264, 269, 272
Poenicke, K. 133 Schoolman, M. 331
Poole, A. 358 n Schopenhauer, A. 19, 166, 169, 332, 344,
Pope, A. 96 347, 355
Porter, R. 187, 188 n, 196 Schultze, F. 240
Price, U. 126 Schulze, G. 3, 214, 221–228
Proust, M. 278 n, 289 Sheppard, R. 40, 275
Pytlik, P. 239 Silk, M. S. 343, 347
Smith, A. 38, 39
Reiner, U. 33 n Smith, R. 124
Richter, S. 346 n Sontag, S. 128
Riedel, W. 33, 75, 85 n, 133 n Staiger, E. 314
Ritter, J. 139 n Steiner, G. 347
Rohrwasser, M. 244 n Sternberg, F. 283
Rosslyn, F. 358 n Sternberger, D. 248
Rousseau, J.-J. 14, 15, 16, 48, 49, 74, 155 Sterne, L. 15
n, 172 Szondi, P. 46, 116, 345
Rush, F. 256 n
Ruskin, J. 2, 116, 117, 126–128, 132, 133, Taylor, C. 2, 183–185, 187, 193, 200–201,
134, 135 203–204
Thomä, D. 313 n
Safranski, R. 39, 48 Thayer, A. W. 95 n
Sartre, J.-P. 156, 161 Tolstoy, L. 278
Schapiro, D. 93 Triest, J. K. F. 106
Schiller, F. 1, 4–8, 9–11, 16, 17–19, 20, 22,
25, 32, 33, 38, 39, 41, 45–50, 52–55, Uz, J. P. 95–96
Index 369
Verworn, M. 117, 129–133, 135 Welsch, W. 135

Vetter, H. 210 n, 226 Wenzel, E. 192, 199
Vickers, B. 345 n Wetzel, T. 141
Vietta, S. 233, 237 Wezel, J. K. 191
Virchow, R. 234 White, J. J. 352
Visser, G. 227 Wiese, B. von 346
Vogel, S. 338 n Williams, E. A. 196
Williams, R. 346
Wagner, R. 92, 105, 108–110, 321, 333, Wilson, R. 305
356, 357 Winter, R. 106
Wallace, A. R. 241 Wittgenstein, L. 177, 184, 228
Wallace, R. M. 203 Woodmansee, M. 7, 170–171, 172
Walzel, O. 128–129 Worringer, W. 128–130
Weber, H. B. von 191, 192
Weber, H. R. 144 Zmegac, V. 277 n
Weindling, P. 234 Zöllner, F. 241, 242
Wellmer, A. 307 Zöllner, J. F. 30 n

CARROLL, JEROME Aesthetics and Modernity From Schiller To The Frankfurt School

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Aesthetics and Modernity from Schiller to the Frankfurt School • Carroll, Giles and Oergel (eds)

M O is Associate Professor in German at the University of Nottingham,

www.peterlang.com P L

M O is Associate Professor in German at the University of Nottingham,

www.peterlang.com P L

Edited by Jerome Carroll,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

isbn 978-3-0343-0217-3 E‐ISBN 978‐3‐0353‐0208‐0

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2012

All rights reserved.

Randall K. VAN SCHEPEN

Notes on Contributors 361

is multidisciplinary and international, as is ref lected in the range of chap-

Couched in these terms, Schulze’s aestheticization of reality is not

significant obstacle to moral freedom, and to moral or epistemological

The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference titled

Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the

The analytic elusiveness of the aesthetic is ref lected in the ambiguity of its

understood in relation particularly to eighteenth-century moral sentimen-

whereas Aristotle had ref lected f lexibly and empirically on the achieve-

again, the aesthetic, as a practical understanding, if not as a self-conscious

its own aesthetic potentiality. A foundational change in sensibility was

5 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 77.

no longer sought to identify them, as in sentimentalist ideology, but rather

7 See Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 137.

a modulation of them: and yet it is separate in so far as it raises them to a

8 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 153.

9 See Eliot, 439, 442.

Although Schiller, the moral idealist who had become an institution

10 Nietzsche, Twilight, 78.

13 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 168.

same token, had an almost unbearably urgent sense of what it meant to

16 See Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 149, 161.

Armstrong, I. The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

The Invisible Hand:

My aim in this discussion is to shed light on the modernity of Schiller’s

Answering the Question:

The emergence of aesthetics is necessarily linked to the process of

The rehabilitation of sensory experience around 1750 may no longer be

vehemently denied, literature increasingly takes on the tasks of criticism

but for it to be restricted on the basis of a very narrow conceptual understanding

autonomous art-forms and popular spectacles in particular are excluded

16 See Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte, 332.

seer called Sicilian, recognizing them to be mere deceptions generated by

and the excessive Enlightenment of Western European materialism and

17 ‘einer unsichtbaren Hand’, Schiller, Geisterseher, 655.

Media Aesthetics of the Invisible Hand

In this respect, what Schiller produces in – or rather, with – the Ghost-

of a merchant acting solely in his own interests, he writes as follows: ‘He

and the classical movement’s ideology of humanitarianism grounded in self-

18 My understanding of this term is based on Sheppard’s account in ‘The Problematics

the impression of three-dimensionality.19 The term ‘advanced’ also refers

practices and material technologies enabling ‘proto-cinematographic’20

Baumgarten, A. G. Ästhetik. 2 vols, ed. D. Mirbach (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007).

20 This concept is taken from Segeberg, Literatur im technischen Zeitalter.

Benjamin, W. Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik in der Romantik, Gesammelte Schriften,

Kondylis, P. Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus (München:

The Aesthetics of Historicity:

dif ference is generated and gradually assimilated, producing something

9 See Oergel, Culture and Identity.

11 Schiller, ÄE, 5. Brief, 13–14.

Schiller’s and Schlegel’s awareness of historicity, which forms the basis

How is this to be achieved? Via the long road of culture: