Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art

Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art is a collection of essays exploring the rise of aesthetics as a response to, and a part of, the reshaping of the arts in modern society. The theories of art that were developed under the name of "aesthetics" in the later eighteenth century have traditionally been understood as contributions to a field of study in existence at least since the time of Plato. If art is a practice to be found in all human societies, then the philosophy of art is the search for universal features of that practice, statable in definitions of art and beauty. Despite appearances to the contrary, however, art as we know it - the system of "fine arts" - is largely peculiar to modern society. Aesthetics, far from being a perennial discipline, emerged when it did in the effort both to understand and to shape this new social practice. The essays included in this volume share the conviction that aesthetic ideas can be fully understood when seen not only in relation to intellectual and social contexts but as themselves constructed in history. This is relevant to the concept of art itself, which acquired its current meaning in relation to actual changes in the social uses made of painting, writing, and the other media. Ranging widely in method, with allegiance to no particular theoretical outlook, these studies are both grounded in the history of philosophy and drawn from recent developments in literary theory, art history, and social history, and seek to clarify philosophical issues by taking their historical content into account.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICS AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF ART

Eigh teen th - Cen tury Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art Edited by Paul Mattick, Jr.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. Cambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521431064 © Paul Mattick, Jr., 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 This digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Eighteenth-century aesthetics and the reconstruction of art / edited by Paul Mattick, Jr. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-521-43106-9 1. Aesthetics, Modern - 18th century. 2. Art - Philosophy. I. Mattick, Paul, 1944N66.E35 1993 701\17'09033 - dc20 92-26692 ISBN 978-0-521-43106-4 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-06683-9 paperback

CONTENTS

List of contributors Introduction

page vii i

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

1

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the subject of aesthetics

16

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

2

The beginnings of "aesthetics" and the Leibnizian conception of sensation

52

JEFFREY BARNOUW

3

Of the scandal of taste: social privilege as nature in the aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant

96

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

4

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

120

DAVID SUMMERS

5

Art and money

152

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

6

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics: rereading Schiller's Aesthetic Letters

178

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

7

Thinking about genius in the eighteenth century JOHN HOPE MASON

210

VI

8

CONTENTS

Creation, aesthetics, market: origins of the modern concept of art

240

ANNIE BECQ

Index

255

CONTRIBUTORS

JEFFREY BARNOUwis Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin. ANNIE BECQ

is Professor of Literature, University of Caen.

BOHLSis Assistant Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ELIZABETH A.

is in the Department of Politics, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. JOHN HOPE MASON

PAUL MATTICK, JR.,

is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Adelphi

University. RICHARD

SHUSTERMANis Professor of Philosophy, Temple Uni-

versity. DAVID SUMMERS

is Professor of Art History, University of Virginia.

is Associate Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University. MARTHA WOODMANSEE

vn

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

INTRODUCTION

The opposition of "culture" to "nature" suggests the historical character of the former; if nature is that which is given, at least for the temporal span relevant to human experience, culture is that which is constructed, and so maintained, destroyed, or reconstructed by human action in time. And yet human beings have tended to discover in the practices and institutions of the particular modes of social life in which they find themselves universal features of their existence. In Western Europe, and the societies shaped under its influence, it is only during the last several hundred years that the idea has gained ground that history is marked by discontinuities as well as continuities and by the production of new phenomena of social life rather than a cycling through a set of constant alternatives. No doubt this is in large part because these centuries have seen a social transformation not only profound, and affecting every area of social life, but also extremely rapid and marked by a continuous dynamism: the development of the capitalist mode of production. This was true in particular of the period of revolutionary change - in politics, economy, technology, and modes of thought - that made itself felt, even where its direct effects were limited, throughout Europe in the decades on either side of 1800. It is not surprising that under the tremendous impact of this experience the idea of modernity, as a historical period fundamentally different from what preceded A number of individuals should be acknowledged for their help in the preparation of this volume: Beatrice Rehl, for being a knowledgeable and understanding editor; Lydia Goehr, for useful comments on an earlier version of the Introduction, delivered as a talk at the 1991 meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics; and the authors represented here, for their papers and willingness to reconsider and refine them.

2

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

it, developed, and with it the beginnings, in Enlightenment thought, of a conception of history as characterized by fundamental innovation. Though already by the time of Karl Marx's writing this conception could take the form of a thoroughgoing insistence on the historical specificity of the practices, institutions, and modes of thought of different forms of social life, the conventional wisdom even of "modern" society continued to discover in its own institutions essential features of any imaginable society. This prejudice, as Marx proposed, could it seems be overcome only to the extent that present-day society revealed its insufficiencies, its incapacity to solve the problems to which it gave rise, and so suggested the idea (however hard to believe) of its own eventual historical limits. In this regard the period of the later 1960s has been of particular importance for the intellectual life of the United States and Europe. Although the worldwide eruption of social movements during this time, within a global order then thought to be threatened only by excessive affluence and intellectual conformity, posed no actual challenge to that order, it provided a great stimulus to historical and critical thinking. Not only in history proper but in the social disciplines generally the past twenty-odd years have seen increasing appreciation, among academics and other intellectuals, of the historical character of cultural objects and of the necessity, if they are to be understood, of viewing them within their complex social contexts. This has been reflected also in important work in such areas of study as literary criticism, history and philosophy of science, and art history. Philosophy has been a major exception, remaining an academic field characterized by very little in the way of historical selfconsciousness. Although philosophy is largely occupied with the study of historical texts, they are typically treated as if they are the products of contemporaries rather than of participants in discursive contexts that may be quite different from those of the present day. In particular, as a glance at even recent anthologies of aesthetics or issues of the aesthetics journals will show, the philosophy of art is still basically oriented in an unhistorical, even when nonessentialist, fashion. This can be seen most clearly in the continuing debates about the definition of art; but even historical work (say, on the development of Kant's thought or on the aesthetics of gardens) tends to isolate philosophical writing from its historical context and so confer the appearance of timelessness on its issues. The present

Introduction

3

collection of essays is intended as a challenge to this modus operandi. Their authors work with a variety of analytic and historical methods and share allegiance to no particular theoretical outlook, but all rest on the conviction that aesthetic ideas, of the present as well as the past, can be fully understood when seen not only in relation to intellectual and other social contexts but as themselves constructed in history The publication of Baumgarten's Aesthetica in 1750-8 marks, it is generally agreed, the formal debut of aesthetics as an autonomous field of discussion, whose origins may otherwise be traced to British writers earlier in the same century. Insofar as aesthetics is taken to name the theory of art along with the theory of beauty (and allied notions), its starting point could also - as Tatarkiewicz suggests in his History of Aesthetics - be dated by the appearance in 1747 of Batteux's Systeme des beaux-arts, which first defined the modern group of fine arts. The eighteenth century is indeed widely acknowledged to contain the origin of what Kristeller called "the basic notion that the five 'major arts' constitute an area all by themselves, clearly separated by common characteristics from the crafts, the sciences and other human activities/7 a notion that "has been taken for granted by most writers on aesthetics from Kant to the present day/71 The discovery by modern aestheticians of the beginning of their discipline in the mid-1700s, however, is almost invariably accompanied by the identification of an earlier origin in classical Greece. The editors of a current textbook anthology are typical in finding that the central concerns of aesthetics have their starting point, "as does so much in philosophy, in the thought of Plato." They acknowledge "that Plato held nothing like a modern conception of the arts, and that he identified what we call art with a form of craft," only to insist that "Plato's view of poetry and painting as imitative in nature set the stage for practically all discussions of the nature of Western art for the next two thousand years."2 These writers seem not to notice, for instance, that the logic of 1

2

Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), I, p. 4; Paul O. Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts'7 [1951), in his Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 165. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Roblin, eds., Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, id ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), pp. i, 5.

4

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

Socrates's argument in the Ion, with which their anthology begins, depends on a contrast between poetry, a matter of divine inspiration and temporary madness, and technai like painting, sculpture, and flute playing, which are subjects to be mastered.3 Plato does develop his argument against poetry in Book X of the Republic by way of an analogy with painting, but it is poetry alone that he wishes to banish from his ideal city, as Alexander Nehamas has pointed out. Further, although poetry is today paradigmatic of fine art, Plato attacks it not as such but for its role in the civic ritual-cum-entertainment that drama was then. In Nehamas's words, "Nothing in Plato's time answered to our concept of the fine arts, especially to the idea that the arts are the province of a small and enlightened part of the population . . . and Plato holds no views about them." 4 If we turn to the topic of beauty, the other central object of aesthetic theorizing, the story is much the same. As Kristeller observes, this concept "does not appear in ancient thought or literature with its specific modern connotations." In particular, the distinction between aesthetic and moral value so basic to the modern conception is only inconsistently made in Greco-Roman theory, and it is symptomatic that the analysis of beauty from Plato to Augustine and Saint Thomas and well into the Renaissance involves no or little consideration of the arts. As late as 1724, Kristeller points out, de Crousaz thought nothing of substituting a chapter on the beauty of religion for one on music in the second edition of his Traite du beau.5 It seems to be only with the development of the modern category of the fine arts that beauty becomes a properly "aesthetic" concept, with even natural beauty defined by analogy with the pleasure afforded by artworks, formally construed. But it would also be too simple to say that the appearance of aesthetics was a response to the emergence of the "fine arts." As 3

4

5

For a discussion of the Greek contrast between art (techne) and poetry, see Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), pp. 73ff. Alexander Nehamas, "Plato and the Mass Media/' The Monist 71, no. 2 (1988): 224. Nehamas goes on to point out that "part of what makes the fine arts fine" in contemporary culture "is precisely the distance they have managed, over time, to insert between representation and reality"; that is, what is today conceptualized under the name of the aesthetic attitude involved in great part the decline of the mimetic element to which Plato objected (pp. 226-7). Kristeller, "Modern System," p. 166; see pp. 167-8, 176-7, and 197.

Introduction

5

Pierre Bourdieu has argued, "the work of art exists as such . . . only if it is apprehended by spectators possessing the disposition and the aesthetic competence which are tacitly required/76 These spectators themselves had to be produced, and we can see what is now called aesthetics at work in the process by which they were brought into being. That is, art as social practice and aesthetics as mode of talk about it were clearly interdependent in a way to which a phrase like "theory of art" does scant justice. The founding texts of modern aesthetics can be seen therefore as attempts not so much to understand as to aid in the transformation of earlier forms of production into a new practice of art. We may take as example a text commonly identified as the inaugural work of aesthetics "as practiced by professional philosophers today."7 Addison's essays On the Pleasures of the Imagination (1712) were (Martha Woodmansee has pointed out) addressed not to philosophers of art but "primarily to a rising class of bankers, merchants, and manufacturers who had so recently achieved a modicum of the leisure enjoyed by the aristocracy that they were still in the process of developing ways to fill it."8 Recommending to this readership such pleasures as those afforded by the visual arts, music, architecture, natural "prospects," and above all literature, Addison praises the pleasures of the imagination as ones "that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving" and that give the man open to them "a kind of Property in everything he sees" [Spectator, no. 411). In this way aesthetic contemplation is promoted at once as a gentlemanly pursuit, a marker of social status, and a training in the experience of individual ownership, all in the general context of an effort to improve the "National Taste" (see no. 409). The programmatic role of aesthetic writing can be seen as well in a negative reaction that makes clear the historical novelty of locating the essence of aesthetic experience in a liking (to use Kant's phrase) "devoid of all interest," and so in sharp contrast with both moral judgments and judgments of utility. As late as 1815 Quatre6

7

8

Pierre Bourdieu, "The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic/' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (1987): 203. Peter Kivy, "Recent Scholarship and the British Tradition/' in Dickie et al., eds., Aesthetics, p. 255. Martha Woodmansee, "Toward a Genealogy of the Aesthetic: The German Reading Debate of the 1790s/' Cultural Critique 11 (1988-9): 203-4.

6

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

mere de Quincy objected to the display of artworks in museums on the ground that the removal of works from their original political, religious, and moral uses would lead inevitably to an art " conceived without passion, executed without warmth, and viewed without interest/7 The collection of artworks without regard for their social functions could mean nothing "but to say that society has no use for them/' 9 If we think of the eighteenth-century reclassification of the activities and objects that now form the fine arts not as the revelation of a character previously obscured but as the development of new social functions for them, the idea of art's autonomy, here opposed in a losing rearguard action, can be understood to mark that reclassification itself. It names the new uses these items, removed from their original uses, acquired, as markers of the place of new and old upper classes relative to each other and to those below them, as sites for the formulation of individual and group interests, as embodiments of national history and of individual genius, and as materials for the construction of a mode of sensibility characterized by distance from material necessity and so free to cultivate responsiveness to sense experience. Did aesthetics, then, truly begin together with art in its modern sense only in the eighteenth century? Beyond being in conflict with the nearly universal understanding by aestheticians of the history of their own field, such a view makes difficult to understand the conviction on the part of eighteenth-century writers on art and beauty that they were continuing a form of discourse practiced by the ancients, as evidenced in their constant reference to the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, Quintillian, Pliny, and the supposed Longinus as guides in the matter of artistic theory, as well as to ancient works of art as exemplars of artistic practice. And, after all, don't our art museums count among their treasures Greek pots and Roman sculptures, not to mention Egyptian mummy wrappings and Assyrian bas-reliefs? The normal solution to such problems is to discern identity of content beneath terminological or even conceptual disparity. Thus we have a form of intellectual history common to many fields: a cultural category is seen as having been originally "embedded" in 9

Quatremere de Quincy, Considerations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l'art (Paris, 1815; Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 31, 37.

Introduction

7

other cultural institutions only to emerge into full view as an area of human practice in the modern period. An example is provided by the history of economics. Schumpeter's magisterial History of Economic Analysis, like histories of aesthetics, both notes that economics "rose into recognized existence . . . between the middle of the seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries'' and begins its survey with "Graeco-Roman economics/' 10 Schumpeter's explanation for the late appearance of political economy as an autonomous discipline points to the allegedly "common" and "drab" character of economic life, which therefore for a long time elicited less specifically scientific curiosity than, say, natural phenomena. 11 Given that economic theory as it developed after 1700 has for primary subject matter the principles of production and distribution of goods in a market society, more plausible explanations point to the laying of the foundations of industrial capitalism in this period.12 But the belief of economists that their theories represent "more than the laws appropriate to a particular social system" 13 itself rests on the idea that the entities and relations described by those laws have existed in all cultures, in however disguised forms. Economics, in such views, became a science in the modern period because "the economy" emerged from its coverings of religion, politics, or kinship into the clear light of the marketplace. Similarly, a recent attempt to grapple with the "historicity of aesthetics" describes the career of this field since its Greek origin as passing through centuries when it "took on the garb of whatever philosophy appropriated it, reflecting in turn cosmological, metaphysical, religious, moral, and epistemological theses until, with the Enlightenment, it emerged with an identity more truly its own." 10

11 12

13

Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. E. B. Schumpeter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 51. Ibid., p. 53. See, e.g., Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946), pp. 1 off. Roll, whose book is based on the idea that economic thinking is determined by "the economic structure of any given epoch" (p. 4), nevertheless finds in "ancient thinkers . . . the starting point of all social theory" (p. 11 ]. In any case, his approach implies, of course, that every epoch has an economic structure. On the history of economics, see Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), for an argument that "economics" can really be said to begin only in the nineteenth century, by way of a significant conceptual break from the earlier "political economy." Roll, History of Economic Thought, p. 10.

8

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

In this, according to this author, aesthetics followed the path taken by the arts themselves, which emerged from the integument of political and religious function in the same period. As a result, "when with the eighteenth century the autonomy of aesthetics was proclaimed, it appeared that at long last a major force in social activity - art - had finally achieved intellectual recognition/' 14 From this point of view, although Plato understood the arts differently from the way we do, his subject matter was nevertheless the same as ours. This is inherent in the very concept of "autonomy/7 which suggests the idea of the disengagement of a previous existent from its earlier subordination to other social institutions. ("Autonomy" thus expresses in a positive way what a pessimistic-Romantic view of modernity - Quatremere provides an early example, John Dewey a more recent one - might describe as "alienation," the removal of art from its meaning-giving relation to everyday life or ritual.) The implication is that the practices of present-day society represent fundamental features of human life, found in all other social systems although only among us freed from obscuring "extrinsic" institutions. 15 The difference between distant past and present thus takes on the form of points along a history of aesthetic doctrines. Museums have made this manner of considering the past a principle of their physical organization. In the museum (as in the texts of art history) artifacts removed from their original contexts - ritual objects from 14

Arnold Berleant, "The Historicity of Aesthetics - I," British Journal of Aesthetics 26, no. 2 (1986): 102.

15

"Different forms of institutionalization blend into or arise out of extrinsic institutions such as religious, economic, or political organizations" (Julius M. Moravcsik, "Art and Its Diachronic Dimensions," The Monist 71, no. 2 [1988]: 165). With respect to similar conceptions in political economy, Marx's critique is basic: "The materials and means of labor . . . play their part in every labor process in every age and under all circumstances. If, therefore, I label them as 'capital' . . . then I have proved that the existence of capital is an eternal law of nature of human production, and that the Kirghiz who cuts down rushes with a knife he has stolen from a Russian so as to weave them together to make a canoe is just as true a capitalist as Herr von Rothschild. I could prove with equal facility that the Greeks and Romans celebrated communion because they drank wine and ate bread, and that the Turks sprinkle themselves daily with holy water like Catholics because they wash themselves daily" (Karl Marx, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production," Capital [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976], I, pp. 998-9). For an extended discussion of the limits of cross-cultural and transhistorical generalization, see my Social Knowledge (London: Hutchinson, 1986).

Introduction

9

early twentieth-century Central Africa, say, or from Renaissance Florence - are assembled together with pictures painted with museum display in mind as examples of "art." Similarly, the history of aesthetics is constructed by assembling texts of many different types to form a sequence illustrating a narrative. This can be seen most explicitly in Tatarkiewicz's great History, put together out of extracts from classical, medieval, and early modern writings. What holds these pieces of text together as elements of a history is the framework provided by Tatarkiewicz's relatively orthodox conception of aesthetics, by this means treated as a category applicable to many kinds of writing from a variety of periods and cultures. To whatever extent the modern system of the fine arts can be traced back beyond the Renaissance to the Greeks (and beyond) or related to the productions of other cultures, such research demands a careful comparative study of changing relationships between practices, classifications of them, and reflexive attempts to understand, evaluate, and develop those practices and classifications. With respect to the effort to analyze the meanings of words like "art," Raymond Williams has observed that "the most active problems of meaning are always primarily embedded in actual [social] relationships and . . . both the meanings and the relationships are typically diverse and variable, within the structures of particular social orders and the processes of social and historical change."16 However, despite recent bows in the direction of historical thinking, aesthetics has not taken this feature of its subject matter very seriously. In the continuing preoccupation with the definition of art that has been a central interest of recent Anglophone aesthetics, for instance, attempts to locate essential attributes of art objects or activities have lately given pride of place to explanations in terms of context. By some this context is seen as a set of social practices or institutions, by others as primarily theoretical, with art theory or even specifically philosophy the maker of art. Versions of both approaches may naturally emphasize that art develops in history. But even such views typically hold to the underlying assumption of continuity, justifying the unproblematic use of "art" throughout that history. Though Arthur Danto, to take an eminent instance, is willing to see art as having come, in the present period, to an end, he sees this 16

Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 22.

IO

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

outcome as the result of an "internal development" determined by art's "historical essence" and as leading to a stage of thought "outside history, where at last we can contemplate the possibility of a universal definition of art." 17 It is no accident that attempts of contemporary aestheticians to comprehend the nature of art so often lead them to examine such test cases as Duchamp's Fountain, Warhol's Brillo Boxes, and performance art. These philosophical efforts - which themselves followed at a distance the lead of minimalist and conceptualist artists - are responses to a specific development in art history, the phenomenon of the avant-garde, originating in the later nineteenth century and central to the evolution of art throughout the twentieth. This phenomenon involved the posing of challenges to the official and accepted art of the time - challenges made in the name of art itself. Historically these challenges were victorious; impressionism, once shocking, quickly became a successful style, and Duchamp's readymades had to be manufactured in series to meet the demand of museum collections. This development is not unrelated to the expansion of the sphere of art to include all sorts of objects once ruled outside it: non-European artifacts, so-called folk objects, photographs, and even movies. The attempt to describe this complex historical transformation as finally revealing the key to the nature of art, however, represents on the analytical level the same procedure as that by which the museum by folding the readymade within its embrace removed the sting of its challenge to earlier conceptions of art. Already twenty years ago, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault pointed out that such categories as "literature" and "politics" - like "economics," "art," and "aesthetics" in current usage are recent ones, "which can be applied to medieval culture, or even classical culture, only by a retrospective hypothesis, and by an in17

Arthur Danto, "Art, Evolution, and the Consciousness of History," in his The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 204, 209; and see pp. 187-210, where Danto goes so far as to speak of evidence for "something like artmaking" as "part of the human phenotype, doubtless with a basis in the DNA," for as long as we have archeological records (p. 196). For another example, see Noel Carroll's "Art, Practice, and Narrative," The Monist 71, no. 2 (1988): 140-56 (in which note the identification of the "core activities of the practice of art," p. 153, and the admitted "necessity of recourse to certain issues of function" transcending history in the definition of art, p. 155, n. 12).

Introduction

11

terplay of formal analogies or semantic resemblances/7 Accordingly, he pointed out, these categories are "reflexive categories, . . . institutionalized types . . . facts of discourse that deserved to be analyzed beside others." 18 That is, the idea of a history of aesthetics must make room for an analysis (by the nature of the thing a historical one) of the category of "aesthetics" itself. Of course, the principles on which such an analysis is to proceed are far from clear, once the assumption of disciplinary unity is abandoned. Despite the clarification and stimulation offered by his project of epistemological "archaeology/' Foucault's own suggestion in terms of "discursive formations" seems untenable; at any rate neither he nor anyone else has actually tried to define the set of rules required to specify such a formation for any cognitive domain. One can use linguistic techniques to delimit sublanguages, areas of language use characterized by particular restrictions on grammar, but this seems to be in general true only for areas with a relatively closed subject matter, in which a limited vocabulary is used in fairly fixed ways, as in the natural sciences.19 On the terrain mapped and remapped by the traditional "humanities," on the other hand, something like the procedure recommended by Foucault can be followed: the "pre-existing forms of continuity" that define the received disciplines "must not be rejected definitively, of course, but the tranquillity with which they are accepted must be disturbed; we must show that they do not come about of themselves, but are always the result of a construction." The results of this construction are to be looked for in the contexts of practice in which theoretical discussion goes on, the systematic interconnection between statements, the relations (temporal, logical, and analogical) between concepts, and the transformations worked across a culture and through time on a set of themes whose manner of invocation brings them into contact with one another, thus producing what academic usage now seems content to call discourses.20 As }. G. A. Pocock has emphasized, central to the shift from the traditional history of ideas to what he suggests we call the history of 18

19

20

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 22. See, e.g., Z. S. Harris, A Theory of Language and Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 10. Foucault, Archaeology, pp. 25ff.

12

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

discourse is the move from a focus on self-conscious theory to "the great variety of things that could be said or seen to have been said, and upon the diversity of linguistic contexts that went to determine what could be said but were at the same time acted upon by what was said/' 21 Discourse as so conceived draws on a great number of what Pocock (not idiosyncratically) calls idioms, languages, and themes - modes of expression, systems of concepts, and sets of issues - related to a variety of contexts and capable both of cooperating and of interfering with each other in various ways. Context is in the first place linguistic; but further, as Pocock says, a language "is not only a prescribed way of speaking, but also a prescribed subject matter" and "each language context betokens a political, social, or historical context within which it is itself situated; we are obliged at the same point, however, to acknowledge that each language to some degree selects and prescribes the context within which it is to be recognized."22 Pocock has political theory in mind, but his account holds for our subject matter as well. Thus essays in this volume range beyond the canonical literature of aesthetics to explore what we might call a theoretical discourse of the arts as it came into existence in the eighteenth century. For examples: Jeffrey Barnouw brings Leibniz's theory of indistinct perception into contact with the literature on "taste"; my own essay links French salon criticism both to the preoccupation of such Enlightenment philosophers as Hume and Rousseau with the effects on culture of a money-oriented economy and to the conception of art worked out in the aesthetic writings of Kant and Schiller; Elizabeth Bohls relates picturesque travel accounts to Joshua Reynolds's Academy lectures, Locke's theory of property, and Smith's moral theory; while David Summers, largely concerned to trace the doctrine of the "common sense" in Kant's aesthetic to a tradition of faculty psychology extending back to Aristotle, also suggests the relevance of that aesthetic doctrine to Kant's democratic and cosmopolitan impulses. In these cases and others the interrelations of themes and languages constituting a discourse are not 21

22

J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, sity Press, 1985), p. 2. Ibid., p. 12.

and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

Introduction

13

arbitrary; as Pocock says, the discourse "declares itself in the literature/' 23 Thus the network of discussion of "beauty/' "taste/ 7 "genius," and so forth indicates the formation of a theoretical discourse on art and aesthetic experience in the course of the 1700s. The unity so formed is rent by contradiction, ambivalence, misunderstanding; that is, it is formed by the myriad of ways in which modes of speech can be appropriated and rejected, be understood and misunderstood, demand response and be granted or refused it, as well as by the linkage of one set of concerns with another (the hierarchy of subjects in painting, for example, with issues of state finance). This process is illustrated with particular clarity in John Hope Mason's essay on "genius/7 which explores the emergence of this central category of modern discussion of the arts as an aspect of the social and so intellectual processes of transformation taking place across all Europe during our period. The reality of the discourse can be seen, notably, in the way both similarities and differences articulate what was an international discussion, in which the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment were given concrete form in the contacts between persons and ideas maintained by constant travel, enormous correspondence, and the circulation of printed texts. In his criticism of the 1765 Salon, for instance, Diderot "had as starting point a study of the ideas on art of Winckelmann, Hogarth, and Daniel Webb/' and two years later he was deeply affected by Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which he most likely read in English after a visit from Burke's brother, Richard.24 Although such textual migrations carry particular idioms from one local context to another (as when Burke's book transported the "sublime" back to France, whence it had earlier come in Boileau's translation of Longinus), a condition for this was - besides the shared knowledge of classical culture as fundamental point of reference - the similarity between the "languages" (in Pocock's sense) in 23 24

Ibid., p. 14. E. M. Bukdahl, "Introduction" to Salon de 1767, in Denis Diderot, Oeuvres completes, ed. H. Dieckmann, J. Proust, and J. Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1975-), XVI, p. iO; see p. 12.

14

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

which art was discussed in different parts of Europe. Thus the critique of the "particular" that Elizabeth Bohls examines for the case of England reappears, as Martha Woodmansee's discussion reveals, as far away as Schiller's critique of popular poetry; issues of class central to both these idioms arise, Richard Shusterman shows us, in Hume's and Kant's theories of taste; and the gendered character of the distinction made by Reynolds between feminine "particularity" and the masculinity of the "Grand Style" is repeated in the linkage of luxury, effeminacy, and the degradation of taste made by the French authors discussed in my essay. Finally, as Annie Becq's contribution indicates, patterns visible in this fabric of themes and idioms suggest the intimate relation of the new autonomy of art to the growing social importance of the market, which in the field of art was taking the place of the patronage system. Specifically, the analogy between (purely) aesthetic value and the abstract exchange value central to the capitalist system, whose emergence we can now recognize as the core of "modernization," helps explain both the important place of art in the culture of modern society and the apparently antagonistic embrace, in both theory and practice, of art and money. Within this discourse the traditional canon of aesthetics undoubtedly has an important place. But eighteenth-century elements of that canon are here linked to contemporary texts on art practice, criticism, and history, to discourses of politics and economics, and to the actual development of art, itself an aspect of the general development of society. Classical and medieval writings make themselves felt, also, as part of the discursive background in terms of which and against which new languages of art were developed. This of course reflects the fact that in the period under consideration aesthetics, though named, had not been constituted as a selfcontained discipline,- this happened only in the course of a long process, which began in the German university system of the eighteenth century, to which Baumgarten's book was directed, passed through the subsequent development of that system as an aspect of German modernization and nation building, and finally led at the turn of the century to the institutionalization of aesthetics as an academic subspecialty within philosophy, itself largely indebted for its institutional existence to the German model of higher learning. It is this outcome, of course, that is primarily responsible for the

Introduction

15

shape normally given to the "history of aesthetics/7 generally written, as Remy Saisselin complains, "as a series of philosophical problems eventually resolved by Kant."25 If this shape has been more or less abandoned by the authors represented here, it is not because the conceptual analysis and exploration of meaning on which philosophy has centered its efforts have been replaced by history (which of course itself cannot exist independently of theoretical interests); in fact, the latter serves here as necessary presupposition of the former. That history cannot take its place follows from the fact that we stand as present-day commentators on the past within a discourse formed in part by elements of that past, and to which we must therefore take a reflexive and critical stance. This is particularly true (or at least true in particular) of our relation to the eighteenth century, which saw the birth of many if not all of the central discourses of modernity: natural science, politics, and economics as well as art. Put slightly differently, the discourse studied here is one in which the writers of these essays are implicated. Terms of the languages with which we still work to articulate experience derive directly from it. As a result, for example, Bohls's presentation of eighteenthcentury aesthetic discourse as structured importantly by gender categories reflects a current social preoccupation, and one hardly confined to academics; her response to the writing of the past is an acknowledgment at once of the persistence of gender oppression across the temporal span that lies between ourselves and (say) Reynolds and of the continuing importance of art as a cultural field in which social issues are articulated. There is no conflict in principle between historical accuracy and relevance to current social and so intellectual concerns. If one can feel the present-day discussion of the relations between "high" and "low" art in the essays by Shusterman and Woodmansee, or that of the "modernist" conception of artistic originality and the constructed character of representation in Becq's account of Diderot, it is the continuing relevance of the texts of the past to such concerns that makes the effort required to understand them in their own historical terms worthwhile. 25

R. G. Saisselin, Taste in Eighteenth-Century France (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1965), p. 1. This is, he explains, due to "the simple fact that the history of aesthetics has been written by philosophers rather than by historians;" for the former "quite often people who wrote on taste, poetry, beauty, the sublime, became aestheticians" (p. 3).

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

1

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the subject of aesthetics

Eighteenth-century Britain saw an unprecedented flood of writing on aesthetic topics: beauty, sublimity, taste, genius, painting, landscape gardening, and scenic tourism. 1 This discussion ranged from the neoclassicism of Sir Joshua Reynolds to the discourse of disinterested contemplation, beginning with Shaftesbury, and the aesthetics of the picturesque as expounded by Gilpin, Price, and Knight. But these apparently disparate aesthetic discourses share a distinctive manner of constructing their respective subject positions. The discourse of disinterestedness most obviously constructs the aesthetic subject through a process of exclusion: disinterested contemplation, or the aesthetic attitude, is a special mode of attention defined as excluding any practical stake in the existence of the object. (Kant's exclusion of vested interest from the judgment of taste is perhaps the best known version of this concept, though its emergence has been traced to early eighteenth-century British writers.)2 Both Reynolds's Discourses on Art and treatises on the picturesque employ similar exclusions in their efforts to mold the subject of aesthetic reception. What was excluded or abstracted out or we might even say purged was a wide range of concrete affiliations to particular people, places, and things. For Reynolds, the detail - the representation in painting I am grateful to John Bender, Bliss Carnochan, Deidre Lynch, Paul Mattick, and David Wellbery for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1

2

John W. Draper's bibliography, Eighteenth Century English Aesthetics (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), lists over 1,200 items and is by no means exhaustive. Jerome Stolnitz, "On the Origins of 'Aesthetic Disinterestedness/ " Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961-2): 131-43.

16

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

17

of concrete material particularity - became a symbolic threat to order in both the individual mind and the political state. Good painting used the abstractions of form to promote social and political hierarchy. Both the discourse of disinterested contemplation and the aesthetics of the picturesque share with Reynolds this willed distance from particular material objects and from the human desires or needs corresponding to them. Though the picturesque was based on landscape painting, for Reynolds an inferior genre, it was driven, as was his aesthetics, by an abstracting or idealizing urge, leading to a high degree of perceptual consensus. Both for Reynolds and for theorists of the picturesque, one dimension of specificity excluded in forming the aesthetic subject was that of gender. This becomes apparent in Ann Radcliffe's Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795), a picturesque tour written by a woman: a pattern of disruption throughout the text strongly suggests resistance to the rational, neutral, and by implication universal aesthetic stance in which picturesque tourism participated. These eighteenth-century aesthetic discourses all display a pattern of excluding or rejecting material particularity in favor of abstract or formal considerations. But constructing the subject through processes of exclusion was not confined to aesthetics: the subject of aesthetics was paradigmatic for broader structures of thought. Moral philosophy, in particular Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and political theory, notably Locke's influential Second Treatise of Government, reveal analogous means of constructing their respective subjects. Smith moves beyond the web of individual circumstance on his way to higher morality, while Locke manages to subsume concrete, unequal property relations beneath individuals' formal legal equality. In both cases, the specificity of social rank is seemingly transcended, only to remain part of a deeper determining structure. In Smith's Theory, as in Reynolds's Discourses and in writings on the picturesque, gender too becomes a critical link in the network of suppression that forms a kind of ground for the construction of the subject, or, as Smith calls it, the "impartial spectator." Like Reynolds's aesthetics, Smith's ethics reinforce a consensual perception, a heightened sameness, among members of a powerful social group. We can begin to recognize a many-faceted movement toward a subject who would be "neutral"

18

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

or "middling/7 in significant respects "contentless" - a falsely universalized, pseudodemocratic model of the citizen.3 In a period when the growing sophistication of England's market economy demanded an increasingly specialized division of labor (we think of Adam Smith and his pins), a diversity of tastes as well as occupations was more and more a fact of life, even among the aristocracy as their customary leisure gave way to various capital ventures. We may be uncovering a countermovement, a reaction to this fact and the potential political threat that it posed. The aesthetic sphere emerges as an alternative site for a harmony perceived to be slipping away in other areas of life, notably the political. An aesthetic paradigm of perception thus becomes a cultural means toward the ultimately political end of homogeneity and solidarity among England's governing classes. DETAILS AND "DEFORMITY"

The relation between the general and the particular was an urgent problem in the theory and practice of art for a diverse group of eighteenth-century figures, sometimes labeled "neoclassical/7 from Samuel Johnson to Goethe. 4 Reynolds's wrestling with this issue in the Discourses reveals a deep-seated mistrust of material specificity in the visible universe - a striking repugnance for the particular or the detail. As president of the Royal Academy, delivering the Discourses as official policy statements for that body, Reynolds was expressing a view of art that carried considerable cultural weight. Probing this seeming idiosyncrasy, his dislike of details, may open a view into the political unconscious of a powerful social group.5 3

4

5

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 199. This study gives extensive and varied evidence for the thesis that "the very blandness and transparency of bourgeois reason is in fact nothing other than the critical negation of a social 'colorfulness/ of a heterogeneous diversity of specific contents, upon which it is, nonetheless, completely dependent" (p. 199). On the problems of defining "neoclassicism," see Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 1-49, and Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism (New York: Penguin Books, 1968). Reynolds's views on painting did not enjoy unchallenged hegemony. His long-standing rivalry with Gainsborough, whose less-idealized style found favor in George Ill's court, is discussed by Edgar Wind in Hume and the Heroic Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), esp. p. 31. In this context the Discourses may be understood as a polemic for the high, or heroic, style in a society whose interest in it was perceived

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

19

The Third Discourse, which treats of Beauty and the Grand Style, begins by urging young painters toward a more conceptual approach to their art: they need to move beyond real models and paint according to abstract mental ideals. Reynolds asserts that the power of discovering what is deformed in nature, or in other words, what is particular and uncommon, can be acquired only by experience; and the whole beauty and grandeur of the art [painting] consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.6

Eccentrically particularized natural objects, and especially (for the portraitist) human bodies, evoke Reynolds's disgust. His "metaphorics of the detail/' one critic finds, employs "the vocabulary of teratology, the science of monsters/' 7 The term "deformity" or "deformed" is repeated seven times within three pages of the above passage. Reynolds's early Idler essay (no. 82, 1759) pronounces an especially forceful version of his anathema on the detail: "if . . . the painter, by attending to the invariable and general ideas of Nature, produce beauty, he must, by regarding minute particularities, and accidental discriminations, deviate from the universal rule, and pollute his canvas with deformity."8 "De-formity" seems to stand for Reynolds in implicit logical opposition to the idea of form, as well as to those, closely related, of "beauty and grandeur." But deformity is more than just formlessness or the anarchy of random particulars ungoverned by ordering abstractions. The detail becomes a positive "pollution," a monstrosity. An influential tradition in political theory provides a conceptual framework within which we may begin to understand the urgency of

6

7

8

to be flagging. Reynolds's own income, of course, was derived from portraiture, an inferior genre in his own theoretical hierarchy, though he often elevated his portraits by incorporating mythological elements reminiscent of history painting (Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait, pp. i6ff.). However, despite the waning popularity of history painting, with its intellectual and moral dimensions, the de-particularized mode of perception that grounds Reynolds's thought seems to have persisted in a more purely aesthetic form in the increasingly prestigious field of landscape painting and picturesque aesthetics, as I will show. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 44. Parenthetical references in the text are to this edition. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 16. Quoted in Michael Macklem, "Reynolds and the Ambiguities of Neo-classical Criticism," Philological Quarterly 31 (1952): 383.

2O

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

Reynolds's preoccupation. Recent scholarship places him within the discourse of civic humanism, in its eighteenth-century British variant. 9 The historian J. G. A. Pocock has traced civic humanism from its classical antecedents through the republican experience of Renaissance Florence, and thence to eighteenth-century Britain and America,- I will summarize, at the risk of oversimplifying this rich and resilient tradition. 10 Civic virtue, or disinterested commitment to the public good, which preserves the body politic against the strains of time and contingency and the push and pull of competing individual interests, can only survive under certain conditions. One of these is limited citizenship. Those who are occupied in their daily lives with the material particularity of the world of craft or trade, the "mechanical arts/ 7 pursuing the demands of economic survival or the lure of acquisition and luxury, will never achieve the generalizing, rational habits of thought needed to move beyond private interest and to grasp - and act upon - the idea of the public good. The man of independent means has the potential (somewhat paradoxically) to free himself from experiencing the world as material. Only he may arrive, with effort and study, at the "liberal" or "comprehensive" point of view that is the basis of virtuous political action. As Terry Eagleton has put it in another context, "Only those with an interest" - in the eighteenth-century sense of owning property - "can be disinterested."11 Painting, Reynolds repeatedly insists, is a liberal art and not a "mechanical" trade. (See, e.g., pp. 48, 57, 93, 117 and 170-1.) Hence, it must pursue ideal objects, which address only the intellect and cannot be possessed, rather than actual, material objects in the world, which appeal to the senses and excite the acquisitive urge. Reynolds's version of a civic humanist theory of art is a relatively belated one. Writing at a time when heroic political action in the classical sense appears increasingly irrelevant to a modern market society, he shifts his emphasis to the epistemological dimension of citizenship. It is no longer the capacity for acts of public virtue but the ability to understand one's relation to the idea of the public depending in turn upon the ability to abstract general ideas from raw 9

John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 10 The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 11 The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984), p. 16.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

21

sense data - that defines the liberal mind. That mind differentiates itself in its fundamental economy, the very ordering of its faculties, from the "mechanic" mentality. The Ninth Discourse contains Reynolds's most sweeping account of "the progress of the mind/' a progress which, we observe, quickly leaves some minds behind: Man, in his lowest state, has no pleasures but those of sense, and no wants but those of appetite; afterwards, when society is divided into different ranks, and some are appointed to labor for the support of others, those whom their superiority sets free from labor, begin to look for intellectual entertainments. . . . As the senses, in the lowest state of nature, are necessary to direct us to our support, when that support is once secure there is danger in following them further; to him who has no rule of action but the gratification of the senses, plenty is always dangerous: it is still more necessary to the security of society, that the mind should be elevated to the idea of general beauty, and the contemplation of general truth; . . . the mind . . . obtains its proper superiority over the common senses of life, by learning to feel itself capable of higher aims and noble enjoyments. (Pp. 169-70)

Foremost among these "noble enjoyments" is, of course, the art of painting. Social stratification is the informing principle of Reynolds's theory of painting. Bent on presenting his art as one produced and consumed by "those whom their superiority sets free from labor," he accomplishes this by means of an analogy between social groups and the faculties of the mind - the "high" intellect versus the "common" senses. This passage emphasizes the danger to individuals and society of seeking sense gratification to the exclusion of higher ideals. Civic humanism cast such pursuit of private interest, or "luxury," as an enemy of the state. 12 The capacity to abstract from the particular to the general, developed, for example, through a taste for the right type of art, "elevates" citizens' minds, helping them overcome differences between their private interests and individual ways of seeing by leading them toward a consensual apprehension of the world at the fundamental level of perception itself. Reynolds implies that the promotion among a select group of citizens of a cohesive community of vision or taste, a civic humanist art, contrib12

Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 135-7, 443-5, 492-3; Barrell, Political Theory of Painting, pp. i i , 38-9.

22

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

utes to the "security of society/' That security depends on solidarity among the governing elite to resist those who, because their labor confines their views to sense gratification and private interest, are a constant danger to the state. One important classical source for the analogy underpinning this passage is Plato's Republic. Critics generally recognize Platonic elements in the Discourses, though they disagree on the extent of Reynolds's Platonism.13 The analogy between the well-ordered mind and the well-ordered state is elaborated in Book IV of the Republic: the "just" hierarchy in which the rational soul governs the desires of the base senses parallels that in which the warrior Guardians rule over craftsmen and money-makers, women, children, and slaves.14 The homogeneous, self-disciplined class of enfranchised citizens is associated with reason, and the diverse and potentially disorderly throng of the ruled is linked to the senses, the "lower" faculties. In Book X Plato adds a third term to the analogy as he justifies his wish to expel all imitators - notably poets and painters - from the city. By imitating the appearance of particular material things, he claims, the imitator "awakens and nourishes and strengthens" the base, irrational elements of the soul and thus "impairs the reason." Painting and poetry threaten proper hierarchy within the state by subverting that within the human soul: "As in a city we cannot allow the evil to have the authority and the good to be put out of the way, even so in the city which is within us we refuse to allow the imitative poet to create an evil constitution indulging the irrational nature" (§605).15 Reynolds, of course - joining a long tradition of European painters and critics - resisted this particular dictum of Plato's, as he resisted Plato's closely linked classification of painting as a craft or trade. Reynolds used Plato's analogy between mind and state to assert painting's political inoffensiveness - indeed, its power 13

14

15

Some also point out anti-Platonic features, such as his ridicule of a vatic theory of artistic inspiration. See, e.g., W. J. Hippie, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), pp. 133-48; Macklem, "Reynolds and the Ambiguities of Neo-classical Criticism"; and Robert Wark's introduction to the Discourses, p. xix. The Republic, in Plato, Works, tr. Benjamin Jowett (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1871), vol. 2, pp. 259-72, §§434-48. References in the text will be to this edition by Renaissance page. See Barrell, Political Theory of Painting, p. 13.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

23

to uphold the state - by aligning it with the higher faculty of reason rather than the lower ones of sense. Concerned to establish painting once and for all as a liberal art, Reynolds maintained that properly pursued, painting did not threaten the good order of the mind or of the state, but rather confirmed the grounds of the distinction, between reason and the senses, the franchised and the unenfranchised, on which good order was based.16 Reynolds's concern for good order within the work of art is frequently evident in the Discourses. The Fourth Discourse instructs students in applying to every facet of painting the guiding principle "that perfect form is produced by leaving out particularities and retaining only general ideas" (p. 57). As he translates his subject, an incident from history or myth, into an image on canvas, "the Artist should restrain and keep under all the inferior parts of his subject" (p. 59). We may discern moral and political overtones in such "restraint/7 especially if we read the Discourses, as Reynolds's classically educated audience certainly would have, against the background of Platonic psychology/politics. The "inferior parts" of the painting ("particularities," or details that merely capture the senses), of the mind (the senses themselves), and of the state (the "mechanic" orders) must be "restrained" or "kept under" if they are not to threaten proper hierarchy within the respective wholes. "Particularities" have a divisive influence: the painter of talent, Reynolds asserts, will not "waste a moment upon those smaller objects, which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart" (p. 50). Division within the painting fosters division within the mind or soul of the viewer - an image, in turn, if we follow the Platonic analogy further, of political division or subversion within the state. In another section of the Ninth Discourse (perhaps the most Platonic of the Discourses) Reynolds suggests more explicitly that upholding the hierarchy of the faculties is the painter's contribution to proper political order. Our art, like all arts which address the imagination, is applied to somewhat a lower faculty of the mind, which approaches nearer to sensuality; but through sense and fancy it must make its way to reason . . . and without 16

Ibid., p. 16.

24

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

carrying our art out of its natural and true character, the more we purify it from every thing that is gross in sense, in that proportion we advance its use and dignity; and in proportion as we lower it to mere sensuality, we pervert its nature, and degrade it from the rank of a liberal art; and this is what every artist ought well to remember. Let him remember also, that he deserves just so much encouragement in the state as he makes himself a member of it virtuously useful, and contributes in his sphere to the general purpose and perfection of society. (Pp. 170-1)

The political context in which the Discourses were delivered - in an institution of royal patronage, addressing the beneficiaries of George Ill's "encouragement" - underlines the political content of Reynolds's message. The "purification" of painting to address itself to the "higher" faculties, using the "lower" ones merely as steppingstones, is placed in clear relation to painting's usefulness to the state. By suppressing the "gross" particulars of sense, the painter contributes, by analogy, to the "perfection of society" - to the continued rule of its "higher" over its "lower" members. A further, unarticulated term in the conceptual structure of the Discourses is that of gender. Naomi Schor, invoking Reynolds's classical frame of reference, reads his antipathy to the detail as reinscribing the sexual stereotypes of Western philosophy which has, since its origins, mapped gender onto the form-matter paradigm, forging a durable link between maleness and form (eidos), femaleness and formless matter. This equation pervades Greek theories of reproduction, notably Aristotle's . . . "Matter longs for form as its fulfillment, as the female longs for the male."*?

Quoting the Physics, Schor note^ the way in which Reynolds's gendered language replicates this Aristotelian scheme, casting nature as explicitly feminine and implicitly in need of discipline. The painter corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original. (P. 44) Reynolds treats excessive details in a finished painting as uncorrected remnants of an "imperfect," formless or deformed feminine 17

Schor, Reading in Detail, p. 16.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

25

nature. Details are "deformities" when they are "accidental" rather than essential and are not properly subordinated to "general figures" or abstract ideas of form. These ideas can only be "made out" by the painter's form-providing masculine eye. Nature's feminine substrate must be subjected to the discipline of a masculine intellect if painting is to represent nature's "more perfect" state and thus (in the words of the Ninth Discourse, quoted above) contribute "to the general purpose and perfection of society." In Reynolds's civic humanist state, as in the actual states of Athens and Britain, women, along with "mechanics," were among those who must be ruled. Both groups were associated with the "lower" faculties, seen as too close to material particularity and thus incapable of a "liberal" perspective. The antipathy to details that pervades the Discourses can be understood, then, as rooted in the powerful Platonic analogy between the state, the individual mind, and the work of art. Good form in painting entails subordinating objects and figures to the idea, or subject, of the work. Each figure, in turn, derives its form from a process of comparing and abstracting from actual exemplars. If not subordinate to form, in these related meanings of the term, details metaphorically threaten proper order in both mind and state. They are associated with "low," potentially unruly elements in each: the senses and their disorderly desires, in need of regulation by the intellect; and the groups of people - "mechanics" and women more subject to those desires and hence more likely to foment political disorder if not well ruled by citizens, in whose own minds, in turn, the senses are firmly under reason's control. The primacy of form in painting both represents and promotes right rule in mind and state. Reynolds's contempt for monstrous or polluting "particularities" draws its urgency from this Platonic analogy's political charge. THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE

Distance from the senses, and from the divisive private interests associated with them, depended for Reynolds on the ability to abstract or generalize; the art of painting, correctly practiced, fostered this ability. His de-particularized artworks were calculated to help citizens distance and discipline merely private interests, needs, and

26

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

desires. Distance from necessity became a central element in a tradition of aesthetic thought usually discussed by historians of aesthetics under a different rubric. 18 The idea of aesthetic disinterestedness, or aesthetic attitude - a special mode of attention supposedly excluding a practical stake in the existence of an object emerged and spread beginning roughly with Addison. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes this strange new "historical invention " as "an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world - the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic necessities - a life of ease." Like Reynolds's theory of painting, the aesthetic attitude, or the separation of aesthetic perception from other kinds, generally functions to uphold social stratification. Bourdieu locates the modern legacy of this "invention" in cultural practices that, precisely through a denial of the social, reinforce social and economic hierarchy by distinguishing privileged individuals. The greater its distance from social reality and material necessity, the more prestigious a cultural product becomes: for example, classical music, the "purest" and most "spiritual" of the arts, is the taste that most infallibly marks the cultural consumer as upper-class.19 But the aesthetic attitude had a social and political significance prior to such outward marking of bourgeois subjects. At its historical inception in eighteenth-century Britain, aesthetic disinterestedness had a powerful political potential very similar to that of Reyn18

19

A standard periodization of the history of aesthetics, like that Tzvetan Todorov sets forth in Theories of the Symbol (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), separates "neoclassical" theories, grounded in a mimetic concept of art, from a "Romantic" paradigm of reception positing autonomous, internally coherent, intransitive works (ends in themselves) as objects of disinterested contemplation. However, a work that is still in theory mimetic, but purged of particular content, like those Reynolds advocates, seems to me to move decisively in the direction of the autonomous work, as Todorov recognizes in his discussion of Batteux's concept of beautiful nature (pp. 114-16). The underlying continuity between these two themes in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the de-particularized artwork and disinterested contemplation, makes it misleading to relegate them to separate periods. See also M. H. Abrams, "From Addison to Kant: Modern Aesthetics and the Exemplary Art," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics, ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985], pp. 18-21. Abrams does not use the term "Romantic" in this essay but discusses "heterocosmic" works and "contemplative" reception. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 3, 5, 18, 80.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

27

olds's civic humanist theory of painting, though not as explicitly articulated. Where Reynolds constituted the object, the painting, so as to form subjects through habitual viewing, other writers beginning with Addison and Shaftesbury undertook unmediated prescriptions for the perceiving subject. Aesthetic perception, not by virtue of its object but merely by definition, excluded practical needs and desires. It was abstract, without being cerebral; rooted in the senses, it nonetheless transcended the private interests traditionally associated with them, opening a space for consensus. In a society moving irrevocably toward a capitalist market model, where private interests fuel the economy and cooperation is merely coincidental, as in Smith's "invisible hand/7 aesthetic experience thus became a potential location, as it were by default, for a sense of community, or at least for the wistfully projected fantasy of community, as when Burke or Hume attempts to make a case for a universal standard of taste. 20 More than a nostalgic fantasy, however, the discourse of aesthetic disinterestedness, I will argue, constructed subjects capable of political solidarity, because they were accustomed to a mode of perception freed of divisive individual interests. It is no coincidence that Lord Shaftesbury, an early proponent of a civic humanist theory of painting, was also "the first philosopher to call attention to disinterested perception/' 21 His thought, steeped in Plato and Plotinus, aestheticizes virtue: it becomes a kind of spectatorship, a beholding and approving of the beautiful in the moral realm. As in Reynolds's later version of civic humanism, perception itself takes on a moral - and by extension a political - valence: a perception freed of private interest is accordingly opened to the idea of the public good. In his dialogue "The Moralists/' Shaftesbury contrasts the aesthetic perception of a natural object, in this case the sea, with the desire to use, possess, or control it. The teacher, Theocles, socratically quizzes his pupil, Philocles: Imagine then . . . if being taken with the beauty of the ocean, which you see yonder at a distance, it should come into your head to command it and, like some mighty admiral, ride master of the sea, would not the fancy be a little absurd? 20

21

See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 38-9. Barrell, Political Theory of Painting, pp. 1-8, 2 7 - 3 3 ; Stolnitz, "Origins of 'Aesthetic Disinterestedness/" p. 132.

28

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

Philocles replies with a startling logic: Absurd enough, in conscience. The next thing I should do, 'tis likely, upon this frenzy, would be to hire some bark and go in nuptial ceremony, Venetian-like, to wed the gulf, which I might call perhaps as properly my own.22 Shaftesbury is alluding to the traditional "wedding" between the Republic of Venice and the Adriatic: the doge sails out in state to drop a ring in the water. Through this custom Shaftesbury proclaims the gendered identity of the aesthetic subject. Although aesthetic contemplation and property ownership, tellingly exemplified by marriage, are presented as mutually exclusive, both are clearly aspects of masculine privilege in eighteenth-century Britain. Addison, in his influential Spectator essays on the "pleasures of the imagination," distinguishes those pleasures both from the "grosser" ones of sense and from the more "refined" ones of the understanding. Shaftesbury's follower Francis Hutcheson, borrowing Addison's phrase, describes the pleasures of the imagination as those preceded by no "uneasiness of Appetite," as well as "entirely abstracted from Possession or Property/' Elsewhere, Hutcheson elaborates his central claim that perception of beauty comes from an "internal sense" - and is thus as immediate, inevitable, and universal as sense perception - by asserting that no "Prospect of Advantage or Disadvantage" can "vary the Beauty or Deformity of an Object": For as in the external Sensations, no View of Interest will make an Object grateful, nor Detriment, distinct from immediate Pain in the Perception, make it disagreeable to the Sense; so propose the whole World as a Reward, or threaten the greatest Evil, to make us approve a deform'd Object, or disapprove a beautiful one; . . . our Perceptions . . . would continue invariably the same. Hutcheson grounds this unbribable quality of aesthetic perception in the analogy (for him more than an analogy) with sense perception. The effect is to ally him with other writers concerned to segregate aesthetic perception from the practical realm of interest, punishment, and reward.23 Hume's scattered remarks on aesthetic judgment in the Treatise 22 23

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. J. M . Robertson (London, 1900), II, pp. 126-7. Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), no. 411 (21 June 1712), p. 537; Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Pas-

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

29

handle it as analogous to moral judgment. Both beauty and virtue are recognized, as for Hutcheson, through a feeling, "a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind/7 What distinguishes an aesthetic sentiment, or a moral one, from a feeling of merely private satisfaction is that the object or character is "considered in general, without reference to our particular interest/' We need to correct for the limitations of our individual points of view in order "to prevent . . . continual contradictions, and arrive at a more stable judgment of things"; hence, "we fix on some steady and general points of view; and always, in our thoughts, place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation/ 724 A process of abstraction, fixing on the general, becomes a means of escaping the "instability" caused by particular, practical commitments. Of Britain's prominent midcentury writers on aesthetic topics, most make some approach to defining aesthetic perception as disinterested. Alexander Gerard lists "gratification of appetite" and "pursuits of gain" among the forces that inhibit sensibility or the capacity to respond to an aesthetic object. Similarly, Edmund Burke distinguishes between lust, which "hurries us to . . . possession," and love, our response to the beautiful, which does not. 25 Lord Kames's distinction in the Elements of Criticism between emotions and passions makes the nonactive nature of the aesthetic attitude the key to its disinterestedness. Passions are followed by desire, which is inseparable from action toward a practical end (revenge, securing possessions, etc.). Emotions, "in their nature quiescent," are evoked by aesthetic experience.26 Archibald Alison, writing late in the century, presents the most discriminating account to date of the aesthetic attitude as a state of mind. He follows Shaftesbury and others in excluding the useful,

24

25

26

sions and Affections (1728), in Collected Works (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971], II, pp. 101-2; and idem, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), in Works, I, pp. 1 0 - 1 1 . A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 472, 581-2; Henry H o m e (Lord Kames), Elements of Criticism (London, 1762), I, p. 56. See also Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, i960], esp. pp. 49, 6 3 - 4 , 113-14Gerard, An Essay on Taste, id ed. (Edinburgh, 1764), p. 99; Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (South Bend: University of N o t r e D a m e Press, 1958], p. 91. All quoted in Stolnitz, "Origins of 'Aesthetic D i s i n t e r e s t e d n e s s / " pp. 134-5, 140. Home, Elements of Criticism, I, p. 56.

3O

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

the agreeable, and the convenient from the specifically aesthetic qualities of objects. Leisure, for Alison, is a primary precondition of aesthetic reception, or, as he would put it, for experiencing the "emotions of taste/ 7 The mind must be "vacant and . . . unemployed/7 not pursuing any practical aim, to be "open to all the impressions, which the objects that are before us, can create/7 This partly explains why we find "only in the higher stations . . . or in the liberal professions of life . . . men either of a delicate or comprehensive taste.77 Aesthetic reception is for Alison an explicit class privilege, as are both production and reception for Reynolds: activities of the leisured, liberally educated gentleman. These writers are fully aware that comfortable material circumstances are needed to create or perceive in the specially valued ways they describe. Addison made the same point several decades earlier when he observed, "A Man of a Polite Imagination, is let into a great many Pleasures that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving.7727 We have observed a procession of British writers from beginning to end of the eighteenth century constructing the aesthetic subject through the exclusion of practical interests, needs, and desires. Through incidental remarks that reveal these writers7 deepest assumptions, we have been able to establish this aesthetic subject as male and identified with society7s upper ranks. The need for distance or detachment mandates casting off particular interests, including a move away from the "particularity77 of feminine gender or "mechanic77 rank toward a putative universal: the privileged masculine self. THE PARADOX OF THE FEMALE PICTURESQUE

Although its applications to landscape gardening, to amateur sketching and painting, and especially to the increasingly accessible practice of scenic tourism brought the picturesque to Britain7s prosperous "middling sort,77 the aesthetics of the picturesque has significant affinities with the "high77 aesthetic theories discussed above. First appearing around the 1740s, the concept steadily gained currency 27

Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), pp. 6, 62; Addison, Spectator, no. 411, p. 538.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

31

after midcentury; it was widespread by the 1780s and hackneyed by 1800.28 Words such as ''landscape/' "prospect" and "scene" came to incorporate the basic idea of the picturesque: considering nature as a subject for landscape painting. The connoisseur of the picturesque view applied an elaborate body of concepts drawn from the study of landscape painting (the "fore-grounds, distances, and second distances - side-screens and perspectives - lights and shades" that Jane Austen satirized in Northanger Abbey29), mentally manipulating actual rocks, trees, or cottages to fit an ideal pictorial order. This way of looking at land was a harbinger of abstract aesthetic values. It put into practice the same separation of the aesthetic from the practical that informed the discourse of aesthetic disinterestedness.30 The viewer of the picturesque was detached from the scene, becoming a purely organizing eye, and the landscape was correspondingly purged of all that made it unique. 31 A subject constructed in this way has a great deal in common with the disinterested aesthetic subject as he 28

29

30 31

Elizabeth Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925), pp. 170, 167. Standard discussions of the picturesque include Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Putnam, 1927); and Hippie, The Beautiful the Sublime, and the Picturesque, pp. 185-283. Man waring presents the picturesque in the context of connoisseurship and the history of taste. Malcolm Andrews's The Search for the Picturesque (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989] is the most comprehensive recent study of the phenomenon; other recent interpretations include John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972]; Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 61-137; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 254-69; and Kimlan Michasiw, "Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque/' Representations 38 (1992]: 76-100. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 125-6. Hippie, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque, p. 190. Of course, picturesque aesthetics was by no means a pure or one-dimensional phenomenon,- m y brief summary cannot do justice to its historical complexity. Although the abstracting tendency I describe is clearly at its center, connecting it to other contemporary aesthetic discourses, the picturesque harbors more than one incipient paradox, as becomes apparent in Andrews's excellent study. The nationalistic strain he points out in the evolution of picturesque taste qualifies my assertions. Although applying formal principles remained central to the practice of picturesque tourism, Britons took increasing pride in the quality of particularly British scenery judged by these standards, as well as enjoying associations with indigenous literary and mythological traditions (Andrews, Search for the Picturesque, pp. 4, 9-10, 35, and passim|.

32

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

was described from Shaftesbury to Kant: purified of concrete, specific connections to the aesthetic object; socially privileged; and ideologically masculine. One way in which the discourse of the picturesque detached the aesthetic from the practical was its refusal to recognize, in looking at land, the ways in which the topography of a specific place reflected the material necessities of its inhabitants. Land shaped by people and serving their needs through agriculture or industry was not the stuff of picturesque description, which was, in Andrews's phrase, "aggressively anti-utilitarian" and specifically "antigeorgic."32 In the tradition of descriptions by topographical poets like Thomson and Dyer, the picturesque kept its distance from this type of necessity. It emphasized purely visual qualities while deemphasizing associated ideas of any kind, whether intellectual, emotional, historical, or social.33 When we see people in a picturesque scene, they are faceless, merely ornamental. The country clergyman William Gilpin, perhaps the best-known proponent of the picturesque, published multiple volumes on British beauty spots from the Scottish Highlands to the River Wye from the 1780s through the early 1800s. Gilpin's approach accentuates the strict application of compositional rules; later theorists of the picturesque, Sir Uvedale Price and Sir Richard Payne Knight, shift their emphasis to effects of light and shadow, color and texture. All three writers have in common an "insistence upon the aesthetic significance of lines, colors, textures taken abstractly from the concretes in which they occur/' 34 While Price and Knight, landowners themselves, addressed an audience of fellow landscape gardeners, or estate "improvers/7 Gilpin spoke to the considerably broader circle of those who could afford leisure travel. He proposed a new objective for travel, "that of examining the face of the country by the rules of picturesque beauty: opening the source of those pleasures, which are derived from the comparison/735 Gilpin's eye is always that of the improver, trying to imagine 32 33 34 35

Ibid., pp. 49, 64; see also pp. 53 and 569 and Barrell, Idea, pp. 5 8 - 9 . Hussey, The Picturesque, p. 5. Hippie, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque, p. 292. Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, e*)c. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty-, made in the Summer of the Year 1770, 2d

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

33

"what would amend the composition; how little is wanting to reduce it to the rules of our art."36 Of the town of Newport he comments optimistically, "A few slight alterations would make it picturesque" (p. 129). Excessive traces of human habitation, industry, or commerce are undesirable intrusions on a picturesque scene. "Furrowed-lands, and waving-corn, however charming in pastoral poetry, are ill-accommodated to painting. The painter never desires the hand of art to touch his grounds," he comments, his range of association moving from painting to poetry and back while ignoring the extra-aesthetic value of cultivated acres (p. 45). An isolated cottage or hamlet may add charm to a scene, "but when houses are scattered through every part, the moral sense can never make a convert of the picturesque eye" (p. 12). Moral imperatives like sheltering the lower orders are extrinsic to the clergyman's aesthetic vision. Observing the effect of charcoal smoke which, "issuing from the sides of the hills, and spreading it's [sic] thin veil over a part of them, beautifully breaks their lines, and unites them with the sky," Gilpin aestheticizes a trace of grimy human industry to the point where its source is forgotten (p. 23). In tour after tour, by imposing "the rules of our art" on the idiosyncrasies of what he actually sees, Gilpin elides materially conditioned meaning from the English countryside. By choosing - or producing - landscapes innocent of traces of contemporary civilization or economic struggle, he attempts to uncouple aesthetic perception from the practical use value of land. Ann Radcliffe's picturesque tour A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795) juxtaposes the aesthetic and the practical in an unprecedented friction. Radcliffe's idyllic descriptions of picturesque scenery along the Rhine display a pattern of disruption which suggests a conflicted feminine subjectivity resisting the detached, neutral, and by implication universal stance in which picturesque tourism participates. Feminist film theorists have had to confront the paradox of the woman as spectator in a medium directed toward a male

36

ed. (London, 1989), p. 1. References in parentheses in the text are to this work and this edition. Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to which is added a Poem, on Landscape Painting (London, 1792), P. 49-

34

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

viewer and structured around a masculine subjectivity37 In A Journey, a woman inserts herself as subject, or spectator, in a masculine aesthetic discourse, the picturesque. The text's sometimes disturbing incongruities suggest the consequences of a woman's occupying such a "noncoherent" position. 38 Radcliffe's expansive and uneven narrative provides something for everyone in England's robust market for travel literature, combining elements of the report on manners and conditions abroad with the genre of the picturesque tour as popularized by Gilpin. Manners and conditions prevail in scenically unrewarding regions like Holland, whereas the Rhineland inspires highly aestheticized landscape descriptions. As they approach the Rhine, however, the travelers also encounter more frequent traces of the ongoing European war against revolutionary France. These are recorded in language very different from that of Radcliffe's picturesque descriptions. A jarring, uncommented counterpoint unfolds which dramatizes the dissociation of the aesthetic from the practical. This pattern of disjunction enacts, at the same time, the woman writer's contradictory position within the discourse of the picturesque and its larger ideological context. Women's day-to-day lives - even, or especially, those of privileged women in Radcliffe's day - were limited by the fact of their gender. Like other subordinate groups, women were confined by the specificity of their position as contrasted to the privileged masculine "universal." This helps us comprehend the marks of struggle in Radcliffe's writing against the assumed mental freedom of the aesthetic attitude. To speak as an aesthetic subject was the prerogative of Radcliffe's class but not of her gender. It backfired, as we shall see: the particularity of her gender asserts itself in her text as strain, inconsistency, and rupture. It may seem strange that Radcliffe and her husband set off down the Rhine in search of the picturesque in the summer of 1794 de37

38

See, e.g., Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 ( i 9 7 5 | : 6 - i 8 ; B . Ruby Rich, Judith Mayne, et al., "Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics," New German Critique 13 (1978): 83-107; and Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 12-36. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, p. 8: "[T]he position of woman in language and in cinema is one of non-coherence; she finds herself only in a void of meaning, in the empty space between the signs."

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

35

spite the French army's occupation of the west bank of that river since the previous year. The coalition including Austria, Prussia, and England continued to hold the east bank. No major battles took place along the Rhine that summer, though skirmishes were frequent. Describing a view along the Rhine, Radcliffe presents an aestheticized nature impervious to the petty intrusions of historical circumstance: The Rhine no where, perhaps, presents grander objects, either of nature or of art, than in the northern perspective from St. Goar. There, expanding with a bold sweep, the river exhibits, at one coup d'oeil, on its mountainous shores, six fortresses or towns, many of them placed in the most wild and tremendous situations; their antient and gloomy structures giving ideas of the sullen tyranny of former times. The height and fantastic shapes of the rocks, upon which they are perched, or by which they are overhung, and the width and rapidity of the river, that, unchanged by the vicissitudes of ages and the contentions on its shores, has rolled at their feet, while generations, that made its mountains roar, have passed away into the silence of eternity these were objects, which, combined, formed one of the sublimest scenes we had viewed.39 Castles, preferably in ruins, were highly favored elements of scenery. The "sullen tyranny/' or political oppression, that they represent is displaced backward into "former times" (not a safe assumption in eighteenth-century Germany). The forms of nature, river and cliffs, are pictorially described, using height, breadth, and "bold sweep"; they are eternal, whereas human "contentions" are fleeting. Nature diverts our attention from history, aesthetics leads us away from politics, in a pattern so familiar it still sounds like a platitude - but a powerful one, as Jerome McGann has shown in his work on Romantic nature poetry, finding similar shifts of emphasis in complex and ambivalent literary forms. 40 As the Radcliffes journey down the Rhine, however, human contentions assert themselves again and again in an eerily uncommented alternation with picturesque descriptions. Radcliffe's recording of the traces of war is by no means disengaged. (It may 39

40

A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (London, 1795|, p. 305. Parenthetical references in the text are to this edition. The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 59-92.

36

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

reflect opposition, like her husband's, to English involvement in Continental wars.)41 She describes hospital wagons full of wounded soldiers: They were all uncovered, so that the emaciated figures and ghastly countenances of the soldiers, laid out upon straw in each, were exposed to the rays of a burning sun, as well as to the fruitless pity of passengers [passers-by]; and, as the carriages had no springs, it seemed as if these half-sacrificed victims to war would expire before they could be drawn over the rugged pavement of Cologne. Any person, who had once witnessed such a sight, would know how to estimate the glories of war. (Pp. 327-8) Not only the disturbing effects of war on the bodies of these "halfsacrificed victims" but their painful interaction with their physical surroundings are observantly noted: the sun burns, the cobblestones jolt the wagons. But on the same page, the text recovers its composure, its surface closing like still waters over the momentary disturbance, and Radcliffe goes on to comment on the "venerable and picturesque character" of Cologne viewed from the water. The traces of war are obtrusive as the travelers move south. In Mainz they view the damage from the siege of 1793. The elector's palace is being used as a barracks and hospital; Radcliffe glimpses "half-dressed soldiers" in its windows (p. 182). Nearby Oppenheim is scarred by earlier conflicts: "Louis the Fourteenth's fury has converted it from a populous city into little more than a picturesque ruin" (p. 236). Violence and the picturesque are brought into uncommented relation: past "contentions" have produced present scenic attractions. The travelers ride along, passing more mountains, castles, and quaintly costumed peasants. They expect to hear gunfire, but do not; the peasants go on cutting their harvest, and "nothing but the continuance of patroles and convoys reminded us of our nearness to the war" (p. 268). They are told at dinner that the French have attempted to cross the Rhine fifteen miles upstream. Marching Austrian battalions keep them awake all night in their inn until the blare of military music at dawn "seem[s] like a dream" (p. 271). Shortly afterward, as the Radcliffes ride along the foot of the Bergstrasse, this long description appears: Our way lay along the base of these steeps, during the whole day; and as we drew near to Switzerland, their height became still more stupendous, 41

Aline Grant, Ann Radcliffe (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1951), pp. 54-5.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

37

and the mountains of Alsace seemed advancing to meet them in the long perspective; the plains between, through which the Rhine gleamed in long sweeps, appeared to be entirely covered with corn, and in the nearer scene joyous groups were loading the waggons with the harvest. An harvest of another kind was ripening among the lower rocks of the Bergstrasse, where the light green of the vines enlivened every cliff, and sometimes overspread the ruinous walls of what had once been fortresses. We passed many villages, shaded with noble trees . . . their spacious street generally opening to the grandeur of the mountain vista, that extended to the south. In these landscapes the peasant girl, in the simple dress of the country, and balancing on her hat an harvest keg, was a very picturesque figure. (Pp. 272-3)

Radcliffe works with the perspective between the mountains, using color and contrast to compose her picturesque scene. Aesthetically overgrown ruins ornament the background; human figures, the foreground. If we think a moment, though, how "joyous" can these harvesters really be with a French invasion under way? It is not likely that they are meant to be celebrating their liberation by the Revolution. Rather, their joy is pure picturesque convention. It underscores the near-schizophrenic split in Radcliffe's text between the ahistorical idylls produced by the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque and the traces of historical conflict which, banished from the aestheticized surface of A Journey's scenic descriptions, return to jar its artificially idyllic tone. The disruptions and incongruities that mark this text appear to signal a conflict between mutually inconsistent determinants of its writer's subjectivity. On the one hand, her membership in England's privileged classes authorized Radcliffe to speak from the position of the aesthetic subject. On the other hand, as a woman, Radcliffe was also part of what the aesthetic subject excluded: her feminine gender was "particular" in relation to the masculine universal. The disrupted text of A Journey testifies to the conceptual dissonance between the position of the aesthetic subject and the feminine gender.42 For Reynolds, as we saw, formless matter and the unruly detail were implicitly female, threats to the hierarchical form imposed by the male painter. In Radcliffe's Journey female insubordination 42

Nancy Fraser makes use of the idea of conceptual dissonance in "Habermas and Gender," in Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 125.

38

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

seems to align itself with the unruly contingency of history itself. The conflicted subjectivity of the privileged woman plays itself out in her narrative in the insistent intrusions of the practical, in the form of the traces of war, into the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque.

THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Thus far we have looked within the emerging discipline of aesthetics for various versions of the logic of suppression and exclusion that produced the aesthetic subject. With Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a markedly similar logic enters the not too distant philosophical discipline of ethics. Like Reynolds's aesthetics, Smith's ethics reinforces a consensual mode of perception, building solidarity among members of an elite social group. But for Smith, as for Reynolds, this involves a network of exclusions that forms a kind of repressed ground for the ideological representation of the subject. And for Smith, too, gender, specifically feminine gender, forms part of what is excluded. It is a commonplace to post-Freudians that civilization requires us to suppress some of the feelings, needs, and desires pertaining to our particular locations in the material world and the social structure. Smith's theory describes this process using a regulatory construct he calls the impartial spectator. Significantly, the very idea of a spectator or looker moves Smith's ethics (like Shaftesbury's half a century earlier) in the direction of aesthetics. 43 Smith achieves the suppression of particularizing characteristics through a painstaking process. To form a moral judgment on someone else's action, I must first project myself imaginatively into that person's position and reconstruct all the circumstances of the situation. Then, to judge the propriety of his or her sentiments, I compare them with what an impartial spectator, stripped of all the biases both of my individuality and of the actor's, would feel in the same situation. When I myself am the moral agent, I need to adjust my feelings to the level that this imaginary spectator could enter into. 43

Stolnitz, "Origins of 'Aesthetic Disinterestedness/" p. 133.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

39

Twentieth-century commentators such as T. D. Campbell and A. L. Macfie emphasize that Smith's spectator is an empirical construct, representing a socially and historically relative norm. It is an abstraction, but not an ahistorical abstraction.44 It internalizes the "mirror" of society, others' reactions to our behavior.45 Smith's ideally moral society would resemble (but with an opposite evaluative slant) Rousseau's description in the Second Discourse of overcivilized, alienated man: 'The savage lives within himself. The sociable man, always outside of himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others; and it is, so to speak, from their judgement alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence."46 The truly moral individual, for Smith, lives so much "outside of himself" that he almost becomes the impartial spectator; he "scarce ever feels but as that great arbiter of his conduct directs him to feel" (p. 147). This species of self-alienation may help account for the recurring note of anxiety that recent readers of Smith's theory have noticed amid its generally placid tone. R. F. Brissenden ascribes his lurid descriptions of the tortures of guilt to an acute sense of "the way in which society can bring to bear on the individual forces that may prove intolerably painful." David Marshall locates Smith's anxiety in a splitting of the self into actor and spectator, or public and private elements, with the public part, the impartial spectator, having the final say.47 More than splitting, I would call this process a certain emptying out of selves - a jettisoning of ideologically impermissible kinds of individual "content," with the aim of producing a nation of rational, neutral, middling impartial spectators. The practice Smith recommends of repeatedly projecting oneself into the spectator is 44

45

46

47

See, e.g., T. D. Campbell, Adam Smith's Science of Morals (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), pp. 134, 137; and A. L. Macfie, The Individual in Society: Papers on Adam Smith (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 81. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. A. L. Macfie and D. D. Raphael (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), p. n o . References in parentheses in the text are to this edition. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, tr. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1964), p. 179. Brissenden, "Authority, Guilt, and Anxiety in the Theory of Moral Sentiments," Texas Studies in Language and Literature n (1969): 9 4 5 - 6 2 ; Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 176-7.

4O

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

his version of the long and grueling process through which citizens self-enforce this homogeneity.48 I would also emphasize, with Campbell and Macfie, that the forces society is bringing to bear are not timeless but historically specific and concrete, although it is beyond the scope of this paper to describe them in detail. 49 Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer have traced the long process of English state formation from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. They understand it as a process whose political and cultural dimensions necessarily intertwine. State agencies attempt to give unitary and unifying expression to what are in reality multifaceted and differential historical experiences of groups within society, denying their particularity. The reality is that bourgeois society is systematically unequal, it is structured along lines of class, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, occupation, locality. States act to erase the recognition and expression of these differences.50

Such systematic denial of particularity, they emphasize, also involves pain: "the specifics of state formation, and the forms of cultural relations which states regulate . . . hurt as much as they help/' 51 1 understand the discourses of aesthetics and moral philosophy as helping mediate the complex interaction between the emergence of a modern British state and what might be called "the mak48

49

50

John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], pp. 201-28, sets forth detailed analogies between Smith's spectator, the concept of surveillance in Bentham's Panopticon prison, and the narrative convention of mental transparency (free indirect discourse), through which individuals render an account of themselves in the realist novel and in modern society. One relevant factor might well have been the modern conception of the state as an impersonal entity, separate from both ruler and ruled, which began to emerge in England in the 1530s under Cromwell; international commercial rivalries in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries further stimulated British thinkers, as well as the rival French and Dutch, to conceptualize sovereignty abstractly. The Civil War struggle over sovereignty advanced this process, as did the triumph of parliamentary over personal rule with the Glorious Revolution. An impersonally conceived state would need citizens correspondingly able to relate to abstractions. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), esp. vol. 2, pp. 349-58; Philip Corrigan and Revolution Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 4 3 - 5 4 ; and J. H. Shennan, The Origins of the Modern European State, 1450-172$ (London: Hutchinson, 1974), pp. 87ff. Corrigan and Sayer, Great Arch, p. 4. 5 1 Ibid.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

41

ing of the British ruling class" - the formation of subject-citizens suited to govern and sustain such a state. Aesthetics, I have claimed, was paradigmatic among the "universalizing vocabularies"52 helping forge the unity of the British political nation. The vested interests, needs, and desires excluded in disinterested aesthetic reception are the trappings of social and political diversity and the seeds of division - symbolized, too, by the details Reynolds would scourge from painting and the traces of human making or dwelling that Gilpin's picturesque eye would exclude from a perfect view. As Smith's ethics sets forth a highly systematized regime for policing particularity in the name of morality, the aesthetic paradigm transcends the boundaries of the aesthetic sphere to aid the regulation of practical affairs. It is revealing to note some of the kinds of "content" Smith seems especially concerned to suppress: first, social inequality; second, bodily appetites, especially sexual passion; and finally, femininity, which is connected to both the preceding, since women are both a subordinate social group and symbolically tied to nature and the body. Smith's impulse seems almost democratic as he describes the spectator's admonition to remember, on occasions "when we prefer ourselves . . . shamefully and . . . blindly to others," that "we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it" (p. 137). But this democracy of conscience needs to be read in the light of the felt internal democracy among gentlemen, described in J. C. D. Clark's recent study of ancien regime England.53 Solidarity is fostered among the elite, implicitly against the excluded majority. Smith denies that social differentiations such as local customs, ranks, professions, and "states of life" significantly affect our "sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation," because these "are founded on the strongest and most vigorous passions of human nature; and though they may be somewhat warpt, cannot be entirely perverted" (p. 200). But this essentialist claim is limited, we soon find, to the nature of society's comfortable classes.54 Discussing 52 53

54

Ibid., p. 7. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 9 3 - 1 1 8 , esp. p. 114. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 244, 2 4 6 - 8 .

42

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

morality among "savages and barbarians/7 Smith remarks, "Before we can feel much for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves. If our own misery pinches us very severely, we have no leisure to attend to that of our neighbor" (p. 205). Since sympathy is the key to his system, he has unintentionally exposed it as an ethics of prosperity, dependent on a material foundation, an "interest," for the education and leisure needed to perform the complicated mental exercise of moral judgment, but subsuming this foundation beneath a superstructure of impartiality and universality. About the body Smith is unambiguous. "It is indecent to express any strong degree of those passions which arise from a certain situation or disposition of the body. . . . Such is our aversion for all the appetites which take their origins from the body; all strong expressions of them are loathsome and disagreeable" (pp. 27-8). The reasoning behind this is that bodily appetites are difficult or impossible for others, or the impartial spectator, to enter into. Once they are satisfied, we ourselves may be disgusted with what we previously desired. "When we have dined, we order the covers to be removed; and we should treat in the same manner the objects of our most ardent and passionate desires, if they were the objects of no other passions but those which take their origins from the body" (p. 28). We get an amusing image of the sated libertine ordering the "covers removed"; but we should also note here the association of those "objects" - women - with problematic, potentially disgusting or threatening aspects of our material being which require severe restraint under a civilized moral code. Again, more explicitly than in Reynolds, we see the link between women and bodily or material nature. This connection is prominent in other eighteenth-century writers: we think of Swift's "scatological" poems, such as "The Lady's Dressing Room" and "A Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed," in which hysterical disgust for women's bodies and their functions perhaps projects the author's inability to confront his own mortality.55 But associating woman with body as opposed to mind or spirit, matter as opposed to form, nature as opposed to culture, was by no means confined to eighteenth-century Britain, as Simone de 55

Swift, Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983).

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

43

Beauvoir documented decades ago and more recent work by feminist anthropologists like Sherry Ortner has also shown. 56 The reference to material particularity is the conceptual link between the three categories - social inequality, the body and its senses, and women - that Smith seems concerned to exclude from the realm of morality. As a subordinate social group, women are restricted by the specificity of their gender, which excludes them from full participation in rational processes of governance or ethical regulation. Class and gender differences are both potentially politically divisive and must be contained or erased by dominant ideologies. Smith's propensity for abstraction, and the rather formalistic procedures he recommends for moral judgment, are strongly reminiscent of the tendency I noted in writers on aesthetics to valorize abstract concepts and formal features at the expense of particular, historically rooted characteristics of individual people, places, and things. The disinterested aesthetic attitude, the de-particularized artwork or picturesque view, and the impartial spectator all work to universalize modes of perception made possible only by material privilege - to assume or render them generally shared. Feminist criticism repeatedly reminds us that such moves exclude not only women but any group at a distance from the privileged center of such perception.57 Smith's theory has surprisingly little to say about women for a book on moral sentiments written at a time when sympathy and sentiment were so closely associated with the feminine.58 When he does mention them, it is to exclude them from full participation in moral life in a way that points toward particularism as a cause. Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man. . . . Humanity consists merely in the exquisite fellow-feeling which the spectator enter56

57

58

De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, 1953), esp. pp. xiii-xix and 139-8; Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 6 7 - 8 8 . See, e.g., Patrocinio P. Schweickart, "Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading," in Gender and Reading, ed. Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth Flynn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Louise Yelin, "Women and Fiction Revisited: Feminist Criticism of the English Novel," Feminist Studies 12 (1986): 169-85. Marshall, Figure of Theater, p. 184.

44

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

tains with the sentiments of the persons principally concerned. . . . The most humane actions require no self-denial, no self-command, no great exertion of the sense of propriety. They consist only of doing what this exquisite sympathy would of its own accord prompt us to do. (Pp. 190-1)

Generosity, by contrast, is mediated by the impartial spectator, involves self-command, and is a higher virtue. Although spontaneous sympathy for another individual is an originating principle in Smith's theory, it must ultimately be displaced by intellectually mediated, de-particularized moral judgments. Women do not make good impartial spectators because femininity is aligned with all that must be superseded on the way to higher morality. They have less access than men to the purified, universalized model of subjectivity that is Smith's spectator because of the limiting specificity of their gender. Again, as with the subject of aesthetics, we recognize the conceptual dissonance between the position of the impartial spectator - the subject of ethical practice as constructed by Smith's Theory - and contemporary constructions of feminine gender. THE AESTHETIC SUBJECT AND THE LOCKEAN CITIZEN

The newly emerging aesthetic sphere was defined by excluding the practical, and a fortiori the political. Nonetheless, there are significant affinities between the manner of constructing the aesthetic subject that I have proposed and the manner in which one of the period's most influential political theorists constructs the political subject. I am referring, of course, to Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690). Though the Second Treatise is often presented by historians as an ideological justification for the Glorious Revolution, H. T Dickinson has argued that the prevalence of conservative Whig ideology through the first decades of the eighteenth century precluded wholesale adoption of many of Locke's tenets. His currency within practical political debate actually increased later in the century, in the period with which we have been concerned, as the terms of the debate shifted in a more liberal direction.59 In any case, Locke certainly stands as an enduring point of reference in the ongoing 59

H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977], pp. 71, 240.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

45

ideological process of negotiating descriptions of commercial British society. The Second Treatise exemplifies the tensions and contradictions at the heart of liberal political theory. On the one hand, the protection of property, each human being's specific, concrete stake in the material world, is the motive for entering civil society. This is Locke's most significant departure from previous theorists. On the other hand, the innovation in Locke's thought that seemed most radical to his contemporaries was the framework of abstract equality - reciprocal power and jurisdiction in the state of nature, and equality under the law in civil society - that appears to subsume the inequality of property. My discussion of the aesthetic subject and of Smith's impartial spectator has revealed a tension between the concrete and the abstract, between, as it were, content and form. In each case, the latter term is privileged over the former. However, the varieties of concrete "content" that seem to be excluded or abstracted out of each subject position actually persist, I have suggested, as an implicit, determining ground. Let us now trace the tension between concrete and abstract in the coming-to-be of the Lockean citizen. 60 Human beings in the state of nature went from the original, communal dominion that God granted them over the earth to individual, exclusive property ownership. This was accomplished by mixing labor - each person's only original property - with the fruits of the earth, or the earth itself, and thus appropriating them or it. Before the invention of money, which occurred already in the state of nature, a man could only appropriate the amount of land he could cultivate himself or the fruits he and his family could consume before they spoiled. But with a money economy and the option of buying others' labor, appropriation was unlimited. This crucially changed the relations between human beings. Locke declares men to be naturally in a "State . . . of Equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having 60

My discussion of Locke is greatly indebted to C. B. Macpherson's controversial analysis in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962]. For opposing views see John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); and James Tully, A Discourse on Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), as well as Locke Newsletter 13 (1982).

46

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

more than another/' 61 But when property and money enter the state of nature, embodying natural rights in a material form and giving tangible substance to an individual's capacities and efforts, people are brought into relationships that are not "reciprocal" but are, rather, as Peter Laslett has observed, conditioned by "their differing contact, almost physical contact, with the world of material things . . . their property as thus defined" (p. 115). The key attribute of Lockean property is that it is alienable, distinguishable from ourselves. We can sell it or buy it; it can become the subject of negotiation between us. It transports us, Laslett remarks, into a different world: [I]n some symbolic way, it is through the theory of property that men can proceed from the abstract world of liberty and equality based on their relationship with God and natural law, to the concrete world of political liberty guaranteed by political arrangements. (P. 117, emphasis added)

Locke's account of the transition from the abstract to the concrete world takes its shape from the concrete circumstances of seventeenth-century English society. The contradictions of his culture generate ambivalence and contradiction at the heart of his theory. These contradictions enter most forcefully through the assumption that a man's labor is both his own and alienable - he can sell it or buy others'. Given this, and given differential industriousness or luck, the state of nature must end in irreversible inequality. Those who get there first will accumulate land and money; the rest, because of the limited total amount of land, will be excluded from landownership and reduced to selling the only property they have left, their labor. At this point - still before the hypothetical social compact that founds civil society - equal natural rights have already been transformed into differential natural rights. As C. B. Macpherson explains, Once the land is all taken up, the fundamental right not to be subject to the jurisdiction of another is so unequal as between owners and non-owners that it is different in kind, not in degree: those without property are, Locke 61

John Locke, "Second Treatise/' in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: NAL-Mentor, 1963), §4. Further references to this edition will be by section number in the text, or by page number when quoting Laslett's introduction.

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

47

recognizes, dependent for their very livelihood on those with property, and are unable to alter their own circumstances. The initial equality of natural rights, which consisted in no man having jurisdiction over another, cannot last after the differentiation of property. To put it another way, a man without property in things loses that full proprietorship of his own person which was the basis of his equal natural rights. 62

But even more than that, from a beginning state in which everyone was a rational being - "Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties'7 (§4) - a state has been reached in which rationality itself is also, necessarily, differential. The only ones fully capable of exercising it are those who have accumulated property to the exclusion of the rest. Locke's own comments on the day-laborer in civil society in Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money (1691) show him aware that such people have little opportunity to use or develop their rational faculties. They need all their energy just to stay alive, living "from hand to mouth/' and cannot "raise their thoughts above that/' 6 3 Besides non-property-owning males, the other large group of concrete individuals excluded from Locke's social contract is women. Linking the two exclusions is the concept of property - first of all, property in one's own person - as a prerequisite for citizenship. Women in Locke's society were not understood as owning themselves in either a reproductive or a productive sense; their fathers, husbands, or masters held disposal over them. Hence they were unqualified to enter into political relations as possessive individuals. Locke's concern to disentangle the politics of the state from the patriarchal model of the household left household members firmly under the authority of a male head, while excluding everyone but him from taking part in a public political realm. The Second Treatise, in separating the rights of citizens from the obligations of families, announced a paradigm shift from a political world populated by men and women involved in a web of familial and sexual interconnections to an allmale world based solely on contractual obligation. . . . In modeling govern62

Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, p. 231.

63

Quoted in ibid., p. 230.

48

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

ment as a contractual business rather than as a family relationship, Locke relocated politics outside the household in exclusively male space.64

Interpreting the advent of liberal political theory as a sign of historical progress thus becomes an especially suspect Whiggism from the point of view of British women, whose political exclusion was in an important sense sealed, rather than remedied, at this juncture. Locke has taken assumptions he held, as a member of the privileged classes of late seventeenth-century England, about the actual difference between individuals in different social groups and read these assumptions back into his state of nature in a generalized form. By basing the right to property on natural law but then removing natural-law limitations from it, he arrived at a "state of nature" that accurately reflected the ambiguities of British commercial society at the outset of the century of expansion between the Glorious Revolution and the French wars. 65 The dangerously democratic tendencies that attracted the most attention in Locke's contemporary reception were solidly underpinned by concrete inequalities. 66 Although equal natural rights supposedly carried over from the state of nature into civil society, which supposedly gave concrete embodiment and protection to their abstractions, the very way in which those rights were conceived guaranteed that equality would not be preserved. Abstract and concrete worlds persist in uneasy tension as the Lockean subject-citizen is constructed through a process of exclusion that is implicit, but unacknowledged, within the terms of the Second Treatise. Systematic inequality is systematically obscured at the formative moment of the modern British state. 67 64

65

66 67

Ruth Perry, "Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism," Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (Sept. 1990): 449-50. The tensions reflected in Locke's state of nature continue through his discussion of civil society. An ambiguity in his definition of property leads to uncertainty as to who are parties to the social compact. Does property consist of "Lives, Liberties and Estates" (§123), or is it, as Locke elsewhere leads us to believe, only goods and land (e.g., §§138-40, 193)? By taking the concept of property both ways at once, Locke arrived at a portrait of civil society which is, theoretically speaking, confused but accurately reflects the structure of the society in which he lived. All persons are subject to society's laws, because of their interest in preserving their lives and liberties, but only property owners are full members of civil society, because of their added interest in preserving their estates, and because only they have the wherewithal to exercise the reason needed for full participation. For contemporary reception see Dickinson, Liberty and Property, p. 71. Macpherson comments, "It is not . . . that Locke deliberately twisted a theory of equal natural rights into a justification of a class state. On the contrary, his natural

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

49

Both aspects of Locke's narrative, both sides of its tension, find their counterparts in the discourses of aesthetics and in Smith's ethics. A common impulse toward uniformity or homogeneity among subjects seems to inform the various mechanisms we have surveyed for excluding the particular or the concrete from privileged representations and practices. Reynolds's symbolically loaded exclusion of details from painting corresponds in this respect to Shaftesbury's and others' exclusion of vested interest from aesthetic perception and judgment, to Smith's barring particular circumstances from moral judgment, and to Locke's emphasis on the abstract equality of natural rights. But Locke is especially instructive on the necessary counterpart to this impulse: the foundation of inequality on which it rests, actively present even though subsumed within a framework of equality. Social stratification is the informing principle of Locke's model of society, as it informs Reynolds's theory of painting and the discourse of disinterested aesthetic perception. Adam Smith, too, implicitly assumes material inequality as a foundation for his ethics, even as he explicitly denies that social status plays a role in moral judgment. The central tension between concrete and abstract, "content" and "form," structures each of these otherwise diverse approaches to producing the subject-citizen. He is constructed through processes of exclusion, systematically denying the social differences, or varieties of particularity, on which his privileged identity depends. We can now recognize the discourse of aesthetics as a paradigmatic part of a broader social phenomenon - the long process I have half-jokingly called "the making of the British ruling class." Gender is prominent among the differences suppressed during these processes of subject formation. Reynolds, Shaftesbury, Smith, and Locke, each in his more or less obtrusive manner, constructs the feminine as mutually exclusive with the position of the subject. As substrate to masculine agency or as possession to a male owner, the feminine is associated with the concrete, the material, the particular - with all that is conceived as antithetical to subjecthood. The aesthetic discourse of the picturesque discloses its gendered charrights assumptions, honestly held, were such as to make it possible, indeed almost to guarantee, that his theory would justify a class state without any sleight of hand. . . . [T]he source of the contradictions in his theory is his attempt to state in universal (non-class) terms, rights and obligations which necessarily had a class content" [Possessive Individualism, pp. 250-1).

5O

ELIZABETH A. BOHLS

acter in Radcliffe's Journey when a woman positions herself as picturesque tourist, only to produce a text rent with telling incongruities. Interconnections emerge among gender and the other categories making up the complicated network of exclusions I have collectively labeled ''the particular"; Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments displays most compellingly the articulation of femininity with social hierarchy and the materiality of the body Gender becomes a point of intersection or magnification for the various dimensions of difference. I have once or twice mentioned the positive, indeed Utopian, potential contained in the erasure of distinctions, or denial of the particular. In closing, let us briefly consider this side of the dialectic from the point of view of gender, specifically of early feminism. The Enlightenment vision of an expanded political community and an open debate, or "public sphere/' with the potential to contest autocratic rule, depends on minimizing differences between subjectcitizens. In the coffeehouses of early eighteenth-century London, the suspension of status (temporary, of course, and never extending below the "middling sort" in the social hierarchy) made possible an unprecedented freedom of intellectual exchange.68 The eighteenthcentury feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), takes up an Enlightenment position in this sense. She imagines female subjects breaking out of an unworthy tutelage in which women are mired in particularity, "slaves to their bodies"69 and to their oppressive social relations with men, and thus unable to take part in the exchange of abstract or general ideas which constitutes the public sphere. Like Reynolds and Smith, Wollstonecraft aligns femininity with the body and with a limiting particularism. 70 Unlike those writers, she makes clear that such an 68

69

70

Recent accounts of the public sphere appear in Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Eagleton, The Function of Criticism; and Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, pp. 80-84. See also Jiirgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Oeffentlichkeit (Neuwied, 1962). Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 44. Wollstonecraft's contemporary Hannah More, part of the antifeminist backlash of the late 1790s, employs similar terms: "Both in composition and action they [women] excel in details; but they do not so much generalize their ideas as men, nor do their minds seize a great subject with so large a grasp" [Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education [London, 1799], vol. 2, p. 25].

Disinterestedness and denial of the particular

51

alignment is culturally imposed and therefore contingent. Women can and should aspire to the de-particularized subjecthood that privileged men already enjoy, and to membership along with men in the public arena of political discourse. At Wollstonecraft's historical moment, the thought of individuals laying aside what divides them to pursue political community was a liberating vision with a very powerful appeal; it retains some of that charisma even today. But the body of this essay has, I hope, suggested an equally powerful oppressive potential in versions of the subject or the community grounded in the denial of difference. A discourse, or a social formation, that takes this route to promoting social homogeneity and political unity is likely to exclude whole groups of concrete individuals. A corollary concerns the limitation of Wollstonecraft's type of feminism: educating individual women to behave in certain ways like privileged men falls short of changing the cultural inscription of the feminine. Giving them legal ownership of themselves (an issue that divides the Supreme Court even today) will not suffice to make women into Lockean individuals. The question we are left with, then, runs something like this: Is it possible to reconceive identity as not predicated on exclusion?71 Can we imagine social selves in a manner that would encompass diversity, rather than needing to suppress it, while still preserving the possibility of individual and collective action? 71

See Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Biddy Martin, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" in Teresa de Lauretis, Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), pp. 191-212.

JEFFREY BARNOUW

2

The beginnings of "aesthetics" and the Leibnizian conception of sensation

The term "aesthetics" was coined by A. G. Baumgarten in 1735 t o designate a projected discipline which was to do for sensate, or "confused," knowledge what logic did for rational, or demonstrative, knowledge. When he followed through with the first volume of his Aesthetic in 1750, he in effect consolidated a theory which Leibniz had adumbrated in various dispersed passages. This theory was based in a view of sensation as a "confused" mode of representation or knowledge in the sense that its apparently immediate qualities were actually constituted by the summation of impressions which, taken singly, would be beneath the threshold of awareness. Leibniz thereby found a means of bringing out the virtues of ways of knowing grounded in confused ideas or representations, as opposed to the clear and distinct representations that were fundamental to the Cartesian conception of necessary knowledge. Along with other advantages of such "con-fusion" Leibniz revealed the role played by subliminal or marginal awareness (registered in consciousness at most as feeling) in knowledge and action generally. Understanding these insights will be the task of the final section of this essay. Baumgarten's new discipline of aesthetics also continued tendencies of seventeenth-century thought in which, under headings such as gusto, ingenio, and agudeza, or finesse, delicatesse, and je ne sais quoi, subtle sensitive modes of perception and judgment were delineated that had been ignored or excluded by the new insistence on reasoning grounded in clear and distinct ideas, which was common to the poetics of classicism and the methodology of rationalism. The spirit of the "New Science" - what Pascal called "the intelligence of geometry" - called forth this countermovement to complement it, to compensate for its restrictive focus, sometimes even within the

T h e Leibnizian conception of sensation

53

work of a proponent of that spirit, a Boileau or Pascal.1 Indeed, far from being a reaction against a form of scientism, these protoaesthetic tendencies often extended the attitude of scientific inquiry into "confused" areas of experience. And even where it belonged more to belles-lettres, this movement seems to have exerted a significant, neglected influence on Leibniz's philosophical thinking, even before the disparate strands were overtly brought together by Baumgarten. In retrospect these tendencies can be recognized as aesthetic in that they point toward an analysis of the kinds of experience that have come to be considered aesthetic, though it is significant that enjoyment of the beauty of nature or of art was not a primary concern in this strain of thought. The main focus was experience and judgment of a sort which eluded formulation not only in rules but in language altogether and which dealt above all with the nuances and thus the substance - of social interaction. In this respect the writings of Gracian, Mere, Bouhours, and others studied in the first half of this essay continue a vein of the Italian Renaissance represented, above all, by Castiglione's Courtier. The influence of the aesthetic dimension of Leibnizian thinking diffused again after its largely unsuccessful consolidation as a philosophical discipline by Baumgarten, nonetheless attained a few significant high points associated with the term "aesthetic," notably the conception of aesthetic education developed by Friedrich Schiller (whose fundamental approach is far more Leibnizian than Kantian) and, drawing on Schiller, Charles S. Peirce's late reconstruction of aesthetics as the foundational normative science (underlying the other two, ethics and logic), concerned essentially with analyzing and refining habits of feeling.2 The genesis of this intermittent tradition of aesthetics is our focus here. 1

2

See the introductory section on sentiment in the works of Pascal and the chevalier de Mere in Jeffrey Barnouw, "Feeling in Enlightenment Aesthetics/' Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1988), vol. 18, pp. 323-42, which may be considered a premature sequel to the present essay. See Jeffrey Barnouw, "'Aesthetic' for Schiller and Peirce: A Neglected Origin of Pragmatism," Journal of the History of Ideas 49, no. 4 (Oct. 1988), 607-32, repr. in Essays on the History of Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy, Library of the History of Ideas 5 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1992), 377-402; idem, "Aesthetics as Normative Science in Peirce: The Deliberate Formation of Habits of Feeling," paper given at the Charles Sanders Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress in

54

JEFFREY BARNOUW GUSTO, INGENIO, AND AGUDEZA IN GRAClAN

The concept of gusto, which had come to mean taste in matters of artistic judgment in the Italian Renaissance,3 acquired a new sense and prominence through the writings of the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracian in the 1640s, where gusto was often closer in meaning to "tact" than "taste" (i.e., an intuitive capacity to understand a situation and act spontaneously, discreetly, and appropriately). As such, gusto is the key to an art of worldly wisdom or prudence.4 Gusto for Gracian is a discriminative capacity (like discretion) reaffirming the common root meaning of Latin gustare and German kosten, "to try

3

4

Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 1989, which was developed into "The Place of Peirce's 'Esthetics' in His Thought and in the Tradition of Aesthetics," in Peirce and Value Theory: On Peiician Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Herman Parret, Semiotic Crossroads 6 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1993). Robert Klein, "Judgment and Taste in Cinquecento Art Theory," in Form and Meaning: Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, tr. Madeline Jay and Leon Wieseltier (New York: Viking, 1979), pp. 161-9, undertakes to trace "the transformation of guidizio into gusto" or "stages of contact, and of semantic contamination, through which gusto gradually replaced guidizio." Another term he notes is discretio, which nearly took the place eventually claimed by gusto. What he concludes from this is, however, not clear. More relevant to our topic is David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Summers focuses, to begin with, on relations which "are aesthetic in that they are determined by sense, by the judgment of sense" (p. 8). He recognizes that "a long tradition of speculation concerning prerational sensate judgment" continued through the Renaissance to contribute "substantially to modern aesthetics when it was finally defined as such by Baumgarten" (p. 22), and he discusses Leibniz and Baumgarten briefly with regard to "confused" "ideas" (pp. 182-97]. El ordculo manual y arte de prudencia (1647), translated many times into English, including The Art of Worldly Wisdom, tr. Joseph Jacobs (New York: Ungar, i960), culled aphorisms from his earlier works, El heroe (1637) and El discreto (1646). See Karl Borinski, Baltasar Gracian und die Hoflitteratur in Deutschland (Halle: Niemeyer, 1894), pp. 39-52, on Gracian's idea of gusto. In attributing such influence to Gracian, he is following writers on taste in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, who cite Gracian as originator. While he too acknowledges this, Friedrich Schummer remarks that scholars of that age were aware that classical authors such as Petronius, Cicero, and Quintillian had used the terms gustus, gustare and sapor, sapere (cf. English savor, savvy, sapient) in metaphorical extension to mean assessment and appreciation. He argues that Gracian's usage was "innovative" insofar as it obscured this classical aesthetic sense and that the later seventeenth-century revival of taste as an aesthetic concept owed nothing to Gracian and indeed had to overcome his influence, while reviving the extended meaning of the classical Latin terms. He bases this argument on the claim that Gracian's

T h e Leibnizian c o n c e p t i o n of sensation

55

or test."5 The background of the word "taste" (from Middle English tasten, "to touch, test, taste"; and Old French taster, "to feel, try, taste"; with a first meaning: "to become acquainted with by experience" or "to try or test by or as by the touch") shows a similar range and suggests an etymological link to the Latin root of "tact" [tangere, "to touch"; 1: "sensitive mental or aesthetic perception").6 An experimental as well as experiential aspect is common to these terms, an element of curiosity as in the German tasten. Gusto is a subtle mode of judgment that does not make use of fixed general concepts and is attuned to the individual and the unique. Gracian treats gusto as roughly equivalent to genio and juicio (judgment), all of these terms designating a complement of ingenio. This distinction does not imply an opposition, as Pascal's between esprit de geometrie and esprit de finesse does, so much as the interdependence of two principal components of understanding (entendimiento): the art of prudence, where judgment and genio are crucial, and the art of acuity (agudeza) centered in ingenio.7 Gracian's compendium of mannerist style [conceptismo), Arte de ingenio (1642), expanded as Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648), has been treated almost exclusively as concerned with literary conceits, but it has to do as well with promptitude and penetration in speech and action.8 What is essential is being ready for any opportunity

5

6

7

8

concept of taste was not an aesthetic category. But this ignores the dramatic flux of terms for mental functions in this period and the wide range of reference of concepts originating in the "theory" of conduct. Friedrich Schummer, "Die Entwicklung des Geschmacksbegriffs in der Philosophic des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts," Archiv fur Beghffsgeschichte 1 (1955): 120-41. Hellmut Jansen, Die Grundbeghffe des Baltasar Gracian (Geneva: Droz, 1958], p. 66} and Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1957), p. 396: "erproben, priifend beschauen, versuchen," and then "aussuchen/wahlen." Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam, 1973), pp. 1193 and 1186. Jansen, Die Grundbeghffe, pp. 27-37, 44. Jansen sees genio as the basis or predisposition, ingenio as what one can make of it, but he also shows that both are natural gifts and perfectible by art. In practice the difference seems to be that between settled and spontaneous behavior. Ibid., pp. 9, 41. See also Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 294-301. Acumen was linked to prudentia in Cicero (p. 294), but Gracian supplemented classical rhetoric with a new discipline regarding "the faculty of acuteness" (p. 298). The French translation of Agudeza y arte de ingenio by Michele Gendreau-Massaloux and Pierre Laurens, La pointe ou l'art du genie (Paris: UNESCO, 1983), renders aqudeza as la pointe,

56

JEFFREY BARNOUW

or occasion. Circumstances provide matter and motive energy to ingenio. "Contingencies sollicit promptitude/' 9 Conversely, the poetic heights of subtlety and vivacity require special circumstances "a rare contingency" - to justify and sustain them, without which agudezas would be (as he repeatedly says) mere rhetorical devices.10 Gusto too applies to aesthetic as well as practical matters. Its range is as broad as life, and in every area its role has a cognitive aspect.11 Gracian writes of "objective subtleties/' and acuteness is also not simply a quality of the knowing subject. "Matter is the foundation of discourse,- it gives rise to subtlety. The objective agudezas are contained within the objects themselves." The concepto is not merely a verbal conceit, but is also not a rational concept. "The wise man forms conceptos of all things,- he digs, with differentiation [distincion], where he finds a solid basis and substance, and thinks there might be more to it than he thinks." 12 As a power of ingenio, agudeza shows itself in the recognition of correspondences between things, of the sort that lead to the formation not of concepts but of metaphors. The similarities and differences in question do not stand out as distinguishing marks, yet

9 10

11

12

though its introduction opens by remarking that it means, not witticism, " 'pointe d'esprit', ni meme Pesprit de pointe, que la pointe de Pesprit, ce qu'il y a en lui de plus acere, et penetrant: angle aigu de Pintelligence" (p. 17). Vico too plays this angle, identifying ingenium as acute and relating it to a non-Cartesian physics of "points" [The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, tr. Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin [Ithaca: Great Seal Books, 1963], pp. 148-52, and cf. 122-3; De nostri tempohs studiorum ratione, ch. 4), the acute played off against Cartesian linearity. The relation of Vico to Gracian as well as to Tesauro and Pellegrini might be worth investigating. Gracian, Agudeza, chs. 7, 38, 45; La pointe, pp. 30, 83, 269, 300-1. See La pointe, pp. 107, 111-2, 121-2, 158, 219, 221, 227. He sometimes refers to such occasions or the verbal responses to them as sublime. His "mannerist" or "conceptist" poetics is usually, and understandably, related to English theories of metaphysical wit, but Agudeza, with its emphasis on the poetic value of religious ideas and the feelings they engender, also anticipates the poetics of John Dennis. See Jeffrey Barnouw, "The Morality of the Sublime: To John Dennis," Comparative Literature 35 (1983): 21-42. Emilio Hidalgo-Serna, Das ingeniose Denken bei Baltasar Gracian (Munich: Fink, 1985), establishes the connection of his idea of gusto to ingenio, agudeza, and his much misunderstood conceptismo, and refutes the claim of Borinski, Schummer, and Hans-Georg Gadamer [Wahrheit und Methode [Tubingen: Mohr, i960], pp. 31-6) that gusto had an exclusively moral range of reference for Gracian. Gracian, Agudeza, chs. 2 and 62; La pointe, pp. 47 and 392; Ordculo, §35. See Hidalgo-Serna, Das ingeniose Denken, pp. 98, 131, 91-2; cf. pp. 113-48, on the cognitive side of conceptismo in Agudeza.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

57

they can be sensed by the discerning mind. There is a similar conception of "wit" [ingenium), contemporary with Gracian, in Hobbes. In wit, Hobbes writes, quick ranging of mind . . . is joined with curiosity of comparing the things which come into the mind, one with another: in which comparison, a man delighteth himself either with finding unexpected similitude of things, otherwise much unlike, in which men place the excellency of fancy, . . . or else in discerning suddenly dissimilitude in things that otherwise appear the same . . . [which] is commonly termed by the name of judgment: for, to judge is nothing else, but to distinguish or discern: and both fancy and judgment are commonly comprehended under the name of wit, which seemeth to be a tenuity and agility of spirits.13 Judgment is a "sudden" discerning, construed in analogy to fancy (or what will later be "wit" in a narrow sense) rather than in contrast to it. Moreover, wit is significantly related to curiosity in Hobbes, who like Gracian sees curiosity as the distinguishing trait of humanity.14 For Gracian the cognitive value of the concepto, of agudeza, and of the "art of ingenio" is also closely linked to the role of curiosity and novelty, wonder, and surprise in the gaining of knowledge. In the dedication of El heroe curiosity is said to be the distinctive trait of man, spur of his ingenio; in El chticon it is the mother of gusto. "What was admirable yesterday is contemptible today, not because it has lost in perfection, but in appreciation, not because it has changed, but because it has not. The wise restore civility of taste by making new reflections on the old excellences, thus renewing taste along with wonder." Gusto is identified with our appetite for life.15 In another formulation the mother of gusto is not wonder but multiplicity, which means the human need for variety, since Gracian elucidates this by saying that man is distinguished from beast by the fact that this gusto leads him not to some particular sphere 13

14

15

Human Nature, ch. io, §4, in Hobbes, Body, Man, and Citizen, ed. Richard S. Peters (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 227. This work was written ca. 1640 and first published in 1650. See Jeffrey Barnouw, "La curiosite chez Hobbes," Bulletin de la Societe francaise de philosophie 82, no. 2 (Apr. 1988): 41-69; and idem, "Hobbes's Psychology of Thought: Endeavours, Purpose, and Curiosity," History of European Ideas 10, no. 5 (1989]: 519-45El chticon (1651-7), Part I, ch. 2, "The Great Theater of the World," and see ch. 3 for curiosity as the mother of gusto. Hidalgo-Serna, Das ingeniose Denken, pp. 150, 153; cf. pp. 13, 70-1, 97/ 139-40, 165.

58

JEFFREY BARNOUW

but to the whole world. In chapter 2 of El criticon, 'The Great Theater of the World/' he varies the topos, best known from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, of man's having no fixed sphere of life as the other animals do,16 linking boundless appetite to gusto, which thus comes close to the sense it has since acquired in English. The same chapter relates wonder, curiosity, and knowledge in a way recalling Aristotle (as we will see): "We lack wonder [admiration] generally because we lack novelty, and with it, attention/' An essential link between Gracian's poetics or art of acuity and his art of prudence or recommendations for social success is their common foundation in a psychology of appetite or interest that brings out the virtues of difficulty and incomplete satisfaction. In both spheres the qualities he values can be felt but not defined, known in their effects but not their causes, and one should accordingly reveal only glimpses of what one has to offer. Artistic or artful self-expression in poetry, as in society, is partly a matter of selfconcealment as well as of concealing one's art or artifice. Knowledge and enjoyment that cost something are all the more valued for that and are greatest when still mixed with curiosity or desire. These insights should guide our control of others but also the management of our own happiness.17 The importance of concealing one's art or artifice in social encounters was a recurring motif, under the heading of the newly minted sprezzatura (nonchalance), in Castiglione's Courtier, which anticipated Gracian generally in establishing the analogy between social comportment and artistic expression. In one passage at least Castiglione also saw the advantage of not completely revealing - of partly concealing — one's meaning or virtue or beauty: [I]f the words used by the writer carry with them a certain, I will not say difficulty but veiled subtlety, and so are not as familiar as those commonly used in speech, they give what is written greater authority and cause the 16

17

Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1948), pp. 224-5. Agudeza, chs. 7, 39; La pointe, pp. 79-80, 273. These related themes are insistent in the Ordculo. See §§5, 19, 58, 68, 94, 170, 189, 200, 212, 253, 277, 282, 299; The Art of Worldly Wisdom, pp. 3, 11-12, 34, 40, 55, 101-2, 114, 120, 128, 152-3, 167, 170, 179. For economic metaphors in the psychology, see Werner Krauss, Gracidns Lebenslehre (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1947), pp. 113-21.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

59

reader to be more attentive and aware, and so reflect more deeply and enjoy the skill and message of the author; and by judiciously exerting himself a little he experiences the pleasure that is to be had from accomplishing difficult tasks.18 Nonchalance, doing something difficult with apparent ease, unconcern, and even disdain (the original sense of sprezzo), is elucidated by reference to the use of imperfect harmonies in music, which keep the listener in a state of expectancy, and to Apelles's point in criticizing a painter "for finishing his work too thoroughly/' The analogy with social behavior may verge on fatuousness at times: delicate hands, "uncovered at the right time, when there is a need to use and not just to display them, leave one with a great desire to see more of them." 19 But Castiglione counsels such tactical reserve in the display of all one's talents, since disguised self-promotion is crucial to his view of court life. The similar advantage of subtlety, not to say difficulty, in the art of writing was perhaps an incidental analogy for Castiglione, but it became the dominant topic of mannerist poetics in Italy in the same period as Gracian's Agudeza. In works such as Matteo Pellegrini, Delle acutezze (1639), a n d Emanuele Tesauro, II cannocchiale aristelico (1655), it was clear that this insight was drawn from Aristotle's justification of figural language, particularly metaphor, in his Rhetoric. Pellegrini's work, as its subtitle said, was meant to illustrate the "Idea dell'arguta [acute] et ingeniosa elecutione," using the "telescope" (i.e., the Rhetoric) of "the divine Aristotle." It is worth asking in what ways Gracian was different from Castiglione and from Pellegrini and Tesauro. Gracian is distinguished from Castiglione by the degree to which he is interested in the cognitive dimension of the subtleties of social interaction. There is frequent reference in The Courtier to instinctive judgment, a fine judgment akin to grace, a discernment and discretion that cannot be given rules, but Castiglione does not seek 18

19

Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 72. Castiglione has Federico say this, but only after distinguishing writing from speaking (which requires clarity) and in answer to Count Lodovico da Canossa, who had just said that "it is more important to make one's meaning clear in writing than in speaking; because unlike someone listening, the reader is not always [sic!] present when the author is writing." Ibid., pp. 69, 87; cf. pp. 67-8.

6O

JEFFREY BARNOUW

to analyze or elucidate such capacities.20 In another passage anticipating mannerist poetics he writes: Thus good usage in speech . . . is established by men of discernment who through learning and experience have acquired sound judgement, which enables them to agree among themselves and consent to accept those words which commend themselves to them, and these they recognize by means of a certain instinctive judgement and not by any formula or rule. Do you not realize that these figures of speech which give such grace and clarity to what we say are all abuses of grammatical rules but are accepted and established by usage because (and this is the only possible reason) they are pleasing?21

The reference to instinctive judgment (the approval implicit in the pleasure) is not a focus of inquiry for Castiglione, as it will be for Gracian, but rather brings questioning to a halt. When Federico claims that "it is sometimes allowable, in the service of one's masters, to kill not just one man but ten thousand, and to do many other things which on a superficial view would appear evil although they are not/' he is asked to "teach us how to distinguish what is really good from what merely appears to be;/ and immediately begs off, "for there would be too much to say. But let everything be decided by your discretion."22 Tesauro, like Gracian a Jesuit, also focused on acuity {argutezza or acutezza) claiming that the ingenious could as well be called the acute, but he gave acuity a narrower range of application, largely restricted to literary expression, because he saw it as a mode of language use. He distinguished grammatical speech, which works with concepts proper to their objects, from rhetorical, acute, or ingenious speech, which introduces unaccustomed means of signification calling for acute or ingenious interpretation and thus adding pleasure to the process of understanding. The acuity of the underlying perceptions does not get the attention it did in Gracian. Looking for indications of the role acuity might play in social life (indications he said he could not find in the Cannocchiale or in Pellegrini's Delle acutezza), Klaus-Peter Lange discovered a promising adaptation of the grammatical/rhetorical distinction in Tesauro's Filosofia morale. Here the distinction is between serious and humorous speech [facetia], the latter being ingenious or acute speech in a social context, which Tesauro associates with urbanity and civility, 20

E.g., ibid., pp. 63-4, 112-3.

21

Ibid., p. 80.

22

Ibid., p. 131.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

61

following Aristotle's use of the term asteia in the Rhetoric (III.io.i4iob6). Illustrating wit in the process of characterizing it, he says it is beneficial for conservation (of the individual) and conversation (with others); it provides relaxation for the mind as rest does for the body; and it fosters sociability. As Lange conveys it, Tesauro's account of how this works seems to miss the point of wit. He suggests that the delight of one who produces an acute remark is expressed by a smile that has an effect on the heart of the listener, which would bypass or even short-circuit the effect of the witty insight itself. Yet this self-appreciation does serve to show that the free play of association of ideas and words is not consciously controlled by the agent, who thus can experience wonder or admiration at the results. Despite suggestions that facetia enables us to learn as well as teach, Tesauro carries over too little of Aristotle's interest in the cognitive aspects of wit and metaphor.23 Gracian, more than his Italian counterparts, pursues the acute and ingenious as traits of mind which correspond to features of the world. He gives greater prominence to learning by experience and holds that taste or tact is in need of cultivation just as ingenio is; the nurture of each is closely intertwined with that of the other. Gusto must be refined continually and developed into a second nature. Gracian's logic of subtle "ingenious" thinking and "science of good taste" 24 may thus be seen as anticipating not only Baumgarten's aesthetics but even more Schiller's idea of aesthetic education, which was meant to refine the capacity of sense or feeling (Empfindung) that underpins our convictions as well as our knowledge, informing our range of response in all facets of life.25 PASCAL AND MERE

Although the differences from a scientific or mathematical model of knowledge are left implicit, Gracian's conception of taste (tact), sub23

24

25

Klaus-Peter Lange, Theoretiker des literahschen Maniehsmus: Tesauros und Pellegrinis Lehre von der "Acutezza" oder von derMacht der Sprache (Munich: Fink, 1968), pp. 1 4 2 - 3 , 148, 152-4. Tesauro's idea of unserious speaking anticipates aspects of Schiller's understanding of play. Gracian, Elheroe, ch. 5; El discreto, ch. 5; Hidalgo-Serna, Das ingeniose Denken, pp. 156, 162, and cf. p. 170. See Jeffrey Barnouw, ' T h e Morality of the Sublime: Kant and Schiller," Studies in Romanticism 19 (1980): 497-514, esp. pp. 513-14.

62

JEFFREY BARNOUW

tlety, and acuity is similar to Pascal's roughly contemporaneous idea of l'esprit de finesse (the intelligence of subtlety), correlated with jugement and sentiment, and contrasted with l'esprit de geometrie. Some few, Pascal says, accustom themselves to judge instantaneously by sentiment ("feeling/7 but perhaps also drawing on a secondary meaning, "opinion"), instead of reasoning step by step according to principles, although in fact the esprit, or intellect, reasons in such judgment as well, "but tacitly, naturally, and without art." In effect the concept esprit has split in two. Explicating the distinction between the esprit de finesse and that of geometry, Pascal says that just as true eloquence scorns the eloquence founded self-consciously on rules, there is a morality of jugement based in feeling which scorns the morality of intellect. 26 Finesse, like its variant delicatesse, favored by writers like SaintEvremond, who associates it with penetration and discernment as well as with what is curieux and ingenieux, depends on fine or subtle discriminations (and correlations) that can be learned but not taught or systematized. 27 Uesprit de finesse may well have been personified for Pascal by his older friend the chevalier de Mere, whose style of thought is epitomized in his differentiation of two divergent aspects within the neoclassical ideal of justesse which moves it (at least partly) out of the range of rules or explanations: The first depends less on esprit and intelligence than on taste and sentiment; and if esprit does contribute to it (if I may say it in this way), it is an esprit of taste and sentiment: I have no other terms to explain more clearly this I know not what of wisdom and adroitness which always knows what is fitting. . . . The other justesse consists in the true relation which one thing should have with another.28 26

27

28

Blaise Pascal, Pensees (Paris: Gamier, 1961), pp. 73—5 (nos. 1-4 in the Brunschvicg ordering), Oeuvres completes, ed L. Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1963), p. 576 (nos. 5 1 2 - 1 3 in t h e Lafuma ordering). Pascal's focus was less political or social conduct than practical orientation i n ethics and religion. But he sounds like Gracian in no. 6, p. 76: " O n se forme Pesprit et le s e n t i m e n t par les conversations." Cf. Ordculo, §58; "Es m u y eficaz el trato, - c o m m u n i c a n s e las costumbres y los gustos; pegase el genio y el ingenio, sin sentir." And Gracian would agree with what Pascal adds: "On se gate l'esprit et le s e n t i m e n t pas les conversations. . . . II import done de tout de bien savoir choisir." Quentin M. Hope, Saint-Evremond: The Honnete Homme as Critic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 8 7 - 9 7 . Le chevalier de Mere, "De la justesse," Oeuvres completes, ed. Ch.-H. Boudhors (Paris: Fernand Roches, 1930), I, p. 96.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

63

As in Pascal the point is not to develop a simple dichotomy opposing feeling to intelligence but rather to suggest that there is also a kind of intelligence in which feeling plays a crucial role and that where feeling assumes such a role, a kind of intelligence is at work. The phrase "this I know not what of wisdom and adroitness" is a characteristic locution for Mere. "I know not what" recurs throughout his writings but significantly never becomes focal for him. Its use expresses his tacit concern not to reduce things to the cut and dried. In the first of the Conversations with the marechal de Clerambault (his first work, published in 1668-9, when he was over sixty) there are no less than six places where he uses the expression. Ladies are said to want to preserve "I know not what of modesty, which gives rise to respect." There is "I know not what of the free and easy that has better effect" in conversation than insistent witticisms. "When one speaks, there comes from the esprit and sentiment I know not what of the naive which clings to our words" but which cannot be carried over in speaking a foreign language.29 In these examples the quality of not quite knowing seems in harmony with the quality not quite known. This does not mean it is always a quality Mere approves of. False gallantry shows itself, the chevalier says, in "I know not what of brilliance, which can surprise" in an unwanted way, though he concedes that an honnete homme who lacks gallantry sometimes cannot find a graceful way of insinuating what he has to say into the conversation, even though it is full of bon sens. The marechal answers that women do not want good sense in such a setting but rather "that I know not what of piquancy," which teases without embarrassing. Finally, the chevalier counters that brilliance can soon become tiresome, and the more intelligent ladies much prefer "I know not what further reserve [de plus retenu]."30 The expression "je ne sais quoi" was hackneyed before Mere took it up. Erich Kohler has surveyed its vicissitudes, alluding to twin sources in an urbane nescio quid of Cicero and the nescio quid of 29 30

Ibid., pp. 8, 9, 11. Ibid., pp. 18, 20, 21. See also p. 55: moral education is a matter of developing a delicate goust for agreements so that a child can judge "by I know not what feeling that is quicker and often more accurate than reflection." (All translations from the Oeuvres completes are my own.) Other instances in the Conversations are pp. 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 40, 46, 73, 77, 82, 85, 8 7 - 8 , and 89.

64

JEFFREY BARNOUW

mystical ineffability going back to Augustine, and he finds that the je ne sais quoi of preciosite did not survive satire like Boileau's Les heroes de romans (1664) or criticism like that of Pabbe d'Ailly: 'Words such as 'sympathy/ 'I know not what/ and 'occult qualities7 do not mean anything; . . . men invented them in order to say something when they lacked reasons and did not know what to say/'31 The influence of scruples carried over from scientific debate is apparent in the association with "occult qualities." A poem describing l'honnete maitresse attributed her appeal not only to an I know not what that was hardly expressible but also to "hidden and internal perfections/' "occult properties . . . which are only recognizable by the effects they produce/' 32 But with the ascendancy of Newton, however, a conception of the new science came to predominate that restored a good conscience to such ways of knowing. As we will soon see, the je ne sais quoi also became a topic of inquiry in its own right. 33 It is worth pursuing what may seem a trivial expression in Mere because the je ne sais quoi will be of focal interest in Bouhours and subtly important in Leibniz. Mere invokes it whenever he wants to suggest a gap between what can be felt and what can be formulated in words. But this is far from mystical ineffability, since for him the mark of a noble and perfect manner of expression [de s'expliquer) is "to let certain things be understood without saying them." "One's meaning extends further than one's words."34 Similarly the best painters "give exercise to the imagination and leave more to be inferred of a thing than they show of it." 35 Images, like words, can convey more than they make explicit. Mere found a similar quality 31

32 33

34

35

Erich Kohler "Je ne sais quoi: Ein Kapitel aus der Begriffsgeschichte des Unbegreiflichen," Romanistisches fahrbuch 6 (1953-4): 21-59, e s P- PP- 3O-3 1 - Particularly w i t h regard to Mere Kohler repeatedly hypostatizes the je ne sais quoi as an unknowable Ding an sich, different in each case. Couvray, L'honnete maitresse of 1654, quoted by Kohler, "Je ne sais quoi," p. 26. There had been an address by Gombauld devoted to the je ne sais quoi before the fledgling French Academy in 1635 which m u s t have reflected the attitudes of the Hotel de Rambouillet and been close in spirit to Mere. Mere, Oeuvres completes, I, p. 62. Samuel Sorbiere praised Mere in just such terms as "un esprit delicat, qui touche finement les choses, et les laisse presque toutes a deviner" (quoted in the notes, I, 159). Ibid., p. 63. Cf. Ill, p. 83: "In those paintings of Apelles which were only sketched there was an I know not w h a t which charmed but was not to be found once they were finished."

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

65

in "what they call fagonnei"; "Les fagons should tend only to signify delicately and gracefully what must only be insinuated."36 Analogously the writer or artist should not deliberately seek to create such effects but should concentrate on the object, on "thinking well/' since "good discernment for things" entails "the delicacy of feeling which makes for delicacy of language."37 The same hidden causes operate in the expression as in the understanding of meaning, and something analogous takes place in aesthetic perception. The judgments and pleasures of taste are matters of '''agiement," a correspondence between what pleases and the "natural feelings" of the individual it is pleasing to, as Pascal too had argued. Agiement is an agreement between subject and object at a subliminal level underlying overt perception, "a proportion which charms without one perceiving where it comes from."38 Mere wrote a short work called "Les agrements" in which he referred to them as "I know not what that can be felt but not explained." They are themselves difficult to perceive, "but the almost imperceptible agiements do not fail to produce a great effect, and it is they that touch the most."39 "The ancients represented the Graces as delicate in order to suggest that what pleases consists in almost imperceptible things, as . . . in I know not what that easily escapes and which one can no longer find as soon as one searches for it."40 This elusive quality characterizes many facets of the social aesthetic of the period, and the je ne sais quoi is repeatedly associated with grace, not only in the sense made popular by Castiglione's Couitiei but in the theological sense as well. This is a topic for a separate paper. One last variation on the theme may round out this proto-aesthetic interest in barely perceptible and therefore powerful qualities, which tended increasingly to become an interest in the qualities of perception itself. Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, the friend and mentor of Mere, used 36

37 38

39 40

Ibid., II, p. 13. Mere insists that "what one tries to understand by fagons is only too real and effective." He uses the neologism "nuances" similarly (ibid., I, p. 74, cf. p. 162; II, pp. 19 and 104, "je ne sc.ay quelles nuances. . . ."). Ibid., I, p. 73Ibid., pp. 73, 72. Cf. Pascal, Pensees, pp. 8 0 - 1 , nos. 3 2 - 3 , Brunschvicg ordering (nos. 585-6, Lafuma ordering). Mere, Oeuvres completes, II, pp. 12, 19. Ibid., pp. 14-15.

66

JEFFREY

BARNOUW

much the same terms in 1644 to characterize the quality for which he coined the term "urbanity," "a scarcely perceptible impression which can be recognized only by chance, . . . it can be felt but not seen and inspires a secret genie which one loses by seeking, or taken in a broader sense, it is the science of conversation," and finally "an adroitness [adresse] at touching l'esprit by I know not what piquancy, the sting \piqure] of which is agreeable to him who receives it because it tickles but does not injure and leaves a painless spur" which awakens 1'esprit to action.41 Many of his contemporaries, including Balzac, testified to the fascination exercised by Mere in his letters and conversation,42 but now he often seems only fatuous when he holds forth on the fine points of being an honnete homme. His relation to Pascal shows up the limitations of his merely mondaine conception of finesse and his blindness to a significant scientific source of I know not what. Both men associated the esprit de finesse with the social-aesthetic orientation of the honnete homme, characterized by the absence of any narrowness reflecting professional specialization.43 But Mere claimed Pascal had only an esprit de geometrie until a trip threw him together with Mere, Du Vair, and other worldly men who opened the world of taste and feeling to him, giving him "un tout autre esprit." In effect Mere presents Pascal's experience as a quasi-religious conversion to worldliness ("dazzled by such vivid light") leading him to abjure mathematics. 44 41

42

43

44

Quoted from Balzac's second Discours in E. B. O. Borgerhoff, The Freedom of French Classicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 10-1. Cf. Les oeuvres de Monsieur le Chevalier de Mere (Amsterdam: Mortier, 1692], II, pp. 1 6 5 - 6 : "J'espere, Madame, qu'enfin vous donnerez cours a ce nouveau m o t d'urbanite que Balzac avec sa grande eloquence n e pu mettre en usage/' He recalls that h e and she have discussed it at length and affirms that it "consiste en je n e scay quoy de civil &. de poli, je n e scay quoy de railleur & de flateur tout ensemble." Gerhard Hess begins his insightful essay "Wege des H u m a n i s m u s i m Frankreich des 17. Jahrhunderts, II. Mere," Romanische Forschungen 53 (1939): 262-99, with a 1646 letter from Balzac to Mere, "Je reconnois u n e puissance secrete qui agit sur moy, et il est tres-vray que je n e vous ay jamais veu, ny n'ay jamais songe a vous, qu je n'aye senti je n e scay quoy qui m ' a chatouille le coeur." Mere, Oeuvres completes, I, p. 11: "un honneste h o m m e n'a point de mestier." Pascal, Pensees, p. 81, no. 35, Brunschvicg ordering (no. 647, Lafuma ordering], on l'honnete homme; cf. p. 86, no. 68 (no. 778). Mere, "De l'esprit," Oeuvres completes, II, pp. 8 6 - 8 : "C'estoit u n grand Mathematicien, qui n e scavoit que cela . . . qui n'avoit ny goust, ny sentiment." "Depuis ce voyage, il n e songea plus aux Mathematiques qui l'avoient toujours occupe, et ce fut la c o m m e son abjuration."

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

67

Mere's account (which has generally been taken to refer to Pascal but is highly stylized, not to say "fictionalized") emphasizes that this other esprit is a matter of knowledge. In context in his "De l'esprit" it serves to illustrate Mere's idea that learning is based in pleasure. Pascal's illumination showed that insight can be propagated instantaneously.45 As pleasure makes us attentive and receptive, learning proceeds exponentially when the matter gives us pleasure. "If study is boring, it is not the sort that leads to esprit." "Only esprit can give rise to esprit." All men have a natural desire to know, particularly to know causes, and the good teacher gives his pupil "the reason for the least of things. Because there is always a natural cause, even if complicated, which makes one way better than another/' 46 It was a fascination with such finesse that allegedly rescued Pascal from mathematics. It was Mere who introduced Pascal to the "doctrine of chances" and the rule of distributions [regie des partis), two problems emerging from his gambling which led to the development of mathematical probability theory, and he had definite pretensions to scientific understanding and even achievement.47 His letter to Pascal (published after Pascal's death, probably in altered form) presented a 45

46

47

There is a paragraph in the biography of Pascal by his sister which alludes to this episode or epoch in his life. "Le voila done dans le monde: il se trouva plusieurs fois a la Cour, ou des personnages qui etaient consommees remarquerent qu'il en prit d'abord l'air et les manieres avec autant d'agrement que s'il y eut ete nourri toute sa vie. II est vrai que, quand il parlait du monde il en developpait si bien tous les ressorts qu'il etait tres capable de les remuer et de se porter a toutes les choses qu'il fallait faire pour s'y accommoder, autant qu'il le trouverait raisonnable" (Pascal, Oeuvres completes, ed. L. Lafuma, p. 21). Mere, Oeuvies completes, II, pp. 8 5 - 9 . His treatment of the natural desire to know, epitomized in the pleasure we take simply in seeing things (p. 86), and of the connection between teaching and knowledge by way of causes (p. 89] - of which Pascal's story is an illustration - is clearly Aristotelian. See the excursus below on Aristotle. See Mere's letter to Pascal in Mere, Oeuvies (Paris, 1692), II, 63; "Vous sc.avez que j'ay decouvert dans les Mathematiques des choses si rares que les plus scavans des anciens n'en ont jamais rien dit, & desquelles les meilleurs Mathematiciens de l'Europe ont este surpris; Vous avez ecrit sur mes inventions aussi-bien que Monsieur Huguens [Huygens], Monsieur de Fermac [Fermat] &. tant d'autres qui les ont admirees." Pascal wrote to Fermat, 29 July 1654, that many people had been able to find "la methode des des" or rule of chances with dice, including Mere, "who first proposed these questions," but that Mere could not discover the rule of distributions (Pascal, Oeuvres completes, ed. Lafuma, p. 43). But cf. ibid., p. 659, Huygens in his Journal on 30 December 1660, referring to Mere as "inventeur des partis dans le jeu."

68

JEFFREY BARNOUW

confrontation of the intelligence of geometry and that of finesse, focusing on their disagreement about infinite divisibility (whether of physical bodies or space or geometrical entities was part of the problem), which hinged on Mere's refusal or inability to disengage conception (what can be conceived) from sensuous imagination. Some of his objections are not easily answered, and it seems likely that Pascal is responding to them in the fragmentary De 1'esprit geometrique. This cannot be gone into here, but it is worth noting that what Pascal calls the infinity of petitesse (a marvel "of nature/' i.e., physical as well as mathematical and made more easily conceivable by the microscope) anticipates the je ne sais quoi of Leibniz's minute perceptions. Pascal took this incapacity to conceive of the infinitely small as a mark of the one-sidedness of Mere's idea of finesse.48 Mere rejected the infinitely small because it conflicted with natural feeling and bon sens, a reflection of his conviction that "one only knows well what one sees distinctly."49 The limit of his celebrated penetration was the almost imperceptible. Conversely, it was Pascal, the master of the distinct, the basis of geometrical method, who reached deeper into our cognitive reliance on feeling and finesse, the imperceptible and the infinitesimal. In this constellation he again points forward to that other pioneer of probability theory and the grandfather of "aesthetics," Leibniz. THE JE NE SAIS QUOI IN BOUHOURS

AND DELICACY

Other examples could be offered of this proto-aesthetic that ranged over all of practical and cultural life as the appropriate mode of thinking and knowing, but one more substantial illustration should 48

49

As Pascal wrote to Fermat in t h e letter quoted above, the difficulty of the proof of infinite divisibility astonished Mere, "car il a tres bon esprit, mais il n'est pas geometre (c'est c o m m e vous savez, u n grand defaut)" (p. 45). If you could m a k e h i m understand how a m a t h e m a t i c a l line is infinitely divisible, Pascal adds, you would render h i m perfect. As it is h e is one of "ces esprits fins qui n e sont que fins, ne peuvent avoir la patience de descendre jusque dans les premiers principes des choses speculatives et d'imagination qu'ils n ' o n t jamais vues dans le m o n d e et tout a fait hors d'usage." Pierre Viguie, L'honnete homme au XVIIe siecle: Le Chevalier de Mere (Paris: Chiberre, 1922), p. 49. Mere, Oeuvres completes, I, p. 69, and cf. pp. 24, i n .

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

69

be sufficient. Dominique Bouhours, a French Jesuit, devoted a chapter of his Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugene to another key notion of the nascent aesthetics, the je ne sais quoi, not as a quality associated with works of art or things of beauty, but mainly as an essential element of personal appeal. This "I know not what" is a capacity both of pleasing and of being pleased, "the most exquisite feeling of the soul for whatever makes an impression upon it.;/ At the same time it is almost unconscious in its operation, not a power we control: "it is so delicate and imperceptible that it escapes the most penetrating and subtle intelligence." What this means is that we sense or feel the effect but cannot perceive the cause, and this is because it operates so swiftly. Even stones become invisible if they fly fast enough through the air, so we should not be surprised if the trait which strikes the soul cannot be perceived [ne se puisse apercevoir) since one does not have the time to notice it [le remarquer). The je ne sais quoi "produces its effect in the shortest of all moments," particularly its effect on the heart. 50 If one could perceive the source of this effect, the effect itself would be undermined. The mystery of the je ne sais quoi is also its essence. The same seems to hold for the chain of effects that it engenders, for the "I know not whats" of beauty and ugliness excite in us "I know not whats" of inclination or aversion that reason cannot grasp and the will cannot control. "These are the first movements which anticipate reflection and liberty." Likings and dislikings thus seem to be formed in an instant, yet Ariste, who affirms this, thinks it consistent with the doctrine of the scholastic philosophers who say that the will can only love what has first been known by the understanding. The connection between this kind of knowing (where the efficacious traits are not known in their own right) and will or affection is instantaneous and imperceptible. We know that our affections and inclinations are well founded but cannot say how.51 These dialogues, published in 1671, the year Leibniz came to Paris, 50

51

Bouhours, Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugene (Paris: Bossard, 1920), pp. 194-213 (quotations from pp. 196, 199-201]. An English translation of this chapter is found in The Continental Model, ed. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 182-92, which I have used but revised where needed. Here, pp. 183-5. See also Borgerhoff, The Freedom of French Classicism, pp. 186-200, on the je ne sais quoi in Bouhours. Entretiens, pp. 204, 199, 207; Continental Model, pp. 187, 184, 189.

7O

JEFFREY

BARNOUW

can be seen as anticipating one of Leibniz's most characteristic ideas, the doctrine of "minute perceptions" (from another angle, "minute appetitions" or "minute solicitations"), which he will make use of even in the analysis of sensation. The je ne sais quoi is a dim awareness of a cause which escapes notice but is known by its effects, and these effects are as relevant to knowledge or discernment as they are to affection. "The expression of the face which distinguishes one person from a hundred thousand others is such a quality, being very noticeable and yet very difficult to describe, for who has ever clearly distinguished the features and the lineaments in which that difference precisely resides?"52 The interest here is in what we know but cannot express in words, or more precisely, what it is (the notae or marques) that enables us to discriminate and recognize but itself eludes specification. Physiognomic perception still poses fruitful problems for psychology, but the operation which Bouhours is concerned with is broader. Thus he goes on to offer examples from symptoms of diseases and from other natural effects such as the tides and magnetism where science has been led to suppose the operation of occult causes. "Nature, as well as art, is careful to hide the cause of extraordinary movements; one sees the machine and observes it with pleasure, but one does not see the spring which makes it work." 53 There is an interesting parallel in Bouhours's later work, La maniere de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit, where he answers the question "what, precisely, is delicacy?" The delicacy of thoughts characterizing imaginative works is best understood, he says, by analogy with nature, that is, where nature works, as Pliny said, in minimis "and where the matter almost imperceptible makes us doubt whether she has a Mind to show or hide her Address."54 Delicacy of thoughts analogously conveys much in few words and induces us to interpret their half-hidden sense. It "keeps us in suspense to give us the pleasure of discovering it all at once, when we have knowledge enough," just as microscopes improve our vision such that we can see nature's 52 53 54

Entretiens, p. 207; Continental Model, p. 189. Entretiens, pp. 199-200; Continental Model, p. 185. Bouhours, The Art of Criticism, or the Method of Marking a right Judgment upon Subjects of Wit and Learning (London, 1705; repr., Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1981), pp. n o — 1 .

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

71

finest workings, like the structure of an almost invisible insect. Here the idea that the charm would be lost once the cause were seen seems to have been abandoned. Still the delicacy of thought and the bien penser of the work's title essentially deal with phenomena that partly manifest and partly obscure the underlying reality, with effects that depend on our not being distinctly aware of their causes. When Bouhours applies the je ne sais quoi to art in the earlier work, he prefaces the discussion in a way that makes it seem an innovation. Acting as a foil for the more "sensitive" Ariste, Eugene says, "At least the je ne sais quoi is restricted to natural phenomena for, as far as works of art are concerned, all their beauties are evident and their capacity to please is perfectly understandable." Ariste answers that the same ineffable effect is found in certain paintings and statues that appear almost alive, that seem to lack only speech and indeed sometimes seem even to speak to us. This effect is apparently linked with the human figure, however, and not attributed to the power of art generally. Earlier Ariste claimed one could neither explain or depict the je ne sais quoi of a human visage; a portrait never led anyone to love the person portrayed. It is worth noting, then, that in the later work, La maniere de bien penser, Bouhours delineates a mode of thinking proper to works of esprit, that is, literary or imaginative writings. The term esprit has in effect changed sides from its position in Pascal's dichotomy, no longer meaning intellect, a shift paralleled in the semantic career of the equivalent English word "wit," which was also the word used to translate the Latin term ingenium and Gracian's ingenio. In the same sense acuity of conceit degenerated, in some writers, into being witty. But esprit in Bouhours has taken a more particular meaning without sacrificing its high level or cognitive import. Moreover, despite the English translation of the title, 55 Bouhours is delineating a mode of thinking - different from discursive reasoning - found in works of esprit. In the first dialogue of La maniere de bien penser, Eudoxe, who favors the ancients, debates with Philanthe, proponent of the modern Italian and Spanish taste, whether a thought that shows esprit needs a foundation on truth or a charming admixture of falsehood that is, fictions, ambiguities, hyperboles, and other figures that are 55

See the preceding note.

72

JEFFREY BARNOUW

little more than lies. Eudoxe argues that such fiction must still be probable and have some truth hidden in it and eventually convinces Philanthe that truth is broader than he thought, "since it may agree with equivocal expressions in matters of wit." Along the way, however, Philanthe has related esprit to the Italian ingegno and agudeza, continuing in the same sentence, "Aristotle reduces almost the whole art of thinking ingeniously to the metaphor, which is a kind of fraud, and Count Tesauro says, according to that philosopher's principles, that the subtlest and the finest thoughts are only figurative enthymemes, which equally please and impose upon the understanding/' 56 Aristotle's Rhetoric is again recognized as the source of the idea that works of imagination embody a kind of thinking patterned after but differing from and even violating demonstrative reasoning. It is not evident that either partner prevails in the dialogue, since Eudoxe vindicates truth as a requisite of works of esprit only by recognizing that it is a kind of truth proper to such works. Metaphor has a truth of its own, as Philanthe concludes, and may be needed for the presentation of any truth. Like Gracian, Bouhours insists that novelty plays an essential role in advancing knowledge, that it is not enough for truth to content the mind, but there must be something which strikes and surprises it. Ingenious thinking is intertwined with curiosity and admiration or wonder. If the thoughts be not new ("it would be hard to say nothing but what is new"),57 they should at least be uncommon or "the way of turning them at least should be so." This idea was nothing new. EXCURSUS ON ARISTOTLE

That metaphor heightens attention and interest through its deviation from normal accustomed language is a point Aristotle makes repeatedly in both the Rhetoric and the Poetics. But the cognitive implications of this are drawn out in the concluding book of the Rhetoric, where he writes that "we all naturally find it agreeable to get hold of new ideas easily, [and] it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh." "Liveliness is specially conveyed 56

57

Ibid., pp. 7 - 8 , I I , 17, 5 1 - 2 . Part of this first chapter is included in Model, pp. 193-205; here, pp. 197, 200, and 204. Art of Criticism, p. 51.

Continental

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

73

by metaphor, and by the further power of surprising the hearer,because the hearer expected something different, his acquisition of the new idea impresses him all the more/7 For Aristotle the pleasure of metaphor is tied up with that of learning, which entails active participation and effort, but not strenuous exertion. "Both speech and reasoning are lively in proportion as they make us seize a new idea promptly/' and people are not taken either with the obvious or with the obscure, but with arguments "which convey their information to us as soon as we hear them, provided we had not the information already, or which the mind only just fails to keep up with/ 758 Aristotle has a similar explanation of the effect achieved by an enthymeme, that is, the abbreviated rhetorical version of the syllogism (just as the example is the equivalent in rhetoric of the other mode of reasoning in logic, induction). Enthymemes are the body of rhetorical persuasion, which is a sort of demonstration, for Aristotle, and thus enthymemes are a sort of syllogism, appropriate in matters concerned not with the truth but with what is like the truth, that is, the probable. The enthymeme has an effectiveness which the syllogism does not, since it omits mention of propositions or premises that can be assumed or taken for granted and takes its point of departure in notions already accepted. "It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences . . . educated men lay down broad general principles,- uneducated men argue from common knowledge.77 Beyond such simplicity, it is important for the audience to think along with the speaker, supplying the parts of the argument that are not spelled out and seemingly coming to the intended conclusion on their own.59 58

59

Rhetoric, III.io.i4O4b6-i2, I 4 i o b i o - i 3 , 14122HJ, i 4 i o b 2 o - 2 6 ; on the pleasure associated w i t h change, and accordingly w i t h wonder and learning new things, see 1371325-34.1 quote the W. Rhys Roberts translation from The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, n.d.), citing the Bekker marginal page numbers. Ibid., 1354a 14, I 3 5 5 a 4 - i 7 , 1357312-18, 1395022-33. Referring to e n t h y m e m e s (as syllogisms), Aristotle writes that "those are m o s t applauded of which we foresee the conclusions from the beginning, so long as they are not obvious at first sight - for part of the pleasure we feel is at our own intelligent anticipation; or those which we follow well enough to see the point of t h e m as soon as the last word has been uttered 7 ' (i4oob29~34). Bouhours says more pleasure is given w h e n hearers or readers are allowed to complete thoughts on their own, whereas spelling everything out awakens resentment.

74

JEFFREY BARNOUW

Enthymeme like metaphor steers a course between the obvious and the obscure, mingling the attractions of clarity and curiosity. In both the Rhetoric and the Poetics he considers metaphor the chief resource of diction, and in each case this points beyond style to a cognitive capacity. "But the greatest thing by far is to be master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars." "Metaphors must be drawn from things that are related to the original thing, and yet not obviously so related - just as in philosophy also an acute mind will perceive resemblances even in things far apart/' 60 Gracian's agudeza seems to have taken its original hint here, as did the corresponding conception of ingenio, esprit, or 'wit7 in the innovative sense of a particular "acute" faculty - contradistinguished from judgment which perceives subtle resemblances and correspondences. The importance of Aristotle's Rhetoric for the seventeenthcentury developments we have briefly considered does not consist simply in particular affinities or borrowings, however, but concerns the general intellectual and cultural role which the "logic" of taste or aesthetics in Baumgarten's sense tried to take on. Aristotle had conceived his rhetoric on the model of his logic of demonstrative reasoning, construing the enthymeme as a weak sort of syllogism appropriate to matters in which probable knowledge had to serve because necessary knowledge could not be had. Aristotle's main intention was to reform rhetoric, however, to give it cognitive interest by shifting its focus from techniques of persuasion to grounds of persuasion, and not so much to develop a logic of probable reasoning in its own right. The epistemological side of rhetoric was also scarcely pursued after Aristotle. The preponderance he gave to demonstrative reasoning, out of all proportion with the role it plays in science, the science of his day or ours - to say nothing of its role in human life - left the task of clarifying the principles and methods of empirical knowledge in its shadow for almost two millennia. "Aesthetics" seems originally to have been conceived in part to fill this need. 60

Poetics, i459a5-8, tr. Igram Bywater, in Works, ed. Ross; cf. Rhetoric, 140537-10, I4i2a9i2

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

75

AESTHETICS IN BAUMGARTEN'S SENSE

In his 1735 dissertation the twenty-one-year-old Baumgarten maintained that poetry represented a sensuous mode of knowledge complementary to the rational mode characteristic of philosophy. Poetics, the discipline concerned with "sensuous discourse/7 presupposed sensuous "ideas" {representationes sensitivae, mental representations in the sense of "idea" established by Descartes and Locke) and a "lower cognitive faculty" that traditional logic, oriented exclusively to rational knowing, had neglected. The distinction between two levels in the cognitive powers was in fact a recent innovation of Christian Wolff, who assigned knowledge founded in distinct ideas to the higher and that founded only in indistinct ideas to the lower. But what Baumgarten meant was that nondemonstrative logic regarding empirical knowledge based in sense perception had yet to be founded. In the closing paragraphs Baumgarten called for a new science, based on principles provided by psychology, "which might direct the lower cognitive faculty in knowing things sensately," just as logic guides intellectual or rational cognition. Referring to the classical Greek opposition between aistheta (things perceived) and noeta (things known), and identifying the latter with the object of logic, Baumgarten dubbed the new science aesthetica, the discipline of aisthesis, or sensuous knowing, including not only sense perception but sensuous imagination. In his later lectures on aesthetics Baumgarten projected the idea of "confusion" back into the Greek origins of his term aesthetica: "in Plato aistheta are opposed to noetois as indistinct to distinct representations." "As they made logike from logikos, the distinct, so from aisthetos we make aisthetike, the science of all that is sensuous." 61 Baumgarten referred to aesthetica in his first major work, the 61

A. G. Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, tr. H. Paetzold as Philosophische Betrachtungen tiber einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983), pp. 84-7; Reflections on Poetry, tr. Karl Aschenbrenner and W. B. Holther (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), pp. 38-9, 77-8. For the lecture notes, see Baumgarten, Texte zur Grundlegung der Aesthetik, ed. Hans Rudolf Schweizer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983), pp. 79-80.

76

JEFFREY BARNOUW

Metaphysica of 1739 (in Part 3, dealing with empirical psychology), as the science of knowing and presenting what one knows sensuously [sensitive cognoscendi et proponendi). The Leibnizian background of this notion had been made clear in earlier paragraphs where repraesentatio non distincta was called sensitiva, after "confused thinking" [confuse cogito) had been defined as that in which one does not distinguish the marks [notas) of the object of thought. 62 As Leibniz had originally explained this: Knowledge is clear, therefore, when it makes it possible for me to recognize the thing represented. Clear knowledge, in turn, is either confused or distinct. It is confused when I cannot enumerate one by one the marks [notas] which are sufficient to distinguish the thing from others, even though the thing may in truth have such marks and constituents into which its concept [notio] can be resolved. Thus we know colors, odors, flavors, and other particular objects of the senses clearly enough and discern them from each other but only by the simple evidence of the senses and not by marks that can be stated.63 Confused knowledge is based on "ideas" taken simply as they are given in experience; a sensuous idea is an unanalyzed whole that may include a number of undifferentiated elements fused together. When Leibniz repeated this explanation two years later in French, he added, "In this way we sometimes know clearly, . . . if a poem or a picture is well done or badly, because it has a certain 'something, I know not what7 which either satisfies or repels us. But when I can explain the marks I have, my knowledge is called distinct."64 Leibniz's reference to a je ne sais quoi is more than simply an 62

63

64

Baumgarten, Texte zur Grundlegung, pp. 16, 10, and 4. Schweizer, p. 5, muddles things in his German translation of §510 by making it a question of distinguishing the marks from one another, rather than simply distinguishing them, although Baumgarten himself may have encouraged this with his distinction in §520 between perceiving a thing in its difference from other things and just perceiving it. In §522 he uses characteres as a synonym for notae (distinguishing traits) and calls a representation distinct if it has clear notas, sensuous if its notae sue obscure. He thus makes things murkier by failing to distinguish between "confused" and "obscure," as in §510. "Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas" (1684), in Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), p. 291. "Discourse on Metaphysics," §24, in Philosophical Papers, pp. 318-19. Loemker's rendering of the last part ("explain the criteria I use"] blurs the point, as does - in the opposite direction - the translation in Leibniz, Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

77

allusion to a then fashionable topos. In the earlier text he used it as an analogy to illustrate the confused nature of sensation. We cannot explain to a blind man what red is; it has to be experienced. But the "idea" of red is not for that reason logically simple: [T]he concepts of these qualities are composite and can be resolved, for they certainly have their causes. Likewise we sometimes see painters and other artists correctly judge what has been done well or done badly; yet they are often unable to give a reason for their judgment but tell the inquirer that the work which displeases them lacks "something, I know not what/' 65

The composite nature of color is a "con-fusion" constituting sensation in a way similar to the reliance of artistic creation and appreciation on felt but unformulated values. We will come back to this conception of sensation in the conclusion of the paper. It is clear for now that an idea may be lively, rich, and fruitful in proportion to its confusion. The advantage Baumgarten will draw from the "confusion" of sensuous ideas is suggested by §517 of his Metaphysical "The more marks a perception contains, the stronger it is," and "a confused perception which includes more than a distinct one is stronger than it" and is accordingly called "pregnant."66 Baumgarten justifies applying the term sensitiva to ideas by referring to Wolff's definition: "an appetite which follows from a confused representation of the good [i.e., object or goal] is called sensuous, and a confused representation is gained through the lower part of the cognitive faculty just as an obscure one is." 67 The term sensitiva (Baumgarten seems to be implying) applied originally to

65

66 67

(New York: Scribner, 1951), p. 325: "explain the peculiarities which a thing has." The original reads "expliquer les marques que j'ai," explain (or make explicit?) the distinguishing marks which I have for a thing in my idea of it, traits attributed to the object and more intrinsic and essential to knowing than any "criteria." Philosophical Papers, p. 291. The concluding passage of the text, p. 294, blends two levels of the constitution of color: "Moreover, when we perceive colors or odors, we are having nothing but a perception of figures and motions, but of figures and motions so complex and minute that our mind in its present state is incapable of observing each distinctly and therefore fails to notice that its perception is compounded of single perceptions of exceedingly small figures and motions. So when we mix yellow and blue powders and perceive a green color, we are in fact sensing nothing but yellow and blue thoroughly mixed; but we do not notice this and so assume some new nature instead." Texte zur Grundlegung, p. 8. Philosophische Betrachtungen, pp. 9 and xi.

78

JEFFREY

BARNOUW

appetite because of the sense-dependent and therefore confused nature of the ideas that gave rise to it. The terminological scruple is exaggerated, but this may be a roundabout way of suggesting that the confusion intrinsic to sensuous representations derives from their relation to desire, a factor brought out in Descartes and even more so in Malebranche. This is not an aspect of sensuous cognition that Baumgarten will give emphasis to in his later elaborations, yet it remains a significant, positive factor in the Leibnizian heritage he passes on, under the name aesthetics, to Mendelssohn and Schiller. It is a significant break with this line of thinking when Kant insists that aesthetic pleasure must be "free of interest/7 that is, free of concern for the actual existence of the object. In his lectures on aesthetics Baumgarten says that "sensuous knowledge is the basis of distinct knowledge, and thus, if the understanding is to be improved as a whole, aesthetic must come to the aid of logic./; He equates the schone Wissenschaften with "sciences of our lower cognitive powers/7 adding, "or, if you want to speak more sensuously, you could follow Bouhours and call them logic without thorns.7" He goes on to cite Bouhours again, along with Crousaz (for his Traite du beau), Bodmer, and Breitinger, as writers who have opened the way for his aesthetic. 68 Compared with his probable model, Christian Wolff's Psychologia empirica (1732), Baumgarten7s "lower cognitive faculty77 includes a wealth of new rubrics, many of which show the influence of the ideas we have traced in the seventeenth century. In addition to Wolff7s conventional headings - sense, memory, imagination Baumgarten treats acumen, the ability to make fine discriminations of things depending on awareness of their characteristics [notae], balanced by ingenium, an ability to see similarities in disparate things. Together these two constitute perspicacia.69 He also includes iudicium, judgment of a sensuous sort, identified with taste [gustus, sapor, palatum), which is both the basis and the object of aesthetica critica. Complementing these "aesthetic77 powers are the related or even overlapping faculties of praevisio, the anticipation of future events based on experience, which shades over into that part of aesthetic known as mantica (divination) based in the interpreta68 69

Texte zur Grundlegung, pp. 8o, 82. Ibid., p. 38, §575: "The aesthetic of perspicacity is the part dealing with ingenious and acute knowing and presenting." But for the reference to "aesthetic" this sentence could come from Gracian.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

79

tion of signs, and which further is hardly different from praesagitio, premonition, equated with the expectation of similar cases, a faculty shared by man and animal that takes the place of reason in animals and which is based on natural signs, a form of the association of ideas, and finally the facultas characteristica, which takes one thing as a sign of the existence of another. Quite distinct from linguistic signs, such natural signs are a means of knowing the reality of another thing because there is a nexus significativus in the world that grounds our inferences.70 When Baumgarten comes to discuss the aesthetica characteristica, or science of sensuous knowledge of signs (circa signa) and of the corresponding presentation of knowledge, it is clear that linguistic signs are a subordinate part, philologia or grammatica in a broad sense. But in other outlines of his aesthetic, perhaps as early as 1742, he sharply separated its two parts, the first dealing with sensuous knowing or thinking, the second with its lively (lebhaft) presentation and thus akin to the traditional disciplines of poetics and rhetoric, and he seems to have identified this second part of aesthetica as "ars signandi et signis cognoscendi, CHARACTERISTICA [Semiotica, Semiologia, Symbolica)."71 This produces a major confusion because signs and semiotic already play important roles in sensuous or empirical cognition itself and in the first part of aesthetica, and here in the second it cannot be merely a question of substituting significanda for propenenda72 in the definition of aesthetica, because an ars signis cognoscendi, art of knowledge by means of signs, is included in this characteristica. I will postpone considering the knotty question of cognitive signs in Baumgarten, which I will take up in a history of conceptions of natural signs as the elements of perception and thinking. 73 Baumgarten finally answered his own call for the new science in 70

71

72 73

Ibid., pp. 48 {praevisio, §§595-6), 58 {praesagitio, §§612-13), and 62 [characteristica, §§619-20), cf. p. 97. Following Leibniz ("Monadology," §26), Wolff referred to praesagitio as analogon rationis. T h e conception goes back to Hobbes's idea of (animal) prudence. Philosophia generalis, §147, a p o s t h u m o u s l y published text from t h e early 1740s, in ibid., p. 75. In s t u d e n t n o t e s from Baumgarten's lectures on aesthetica, in ibid., p. 83. M e a n w h i l e , for a further development of t h e conception of natural signs as t h e basis of cognition in t h e Leibnizian tradition, see Jeffrey Barnouw, " T h e Philosophical A c h i e v e m e n t and Historical Significance of Johan Nicolas Tetens," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), vol. 9, pp. 3 0 1 - 3 5 -

8O

JEFFREY

BARNOUW

1750 with the first volume of his Aesthetica. In its opening paragraph he defined aesthetics as "the science of sensitive cognition/7 adding a series of synonyms: "Aesthetics, as the theory of the liberal arts, lower-level epistemology [gnoseologia inferior], the art of thinking finely [ars pulchre cogitandi], and the art of the analogy of reason [that mode of inference which man shares with higher animals], is the science of sensitive cognition/774 But there was a new emphasis here that went beyond what one could anticipate from the earlier writings. The experience and appreciation of beauty in nature, including the sublime, and of works in the fine arts, including poetry, were included in the scope of Baumgarten's aesthetics, but only as applications of the capacity that was its central concern, and even then not the most important ones. It was rather in the art of common life, particularly the development of a well-rounded graceful individual who could play a spontaneous and articulate role in society, that aesthetics was supposed to have its key influence as a practical discipline (itself an ars) concerning - and nurturing - the "lower/7 sensuous-sensitive faculties. In addition to improving knowledge beyond the boundaries of what can be distinctly known and creating a basis for practice in the fine and liberal arts, aesthetica should make accessible whatever is known scientifically and accommodate it to the common mind. Thus it lends a certain excellence in the practical affairs of common life.75 The nature of this last accomplishment is hard to convey without awkwardness in English: As beauty or fineness of cognition [pulchritudo cognitionis] cannot be any greater or more noble than the vitality [vivis] of the person who is thinking 74

75

Baumgarten, Aesthetica, ed. and tr. Hans Rudolf Schweizer, as Theoretische Aesthetik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), p. 3. Other interpretations of Baumgarten's aesthetics are Ursula Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis: Die Rolle dei Sinnlichkeit in dei Aesthetik des Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972); and Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Aesthetik als Philosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis: Eine Interpretation der 'Aesthetica" A. G. Baumgartens (Basel: Schwabe, 1973). More recently, Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Vom ursprunglichen Sinn der Aesthetik (Zug: Kugler, 1976), and Horst-Michael Schmidt, Sinnlichkeit und Verstand (Munich: Fink, 1982), consider and assess its historical significance in ways differing from mine. Theoretische Aesthetik, p. 2, §3.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

81

finely [pulchre], we must first of all delineate the genesis and ideal image of one who thinks finely and thus the character of the fortunate or successful aestheticus.76

This felix aestheticus is characterized by a native ingenium (wit) that is beautiful and fine [venustum et elegans), its lower faculties being easily excited and apt for elegance of cognition. These qualities are further specified using terms familiar from Baumgarten's Metaphysica: the capacity for acute sensing, in the inner senses and intimate consciousness as well as the external; a disposition for perspicacity, which is refined (literally, polished) by working together with acumen and ingenium; and the gift of taste [sapor), not of the common sort but delicate [delicatum), which together with acumen constitutes the "judgment of the senses/ 777 The most prominent and essential quality of beauty in cognition seems to be life, vitality, or liveliness. Baumgarten insists that the qualities needed in the effective presentation of knowledge are already crucial to fine or beautiful cognition itself, including an element of sensuous intuition. 78 Drawing on the Leibnizian (originally Stoic) conception of marks or notae within representations, Baumgarten later argues that the universals of demonstrative knowledge are gained through abstraction at the cost of material fullness or perfection of representation. "What is abstraction, if not loss [iactura]2."79 It is in the same vein that Baumgarten, at the outset of Aesthetica, anticipates an objection to his conception of aesthetic as a logic of sensuous or confused representation, thinking, and knowledge, namely that confusion is the mother of error, and answers that it is rather "a conditio sine qua non for the discovery of truth/ 780 76

77

78 79 80

Ibid., p. 16, §27. N e i t h e r "aesthetician" or "aesthete" seems a proper rendering of aestheticus. " M a n of sensibility" might do, but not in the modish sense of the later eighteenth century. Ibid., pp. 16-20, §§29, 30, 32, and 35. Iudex inferior is glossed by a cross-reference to Metaphysica, §608, where "taste" {gustus) was iudicium sensuum. A faculty which I have omitted here and above in t h e Metaphysica is the "poetic," which is characterized as combining and taking apart [praescindendo) m e n t a l images (§34], i.e., concentrating attention on a part of a perceptio (§589). {phantasmata) Ibid., p. 22, §§36 and 37. Ibid., pp. 142-4, § § 5 5 9 - 6 0 . Theoretische Aesthetik, p. 4, §7. Here Baumgarten confuses the difference between obscure and clear w i t h that between confused and distinct, but Schweizer's translation corrects (obscures?] this.

82

JEFFREY BARNOUW

Unfortunately, it was the epistemological dimension of "aesthetic" that Baumgarten never fully worked out. THE "AESTHETIC" DIMENSION IN LEIBNIZ

Baumgarten's contributions to our understanding of the thinking and knowing that remain rooted in sensation are not that impressive, when compared with those of Leibniz, but his launching of aesthetics as a formal discipline was important because it provided a frame for a rich group of ideas that had been diffused throughout Leibniz's writings. Understanding Leibniz's conception of sensation is essential to an appreciation of the original meaning and intention of aesthetics, not simply in the sense that Baumgarten gave explicit and systematic form to something that was suggested at various points in Leibniz, but further in that what is formulated in outline and envisaged as a whole by Baumgarten can be given richer content and a deeper, broader foundation by a return to Leibniz. In undertaking to show how this is so, the conclusion of the present essay is engaged in something quite different from discovering in Leibniz elements of an interest or a theory that could be considered aesthetic in the conventional sense of the term. 81 In effect Leibniz understood sensation in a way which revealed continual cognitive achievements in everyday perception of the sort which Gracian and Bouhours had made the privilege of polite society. But the "aesthetic" function of sensation goes far beyond cognition, since it is the basis for determining desires, motives, habits, and character. Before we take up this most fundamental aestheticpractical aspect of Leibniz's thought, a second, more technical look at the conception of confusion as the hallmark of the sensuous will help us avoid certain misconceptions. A distinct "idea" of red is a paradoxical concept for Leibniz. It 81

See Clifford Brown, "Leibniz and Aesthetic/' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 28 (1967): 70-80; and Romano Galeffi, "A propos de l'actualite de Leibniz en esthetique," in Akten des II. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1975), vol. 3, pp. 217-28. The section on "The Relation to Aesthetics" in Ernst Cassirer, Leibniz' System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902; Hildesheim: Olms, 1962), pp. 458-72, is even further from the focus of the present essay insofar as Cassirer sees the basis of Leibniz's contribution to conventional aesthetics in a proto-Kantian idea of the spontaneity of consciousness vis-a-vis phenomena, an idea intrinsically opposed to finding value in "confusion."

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

83

would require insight into the constitution of red, insight that would have to be taken up into the sight of red (in order to be a part of the "idea" of red), which would undermine the confusion and thus the very constitution of red. In the New Essays he responds to Locke's point that "if our senses were acute enough, sensible qualities such as the yellow color of gold would then disappear, and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts. . . . This microscopes plainly discover to us." True, Leibniz answers, "but the color yellow is a reality, all the same, like the rainbow/' and moreover, if our eyes became "more penetrating, so that some colors or other qualities disappeared from our view, others would appear to arise out of them." 82 Later in the same book Leibniz criticizes Locke's definition of confused ideas, which he contrasts with "Descartes's language: for him an idea can be at once clear and confused, as are the ideas of sensible qualities, . . . e.g. the ideas of color and of warmth." Such ideas "are not distinct, because we cannot distinguish their contents. Thus, we cannot define these ideas: all we can do is to make them known through examples; and, beyond that, until their inner structure has been deciphered we have to say that they are a je ne sais quoi."83 Ideas which distinguish their objects, that is, allow them to be identified, need not be distinct, only clear, whereas only those are distinct "which distinguish in the object the marks which make it known, thus yielding an analysis or definition."84 82

83

New Essays on Human Understanding, tr. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), bk. II, ch. xxiii, §12, corresponding to the divisions of Locke's Essay. This edition has no pagination of its own but uses that of the Akademie edition by Robinet and Schepers in the margins, here p. 219. Against Locke's view of "simple ideas" (Il.ii.i; p. 120) Leibniz says, "these sensible ideas appear simple because they are confused and thus do not provide the mind with any way of making discriminations in what they contain." He again cites the apparent simplicity of both green (composed of blue and yellow] and blue itself (composed of motions). Descartes had already used the phrase in this neutral sense, void of the implications of nuance and subtle sensibility that characterized most seventeenthcentury usage, to refer to the otherwise unknown cause of our perceptions. It is not surprising that the phrase disappears in translation: "when we say that we perceive colours in objects, this is really just the same as saying that we perceive something [je ne sais quoi] in the objects whose nature we do not know, but which produces in us a very clear and vivid sensation" [Principles of Philosophy, I, §70, in

The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, 84

and Dugald Murdoch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], I, p. 218). New Essays, II.xxix.4; p. 255.

84

JEFFREY BARNOUW

There is an apparent ambiguity in Leibniz's usage since he also holds that distinct or distinguished perceptions are a prerequisite of sensation, but what this means is simply that certain perceptions (perceptions being defined in the same context as "representations of the compound, or of that which is without, in the simple") must be prominent or concentrated enough to make themselves noticed.85 He says that "when there is a large multitude of small perceptions with nothing to distinguish them, we are stupefied, as when we turn continuously in the same direction several times/' "From this we can see that if we have nothing distinctive in our perceptions, and nothing lifted out, so to speak, and of a higher flavor, we should always be in a state of stupor/786 The apparent contradiction is resolved when two levels are distinguished. Minute perceptions must be con-fused in(to) an aggregate - but sufficiently distinguished as an aggregate - for sensation to occur. A different way of regarding Leibniz's conception of sensible ideas as intrinsically confused has been developed in the critical literature of the last two decades and should be distinguished from the approach proposed here. Hide Ishiguro argued that ideas of sensible qualities like heat or red are not simple for Leibniz, as they were for many empiricists, because he believed that these ideas could always be further analyzed logically through "redescription of the same idea by a combination of other words, each of which has a more general use." She says that for Leibniz "sensible qualities, or what we learn by our senses, are properties of objects or phenomena, not properties of our experiences." In principle we should be able to learn about these properties by means other than our senses, and this would make analytic redescription possible. "For example, 85

86

"The Principles of Nature and of Grace/' §§2 and 4, in Philosophical Papers, pp. 636-7; Cf. Selections, pp. 523-4. "The Monadology/' §§21 and 24, in Philosophical Papers, p. 645; cf. Selections, p. 537. The danger of ambiguity is perhaps greatest in "Principles of Nature and of Grace/' §13, and in a passage quoted by G. H. R. Parkinson, "The 'Intellectualization of Appearances': Aspects of Leibniz's Theory of Sensation and Thought/' in Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays, ed. Michael Hooker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 6: "If [the soul] should arrive at that state in which it has perceptions that are almost all confused, we call this 'death.'" But Parkinson shows that the paradox that "a sensation is both a distinct perception and a confused perception . . . disappears when it is remembered that the sense of 'confused' to which 'distinct' is opposed is different from that in which a sensation is called 'confused'" (p. 10).

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

85

every time one says 'There is something red7, one can say There is the whirling of . . / , and if the truth-value of the two propositions is always the same, then, according to Leibniz's substitutivity salve vehtate principle [the subject of her first substantive chapter], 'red7 and 'the whirling of . . / are identical terms/ 787 Ishiguro is relying on a passage in a 1702 letter to Queen Charlotte of Prussia in which Leibniz7s emphasis seems to press in the opposite direction from hers. He writes: We use the external senses as, to use the comparison of one of the ancients, a blind man does a stick, and they make us know their particular objects, which are colors, sounds, flavors, and the qualities of touch. But they do not make us know what these sensible qualities are or in what they consist. For example, whether red is the revolving of certain small globules which it is claimed cause light; whether heat is the whirling of a very fine dust; whether sound is made in the air as circles in the water when a stone is thrown into it, as certain philosophers claim; this is what we do not see.88 In line with Ishiguro7s emphasis Leibniz does say, with a hint of witty paradox, that sensible qualities can be regarded as occult qualities "and that there must be others more manifest which can render the former more explicable.77 But he does not suggest that these others could be substituted, insofar as sensible knowledge is concerned, for the immediate "occult77 qualities. We do not have, and (I believe he implies) cannot have, nominal definitions of sensible qualities, which would give us sufficient marks to recognize them. Assayers have marks by which they distinguish gold from every other metal, and even if a man had never seen gold these signs might be taught him so that he would infallibly recognize it if he should some day meet with it. But it is not the same with these sensible qualities; and marks to recognize blue, for example, could not be given if we had never seen it. So that blue is its own mark, and in order that a man may know what blue is it must necessarily be shown to him. . . . It is an / know not what of which we are conscious, but for which we cannot account.89 This seems to mean that qua qualities they cannot be characterized or accounted for in principle. This is what makes them occult. 87 88

Hide Ishiguro, Leibniz's Philosophy of Logic and Language (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp. 5 3 - 4 . Selections, p. 355.

89

Ibid., pp. 3 5 6 - 7 .

86

JEFFREY BARNOUW

Leibniz goes on in the same letter to distinguish the occult sense qualities from ideas provided by sense but not proper to any single sense, that is, ideas of "common sense" such as the idea of figures or "the idea of numbers, which is found equally in sounds, colors and touches," which are capable of definition and of being distinctly conceived. This possibility depends on the soul's being able to compare number or figure in the different senses and thus of its having "an inner sense, in which the perception of these different external senses are found united." Here he adds, "This is what is called the imagination, which comprises at once the notions of the particular senses, which are clear but confused, and the notions of the common sense, which are clear and distinct." 90 This important distinction is overlooked by Nicholas Jolley when from the definition of "distinct idea" appropriate to the assayer's recognition of gold he infers that "there is no reason in principle why we should not have a distinct idea of red, or moreover, why such an idea should not be communicated to a blind person." The oversight is exacerbated when Jolley speaks of "color concepts," concerning which he finds Leibniz ambivalent, which actually shows that Jolley has conflated a sense of the term "idea" appropriate to "occult" sense qualities with an incompatible sense of "concept." Jolley then tries to "explain Leibniz's seeming incoherence regarding ideas of sensible qualities" by following Margaret Wilson's suggestion "that Leibniz has only half succeeded in distinguishing conceptual abilities and perceptions," a confounding that also "underlies Leibniz's claim that ideas of colours are necessarily confused."91 It is important to note that Leibniz opposes confused to distinct knowledge only as a relative differentiation within a continuum. 90 91

Ibid., p. 357. Cf. New Essays, II.xxix.13; pp. 2 6 1 - 2 . Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz and Locke: A Study of the New Essays on H u m a n Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 184-5. Cf. Margaret D. Wilson, "Confused Ideas," in Essays on the Philosophy of Leibniz, ed. Mark Kulstad, Rice University Studies in Philosophy, 63 (Houston: Rice University Press, 1977), pp. 123-37. She deliberately does not enter into his theory of confused perceptions beyond distinguishing t h e m from "confused notions or ideas," t h e first being "particular-presentings," the latter constituting conceptual abilities, but she does claim that h e "runs together" t h e two main senses of "confused" that she has distinguished. The inconsistency she finds in Leibniz's treatment of colors seems to be the result of ambiguities generated by her fusing Ishiguro's approach with Leibniz's own contrary tendency.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

87

Distinct "is the knowledge of an assayer who discerns the true gold from the false by means of certain tests or marks which make up the definition of gold. But distinct knowledge has degrees, because ordinarily the conceptions which enter into the definitions will themselves be in need of definition, and are only known confusedly/'92 Almost all knowledge, he suggests, relies at some points on factors that are felt but not focused on, a tacit or aesthetic dimension. Leibniz had shown an affinity to Bouhours by characteristically using the phrase "a je ne sais quoi" to suggest advantages that a confused knowledge might have over a distinct one. It is ironic that his references to Bouhours criticize him implicitly for failing to have grasped the lesson of the je ne sais quoi. In his "dialogue" with Locke, New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz writes: Witty [spirituelles, from esprit; i.e., imaginative] thoughts must at least appear to be grounded in reason, but they should not be scrutinized too minutely, just as we ought not to look at a painting from too close. It seems to me that Father Bouhours, in his Right Thinking in the Exercise of Wit, has gone wrong on this count more than once.93 Later in the same work he writes of a "picture whose parts one sees distinctly, without seeing what they result in until one looks at them in a certain way," that is, an anamorphosis as described by Niceron in La perspective curieuse (1638), but his analogy could be extended to viewing paintings in general, which must be viewed from a certain distance, a principle that holds analogically for all aesthetic perception. Such a painting, he says, "is like the idea of a heap of stones, which is truly confused . . . until one has distinctly grasped how many stones there are and some other properties of the heap." Finding the right position to view the picture from is "the key to the confusion - the way of viewing the object which shows one its intelligible properties."94 With respect to Bouhours the implication was, on the contrary, that taking too close or minute a view destroyed the aesthetic effect, which was a con-fused impression of the whole. As he wrote in an extended criticism of Bouhours, in a letter to Queen Sophie Char92

93

"Discourse on Metaphysics/' §24, in Selections, p. 325; Philosophical p. 319. See also §33, Selections, pp. 338-9. New Essays, II.xi.2; p. 141. 94 Ibid., II.xxix.8; pp. 257-8.

Papers,

88

JEFFREY BARNOUW

lotte, "Often one cannot perceive the defects of the expressions which he censures until one views them from too close/' 95 Answering Bayle's criticism of his "system of preestablished harmony/7 Leibniz uses the analogy of reading a musical score and perceiving the melody in a similar way. "But/7 says Mr. Bayle, "must not the soul recognize the sequence of the notes (distinctly), and so actually think of them?" I answer "No"; it suffices that the soul has included them in its confused thoughts in the same way that it has a thousand things in its memory without thinking of them distinctly96 What is sensed or consciously perceived is the melody; if we attend to the individual notes, we lose the melody, the sense of the whole. The context of this example is a vindication of Leibniz's idea that "the present is pregnant with the future" on the grounds that our thoughts are never simple and the mind is accordingly led from one to the next. The confusion of thoughts that results from the part played by the body is not, he argues, opposed to our spontaneity. [I]t is believed that confused thoughts are entirely different in kind from distinct ones, whereas they are merely less distinguishable and less developed because of their multiplicity. The result is that certain movements, rightly called involuntary, have been ascribed to the body in such a way that nothing is believed to correspond to them in the soul; and reciprocally, it is believed that certain abstract thoughts are not represented at all in the body. But there is an error in both of these views, as usually happens in such distinctions, because we notice only what is most apparent. The most abstract thoughts are in need of some sense perception. And when we consider what these confused thoughts are which are never absent from even the most distinct thoughts which we can have - as, for example, those of colors, odors, tastes, heat, cold, etc. - we recognize that they always involve the infinite and not only that which takes place in our body but also, by means of it, that which happens outside of it. It is "present perceptions, along with their regulated tendency to change in conformity to what is outside, which form the musical score which the soul reads." In this way Leibniz feels justified in extending "spontaneity to confused and involuntary thoughts," al95 96

Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1885), VI, pp. 522-8 (quotation from p. 523). Philosophical Papers, p. 580.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

89

though he is quick to qualify this: "there is spontaneity in the confused as well as the distinct. In another sense, however, we are justified in speaking, as did the ancients, of that which consists of confused thoughts, where there is an element of the involuntary and unknown, as perturbations or passions."97 On the one hand, "confused thoughts/' taken as including sense qualities, constitute wholes which are aesthetically or practically advantageous even though (or perhaps because) they do not enable or even allow us to know what they are composed of. In this respect, which will be considered further, they afford a kind of spontaneity or facilitation to human action. On the other hand, "confused thoughts'7 are those clouded by passion, which restricts freedom. Leibniz evokes a Platonic Christian version of this view when he concludes, "our confused thoughts represent the body or the flesh and constitute our imperfection."98 In fact Leibniz did incorporate something of this latter view into his system of preestablished harmony, maintaining that the soul is free in its voluntary actions, where it has distinct thoughts and shows reason; but since confused perceptions are regulated according to the body, they arise from the preceding confused perceptions without it being necessary that the soul want them or foresee them. . . . They do not happen without cause or reason, the succession of confused thoughts being representative of the movements of the body, the multitude and minuteness of which do not allow them to be distinctly apperceived. "Confused perceptions are regulated by the laws of the movements they represent; the movements of bodies are explained by efficient causes; while final causes still appear in distinct perceptions of the soul, where there is liberty."99 This is an archrationalist position which virtually equates dependence on sense experience with lack of freedom. But, as Robert 97

98 99

Philosophical Papers, pp. 5 8 0 - 1 . For some modern versions and vicissitudes of this conception of passion, see Jeffrey Bamouw, "Passion as 'Confused' Perception or Thought in Descartes, Malebranche and Hutcheson," Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 397-424Philosophical Papers, p. 581. Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, i88o|, IV, pp. 591, 592. Also "Monadology," §49: "action is attributed to the monad in so far as it has distinct perceptions, and passivity in so far as it has confused perceptions" [Selections, p. 543; cf. §60, p. 545, and "Theodicy," §66].

9O

JEFFREY BARNOUW

McRae has pointed out, Leibniz was quite inconsistent on this point, at times claiming that "perceptions spring from one another by the laws of the appetites or of the final causes of good and evil" and at other times that both methods of explanation apply universally.100 Furthermore, he seems to have considered this conception of confused thoughts as less weighty than the proto-aesthetic one. Responding to the view of Bishop Lamy that the mind is more closely united to the body by confused thoughts than by distinct, Leibniz writes: That is not without some basis, for confused thoughts mark our imperfection, passions, and dependence on a mass of external things or matter, while the perfection, force, empire, liberty and action of the soul consist principally in our distinct thoughts. However it does not cease to be true that at bottom confused thoughts are nothing else than a multitude of thoughts which are in themselves like the distinct, but which are so small that each separately does not excite our attention and cause itself to be distinguished. We can even say that there is all at once a virtually infinite number of them contained in our sensations. It is in this that the great difference between confused and distinct thoughts really consists.101 The element of Leibniz's thinking that is our particular interest here, however, finds advantages for human practice, indeed a kind of freedom or spontaneity, in the confused character of sensation, even where it stems from a closer relation to appetites and passions. It is significant in this context that Bouhours went so far as to identify the "I know not what" with the source of our passions, in a positive vein that reversed the derogatory implications of the conventional "stoic" view of the passions as disturbances of the mind arising from inadequate conception. This mysterious quality is, if it is rightly understood, the focal point of most of our passions. Besides love and hatred, which give impetus to all the impulses of the heart, desire and hope, which fill up the whole of man's life, have practically no other foundation. For we are always desiring and hoping, 100

101

Robert McRae, Leibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 67-8, quoting "The Principles of Nature and of Grace/' §3. McRae, Leibniz, p. 127, translated from the Gerhardt ed., IV, pp. 574-5.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

91

because beyond the goal we have set for ourselves there is always something else to which we unceasingly aspire and which we never attain.102 Leibniz applies the idea of the infinitesimal to make pain or displeasure a constituent of desire and pleasure itself, as minute perceptions "cause that disquiet [inquietude, what Locke terms "uneasiness"] which I show to consist in something which differs from suffering only as small from large, and yet which frequently causes our desire and even our pleasure, by giving it a sort of spice."103 He is referring ahead to his refutation of Locke's idea that uneasiness cannot coexist with happiness and therefore that all motivation comes down to "the removing of pain." 104 Inquietude must be distinguished from pain, which includes an element of awareness or apperception. It operates at a subconscious level: "These minute impulses consist in our continually overcoming small obstacles - our nature labors at this without our thinking about it." This leads Leibniz to an affirmation of desire itself: "Far from regarding this uneasiness as something incompatible with happiness, I find that uneasiness is essential to the happiness of created beings, which never consists in a perfect possession, which would make them insensible and stuporous, but rather in a continual uninterrupted progress toward greater goals."105 In the preface to the New Essays he writes that there are many indications (marques, used in an extended sense) which lead us to conclude that at every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection,- that is, of alterations in the soul itself, of which we are unaware because these impressions are either too 102

Elledge and Schier, eds., Continental Model, pp. 1 9 0 - 1 ; cf. p. 171. This passage is reminiscent of Hobbes's rejection of t h e idea of an u l t i m a t e a i m : " t h e Felicity of this life consisteth n o t in t h e repose of a m i n d satisfied. . . . Felicity is a continuall progresse of t h e desire, from o n e object t o another; t h e attaining of t h e former, being still b u t t h e way t o t h e later" [Leviathan [Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. i6o|. 103 New Essays, p. 56. 104 Locke m a k e s inactivity a m a i n source of uneasiness and is t h u s closer to Hobbes and Leibniz t h a n it seems, b u t t h e difference is significant. See Jeffrey Barnouw, "The 'Pursuit of Happiness' in Jefferson, and Its Background in Bacon and H o b b e s / ' Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 11 (1983): 2 2 5 - 4 8 , esp.

pp. 244-7. 105 New Essays, II.xxi.36; pp. 1 8 8 - 9 .

92

JEFFREY BARNOUW

minute and too numerous, or else too united, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive on their own. But when they are combined with others they do nevertheless have their effect and make themselves felt, at least confusedly, within the whole. 106

Leibniz uses the example of the roar of the ocean, which is composed of the noise of every one of the waves "although each of these little noises makes itself known only when combined confusedly with all the others, and would not be noticed if the wave which made it were by itself." In an analogous way, it would seem, every sensation is an assemblage confus, a composite emerging into consciousness. These minute perceptions, then, are more effective in their results than has been recognized. They constitute that je ne sais quoi, those flavors, those images of sensible qualities, clear in the aggregate [assemblage] but confused as to the parts; those impressions which are made on us by the bodies around us and which involve the infinite; that connection that each being has with all the rest of the universe. It can even be said that by virtue of these minute perceptions the present is big with the future and burdened [charge] with the past. 107

These momentous effects result from the composite or confused nature of sensation, which always contains more than we can be aware of. The indistinctness of sensation creates relative wholes that can be dealt with far more easily, spontaneously, in practical life than could their constituent parts taken singly. Moreover, as Bouhours suggested, the confusion of sense also includes desire, as "minute perceptions'7 are at the same time "minute appetitions77 or "minute solicitations/' "It is these minute perceptions which determine our behavior in many situations without our thinking of them, and which deceive the unsophisticated with an appearance of indifference of equilibrium - as if it made no difference to us, for instance, whether we turned left or right/ 7108 106 ibid., p. 53. Remnant and Bennett translated unies as "unvarying" where I substituted "united" (cf. "fused"). They may have been anticipating a subsequent reference to impressions that lack "the appeal of novelty" and therefore escape notice. 107 Ibid., pp. 5 4 - 5 . 108 Ibid., p. 56.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

93

Every action has its sufficient reason, but this is often only the summation of countless insensible impulses. Every impression has an effect, but the effects are not always noticeable. When I turn one way rather than another, it is often because of a series of tiny impressions of which I am not aware but which make one movement slightly harder than the other. All our undeliberated actions result from a conjunction of minute perceptions; and even our customs and passions, which have so much influence when we do deliberate, come from the same source; for these tendencies come into being gradually, and so without the minute perceptions we would not have acquired these noticeable dispositions. 109

The conception of sensation as awareness or apperception of a mass of confused, that is, undifferentiated perceptions is continuous with his understanding of the insensible formation not only of particular motives and passions but of customs and character. Leibniz sees the minute "appetitions" of uneasiness as nature's way of letting us "enjoy the advantage of pain without enduring its discomfort/' The "spur of desire" is the advantage, but the way we benefit from insensibility of minute perceptions goes beyond that and the avoidance of actual pain to the very constitution of sense: [I]f what goes on in us when we have appetite and desire were sufficiently amplified, it would cause pain. That is why the infinitely wise Author of our being was acting in our interests when he brought it about that we are often ignorant and subject to confused perceptions - so that we could act the more quickly by instinct, and not be troubled by excessively distinct sensations of hosts of objects.

In their con-fusion, sensations represent a practical simplifying and reduction to human scale that allows us to cope. Leibniz follows this idea up in a vein that was later to strike Swift. "How many people we observe who are inconvenienced by having too fine a sense of smell, and how many disgusting objects we would see if our eyesight were keen enough!" 110 The concept of human scale is crucial to Leibniz's appreciation of sensation as a beneficial confusion of minute perceptions. Life is not conducted by science or covered by logic. An interesting illustration 109

Ibid., II.i.15; pp. 115-16.

110

Ibid., II.xx.6; p. 165.

94

JEFFREY BARNOUW

of this is a contrast Leibniz draws between two kinds of judgment, which Kant will later call the logical and the aesthetic. 111 [A] mathematician may have precise knowledge of the nature of nine- and ten-sided figures, because he has the means for constructing them, yet not be able to tell one from the other on sight. The fact is that a laborer or an engineer, perhaps knowing little enough of the nature of the figures, may have an advantage over a great geometrician in being able to tell them apart just by looking and without counting; just as there are porters and pedlars who will say what their loads weigh, to within a pound - the world's ablest expert in statics could not do as well. It is true that this empiric's kind of knowledge, gained through long practice, can greatly facilitate swift action such as the engineer often needs in emergencies where any delay would put him in danger. Still, this clear image that one may have of a regular tensided figure or of a 9 9-pound weight - this accurate sense that one may have of them - consists merely in a confused idea.112

Such a sense of the whole works, in Leibniz's view, in much the same way sensation itself does. The same readiness of response comes with sensation, not because sensation is something immediate, but, on the contrary, because sensation imperceptibly - like an empiric's knowing — draws on a distillation of past experience in the form of myriad minute perceptions that are at the same time appetitions. The influence of Leibniz in "aesthetic" thinking is not limited to Baumgarten and his progeny but turns up in the most disparate contexts. Montesquieu wrote that "imagination, taste, sensibility and vivacity depend on an infinite number of minute sensations." Diderot maintained that taste or sensibility was the result of "an infinity of delicate observations" or minute experiments [petites experiences but also essais) which may have been forgotten but which continue to shape our capacity to respond. The sixth sense is a metaphysical fantasy, for everything in us, he says, is experimental. 111

112

Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), pp. 25-7 (Introduction, §7) and pp. 37-8 (§1); see also p. 30; aesthetic judgment is "the faculty of judging . . . by means of the feeling of pleasure or pain"; logical judgment is that which works by means of understanding and reason. Unlike Leibniz, however, Kant claims feeling tells us nothing about the object, so the point of his distinction was different. Schiller reversed the implications of Kant's terms by preserving a Leibnizian sense of the cognitive roles of aisthesis {Empfindung, Gefuhl) in an implicit critique of Kant. New Essays, II.xxix.13; P- 262.

The Leibnizian conception of sensation

95

If the motives or premises of a judgment are present to us, we have what they call science, but if they are not consciously in our memory, we have what they call taste, instinct, and tact. 113 Leibniz rarely wrote about taste, but a reading of Shaftesbury's Characteristics drew the following from him: "Taste as distinguished from understanding consists of confused perceptions for which one cannot give an adequate reason." He added that Shaftesbury "is right in comparing those who seek demonstrations everywhere and are incapable of seeing anything in every-day light to people who are called moon-blind because they can see only by moonlight/ 7114 The kind of knowing that relies not only on sensuous experience but on assessment by feeling has been little studied because so many thinkers have been reason-blind, but Gracian, Pascal, Bouhours, Leibniz, and Baumgarten were notable exceptions. The inquiry of these writers into subtle modes of perception and thinking opened the way for the "aesthetics" of Schiller, Peirce, and others. 113

114

Montesquieu, Oeuvres completes, ed. Andre Masson (Paris: Nagel, 1950), I, p. 615; idem, The Spirit of the Laws, tr. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), p. 222. Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Georges Roth (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1958 and 1962), IV, p. 125, and VII, pp. 163-4; Diderot's Letters to Sophie Volland, tr. Peter France (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 112 and 167. Philosophical Papers, p. 634.

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Of the scandal of taste: social privilege as nature in the aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant i The classic aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant which have largely structured modern aesthetics cannot be properly understood without understanding a central dimension and dilemma of which they themselves were not properly aware and which their theories instinctively tried to avoid or minimalize, if not suppress. This dimension is the social and class-hierarchical foundation of aesthetic judgment; and its apparently inevitable introduction of difference, distinction, and conventional prejudice sharply contrasts with and threatens the idea of a natural uniformity of feeling or response on which the Humean and Kantian aesthetic theories are essentially based. This dimension, I shall argue, lurks pervasively in the subtext of these theories beneath their more explicit arguments and constitutes the unacknowledged structural core of their problematic. It is not that the social dimension of taste is entirely ignored in the Humean and Kantian account of aesthetic judgment. For both Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" and Kant's more substantial and sophisticated Critique of Judgement make, as we shall see, clear references to society and culture and to their role in promoting the proper exercise of taste. 1 However, the full force of the social dimension of taste and the contradictions it presents for their attempts to justify a standard of taste and vindicate the normative necessity and An earlier version of this paper was published in The Philosophical Forum 20 (Spring 1989): 211-29. The author is grateful to its editor for permission to revise and reprint. 1

The texts I shall be employing are D. Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste" in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); and I. Kant,

96

Of the scandal of taste

97

universality of aesthetic judgment is never openly and adequately confronted. It is, rather, evasively swept under the carpet with the aid of some vague nostrum of foundational universality, of natural human uniformity, essentially free from social determination and distinction. For Hume, this natural, universal basis for the standard of taste is found in "the common sentiments of human nature" (237). Certain objects just "are naturally fitted to excite agreeable sentiments" of beauty in sound human beings, are "naturally calculated to give pleasure/' just as certain properties of objects will excite in them standard perceptions of colors, unless there is some obstruction to, disease of, or temporary malfunctioning in the faculty of taste or organ of sense (238, 239). Though Hume is sometimes ready to admit that in actual fact these aberrations are more the rule than the exception, and that precious "few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty" (246-7), he still maintains in theory that "the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature" (249). And this foundational community of sentiment among men both justifies and is justified by the alleged fact that certain works have been "universally found to please in all countries and in all ages" (236). The standard of taste is thus recommended as a universal and natural one, ultimately free from social difference and determination; any distortions of taste imposed by social pressure and prejudice "will yield at last to the force of nature and just sentiment" (249). Kant employs the same strategy of natural foundational uniformity, though characteristically with greater complexity and with much more emphasis on the commonality of human cognition rather than mere sentiment. The pure aesthetic judgment, though determined by the "autonomy of the Subject" with no constraints of conformity to concept, nevertheless can base its claim to necessary and universal assent on the natural "subjective universality" (135) involved in the dispositional powers of cognition shared by all human beings, "that subjective factor which we may presuppose in all men (as requisite for a possible experience generally)" (146). The Critique of Judgement, trans, by J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Page references to these texts will appear parenthetically in my paper and will be clearly distinguishable by context.

98

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Though Kant, like Hume, accords "culture" some role in developing and communicating taste, the standard of taste is not determined by society at all. "Rather must such a standard be sought in the element of mere nature in the Subject" (212). "Rather is it in human nature that its foundations are laid, and, in fact in that which . . . we may expect everyone to possess and may require of him" (116). If taste is not in any significant sense socially and historically conditioned, then a culture's entrenched aesthetic judgments, the verdicts of taste which have so far dominated it, are thus accorded the status of natural and necessary facts rather than seen as the contingent and alterable product of social dynamics and history. Taste which departs from such a standard is thus not merely different but diseased or unnatural. Historically privileged subjective preferences (essentially those of the historically socially privileged) are reified into an ahistorical ontological standard, a necessary standard for all subjects and all times. This, a Marxist might say, is the scandal of taste perpetrated by the Enlightenment's founding fathers of traditional ("bourgeois") aesthetics and smugly perpetuated by their followers. Indeed some Marxists would claim that all traditional (including contemporary) aesthetics represents an attempt to portray and justify certain socially conditioned and privileged determinations of taste as naturally or ontologically grounded values and thus entrench them as somehow objectively proper or necessary, thereby to perpetuate their dominance and the privileged dominion of the class which determines and sustains them. Such global claims may seem too grandiose to be true. 2 Here I shall simply confine attention to Hume and Kant, and see how despite their attempts to confine the social and its hierarchy to an ancillary inessential factor in establishing the standard of taste, they cannot get on without appealing 2

Surely much mainstream "bourgeois" aesthetics is not concerned with judgments of taste at all but with such issues as the logic or objectivity of interpretation, the nature of expression, representation, metaphor, fiction, etc. But one could reply that all these aesthetic topics are nevertheless pursued under the aegis of our entrenched concepts of fine art and the aesthetic, which themselves are at once a product and a support of sociocultural distinction and domination. This, in fact, is not far from John Dewey's view, and I examine it in greater detail in my Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992].

Of the scandal of taste

99

to social privilege in an essential way and thus undermine their project of a foundational naturalistic, class-free aesthetics. II "Of the Standard of Taste/' Hume's major aesthetic statement and one widely esteemed as a masterpiece of modern aesthetic theory, is surely valued more for its perceptive and thorough airing of the problems besetting the idea of such a standard than for the compelling power of the solution Hume suggests.3 Hume's project is to establish a decisive objective standard for the clearly subjective judgment of taste, which as a judgment of sentiment rather than "fact" admits of no factually existent "true and decisive standard." His strategy is to link judgments of taste to judgments which instead do have such a determinate standard "in real existence and matter of fact" (248); and his principal device to effect the linkage is the notion of the good critic. The standard of taste or proper aesthetic sentiment regarding a work of art is determined by the consensus of sentiment of the good critics regarding that work; and for Hume the questions of who these critics are and what qualities they require are "questions of fact, not of sentiment" (248). Hume sometimes seems to suggest that the objectivity of aesthetic judgments may be based on "rules of composition," "rules of art," "rules of beauty," or "principles of taste [that] be universal," so that we should be able to convince someone that our aesthetic judgment is correct "when we show him an avowed principle of art" which bears on the case at hand (235-6, 240, 246, 241). However, not only are these "general rules of art" never specified 3

Philosophical exegesis and criticism of Hume's essay typically praise its astuteness and the ingenuity of Hume's proposed solution, but go on to explain why they find his case for aesthetic objectivity ultimately unconvincing. Among the most interesting discussions of Hume's theory are Peter Kivy, "Hume's Standard: Breaking the Circle/' British Journal of Aesthetics, 7 (1967), 57-66; Carolyn Korsmeyer, "Hume and the Foundations of Taste," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35 (1976), 201-15; and Noel Carroll, "Hume's Standard of Taste," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 43 (1984), 181-94. These and other philosophical commentators on Hume's theory of taste see its central motivating problem and attendant difficulties as epistemological. My paper will argue that the issue is more essentially a social one, which does not necessarily mean it is any easier to solve.

IOO

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

by Hume, but they are explicitly held to be "founded only on experience and on the observation of the common sentiments of human nature" (237). They represent no independent foundation of factual objectivity outside of human sentiment, but are nothing but the expression of "general observations, concerning what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages" (236). In our search for an authoritative standard of taste through impersonal rules of art we are simply thrust back to our human sensibility as critics, of which these rules are merely a derivative expression. There seems to be ultimately no authority except human consensus. But is the consensus of human sentiment as to what pleases really as universal in all cultures and ages (and social groups within a given culture and age) as Hume would like to but cannot fully believe? He himself is too aware of the actual diversity of taste, and too committed to the need for ordered convergence of taste in "civilized society/' to countenance any absolute "principle of the natural equality of tastes" in all people, places, and points of time (233, 235). This is the impasse which requires Hume to introduce the notion of "a true judge" or good critic in order to salvage a workable standard of taste. The five requisite qualities Hume lists for good critics are "delicacy of imagination" (essentially a matter of perceptual acuity and sensibility to fine discriminations), "practice" in appreciating good works of art, experience in their comparison and proper relative assessment, a "mind free from all prejudice," and "good sense" (239~46).4 The standard criticism of Hume's theory is that it is circular. It defines good taste and art by appeal to good critics, but the good critics are in turn ultimately defined in terms of (their experience with and reaction to) good art. However, as Kivy has cogently argued, the final two qualities and perhaps also the first can be defined so as to escape the circularity. His complaint against Hume's solution is instead that it involves an interminable or at least unresolvable regressive debate as to who has the requisite deli4

One might want to argue that Hume earlier provides an additional requirement: "A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object; if any of these circumstances be wanting, our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to judge of the catholic and universal beauty" (237). However, this seems more a requirement for the "circumstances" in which a good critic should judge than a specification of his required attributes.

Of the scandal of taste

101

cacy, good sense, and lack of prejudice, and as to what precisely these critical prerequisites involve. In challenging Kivy's complaint, Noel Carroll rightly remarks that the regressive debate need not be vitiatingly endless, since within an ordered society there could (one might even say must) be sufficient agreement as to the nature of good sense and lack of prejudice, even if this agreement won't be able to resolve clearly and decisively all differences of aesthetic taste (and even, I might add, if such agreement ultimately rests on repressive force). But Carroll goes on to offer his own complaint against Hume's theory. To wit, its reliance on the notion of good critics "is redundant/' since the five qualities specially ascribed to the good critics should be seen as "applying to anyone" at all. If I have the five qualities on my own, Carroll continues, "then what reason should I have to consult a group of critics? I could argue for the worth of the work of art on the basis of my own good sense, my own delicacy of taste, my own practice, my own use of comparisons, and my own lack of prejudice." Carroll realizes that the idea that everyone can "be a critic such that everyone can consult themselves about their assessments seems antithetical to Hume's purposes."5 Carroll is quite right about this, but I think quite wrong in assuming these purposes are primarily epistemological and ontological, as ultimately aiming to ground judgments of aesthetic values in objectively external facts outside any "intersubjectively shared" human sentiment, in some "external, empirically discoverable . . . objective standard" or "entity."6 -Who more than Hume insisted that values and attitudes could not be adequately grounded on or justified by facts? Hume's primary aim was normative stability rather than epistemological certainty or ontological grounding; and all he needs for this is an "intersubjectively shared" socially objective standard. His deep purpose, a purpose he himself did not fully fathom, was social stability under the aegis of the increasingly ascendant bourgeoisie and its liberal ideology. In introducing the notion of the group of good critics (which Carroll mistakenly regards as "extraneous, excess theoretical baggage") and in consigning to their consensus the 5

Carroll, 191.

6

Ibid., 192.

IO2

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

standard of taste and culture, Hume was trying not only to establish or reinforce the hegemony of the liberal culture of his day but to resolve one of the most fundamental and difficult problems of liberal ideology. The problem is one of reconciling the freedom and autonomy of the individual and his private realm (and what could seem more private, free, and autonomous than taste) with the contrasting need for some objective authoritative notion of right (commanding conformity to a more than personal norm and thus some negation of personal freedom) so as to insure that individual freedom and autonomy would not degenerate to chaos and anomie. 7 This tension is already implicitly announced in the essay's title: a standard (social, constraining) of taste (personal, free). In the context of this tension between freedom and normative authority, we shall see that Hume's idea of the group and consensus of good critics is far from excess baggage but rather his most crucial tool for effecting its reconciliation, for mediating between the free assent of personal feeling and conformity to an extra-personal norm. The key premise underlying Hume's strategy here is his belief that despite the divergence and controversy over individual judgments of taste, there is uniformity of sentiment and hence freely achieved consensus as to which critics are to set the standard according to which personal taste should then conform (within, of course, a certain permissible range of variation). The ineliminable role of the consensus ("the joint verdict," 247) of good critics in mediating the tension between individual freedom and social conformity can be appreciated better against the background of two further and related oppositions which pervade and perplex Hume's essay: the natural versus the cultural or learned; and uniformity versus distinctive superiority of judgment (i.e., those judgments, given a conflict or breach in judgment uniformity, which will carry authority to set the standard for consensus). Hume's liberal aim is to avoid the Scylla of suppressing subjective freedom of sentiment (which for him is what taste involves) by imposing externally rigid laws of taste. But he also wants to escape the Charybdis of total freedom, a chaotic free-for-all which would 7

For an illuminating and historically detailed account of the liberal dilemma between the concern for individual freedom and the concern for a standard of rightness, see C. Dyke, "Collective Decision-Making in Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Mill/' Ethics, 80 (1969), 21-7.

Of the scandal of taste

103

threaten the consensus of feeling necessary for holding a society, even a liberal society, together. This fear of social chaos through cultural anomie was surely not an idle one in a society like Hume's eighteenth-century Britain, rampant with social change, riven with increasingly complex socioeconomic divisions, and apparently lacking any sufficiently powerful overarching principle or structure of unity to insure cohesion. As Guyer pointedly puts it, not only was the feudal order and its unificatory ideology gone and discredited, but "political unity could not readily be found in the crown, which was shared by three forcibly united nations and which had sat for a century upon Scottish, Dutch, then German heads, or in a parliament for which only a few were franchised to vote; and perhaps above all, the sectarian struggles of the previous century had shattered the role of religion as a common source of culture/' 8 The problem, then, is how to establish or legitimate an authoritative standard for consensus beyond the individual, which will not be seen as an unjustified imposition on his freedom as subject. The most (perhaps only) satisfying answer would be some form of aesthetic realism: the standard of taste is conformity to real properties 8

See P. Guyer, "The Standard of Taste and the Most Ardent Desire of Society/' in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam (eds.), Pursuits of Happiness: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992). Though conceding the possible social motivation of Hume's theory, Guyer is primarily interested in showing that his idea of an authoritative standard of taste has specifically aesthetic advantages in augmenting aesthetic pleasure. Much of this augmentation derives from the pleasure of agreement with others, and the standard is sought to maximize such agreement and consequent pleasure. Neither Guyer nor Hume seriously questions whether truly universal agreement on refined taste is really possible or desirable, and whether the social pleasure of taste derives not only from the entertaining variety of different judgments but more significantly from the self-satisfied pleasure that one's taste is shared with those of one's own (enlightened) class or class-fragment in superior distinction from those of less refinement, delicacy, and culture. This line of challenge, which closely connects taste with the socioeconomic conditions of its acquisition and sees taste as motivated by the desire for differentiating distinction rather than unificatory homogenization of competing classes and class fragments, is elaborated in great empirical detail with respect to contemporary French culture in P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). My paper is much indebted to Bourdieu's work, but there are certain aspects of his aesthetic theory of which I am very critical, notably his rejection of popular art and the popular aesthetic. For my critique of Bourdieu, see "Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art," British Journal of Aesthetics, 31 (1991), 302-13; and ch. 7 of Pragmatist Aesthetics.

IO4

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

of beauty ontologically grounded in the objects judged, so that conformity of our appreciative sentiments to this standard is justified by the rational project of conforming our judgment to the true nature of things. 9 Hume, however, cannot avail himself of this strategy, since he rejects any such realism, insisting that "Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; . . . To seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an inquiry as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter" (234-5). Rather than ontological realism, Hume's apparent solution is an empirical naturalism: the consensus and standard is naturally there, but is based on nothing more than the "experience" of our natural aesthetic reactions, i.e., "general observations concerning what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages'7 (236). If the standard of taste is constituted by a natural and hence free conformity of sentiment, the standard would be legitimated as commanding assent without unjustifiably imposing it coercively on an individual's sentiments. The dilemma of liberalism would be resolved. Unfortunately, things are not so simple. For the idea of a naturalism of taste suggests that as tastes naturally conform they should be naturally equal. Yet though Hume would like to admit "[t]he principle of the natural equality of taste" on "occasions where the objects seem near an equality," he emphatically asserts that this principle is and must be "totally forgot" when we are faced with judgments sharply out of line with the "natural" consensus; for example in what he (now apparently wrongly) regards as the "palpable absurdity" of comparing the genius of Bunyan and Addison (235). The problem (which relates to the second opposition to be discussed) is that the evidence for the naturalness of the standard of taste is in uniformity of sentiment, but such uniformity is not suffi9

This solution was adopted by Hume's contemporary Lord Kames, for whom the universal assent demanded of taste ''must have a foundation in nature/' an independent ontological foundation outside the vagaries and contingencies of human preferences so "that individuals ought to be made conformable" to it. See H. Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, A. Mills (ed.), (New York: Huntingdon & Savage, 1849), 467-8. It is interesting that an aristocrat like Kames, more assured in the "natural" superiority of his station, was more confident in grounding the idea of superior taste in the realm of nature than was a middle-class figure like Hume, whose career and livelihood depended largely on the taste of the readers whose purchase of his books allowed him a literary-philosophical career.

Of the scandal of taste

105

ciently evident to make the case for naturalism compelling. If taste is natural but divergent, then in order to save the standard of taste and its naturalness, some judgments of taste must be argued to be more natural than others. This is precisely Hume's strategy. Deviant judgments are explained in terms of distortive diseases or obstructions of the natural mechanism of aesthetic perception. Hume likens deviance in aesthetic taste to the aberrational deviances in sensory perception induced by "fever" or "jaundice," which involve "some apparent defect or imperfections in the organ" of perception (238-9). If not unnatural through disease, divergent taste is unnatural in being distortively mediated by some social veil. Hume enumerates authority, prejudice, envy, and jealousy among such distortions but insists that, given "the sound state of the organ" of perception, "when these obstructions are removed, the beauties, which are naturally fitted to excite agreeable sentiments, immediately display their energy," and, with time, "prejudices . . . yield at last to the force of nature" (238, 249). Hume clearly seems to be arguing the Enlightenment's case that if only we could see things naturally (free from disease and cultural prejudice) we would all see them aright, and true uniformity of sentiment on matters of taste would indeed obtain. But in sharp contrast to this naturalism, when we look at whom Hume regards as the good critic or "true judge," it is obviously not a healthy innocent or homme sauvage, but someone who is thoroughly educated, socially trained, and culturally conditioned. For what is the requisite practice, comparison, and good sense of Hume's good critic except for the achievement and exercise of dispositions (socially acquired and refined) to react to the right objects in the culturally right way or to think in ways that society regards as reasonable? The same may even be said for the requirement of "delicacy of imagination" with its skill in discriminating "minute qualities" (250). For once we abandon the notion of the innocent-eye, we must recognize that not only the aesthetic properties we think relevant to discriminate in an object but also the degree of minuteness of discrimination desired (since one could be too sensitive to unintended and negligible differences in minute qualities so as to impair the aesthetic grasp of the work as a whole) are not determined foundationally in the order of things. They are instead a product of a social praxis, a way of living with art which informs or prestructures our aesthetic response.

IO6

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Thus, in effect, Hume's good critic turns out to be not one without prejudices but simply one with the right prejudices; viz. those unquestionably assumed as right (hence regarded as natural or necessary truth rather than prejudice) by his culture and its traditions of aesthetic appropriation. It is on this requirement of lack of all prejudice that Hume's argument becomes most confused, and we can see through his masquerade of naturalism to the truth that good taste requires a culturally acquired (more than merely natural) attitude which only the socially advantaged can properly exercise. In accord with his naturalistic line, Hume begins by claiming that the critic "must preserve his mind free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to enter into his consideration but the very object which is submitted to his examination" (244). But this clearly contradicts his demand that good criticism requires the application of practice, good sense, and comparison, all of which take us beyond the object presently perceived to preconceptions of how such objects should be perceived and assessed; such preconceptions are socially formed and modified and are culturally variant rather than given naturally and immutably to man in general. Good sense and practice in the refinements of art are (and surely were in Hume's day) inextricably bound with good breeding in a particular culture. Moreover, Hume himself seems to recognize the role of variant cultural prejudices when he tells us that in assessing a work of "a different age or nation" the critic "must place himself in the same situation as the [original] audience" (244-5). But then he immediately tries to assimilate this projective placing to lack of prejudice by likening it to the act of "considering myself as a man in general, forget[ting] . . . my individual being and my peculiar circumstances. A person influenced by prejudice, complies not with this condition; but obstinately maintains his natural position, without placing himself in the point of view which the performance supposes" (245). Hume's unprejudiced naturalism has thus become deeply confused. First, the critic's imaginative "placing" is not the exclusion of prejudice but the temporary adoption of different prejudices, those of the work's author or original audience. Moreover, that such a selfforgetting projective attitude should be adopted is not at all a natural inclination but a culturally acquired prejudice, one which obviously requires a level of learning and socioeconomic ease that only a domi-

Of the scandal of taste

107

nant class could enjoy. As Hume later remarks: "A man of learning and reflection can make allowance for these peculiarities of manners; but a common audience can never divest themselves so far of their usual ideas and sentiments" (251). Hume thus ends up here by identifying man's "natural position" with a prejudiced one, in sharp conflict with his general valorization of the natural as opposed to and ultimately overcoming prejudice. The upshot of all this is that despite his recognition that taste involves much more than natural gifts, Hume never faces up to the fact that this completely undermines his appeal to a natural standard of taste through the common natural constitution of mankind, through "general principles . . . uniform in human nature." The standard is culturally rather than naturally set, and as such reflects not the natural free sentiment of the individual but the social authority of those who set the standard. And only the socioeconomically privileged can set the standard of taste since only they have the access to the right objects and the time and education necessary to make taste ever more refined. As Lord Kames bluntly asserts: "Those who depend for food on bodily labor are totally devoid of taste. . . . The exclusion of classes so many and numerous reduces within a narrow compass those who are qualified to be judges in the fine arts."10 Moreover, to maintain their distinction as having more refined taste they will ensure that the standard is always something beyond the natural reach and pleasure of the vulgar; for how else could they assert their superiority of taste? Hence there is a social explanation for the fact, noted by Hume, that "a person familiarized with superior beauties" cannot appreciate the beauty of vulgar ballads though they be not wholly without beauty (244). It is not surprising that a bourgeois liberal like Hume locates the social authority for taste not in birth or title but in the authority of talent, sense, education and industriousness of practice; and it is not the authority of an individual potentate but the cooperative consensus of a group of such superior men. No longer will taste in art be determined by the individual tyranny of patron king, nobleman, or bishop, but by the collective tyranny of the educated burghers. Their superiority in such matters is, however, presented by Hume as a recognized fact; for they are "acknowledged by universal sentiment 10

Ibid., 472.

IO8

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

to have a preference above others" (248). But if a fact, it is a sociocultural not a natural fact; and since it is based upon the social consensus of their superiority, upon "universal sentiment" of their "preference above others," Hume is clearly wrong to treat it simply as a question "of fact, not of sentiment" (248). Yet while Hume's naturalism relies on distinguishing the sociocultural from the natural, this distinction is not consistently maintained. It is rather purposefully hedged and muted so that historically entrenched sociocultural standards, standards and paradigms determined and sustained by a privileged social class (or succession of such classes), can be imported into and presented as the natural. l1 The idea of a group of good critics, whose superiority is universally respected and who in principle span the length of history and are thus not specifically confined to a particular nation or explicitly defined by one particular class, is crucial in making their consensual verdict seem almost a natural product of human nature at its best, and thus a naturally legitimate authoritative standard of taste to which we should freely conform. But we should not forget that this group, despite its obvious multinational, transhistorical, and transcultural (though clearly not pan-cultural) composition, is hardly representative of natural man but rather draws exclusively from the more socially and culturally privileged. It is as much an expression of distinction as uniformity. As with the natural/cultural tension, Hume tries to resolve or 11

Hume's younger contemporary Joshua Reynolds displays similar unease and hedging in trying to resolve the very same fundamental tension of nature versus social privilege as the necessary basis of artistic taste. To reconcile the putative natural foundation of taste with his firm belief that art's proper appreciation requires sociocultural privilege and distinction from common human nature (and common "vulgar" humans), Reynolds resorts to the contorted idea that true nature is simply that defined by (or pleasing to) the socially superior or culturally refined, while "the vulgar will always be pleased with what is natural, in the confined and misunderstood sense of the word." Like Hume, he senses the essential differential nature of taste, that "the higher excellencies" of art are defined in contrast to vulgar beauties or "lower ornaments," and are apt to be "degraded" by close association with these latter. Good taste must likewise, for its very definition as good, set itself apart from the common or vulgar. Reynolds therefore warns of the dangers of public exhibitions of art, which threaten to degrade good art and taste by encouraging works aimed at "pleasing indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them." See Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), Discourse V, especially pages 61, 69, 70. I thank Paul Mattick for this reference.

Of the scandal of taste

109

smooth over this second tension of uniformity versus distinction through the crucial notion of the consensual community of good critics. The idea of uniformity of sentiment is essential evidence for Hume that the standard is natural, based on "the common sentiments of human nature/' Hence despite his initial recognition of the enormous "variety of taste" (231), Hume goes on repeatedly to insist on the presence of a substantial uniformity of taste. He claims it is expressed in "rules . . . concerning what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages/' "models and principles" based on "universal experience," and "established by the uniform consent and experience of nations and ages" (235-6, 242).12 It is obvious, however, even to Hume, that no such universal uniformity of sentiment regarding works of art really exists. If it did we would not need to seek a standard of taste, let alone ponder whether we could find one; for we would already have one simply in our uniform consensus. But given the absence of total uniformity, how is the standard to be determined so as not to represent a coercive, illegitimate imposition on individual freedom, an ideal dear to Hume's liberalism? A radically democratic answer might be majoritarianism, but such a standard is obviously too unwieldy and demotic for an eighteenthcentury bourgeois mind. To maintain the sort of standard he wants maintained, Hume must assert "that the taste of all individuals is not upon an equal footing" and must appeal instead to the consensus of a narrower group of cultural distinction: those "rare" "men of delicate taste . . . distinguished in society, by the soundness of their understanding and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind" (248-9). Thus the uniformity or consensus of taste which

12

Hume's questionable conflating culture with unprejudiced human nature is perhaps never more poignantly exposed than in those parts of his essay where human nature freed from benighting prejudice and "superstition" is shown to bear a remarkable resemblance to the social dispositions of an eighteenth-century liberal Briton with strong prejudices against Islam and "the Roman Catholic religion" (233, 254). Hume also makes this point in his essay "The Sceptic." Here, after noting that secondary qualities and the aesthetic and ethical properties of "beauty and deformity, virtue and vice" are not properly in the object itself but are subjectdependent, Hume asserts: "There is a sufficient uniformity in the senses and feelings of mankind, to make all these qualities the objects of art and reasoning" and to provide them with sufficient "reality." See D. Hume, "The Sceptic," Essays, i68n.

IIO

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Hume both appeals to and seeks is not truly universal uniformity; it does not embrace the less educated or ill-bred majorities "in all countries and in all ages." To secure a consensus on the verdict of taste not all are eligible to serve on the jury, only those whose social station and training already insure that a reasonable degree of consensus will be achieved, indeed that it is already given. Uniformity of taste comes to mean the uniformity of taste of those who have taste, and this is already largely determined by prevailing structures of social privilege.13 Yet despite the clearly privileged, narrowly distinctive status of Hume's group of critics, Hume thinks this group can also adequately represent a truly universal standard of taste expressing real universality of sentiment and consensus. For it is allegedly "acknowledged by universal sentiment to have preference above others." The suggestion is clearly that this universal consensus of deference to the privileged few is freely felt and willingly given, since it is not visibly coerced. So conceived, this group of critics solves Hume's liberalist paradox of authority and personal freedom. Personal freedom of sentiment is preserved as expressed in the free decision to submit one's taste to the authoritative standard set by those recognized as superior, the elect. The parallel of this solution to that of representative democracy with only a partial franchisement of the electorate (the political system of Hume's Britain) should be obvious. What should be no less obvious, however, is how very far from free this acknowledgment of critical deference actually is ; how it is instead essentially constrained by socioeconomic inequalities and repressive privileging structures of discourse which help constitute the cultural field and are crucial for sustaining the superior claim of "high culture." For those who lack the necessary preparatory education, leisure, and sociocultural conditioning, and are thus effectively denied access to the works of high culture and to their proper appreciation, there is no real option of challenging (or achieving) the supe13

One is tempted to question whether this universe of consensus is sufficiently large and stable when Hume asserts that "Terrence and Virgil maintain a universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men" (320). But one resists the temptation, since through the powerful logic of taste's presumption of its own past authority, such a challenge would be seen not only as a breach of good taste in how to read Hume as philosophy but a confession of poor taste through failure to identify and satisfy oneself with this "universal, undisputed empire."

Of the scandal of taste

111

rior taste of the privileged, especially when the modes of proper appreciation can always be changed to insure the perpetual possibility of distinguishing refined or tasteful from vulgar appreciation of a given work. The socially unprivileged cannot help but concede the superiority of others in a game of taste so structured as to disqualify or brutally handicap them from the outset, particularly when the "essential" superiority of others is reinforced in so many matters outside the realm of taste. Ill Such considerations lead one to realize that the prospect of founding a universally valid and class-free aesthetic on the grounds of our common human nature would seem much more promising if pursued in the realm of nature rather than in the culturally loaded realm of art. It is therefore not surprising that Kant's attempt to erect such an aesthetic gave pride of place to natural beauty rather than art. For him, not only does the judgment of a work of art fail to qualify as a "pure aesthetic judgment" or "pure judgment of taste," but art itself, unless "brought into combination with moral ideas," "renders the soul dull . . . and the mind dissatisfied with itself and ill-humoured." In contrast, "the beauties of nature" besides providing the paradigm cases of pure aesthetic judgment are "the most beneficial" in affording pure aesthetic pleasure which cannot dull or distress the soul, but only uplift it (191). This superiority of natural beauty apparently stems from its freedom from human frivolity and corruption, making it an unadulterable beauty whose moral content (since Kant sees beauty as a symbol of morality) is unassailable. Kant's explicit reason for denying the aesthetic purity of judgments of art is that they necessarily involve essential reference to concepts (at the very least the concept of a work of art), while the aesthetic judgment is held to be free from any conceptual constraints on the pleasure we take in an object, free from any reference to conceptual knowledge of what the thing should be. But the exclusion of such conceptual knowledge also seems a handy device for excluding from taste all the social differences expressed in the comparative possession and lack of such knowledge; and it is striking that in the same section where Kant unfavorably contrasts art to natural beauty, he describes its pleasure as dependent not only on

112

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

aesthetic form but "at the same time culture" (191). Thus, Kant's pure aesthetic of natural beauty cannot help but present a far more cogent case for foundational aesthetic naturalism than Hume can provide with his emphasis on art. But, as we shall now see, his project exhibits the same problematic and fate as Hume's, implicitly but necessarily incorporating the idea of social privilege on which it both relies and founders. In the face of the obvious actual divergence of judgments of taste, Kant, like Hume, is striving to establish the idea of an aesthetic judgment which can claim the universal and necessary assent of humankind without the aid of any illegitimate coercive structure foreign to and repressively imposed on human nature and violating its proper freedom. The normative aesthetic judgment or standard of taste must again be reconciled with the "autonomy of the Subject" which Kant insists is of the very essence of taste. 14 The dialectical tension between the conflicting needs of personal freedom and more-than-personal authoritative standards for conformity and consensus not only looms pervasively throughout the subtext of Kant's Critique but strikingly surfaces in the text. The freedom/law tension is clearly manifested in Kant's crucial notion of the "free play of the cognitive faculties" (specifically imagination and understanding) which provides the pleasure on which positive aesthetic judgment is based. It turns out, however, that such free play is not entirely free. Freedom of imagination is limited by the constraints of "general conformity to law of the understanding"; its "free play of the powers of representation . . . [is] subject, however, to the condition that there is nothing for understanding to take exception to" (86, 88). Nonetheless, Kant tries to safeguard freedom by insisting that understanding's law to which freedom is subjected is not one that is explicitly formulated through concepts as "a definite law." Yet, the aporia of freedom versus law is more reformulated than resolved by his description of imagination's "free conformity to 14

Kant says that "this universality [of taste] is not to be based on a collection of votes and interrogation of others as to what sort of sensations they experience, but is to rest, as it were, upon an autonomy of the Subject passing judgment on the feeling of pleasure (in the given representation), i.e., upon his own taste. . . . [The judgment of taste) is required to be an independent judgment of the individual himself. . . . Taste lays claim simply to autonomy. To make the judgments of others the determining ground of one's own would be heteronomy" (135-7).

Of the scandal of taste

113

law of the understanding" as "only a conformity to law without a law/7 a notion which (unless it is understood as mere nonnormative accidental coincidence) is as absurd as the idea of following a rule where none exists. 15 The tension between imaginative freedom and the law of understanding to which it must (yet paradoxically freely) submit is a mental microcosm of the real sociopolitical drama of taste played out between the free individual and the social authority that lays down the law of taste. The essentially political and class-related character of the problem of taste is effectively suppressed under the weight of Kant's transcendental aesthetic naturalism (which locates taste in the supersensible stratum of human nature). But it finally emerges, as if an inessential afterthought expressed in a rather muted and indirect manner, in the "Appendix" to the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" (226-7). Here Kant's discussion of taste is led from "the freedom of the imagination in its very conformity to law" to the social "problem of bringing freedom (and therefore equality also) into a union with constraining force (more that of respect and dutiful submission than of fear)." This problem is identified with the tension between "the more cultured and ruder sections of the community," the former representing "law-directed constraint," the latter "free nature." Kant recommends the good taste of ancient times as "a happy union" of compromise between the two, "that mean between higher culture and the modest worth of nature, that forms for taste also, as a sense common to all mankind, that true standard which no universal rules can supply." But at the same time he not only insists on the necessity for taste of a "sound preparatory education" and "the culture of moral feeling and moral ideas" but notes that with the progress of time the force of "nature will ever recede farther into the background" in determining taste. Here Kant comes closest to recognizing that taste not only requires culture but is based on cultural difference and can only sustain its claim to refinement by its distinction from the more "natural" character and preferences of the "ruder sections of the community." But, of course, his 15

In much the same way Kant later tries to maintain both imagination's freedom and its submission to understanding's law by saying that its subsumption is not under understanding's concepts, but "under the faculty of concepts, i.e., the understanding" itself (143). But again, making the law and its source more vague and remote does nothing to render conformity to it free.

114

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

dominant and explicit line is quite the opposite, viz. a naturalism whose standard of taste is one to which all humans by their very nature should all freely agree. Yet his naturalistic solution is no more convincing than Hume's. Since Kant, like Hume, rejects the idea that beauty is a real inherent property of things, independent of human perception and pleasure, he cannot appeal to such a property as an ontological ground which would justify a true judgment of taste as objective and thus legitimate the demand for conformity of variant judgments to it. "The judgment of taste . . . denotes nothing in the object, but is a feeling [of pleasure or displeasure] which the Subject has of itself and of the manner in which it is affected by the representation" (41-2). Nor can Kant legitimate the demand for aesthetic conformity by appeal to the objectivity (and attendant normative universality) of concepts which inform aesthetic judgments, for he emphatically asserts that aesthetic judgments are made "independently of concepts." Thus their claimed "universality" or "validity for all men" "cannot spring from concepts," which may define perfection but not beauty. And since (given Kant's commitment to subjective autonomy) the universal validity of an aesthetic standard must not be seen as illegitimately imposed, he can only base it on "a claim to subjective universality" in human nature (51). The standard of taste to which variant judgments should conform is thus determined neither by the object itself nor by concepts (nor, heaven forbid, by the preference and distinction of the socially privileged) but by what lies deep in every subject and to which each subject should therefore freely or naturally conform. Rather must such a standard be sought in the element of mere nature in the Subject, which cannot be comprehended under rules or concepts, that is to say, the supersensible substrate of all the Subject's faculties (unattainable by any concept of understanding). . . . Thus alone is it possible for a subjective and yet universally valid principle a priori to lie at the basis of that finality [of taste, making "a warranted claim to being bound to please everyone"] for which no objective principle can be prescribed. (212-13) If taste's standard is found in human nature, it is found only in some abstract "supersensible substrate" of such nature, "unattainable" by our understanding. It thus cannot be really found or understood at all, but is rather posited with its putative substrate as a meta-

Of the scandal of taste

115

physical article of faith. Kant's aesthetic naturalism must resort in the end to a supersensible supernaturalism. It would, however, be unfair to fault Kant for consigning the standard of taste wholly to the realm of supersensible speculation. Like Hume with his good critics, Kant offers a more down-to-earth criterion for determining whose or which judgment of pleasure should count as representing the standard, as constituting a true judgment of taste to which all should conform. In principle any person's judgment should reflect the standard, but only provided the judgment is "pure," i.e., made under the proper conditions (147). The most crucial of these, of course, is disinterestedness. "Everyone must allow that a judgment on the beautiful which is tinged with the slightest interest is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste." Disinterestedness is defined as "indifference" to (or lack of "concern" for) "the real existence of the thing" judged, but also as freedom from want since "All interest presupposes a want, or calls one forth" (43, 49).16 But who, then, can afford to be disinterested? Who can take the time and trouble to peruse things closely with exclusive regard to their form and no regard at all to their instrumentality in satisfying one's wants and needs? Obviously only those who have the ease, leisure, and capacity to do so, those whose essential wants and needs are most adequately satisfied, those who have culturally acquired the unnatural aesthetic attitude of detachment from need, of consideration of form over substance, in short the socioeconomically and culturally privileged. Only they can meet the conditions of pure aesthetic judgment and set the standard of taste; and they can do so only so long as they maintain a self-satisfied unquestioning outlook 16

Pleasure from the satisfaction of an interest cannot be aesthetic for Kant, since it is not a free pleasure but dictated by the given interest, which "deprives the judgment on the object of its freedom/' Thus, "taste in the beautiful may be said to be the one and only disinterested and free delight; for with it, no interest, whether of sense or reason, extorts approval" (49). We can see here how closely Kant associated the realm of the aesthetic with freedom and individual autonomy, and thus how resistant he would be to any recognition that such autonomy needed to be coerced into consensus rather than freely and naturally issue in one. We should also note how the free disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment already implies Kant's other not merely logical (i.e., the moments of conceptless universality and necessity) criterion of a pure aesthetic judgment, viz. its concern with only the form of the object and total disregard of any possible purpose or use it may have, including any agreeable sensation, emotion, or charm it provides for us.

Il6

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

on this privileged attitude of detachment, which allows them to take pleasure in their sociocultural superiority by taking pleasure in ways unavailable to others. Hence, it is revealing to note that in introducing the notion of disinterestedness by distinguishing it from various interested reactions, Kant employs examples of figures which clearly underscore the link of taste with sociocultural privilege and distinction. Those who fail to adopt the aesthetic attitude to a palace are the "Iroquois sachem who said nothing in Paris pleased him better than the eating-houses/7 "a Rousseau" who demonstrates concern for the underprivileged by protesting "against the vanity of the great who spend the sweat of the people on such superfluous things," and someone "on an uninhabited island, without hope of ever again coming among men/ 7 totally deprived of society and thus deprived of any means of asserting his social distinction through his judgment of taste (43 ).17 The disinterested aesthetic attitude is thus not at all natural but instead a socially distinctive acquisition, presupposing and motivated by sociocultural distinction. Its claim to be natural and free from "prejudice" or "subjective personal conditions of judgment" and therefore to reflect "a universal standpoint" (152-3) is a tendentious philosophical move to conceal its own true character as a culturally privileged prejudice. Given the empirical diversity of taste, Kant can only posit its natural and necessary universality in a supersensible substrate; and he argues that this substrate must exist, since without it we could not properly explain the judgment of taste's presumption to universal and necessary assent. But this presumptive claim is very easily explained as reflecting the social fact that even so-called "pure" judgments of taste express (and are often made to express) sociocultural superiority, and as such demand and expect to command respect and assent. Even Kant's prime candidate for pure aesthetic appreciation, the appreciation of nature itself, turns out to be far from wholly natural but rather culturally dependent and acquired. His text not only suggests that we need a certain distance of security from the "terrifying" ravages of nature to appreciate their sublimity, but explicitly asserts that the sublime cannot be appreciated without culture's 17

All these figures are presented in the text through Kant's authorial persona imaginatively appropriating their standpoint for the sake of argument.

Of the scandal of taste

117

"development of moral ideas." Hence, "culture is requisite for the judgment upon the sublime in nature (more than for that upon the beautiful)" (115-16). But even the appreciation of "the beauty in nature is not in fact common" or natural to uncultured man. "It is peculiar to those whose habits of thought are already trained to the good or else are eminently susceptible of such training" (160). It is also peculiar to those who have been culturally trained to disregard in their appreciation of nature all its emotional and sensual charms but instead to confine themselves to the beauty of pure form; for to do otherwise is to display a taste reflective of "barbarism."18 Again, who can achieve this training and can afford to turn away from the easy delights of nature's charm for the more difficult and refined appreciation of its beauty? Only those who are already endowed with a life rich in ease and easy delights, and who therefore can take the trouble for more refined pleasures. Such pleasures of refinement Kant and Hume would like to see as in principle available to all, given that all humankind could be afforded the time and education to reach the level of refinement. This, of course, is the liberal dream of culture which still holds most of us humanists in a contented trance. It may seek support from an argument which rests on an analogy with objectivity in science. The fact that mathematical and scientific knowledge cannot be achieved without some measure of leisure and distance from life's urgent necessities does not render it an expression of class preference, does not preclude its being universally valid and in principle shareable by all. If this is so for science (and radical sociologists of knowledge would challenge this), why can't it hold as well for aesthetics? The problem, however, is that the analogy cannot work for Hume or Kant, since aesthetic value (unlike scientific or mathematical 18

"Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion for its delight, not to speak of adopting this as the measure of its approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism" (65). Given both these explicit and implicit admissions of the necessity of culture for the appreciation of natural beauty (rather than merely nature's charms|, one must reject Guyer's assertion that in "Kant's mature theory, it is hardly plausible to suppose that we must learn how to take pleasure in beauty, and thus that we should need education in society to do so." See P. Guyer, "Pleasure and Society in Kant's Theory of Taste/' in T. Cohen and P. Guyer (eds.), Essays in Kant's Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 21-54. The role of cultural education is, as we have seen, still more crucial and clearly recognized in the appreciation of beauty in fine art.

Il8

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

validity) rests not on the nature of objects or concepts but depends on the pleasure of subjects. Once we give up a platonistic aesthetic realism and seek to ground aesthetic value (wholly or even partly) in the response of subjects, there is no fixed yardstick or positive essence of good taste to allow universal convergence. Good taste and refinement then become ineluctably differential terms and are thus irremediably elitist, since they require for their continued meaning that they continually differentiate themselves from what is less refined or more common. 19 Such differentiation can be expressed by ever new differences in modes of aesthetically appropriating objects (which provides a partial explanation of the ever changing fashions in interpretation) and not merely by differences in the objects aesthetically valued. Let me conclude with a brief but necessary word of caution. I have argued that the Humean and Kantian projects of grounding aesthetic value in universal human nature not only fail but conversely demonstrate the inescapable sociocultural dimension of taste and its invariable linkage, at least in our Western civilization, with socioeconomic hierarchy and distinction. I do not think that other theories of aesthetic naturalism will be more successful (partly because the whole idea of any clear distinction between the natural and cultural is untenable),20 and I grudgingly admit that the linkage of taste and fine art with sociocultural distinction has been, at least in our culture, inescapable. Such an outlook might seem compelled to 19

20

An otherwise sympathetic reader of this paper objected that even if all good critics had to be socially privileged this would not imply that they could not be unprejudiced and that their evaluative judgments could not be objectively true to nature's standard of beauty. But apart from recalling the point that the so-called "natural standard" is simply society's prevailing (though continuously contested) standard of the natural, m y reply would be to insist that in a Gadamerian sense (implicit in both Hume's and Kant's accounts of good taste) a totally unprejudiced (i.e., unculturated) view would be a blind and unaesthetic one. Moreover, since the natural standard was defined not platonistically but in terms of universal sentiment while our actual notion of taste is essentially differential and distinctive, the whole idea of a natural universal taste is ridden with fundamental conflict. For a discussion of the philosophical problems in distinguishing the natural from the cultural and conventional, see R. Shusterman, "Convention: Variations on a Theme," Philosophical Investigations 9 (1986), 3 6 - 5 5 . For a more empirically based argument on how, with humankind, the cultural cannot be conceived as any sort of superficies detachable from and not partly formative of the natural and somatic, see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5 5 - 8 3 .

Of the scandal of taste

119

view the whole aesthetic enterprise and with it the most cherished objects of our artistic and cultural heritage as a testimony and mechanism of sociocultural privilege and repression, one which people seeking to liberate the less privileged should simply oppose and abjure. Though this view has considerable cogency, I am reluctant to endorse it. Its weakness seems to be its failure to recognize the complexities of art and its relations to society, as well as the complexities of social privilege (where artists and their intellectual audience, though culturally elite, are themselves subject to domination from the real centers of power and social privilege). Clearly art has served and can serve as an instrument of liberation and transformation, depending on how it is appropriated. Apart from its explicit criticisms of society, art provides examples of alien social worlds, ways of life, and discursive structures, which can help us realize that our own socially entrenched practices are neither necessary nor ideal. Moreover, it can be used (borrowing Bourdieu;s term) as highly valued "symbolic capital" to challenge the stranglehold on our society of economic capital and its ideology of instrumental reason and financial profit. Finally, there is the hope that popular art, once recognized as genuine art, can help overcome the long-standing identification of aesthetic taste with class privilege. All these claims need, of course, to be fleshed out and defended. Our critique of naturalistic theories of taste has thus issued in the need for a new "Apologie for Poetry"; not as in former times against the charge that art is deceitful or frivolous, but rather that it is elitist and oppressive. This is a pressing task for contemporary aesthetics, but one which I cannot further pursue here. 21 21

I treat this matter in considerable detail in Pragmatist Aesthetics, chs. i, 2, 6, and 7.

DAVID SUMMERS

4

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

In this paper I offer an interpretation of what Immanuel Kant regarded as a central formulation in his Critique of Judgment, a formulation which, despite the importance Kant attached to it, seems to have been little considered by his recent interpreters.1 The assumption underlying my interpretation is that when Kant defined taste as a kind of common sense his arguments belonged to the long tradition of the idea of internal sensation, which had worked its way from Greek philosophy - principally the De anima and Parva naturalia of Aristotle - through Arabic philosophy and European thought of the Middle Ages, on into modern times. Recent readings of Kant's Critique of Judgment ignore his demonstration and characterization of a sensus communis aestheticus, no doubt because the faculty psychology to which the internal senses were fundamental has in general been in poor standing in the modern period (although it is everywhere to be found in ordinary language). Also, "common sense" as a philosophical criterion, while it certainly has had its supporters, has just as certainly had its detractors, especially in matters of aesthetics. Both the idea of common sense and its tradition were much more complex than modern treatments of the term allow, however. I will argue that Kant adapted and synthesized a number of traditional meanings of common sense, uniting them at 1

Between the writing of this paper and its final preparation for publication I have read R. A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago and London, 1990), in which common sense is given central importance and other literature regarding the meaning of the idea in Kant is reviewed. Makkreel argues that between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment imagination becomes "reflective judgment" and that this judgment "provides the basis for both a teleological description of nature and I2O

Why did Kant call taste a ''common sense"?

121

the highest level in a new, transcendental version of a "public" or "social" sense. His formulation applied in fundamental ways to the deeply rhetorical discourse of classical Western art, to which the question of the relation of art to audience was central. 2 The modern audience for art emerged in the eighteenth century, and Kant's contribution to the critical questions surrounding this emergence defined the audience for art as potentially universal. By defining taste as a common sense in the way he did, Kant believed he had provided the basis for a new universal discourse at once of feeling, tolerance, and enlightenment. THE INTERNAL SENSES

1 shall begin by briefly reviewing the largely forgotten notion of "internal sensation." The "internal senses" were posited to fill the gap between the five senses and the intellect. As intermediaries between sense and intellect, they explained our various and myriad

2

the interpretation of history" (p. 169); in this scheme the sensus communis is "orientational." According to Makkreel (p. 155), Kant argued for two kinds of orientation. One is "the nature-orienting function of the imagination . . . presupposed by all its other functions." However, because imagination is also reflective, the intimation of purpose in aesthetic judgment provides a higher, analogous orientation toward the transcendental realm. Aesthetic experience orients us to "the world on the basis of the feeling of life"; this higher, teleological orientation permits us to interpret culture on the basis of the sensus communis. Makkreel thus understands the sensus communis as a social sense and differs from Gadamer, who argued that Kant had severed the sensus communis from its traditional roots "in the moral and civic community." Makkreel rejects this criticism, arguing that sensus communis, as the social aspect of reflective judgment, in fact provides the transcendental basis for the interpretation of nature (as opposed to culture) from within, placing aesthetic and teleological judgment in relation to practical reason. In general, Makkreel is at pains to show that, contra Dilthey and Husserl, Kant's sensus communis, and the "orientations" to which it is integral, locate judgment in the "life-world" separate from the world of the physical sciences. I agree with Makkreel's insistence upon the importance of sensus communis for Kant and I agree that for Kant sensus communis and a more general Gemeinsinn are continuous with one another. I will argue that Kant's ideas of inner sense and imagination are dependent upon long traditions of the meaning of sensus communis, with which neither Gadamer nor Makkreel is primarily concerned. Kant's characterization of sensus communis as "orientational" is to my mind deeply continuous with this tradition, but it would require another essay to explain why this is so. For a discussion of art and public in relation to eighteenth-century art, see T. E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London, 1985); and J. Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt

122

DAVID SUMMERS

preintellectual powers in particular.3 The list of the internal senses varied from writer to writer. In the fullest version there were six, but the number was usually smaller, and there was endless discussion concerning their functions and interrelations. The first of the internal senses was the sensus communis, the one especially at issue here, which, according to Aristotle, was a single center upon which the data of the five external senses converged; it organized the data of these five senses, collated the "common sensibles" (that is, the qualities apprehended by more than one of the senses, such as size, shape, and movement), and was a higher "sense" aware of sensation, hence a kind of reflective sensation, which "sees that we see." As what might be called the power to make sense of sensation, the common sense was often linked with imaginatio, a term which more or less explicitly characterized the process of making sense as the process of forming images, if not for the "mind's eye," then at least for the surveillance of the higher mental faculties. As the power to make images, imaginatio was close (but usually not the same as) phantasia, the power to make internal images of things not present, of things in the past, or of nonexistent things, like centaurs. Phantasia in turn was closely related to the thesaurus of memoria, in which images were stored. Estimatio was the power to apprehend what was not actually available in sensation, the usual example being the sheep that instinctively knows the ferocity of the wolf. Cogitatio, the highest of the internal senses, was the general faculty of thinking with images. The whole system of the internal senses, often identified with a highest, most inclusive, and summarizing faculty, cogitation, but also sometimes with imagination or common sense, was often called the "particular intellect," because it embraced all those fac-

3

(New Haven and London, 1986). The idea of "the public" and of a "public sense" could be inclusive or exclusive, and it is most important to recognize that these were major terms of critical discussion regardless of the purposes to which they were turned in one or another instance. I will argue that Kant considered his sensus communis aestheticus to be in principle perfectly inclusive. Kant wrote at one point [Werke [Berlin, 1968], V, p. 293, §40) that by sensus communis (or Gemeinsinn) one should understand "the Idea eines gemeinschaftlichen Sinnes." On the history of the idea of internal sensation, see D. Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1987), with additional references and bibliography. The idea of internal sensation has a rich and characteristic modern history, which has yet to be written.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

123

ulties dealing with the particular - the realm of sensation, experience, fantasy, and relative knowledge - as opposed to the intellect proper, which deals with the general and with absolute knowledge. The various activities of the particular intellect, which of course guide us through most of the business of our lives, were not thought to be activities of reason proper, but were nonetheless activities of the human rational soul that, in addition to their obvious usefulness, prepared sensation for the scrutiny of intellect and were therefore literally and positively prerational. The internal senses were usually localized according to the Galenic scheme of the three ventricles of the brain. Those prerational faculties closest to sensation {imaginatio, phantasia, sensus communis) were placed in the front ventricle of the brain, behind the eyes; those closest to reason [estimatio, cogitatio, but also often the sensus communis) were placed in the middle ventricle, with memoria "in the back of our mind/7 Belief in the system of internal sense flourished into the eighteenth century and continued to be associated with relative or "confused" knowledge (which might be "clear" in a quasi-optical sense but could not be "distinct," that is, could not be like knowledge gained through analysis). Confused knowledge was also associated with that universal, prephilosophical understanding of the world arising from and adequate to the conduct of everyday life. Thomas Reid, for example, insisted that "distinct" philosophical thinking should have a basis in "confused" particular understanding, that is, in common sense.4 Alexander Baumgarten based his "aesthetics" on the same distinction, defining his new branch of philosophy as the study of the lower part of the cognitive powers.5 Kant also clearly recognized this distinction and made free and fundamentally important use of the categories of internal sense and its attendant lan4

5

See, among many examples, Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. B. A. Brody (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1969), pp. 546-7. Sensation yields a "complex and confused" notion of all the qualities of things together. In making judgments about these things, we distinguish, for example, color from figure and both from magnitude. These judgments yield the self-evident, the basis of common sense and its inferences, as well as the basis for still higher modes of thought. Thus, for example, we have an intuitive basis for geometry that precedes the science of geometry, and relative to which arguments of the science of geometry may rightly be regarded as absurd. See Summers, Judgment of Sense, pp. 195-7-

124

DAVID SUMMERS

guage. As we shall see, Kant rejected Baumgarten's identification of the aesthetic and the confused; but when he did so, he did not reject the idea of internal sense, nor did he give up the distinction between the confused and the distinct. Kant moved rather to another version of the same system, which he deeply transformed and set on a new historical path. The internal senses performed the indispensable and literally crucial function of accommodating sensation to intellect, of somehow making the immediately apprehended world also thinkable. On the terrain of internal sense, sensations became the "intentions" and "concepts" that effected this link and metamorphosis. Early on in the discussion of internal sensation al-Farabi defined intentions (as his Arabic terms were translated into Latin) as concepts or thoughts that must be considered both in relation to things outside the soul and in relation to words; and Avicenna defined an intention as what the soul apprehends about sensible things not first apprehended by exterior sense, or, to put it another way, form is apprehended by exterior sense, but intentions are apprehended only by interior sense. In general, what were called "first intentions" were close to sensation, to the thing apprehended as the first object of mind; "second intentions" involved more abstract relations.6 So began a long and complex scholastic discussion which, if often unrewardingly technical and difficult, bore on the central question not only of the relation of mind to the world but of logic and language to the world. As we shall see, it is a discussion that has clear relevance to Kant's notion of the relation between imagination and understanding as aspects of intuition; both imagination and understanding are facets of the same prism but involve very different activities of the mind necessary for the transformation of sensation to concept. COMMON SENSE AND OPTICS

I wish now to examine a text which seems to me to throw light both upon the changes Kant made in the idea of internal sensation and, more generally, upon the central problem to which Kant's whole 6

On intentions, see The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100-1600, ed. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (Cambridge, 1982], pp. 479-95.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

125

critical philosophy was meant to offer a solution. This is from his Inaugural Dissertation: In a representation of sense there is first of all something which you might call the matter, namely, the sensation, and there is also something which can be called the form, namely the species of the sensibles which arises according as the various things which affect the senses are coordinated by a certain natural law of the mind. . . . For objects do not strike the senses in virtue of their form or species. So, for the various things in an object which affect the sense to coalesce into some representational whole there is needed an internal principle in the mind by which those various things may be clothed with a certain species in accordance with stable and innate laws.7 First of all, Kant is not using "species" in a logical sense but rather in a sense akin to its original Latin meaning of "that which is seen/7 a term related to specto, spectare, "to look/7 or speculum, "mirror.77 Species were reified in premodern theories of vision, in which they were regarded as actual shapes, images deriving from things that were in some way transmitted to (or taken by) the eye, providing the basis for the abstraction of intelligible forms. Kant explicitly denies this reification of species, which he separates from sensation; he is arguing that things do not simply come to us as forms (or species), but rather that they come to us in need of formation (or "specification77). This is a difference from the classical view of the matter as deep as it is simple. Aristotle, initiating a long tradition, defined sensation as the apprehension of form without matter, using the metaphor of a signet ring pressed into wax.8 In this view the relation of sensation to its 7

8

Quoted in R. E. Aquila, "A New Look at Kant's Aesthetic Judgments," in Essays in Kant's Aesthetics, ed. T. Cohen and P. Guyer (Chicago and London, 1982), p. 103, n. 13, with further references. In the first sentence I have left the Latin species in place of the translator's "specificity." And see Kant, Werke, II, p. 393. The last sentence reads: "Nam per formam seu speciem obiecta sensus non feriunt; ideoque, ut varia obiecti sensum afficientia in totum aliquod repraesentationis coalescant, opus est interno mentis principio, per quod varia ilia secundum stabiles et innateas leges speciem quandam induant." I understand the insistence on species at the very end to mean that the mind fashions appearance itself "in accordance with stable and innate laws." Aristotle, De anima, \%\&\ jH. {On the Soul, Parva naturalia, On Breath, tr. W. S. Hett [Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1975], pp. 136-7). Although the example is visual, Aristotle continues that "sense is affected by that which has colour, or flavor, or sound, but by it, not qua having a certain identity, but qua having a

126

DAVID SUMMERS

object is both iconic and indexical; that is, sensation is both an image and an immediate consequence of its object. Kant is saying that the relation is indexical, only the immediate consequence, and not necessarily iconic; that is, he is saying that there is no substantial relation of resemblance between a sensation and its object. Objects, he says, "do not strike the senses in virtue of their form or species/' What does he mean by this? I believe that the argument is fundamentally optical or, better, that it derives from a specifically optical understanding well established by the time Kant wrote his seemingly merely scholastic arguments. Modern optics, which developed from Alhazen's eleventh-century Book of Optics, translated from Arabic into Latin in the early thirteenth century, was based upon the combination of Greek geometric optics with a theory of light and its propagation according to which each point on a surface emits rays along an infinite number of noninterfering straight lines. The eye selects from all this dazzle those rays that strike perpendicularly to tangents passing through points along its curved surface. According to this geometry of light and the eye, it is in principle possible to describe exactly the transfer of a surface facing the eye to the surfaces of the eye itself.9 At first blush it would seem that this model for vision would simply have established the authority once and for all of the sense of sight, which is capable of such precise transcriptions of its object. But it also had another fundamental implication. Nominalists were quick to see that if patterns of light were transmitted to the eye with demonstrable geometric regularity, then it was not necessary to suppose — as it long had been - that the form (or species) of an object was itself an entity somehow transmitted to the mind via sensation, and particularly by vision.10 The abandonment of this supposition became the progressive position, especially the scientific position,

9

10

certain quality/7 This formulation would continue to press the question of the nature of species. It is, for example, easy to imagine what the species of a dog might be, since "species" is more or less a synonym for visible shape, but it is not so easy to imagine what the species of a flavor or sound might be. On Alhazen, see D. C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Alkindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), pp. 60-86; and The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham: Books I-III on Direct Vision, tr. A. I. Sabra, 2 vols. (London, 1989). See also Summers, Judgment of Sense, pp. 153-7. K. Tachau, "The Problem of the Species in Medio at Oxford in the Generation after Ockham," Medieval Studies 44 (1982); 394-443.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

127

and raised all kinds of questions about how we apprehend and think about the world. Abstraction, after all, was largely the abstraction of the form, beginning with the separation of form from matter in sensation and continuing in the successive parsing out of "pure form/7 of the object insofar as it was intelligible. How was intellection to be explained without form?11 An influential examination of this problem is provided by Descartes's Optics. Descartes pungently illustrated the account of light and vision I have just summarized with the example of a vat of halfpressed grapes with two holes drilled in the bottom. Just as liquid from the top of the vat will flow as if in straight lines toward the holes when they are opened, so the energy from the sun (or any other visible thing) travels as if in straight lines into our eyes when they are opened. Sight is thus the result of a kind of pressure upon the eye, and it is not necessary to suppose, Descartes argued, "that there is anything in these objects which is similar to the ideas of the sensations that we have of them: just as nothing comes out of the bodies that a blind man senses which must be transmitted along the length of the stick into his hand; and as the resistance of the movement of these bodies, which is the sole cause of the sensations he has of them, is nothing like the ideas he forms of them. And by this means your mind will be delivered from all those small images flitting through the air, called intentional species, which worry the imagination of Philosophers so much/'12 In the following sections of the Optics Descartes continues to press his attack on the notion that sight somehow apprehends the forms of things. "Observing that a picture can easily stimulate our minds to conceive the objects painted there, it seemed to them [the Philosophers] that in the same way, the mind should be stimulated by little pictures which form in our head to conceive of those objects that touch our sense; instead, we should consider that there are many other things besides pictures which can stimulate our 11

12

On the Aristotelian notion of abstraction, see J. Weinberg, "Abstraction in the Formation of Concepts/' in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. P. P. Wiener (New York, 1968], I, pp. 1-9. R. Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, ed. P. J. Olscamp (Indianapolis, 1965), p. 68; for further examples, see N. L. Maull, "Cartesian Optics and the Geometrization of Nature," Review of Metaphysics 32, no. 2 (1978): 253-73.

128

DAVID SUMMERS

thought, such as, for example, signs and words, which do not in any way resemble the things they signify/' He subsequently retreats from the implication that there is no resemblance at all between objects and sensations of them, arguing instead that there is limited resemblance, iconic traces and fragments in the overall indexical impression. To illustrate this he uses the example of engravings, which, "being made of nothing but a little ink placed here and there on the paper, represent to us forests, towns, men and even battles and storms, even though among an infinity of diverse qualities which they make us conceive in their objects, only in shape is there actually any resemblance/' Even shapes in vision, however, do not simply represent, because, according to the rules of perspective, we must show squares as diamonds and circles as ovals. "Now we must think in the same way about the images that are formed in our brain, and we must note that it is only a question of knowing how they can enable the mind to perceive all the diverse qualities of the objects to which they refer; not of knowing how the images themselves resemble their objects/713 Descartes provides another vivid example, this time an experiment in which an eye is taken from "a newly deceased man, or, for want of that, of an ox or some other large animal" and in effect made into the lens for a camera obscura. The eye is opened at the back in such a way that its fluids are not lost, and a translucent membrane is placed over the opening. It is then fitted as a tiny window into a darkened room. In this room the experimenter will see, "not perhaps without admiration and pleasure," "a picture which will represent in natural perspective all the objects which will be outside of it." This image will have certain defects and distortions. The first is that the center will be in better focus than the rest of the picture; the second is that the image will be inverted; and the third is that things will be "diminished and foreshortened - some more, some less owing to the various distances and positions of the things they represent, much in the same manner as in a picture done in perspective." Descartes concludes from this that although the picture "in being so transmitted into our heads always retains some resemblance to the 13

Descartes, Optics, pp. 89-90; and see the critique of these arguments in Reid, Essays, pp. 145-52.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

129

objects from which it proceeds, nevertheless . . . we must not hold that it is by means of this resemblance that the picture causes us to perceive the objects, as if there were yet other eyes in our brain with which we could apprehend it; but rather, that it is the movements of which the picture is composed which, acting immediately on our mind inasmuch as it is united to our body, are so established by nature as to make it have such perceptions. . . . there need be no resemblance between the ideas that the mind conceives and the movements which cause these ideas."14 Although there is of course a long and dense history of both philosophy and science between Descartes and Kant, the problem to which they are addressing themselves is much the same. And to return to Kant's dissertation, his statements may now be more clearly understood. He accepts the principle that "objects do not strike the senses in virtue of their form or species/' We are subject to the forces of nature, which act upon us in sensation. Matter in this view is not simply the stuff of the external world; it is rather the potential arising from the interaction between the forces of nature and our senses. Kant steers clear of any question of resemblance and adopts a principle similar to Descartes's last conclusion, that "there need be no resemblance between the ideas that the mind conceives and the movements which cause these ideas/' If there is form, then, and it does not arise from the external world, it can only arise from the mind itself. Mind itself is the principle of form in that it shapes the "matter" of sensation, re-presenting the world according to "a certain natural law." Given the merely indexical relation between the mind and the physical world, there must be "an internal principle in the mind by which . . . things may be clothed with a certain species in accordance with stable and innate laws." This conclusion provides the thesis for Kant's "Copernican revolution" in critical philosophy and for the vast modern intellectual tradition descending in one way or another from it. It thus opens the way to both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment.15 14 15

Descartes, Optics, pp. 91-101. These arguments are repeated with variations in Part I of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" of the Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. K. Smith (London and New York, 1963)/ PP- 65-6.

I3O

DAVID SUMMERS SENSUS COMMUNIS AESTHETICUS

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant presents his arguments concerning the judgment of taste as the solution to what he regards as a paradox. Why do we feel that judgments of taste, which are about particular things and relations, are in some sense universal? Or why do we feel that they ought to be? If judgments of taste have a "definite objective principle/7 he argues, then they would, like cognitive judgments, possess unconditional necessity and be simply communicable; on the other hand, if they have no such principle at all, like judgments of the sense of taste (which like the judgments of the other individual senses can afford us only "pleasures of enjoyment" rather than the properly aesthetic pleasures of "reflection"), then they would have no necessity at all and would not be communicable. Instead of being like either cognitive judgments or judgments of the five external senses, judgments of taste, because of their peculiar union of the particular and the universal, must arise from a principle .whose universality is to be found in subjectivity itself; "they must have a subjective principle which determines what pleases or displeases only by feeling and not by concepts, but yet with universal validity."16 It is important to keep in mind that Kant's argument proceeds from the assumption that we do in fact make judgments of taste most of them very uncomplicated, as when we enjoy the beauty of flowers - and that these judgments are experienced as mixing the particular and the universal. Judgments of taste are always what Kant calls "exemplary," by which he means simply ostensive - that flower is beautiful - and at the same time we feel the object of our judgment to be as it ought to be, as if it were "an example of a universal rule that we cannot state," a universal rule that seems able to demand the assent of everyone. In order for such judgments to be possible for us, Kant concludes that there must be a subjective principle, which he calls a "common sense." Kant immediately explains what he does not mean by this conclusion; he does not mean to refer to "common understanding," which 16

I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), §20. Subsequent references to this work will be abbreviated to Cf followed by section numbers.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

131

is sometimes called "sensus communis." Not only does "common understanding" judge by concepts rather than by feeling, as taste does, but the concepts by which it judges are "obscure." Kant evidently means to add a necessary distinction to that between the "confused" and the "distinct." As we have seen, "confused" preanalytic concepts are not "distinct," but they may be "clear," in which case they may "stand to reason" and provide an adequate basis for the judgments necessary to conduct our lives. But the concepts of "common understanding" may be the opposite of clear, that is, obscure (or dimmed, to continue the visual metaphor) by habitual misconception - by ignorance, prejudice, or superstition. Kant will finally argue for a purified, transcendental notion of common sense, and he wishes to distinguish it at the outset from what might more properly be called common opinion, an obviously faulty criterion. In fact, the definition of common sense upon which he settles is not only different from common opinion but provides a fundamental means by which the latter may be "clarified." Kant also specifies that the common sense he wishes to define is not an external sense, by which he means that it is an internal sense, and it is thus within the long tradition of the idea of internal sensation that he wishes to lodge his definition. And it now becomes clear why he defines common sense as "the effect resulting from the free play of our cognitive powers" and why the judgment of taste is "a feeling (of internal sense) of that harmony in the play of the mental powers, so far as it can be felt in sensation."17 It is also clear why Kant treats "common understanding" and internal sensation as opposites. Common sense cannot be common understanding because understanding concerns concepts, and the judgment of taste has nothing to do with concepts, whether they are obscure, confused, or distinct. The common sense to which Kant wishes to point the way is preconceptual, or, to put it in other terms, the judgment of taste arises from our delight in the play of the "internal" faculties between sensation and understanding, the play resulting in the formation of the concept. The judgment of taste is thus integral with the primary organization of the "matter" of sensation, which is immediate but prior to the formation of the concept. Some objects 15.

132

DAVID SUMMERS

make us reflectively aware of the activity and interrelations of the faculties that shape the world as we know it, and such objects we call "beautiful." As we have seen in passing, the common sense had always been associated with the imagination, not so much with our capacity to call up images of the absent or nonexistent as with the power corresponding to the prior necessity that the common sense unify and organize the various data of the five external senses, data disparate but alike in being sensation, that is, in being essentially one thing for a central faculty. In general, the external senses were themselves ranked, sight being highest and most like intellect. For that reason the common sense was thought to "make sense" of sensation by making an image of it, an activity not easily distinguishable from immediate reflective self-awareness, from "seeing that we see." In the Critique of Pure Reason the reflective aspect of imagination is little developed, whereas it provides much of the substance of the Critique of Judgment. In the first Critique Kant calls imagination "a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious."18 It is immediately evident, however, that this function is "blind" somewhat in the sense that a mirror gathering light on its surface is blind. The determination of the surface itself, which entails structure and orientation, is itself the basis for synthesis in its etymological sense of composition, placing together. From the beginning, then, imagination for Kant is not passive but active, and since, as I have argued above, Kant did not believe that imagination could simply be a mirror of the world but that the first contact of the world and sense is indexical rather than iconic, the synthetic and therefore judgmental powers of imagination were correspondingly magnified. It is in this first reflection - or, perhaps better, refraction - of the world into the mind through "inner sense" that the spatiotemporal world of our experience is first constituted 18

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 112. Avicenna, with many followers, closely linked the sensus communis with imaginatio or phantasia-, see Summers, Judgment of Sense, pp. 96-7, 159. Marsilio Ficino, commenting on Plotinus, juxtaposed "sensus exterior, in partes quinque divisus" and "sensus intimus atque simplex, imaginatio." See E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York and London, 1962], p. 136. The pervasiveness of this scheme must be stressed and these citations are intended merely to illustrate the tradition to which Kant's arguments belong.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

133

in the way we are able to know it. In the spatiotemporalization of the world by inner sense imagination assumes prodigious formative powers. Not only must it synthesize, but it must have a capacity like memory to remember and associate what is present with what has gone before. This also was a traditional power of common sense. Kant's adaptation and transformation of the traditional scheme of internal sensation, however, effected a pivotal shift of this tradition into characteristically modern patterns of thought. Kant distinguished between the imagination as "spontaneous (as the author of arbitrary forms and possible intuitions)" and the imagination "subject to the laws of association/' 19 The spontaneous imagination works directly upon sensation; its synthesis of the world as spatiotemporal is also a synthesis in terms of Aristotle's "common sensibles" (movement, rest, shape, magnitude, number, unity, and time),20 which, as late medieval authors were to clarify, are all reducible to magnitude and therefore intrinsically mathematical, 21 so that the absolute basis of spontaneous imagination and that of mathematics (especially geometry) are the same. 22 (The association of imagination - or inner sense - with common sensibles, it may be noted, is consistent with Kant's argument that composition and form are more important than color, which, arising from exter19 20

21 22

cj, 22. Aristotle, De anima, 425315; on time as a common sensible, see idem, De memoria et reminiscentia, 45039-14. Summers, Judgment of Sense, p. 159. I have followed D. W. Crawford, "Kant's Theory of Creative Imagination," in Essays in Kant's Aesthetics, p. 151. The transformation of Aristotle's common and special sensibles into the primary and secondary qualities of early modern science and philosophy would amply repay full analysis. Since in Aristotle special and common sensation together make up sensation [aisthesis], it is not surprising that aesthetic issues came to be part of the discussion. As noted by J. Mann ("Beauty and Objectivity in Thomas Reid," British Journal of Aesthetics 28, no. 2 [1988]: 119-31), Reid treated the question of taste in relation to the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, comparing beauty mostly to the former. Although (p. 124) Mann notes that primary qualities "possess what might be called intersensory verifiability," he does not note a relation to common sensibles. This is perhaps because of the transformation of the idea of common sense effected by Reid himself. In Aristotle and the long tradition following him, the common sensibles are somehow apprehended through the special sensibles. Color, for example, is apprehended through and as some magnitude or shape of the object by another magnitude, that of the actual organ of sensation. This relation made necessary the positively formative function of the common sense as the imagination. Reid changed this relation, saying in effect that we just do apprehend magni-

134

DAVID SUMMERS

nal sense, is the source of mere charm.) 23 In any instance the play of spontaneous imagination is thus the play of preconceptual spatial relations in time, the metaphor of play fusing the spatial and temporal dimensions of imaginative synthesis; and again, the common sense as that which sees that we see links space both to selfconsciousness and to the absolute spatiotemporal location and orientation of that self-consciousness. I have mentioned in passing that the "judgment" of a faculty is defined by the faculty itself, and I wish now to consider more carefully what that means. Kant is drawing upon the long and broad tradition according to which the pleasure (or judgment) of a sense consists in something's being found to be in harmony with the structure of the sense itself. The eye, for example, in such a view, finds moderate light pleasing because it functions best in such light, finding too bright light painful, dazzling, or even blinding, just as too little light darkens vision or prevents it altogether. At the same time that sight finds pleasure in moderate light - or "judges" moderate light to be the best - it also reveals itself to be a mean or ratio. 24 Kant extended this understanding of the proportionality of an external sense and a much more complex "internal sense," but the principle is still the same. Proportion to sense yields pleasure, and the pleasure we take in the accommodation of sensation to the constructive activity of spontaneous imagination is aesthetic pleasure, which is thus continuous with the possibility and process of cognition altogether; "a given object by means of sense excites the imagination to collect the manifold, and the imagination in its turn excites the understanding."25 Common sensation is immediate reaction and, more than that, is the actual organization of the world as an image. But at an equally immediate reflective level, the "given object" is also encountered as proportional, neutral or disproportional in relation to the structure and process of intuition itself.

23

tudes (extended objects in optically describable Cartesian and Newtonian space) and thus common sense becomes the faculty by means of which judgments are made about the world as intuited. In the case of objects, which are mathematically describable, the relatively confused apprehension of primary qualities may be made distinct, by measure and by mathematical analysis, but secondary qualities, which Reid thought could not be so described, were inherently more confused and subjective. Beauty, according to Reid, was more like a primary quality and was relatively objective. C/, 14. 2 4 C/, 20. 2 5 Ibid.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

135

This reflective judgment manifested in pleasure is richly implicative. Again, it is the common sense that first "sees that we see," linking spatiotemporal orientation to self-consciousness. It is also I who see that I see, and it is I who may grasp the free play of the faculty of spontaneous imagination evident in the judgment of taste as indicative of my own freedom in opposition to the necessity of external nature. Sensation might be imagined as stimulating the continual formation and transformation of mental crystals in space and time, which are themselves the matrices for any possible such crystallization. This relational play is literally suggestive in that it precedes and implies the formation and specification - that is, the becoming a species, a "visible" form - of the concept, although in itself it remains preconceptual. The judgment of taste, then, is grounded in the immediate interaction of the faculty of sense-making with the world, and it is only if there is such an interaction, Kant argues, "that the judgment of taste may be laid down."26 There must be such an interaction - and therefore the faculty for such an interaction - if what we call aesthetic pleasure actually occurs. It is from this point that Kant proceeds to the question of whether or not there is further reason to believe that there is in fact such a thing as a common sense. It is important to stress that Kant wishes to argue that we must infer a common sense from the fact that we do make aesthetic judgments, rather than deducing the character of aesthetic judgments from the presumed existence of a common sense. It would land us in mere skepticism, he argues, not to suppose that "cognitions and judgments must, along with the conviction that accompanies them, admit of universal communicability" because otherwise it would be impossible to distinguish what we encounter from a "mere subjective play of the representative powers."27 By "universal communicability" Kant seems to mean that we are able to say that something is there as if it were there for everyone. If that is the case, then it must also follow that the fit, the "proportion," we experience between an object and our cognitive powers seems also to be communicable in the same sense. When we judge something to be beautiful we do not feel as if an 26

Summers, Judgment of Sense, pp. 54-62.

27

C], 21.

136

DAVID SUMMERS

alternative judgment is possible, which follows from the simple absoluteness of the judgment itself; we not only have a feeling of pleasure of a certain kind, but we also feel that no one could have another feeling, much as we feel that no one could deny the presence of the object itself. We experience the judgment of the beautiful as common, not as private. This putatively common judgment, however, cannot be grounded on experience alone (since then it would be like a mere judgment of sense, like touch or smell), and the common sense must be offered in general as an explanation for a kind of judgment that implies an "ought." At the level of common sense we are at a first remove from sensation (as we are according to the whole tradition of the idea of common sense), and whereas our judgment of the presence of an object might be felt to demand universal assent, our judgment arising from the compatibility of the object with our first powers of cognition demands assent of a different kind. Again, we do not feel that everyone must agree with our judgment, but rather that everyone should agree. The common sense implied by the judgments of taste provides a norm which, although without further sanction, seems to give me the right "to make into a rule for everyone a judgment that accords" with mine and with the satisfaction in an object I express in such a judgment. 28 Thus, Kant concludes, the principle which concerns the agreement of different judging persons must be thought of not simply as subjective but as universally subjective in the sense that it is grounded in the very structure of subjectivity. In this conclusion common sense begins to take on another of its traditional connotations, this time from outside the strictly psychological system of the internal senses, by referring to those things subject to common agreement and arising from a kind of consensus about shared experience. The idea of common sense, in other words, might help explain why there are hit tunes or why most people prefer some lines in Virgil to others or prefer Aztec to Toltec sculpture. In a manner similar to Kant, Thomas Reid had argued that judgments of taste are immediate affirmations of something judged. Judgment is "implied in every perception of our external senses. There is an immediate conviction and belief in the existence of the quality perceived, whether it be colour, or sound, or figure,- and the 28

C], 22.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

137

same thing holds in the perception of beauty or deformity." Reid also argued that when he called a poem "beautiful," he did not mean to make a statement about himself and his feelings, rather he meant something about the poem itself. "Why should I use a language that expresses the contrary of what I mean? . . . Even those who hold beauty to be merely a feeling in the person that perceives it, find themselves under a necessity of expressing themselves, as if beauty were solely a quality of the object, and not of the percipient."29 For both Reid and Kant, the judgments of taste might be described as "objective" in that they are about objects insofar as we first apprehend them as objects, and these judgments are integral with our very perception of some objects. It is abundantly clear that Kant did not mean that all judgments of taste are judgments about the "quality" of complex works of high culture. His examples are seashells and flowers, and one is reminded of the example of the boy in the Optics of Alhazen (which also occupies a foundational place in the tradition of aesthetics as the investigation of the question of judgments of beauty in relation to judgments of sense in general).30 Knowing nothing of the idea of beauty, the boy chooses the apple with those characteristics more pleasing to the eye as the better apple. The fine arts by extension are important because in them we may become aware of taste as such, of the significance of taste as such, and of the taste of others. We may develop or refine our taste with examples of what by consensus is the great art of the past, but more importantly we may also become aware of the nature of aesthetic judgment itself. This leads to a second meaning of "objectivity," which is of central importance for Kant. The judgment of taste is integral with the exercise of our intuitive and synthetic faculty of imagination. In reflecting upon the judgment of taste we become aware of the nature of this intuitive and synthetic faculty. This points toward the role of the judgment of taste in the critical philosophy because through the judgment of taste we become aware of our freedom relative to the physical world 29 30

Reid, Essays, p. 759. Opticae thesaurus: Alhazeni Aiabis libri septem . . . Vitellonis Thuringpoloni

LibriX, ed. F. Risner (Basel, 1572) (facs. ed., ed. D. Lindberg, New York, 1972), p. 33 (II, 13). See also Summers, Judgment of Sense, pp. 153-7; and E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), p. 89, n. 63.

138

DAVID SUMMERS

and we become aware of purpose as part of our constitution of the world, both in the experienced fit between intuition and the world and in the formation of the concept. The importance of judgments of taste is thus not their object in any particular case but rather the simple fact that we make them. That we do all make them, Kant argues, points to a "common sense/' an "internal sense" that is one of the primary faculties of the human soul. IMPLICATIONS

In the long tradition preceding Kant the sensus communis was thought to perform certain definite tasks of unification and synthesis, tasks prerational both in the sense that they preceded reason and in the sense that they prepared sensation for rational understanding. In making these unifications and syntheses the common sense was also thought to make fallible judgments about particular things and states of affairs. It is the common sense that, in grasping the world as spatiotemporal, judges the shore rather than the boat to be moving, the spokes of the wheel to be turning backward, falling raindrops to be straight lines. But these fallible judgments, arising immediately from synthesis, were basic and integral to the functions of the human rational soul, and were in fact even productive of its higher functions. Kant would seem to want to appeal to some such faculty in order to argue that judgments of taste are not radically subjective; they are not radically subjective, because the structure of that faculty itself is shared and, more importantly, the play of that structure at the first level above sensation is felt to be just as absolutely shared when we become aware of the faculty in judgments of taste. As we have seen, these judgments are immediate to the presumably universal apprehension of external things. Beauty is thus not just in the eyes of the beholder but is instead in the way the beholder makes sense of the seen; and we have reason to believe that this capacity to make sense, and to find things in conformity with this sense-making, is shared. The very fact that we claim to make judgments of taste thus implies "this indeterminate norm of a common sense/ 731 As the arguments of the Critique of Judgment proceed, the idea of 31

cj, 22.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

139

common sense gathers more and more connotations, in general moving from the faculty of the sensus communis/imaginatio as I have just discussed it to what Kant calls Gemeinsinn, the former being concentric to the latter. Midway through these arguments, Kant writes that he does not wish to try to determine whether "taste is an original and natural faculty/7 whether it is acquired, or whether it is only a demand of reason that it be posited in order to explain "harmony of sentiment/ 7 Far from leaving these questions aside, however, Kant considers it necessary to proceed with the analysis of the elements of taste "in order to unite them at last in the idea of common sense."32 Kant insists again and again that all judgments of taste are particular and that no rule can be given for them. It is absolutely impossible for the beauty of a thing to be deduced from a principle. We can never say "all tulips are beautiful; this is a tulip; therefore it is beautiful/7 Rather, that tulip is beautiful because in this relation to our first cognitive powers it reveals the play in itself of these faculties, which we feel as a kind of pleasure. This means that we might formulate rules by which objects with qualities like those exemplary ones we have found pleasing to our taste would be considered beautiful; but we still cannot deduce the beauty of these new objects from conformity with that rule, any more than we can deduce the beauty of any object from our possession of such a rule. Taste may be educated and improved by experience of the exemplary, but the application of "principles of taste77 is always a contradiction because the actual judgment of taste is inevitably particular and cannot be a judgment of taste if it is not. Since it is always a definite thing - a tulip, to keep to that example - which is beautiful, Kant7s arguments raise the question of the relation between the imagination (the free play of which is revealed in the judgment of taste) and the next higher cognitive faculty, the understanding, for which the concept is formed. As we have seen, Kant rejected Baumgarten7s idea that the judgment of taste is a "confused77 cognition as opposed to a "distinct77 one. If that were so, Kant says, then the judgment of taste would involve the concept, just as an ordinary person knows confusedly (but correctly) that cheating is unjust, but a philosopher of law knows distinctly why this is so and 32 ibid.

I4O

DAVID SUMMERS

may discuss the issue at a higher level, "both on identical principles of reason/' 33 But the judgment of taste is preconceptual and, Kant wishes to say, is not a cognitive judgment at all and has no relation at all to the concept as such. Only the understanding has to do with the concept, and the understanding has to do with taste not with respect to cognition but only insofar as the judgment of taste itself, considered both as empirical and as pure (that is, as simple feeling of a kind of pleasure or displeasure, or as the awareness of the ground of pleasure in the felt consonance of object and play of internal sense), is the object of the contiguous but higher faculty of the understanding. Understanding thus comprehends judgments of taste, which are, so to speak, data for it. Further clarification of the relation between imagination and understanding is provided by Kant's distinction between pulchhtudo vaga and pulchhtudo adhaerens. The first is accessible to taste; the second to understanding. Pulchhtudo vaga therefore arises in imagination, in the very formation of the concept, in that process whose culmination is definition and purpose. Such beauty is vaga, or free, in the sense of wandering, because it is rooted in the possibility of the imagination to apprehend whatever may be apprehended. As examples of such "free" beauty Kant cites meander patterns a la grecque or floral wallpaper patterns, "which mean nothing in themselves/' or flowers and seashells, which are pleasing but the purposes of whose elaborate configurations are unknown to us. He also cites musical fantasies and all music without words. All of these are capable of any number of elaborations; yet all of them possess structure which seems to promise purpose but which always stops short of the definition of purpose and therefore stops short of the definition of the concept. 34 Adherent beauty, on the other hand, is bound to the concept, arises together with it, and is therefore linked to purpose. A horse, for example, might be called beautiful because of the suitability of the forms of its body to its evident end of movement. Pulchhtudo vaga and pulchhtudo adhaerens are not obviously 33 34

CJ, 15. CJ, 16. The metaphor of wandering (in language descending from Latin vagor, -ah) had a long history in practical criticism before Kant. The Italian vaghezza, for example, referred to superficial charm and prettiness, that which causes the mind and imagination to wander, m u c h as it seems to mean here; see D. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981), pp. 169-70, 550.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

141

reconcilable and may even be at odds with one another, and the difference between them is the qualitative difference between the process of concept formation and its realization. It is also clear, even though the examples Kant uses are ornamental friezes and musical fantasies, that pulchhtudo vaga is the deeper or more primordial beauty. That is why natural forms, whose configurations are apprehended by us as purposeful, can only be seen as purely beautiful to the degree that they are seen apart from purpose. In the case of works of art, free and adherent beauty are in an even more precarious relation, since free beauty may be excessive or inappropriate relative to purpose. The manifold of sensation presented by a building might easily be adjusted to be more pleasing to the eye, but these same modifications might be very unbecoming in a church. That is, the decorum implicit in the concept of a church might be transgressed by the very changes that make the building more pleasing. In such a case the free play of imagination is limited or disciplined by the concept, and by the purpose entailed by the concept, so that "subjective universal validity" is brought into harmony with "objective universal validity/' Such harmony is achieved in the ideal, in which a combination of the two beauties brings about both "aesthetical and intellectual satisfaction/' Strictly speaking, however, Kant argues, "perfection gains nothing by beauty, or beauty by perfection/' Beauty is not increased by the concept but is rather fixed by it - that is, it is no longer merely wandering or free, no longer caught up in the incessant stream of representation. According to Kant, the critique of taste is concerned with describing and reducing to rules, not the grounds for taste, but rather the reciprocal relation between imagination and understanding, without reference to any preceding sensation or concept. This critique is an art if it works from examples, and "it is a science if it derives the possibility of such judgments from the nature of these faculties, as cognitive faculties in general/7 As a science, this part of the critical philosophy judges the faculty by which the products of the fine arts are judged,35 and it is important to stress again that no rules of taste may be formulated either by the "art" or by the "science" of taste. In the "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant again argues that the representation of any object "requires the accordance of two representative powers": imagination (for the intuition and comprehension of the 35

Ch 34-

142

DAVID SUMMERS

manifold) and understanding (for the concept as a representation of the unity of this comprehension). So far, it is important to note, there is no concept; rather there is a "subsumption" of the imagination in the act or play of representing that thing under the general conditions necessary for the passage from intuition to concept. The freedom of imagination, as we have seen, consists partly in its potential to schematize any sensation without a concept.36 When an object in its representation furthers the imagination in its free play - presumably this furtherance is a step beyond the reflective awareness of pleasure in the representation of an object - then the imagination itself is apprehended as purposeful in that the activity and end of the faculty of imagination are evident to the understanding. The judgment of taste is consequently transcendentally grounded as the constitutive free play of imagination revealed as such to the understanding, which through this revelation and its consequent pleasure grasps the free play itself as purposeful, even though strictly speaking it is without purpose. The imagination is grasped in its nature as free by the faculty of intuition immediately above it, the understanding. The understanding, fully as indispensable to any act of cognition, out of its own nature grasps this freedom as the end and purpose of imagination (and might at the same time provide the basis for the formation of a concept of freedom). Kant argues that judgments of taste are synthetic judgments because they add to intuition and concept the predicate of pleasure (or pain); these feelings are personal and empirical, but insofar as they require universal assent, or seem to, the judgments are a priori. How, he asks again, is this possible? Every judgment of taste is a "singular judgment" because its predicate is added not to a concept but to the act of a particular representation; and pleasure is universal, or felt to be universal, because it is bound up with the act of judgment itself. Therefore "it is an empirical judgment [to say] that I perceive and judge an object with pleasure. But it is an a priori judgment [to say] that I find it beautiful, i.e., I attribute this satisfaction necessarily to everyone/'37 At this point in the argument Kant may be seen again to return explicitly to the traditional scheme of common sense. The judgment of taste can only be directed to the subjective condition of its em36 Q, 35.

37

Ch 37-

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

143

ployment in general and is not applied to a particular mode of sense or to a particular concept of the understanding. By the phrase "a particular mode of sense" Kant means once again that a sensation of one of the five external senses is not at issue but rather a sensation of internal sense. The judgment is thus directed toward "that subjective [element] which we can presuppose in all men (as requisite for possible cognition in general)."38 In a note to this argument Kant states that in order for judgments of taste to demand universal assent it is enough to assume "that the subjective conditions of the judgment, as regards the relation of the cognitive powers thus put into activity to a cognition in general, are the same in all men." This, he says, must be a true and therefore safe assumption because if things were otherwise all communication would be impossible. By this he means that since at the basal level at which judgments about particular intuitions take place communication is possible (I see this page and so do you), we must have formed similar representations in the same manner and that if this page were a masterpiece of calligraphy, I have reason to expect that your pleasure in it will be like mine (even though it may not be) because it is precisely the activity of those modes of formation in themselves that come to light in the judgment expressed by my pleasure. Kant rephrases his conclusions to say that aesthetic judgment is integral with the exercise of the faculties necessary for "the commonest experience" and with "the subjective conditions of the possibility of a cognition in general" necessary for the "ordinary sound understanding which we have to presuppose in everyone."39 This brings him back to something very like the definition of sensus communis he had rejected at the outset, a definition he now reclaims, having clarified and vindicated it by demonstrating its transcendental character. It is at this point too that Kant begins to draw the most important inferences from this demonstration. Common sense provides the basis for human community. This is the fulfillment of the promise of the arguments in the "Analytic of the Beautiful." When we speak of a "sense" of justice or decorum, Kant says, we speak incorrectly if we mean that by some sense we intuit rules, which can arise only from the higher faculties of the mind. And, as 38

C], 38.

39

Ch 39.

144

DAVID SUMMERS

we have seen, he is similarly dismissive of the "common understanding of men/ 7 which, as "vulgar/7 is in itself without philosophical interest. Rather he understands sensus communis as a kind of sense common to all. It is a faculty of judgment, which, when we are reflectively aware of it, allows us to compare our judgment "with the collective reason of humanity/' (Here it must be remembered that judgments of the internal senses are not judgments of reason but are judgments of the rational soul and peculiar to the rational soul.) Kant understands such reflective awareness to be deeply important for generally desirable purposes of enlightenment and tolerance. When we compare our aesthetic judgment with the "collective reason of humanity/ 7 we "escape the illusion arising from the private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which could injuriously affect the judgment/' That is, we may understand our judgment as merely possible but at the same time as essentially like different judgments - even different judgments about the same things - made by others. Our aesthetic judgments, which might on an immediate unreflective level seem natural, indistinguishable from the properties of things themselves, might also in their felt universality provide the basis for the exclusion of those who judged otherwise. Reflectively considered, however, the aesthetic provides a means by which "maxims of common human understanding" can be elucidated. The first two of these maxims, Kant says, are to think for oneself, without prejudice (since one knows that one's aesthetic apprehension of the particular - and the apprehension of others - is merely possible) and "to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else (which is enlarged thought)"; that is, realizing our apprehension to be merely possible, we are able to put ourselves in other possible "points of view."40 Kant went to considerable lengths to separate the beautiful from the good, associating the latter with the concept and with purpose. He clearly did not mean, however, to leave the beautiful and the good permanently severed; rather he wished to redefine their relation and argued that the beautiful is a symbol of the good. Much as Cicero had claimed that our immediate intuition of beauty leads by what he called transferentia to a higher awareness of harmony and measure that is curative for the soul, so Kant argued that "the beau40

cj, 40.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

145

tiful is the symbol of the morally good, and it is only in this respect . . . that it gives pleasure with a claim for the agreement of everyone else. By this the mind is made conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the mere sensibility of pleasure received through sense, and the worth of others is estimated in accordance with a like maxim of their judgment/ 741 Here the sensus communis is raised to a still higher level; because the beautiful is an adumbration of the good for each of us, we may presuppose such adumbrations in others. Moreover, our very humanity is rooted in a "universal feeling of sympathy" and in our ability to communicate our inmost feelings. This, Kant concludes, is finally the basis of a truly social spirit. Kant finds another example of our "common understanding" in ordinary language, which is filled with any number of "metaphors of value," with which we praise beautiful objects in moral terms. We call the more pleasing apple "better." "We call buildings or trees majestic and magnificent . . . colors are called innocent, modest, tender, because they excite sensations which have something analogous to the consciousness of states of mind brought about by moral judgments." Thus is made "possible the transition, without any violent leap, from the claim of sense to habitual moral interest, as it represents the imagination in its freedom as capable of purposive determination for the understanding, and so teaches us to find even in objects of sense a free satisfaction apart from any charm of sense." 42 The idea that the imagination produces the world itself for the mind also provided the kernel for Kant's idea of genius and at the same time gave a powerful dimension to his expanded idea of common sense. "The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is very powerful in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it." The art of extraordinary individuals may heighten awareness of our own faculty of imagination at the same time that it makes their own construction of the world evident. So genius is at once rooted in and nourishes the common sense of humankind, producing endlessly reverberative poetical 41 42

CJ, 59; Cicero, De offidis, I, IV; and Summers, Judgment of Sense, pp. 5 0 - 1 . CJ, 59. The term "metaphors of value" is from E. H. Gombrich, "Visual Metaphors of Value in Art/' in idem, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London, 1963), pp. 12-29.

146

DAVID SUMMERS

ideas, ever-suggestive near-concepts arising from the imagination of genius and freeing us from the law of association (which links sensations as they should be linked as constituents of our experience) "so that the material supplied to us by nature in accordance with this law can be worked up into something different which surpasses nature/' 43 CONCLUSIONS

In its long pre-Kantian tradition, the common sense was sometimes compared to a mirror immediately reflecting the external world to the mind as a unified image; and whether or not it was exemplified in this way, the common sense was assumed to represent the world to the intellect, if not as the world really is, at least as forms capable of being grasped by the intellect in their essence as perceived by the senses. The common sense therefore always had an unspecified role in perception, and speculation on the nature of this role was minimized precisely because its aim was presumed to be the reproduction of the world. For Kant, such a simple reflective relationship could not exist, and the need to explore this productive role expanded accordingly. If there are great, pervasive constancies in the forces of nature within which we find ourselves, and which act upon us and within which we act, these constancies are deeper than the forms of things and are not apprehensible in themselves through these forms. The first faculty of imagination, although reactive, is also absolutely active and positively forms the spatiotemporal world of things as we experience it, act upon and within it, and know it; and it is from the community among us of the formative imagination that we share a communicable world. It is thus not the external world we share and are able to communicate; it is rather the felt uniformity among us of the process of human intuition itself. In the judgment of taste we are aware of our own feeling in relation to the particular at the same time that we are aware of the particular things we sense. The judgment of taste is like our intuition of the presence of particular things because of its felt universality, but this universality points in the case of the judgment of taste to the participation of personal judgment in the absolute 43

ci 49.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

147

possibility of the apprehension of the particular and of particular relations by the human mind. If it is at the base of sensation that consciousness confronts the physical world, whose laws it can understand but which it cannot know in itself, and whose necessities it may not escape but only suffer, it is at the same level of intuition, but in the judgment of taste, that consciousness finds the world to be unified, evidently at once purposeful and composed. It is thus the judgment of taste itself that makes the beautiful object a symbol of the good, as Kant argued it is. It is in the judgment of taste that the anthropomorphic metaphors of teleology are first intimated to us. The separation of form and content implicit in Kant's distinction between "free" and "adherent" beauty, far from being a flaw in his aesthetic theory, maintains the distance between the imagination and the understanding, between the formation of the concept and the concept itself, and is thus essential to his perspectival universality. If form and content were by definition unified, then the judgment of taste would be determined by the concept, and things in general (and works of art in particular) would be without superfluity and suggestion. They would not instigate the formation of concepts other than the one specified, and we could not respond to the works of genius as Kant believed we can. It is because form and content cannot be unified that there can only be exemplary objects, not rules of taste; and if there were rules of taste (which Kant denied), then taste would become the basis for exclusion for those who do not recognize the same rules. Kant did not imagine that Africans, Asians, and Europeans would not form different standards of beauty on the basis of what delighted them in their experience (nor did he deny that an ideal of human beauty existed, which was an ideal of moral action rather than appearance).44 If these norms were each understood to be absolute, that is, if the aesthetically pleasing were inseparable from the self-evidence of things simply intuited, then judgments of taste might again be confused with the concept, the unpleasing confused with the unfamiliar (or vice versa) and both regarded as utterly alien. If, on the other hand, norms of taste are seen as relative to circumstances, but at the same time the act of the judgment of taste is seen as common (and communicable), then 44

c/, 17.

I48

DAVID SUMMERS

taste might become the basis for universal human society Kant believed it to be. My understanding of Kant's argument may be clarified by contrasting it with another interpretation of the Critique of Judgment. In his chapter on Kant in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton argues that the felt universality Kant considers integral with the judgment of taste is such as "to declare that a wholly subjective response is of the kind that every individual must necessarily experience, one that must [my italics] elicit spontaneous agreement from them all. The aesthetic, one might argue, is in this sense the very paradigm of the ideological. For the peculiarity of ideological propositions might be summarized by claiming . . . that there is in fact no such thing as an ideological proposition. Like aesthetic judgments for Kant, ideological utterances conceal an essentially emotive content within a referential form, characterizing the lived relation of the speaker to the world in the act of appearing to characterize the world."45 This reading closely identifying the aesthetic and the ideological does so by means of a point-for-point inversion of Kant's meaning as I understand it. Although it cannot be denied that "good" taste, general savoir faire, and correctness of experience, bearing, and attitude have been (and still are) major indicators of class, rank, and privilege in the modern Western world (and other worlds as well), the effect of Kant's arguments, precisely because the judgment of taste is one with the intuition of things, is not to naturalize our personal feelings, but rather to relativize them, setting them at once in the realm of feeling and of the possible communicability of universal subjectivity. Definition of the aesthetic permits the separation in principle of feeling and intuition, thus providing the basis for a pervasive skepticism, by implication extending even to ideological skepticism, in which case the aesthetic must be regarded as more than merely a cover of mystification for patriarchal, bourgeois rule and reason. But for the purposes of the present argument, it is clear that if Kant's arguments about taste are understood in this way, then Kant's conclusion about taste as a sensus communis forming a principle of human solidarity is not intelligible. Kant is saying that it is much more important that we all experience some things as in conformity 45

T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), p. 93.

Why did Kant call taste a ''common sense"?

149

with our taste than it is that we all agree that any one thing is in such conformity. In fact, it is a mistake even to compare the two because it is in the shared possibility of making judgments of taste that the deepest significance of these judgments lies. Kant is also saying that because the significance of the judgment of taste finally rests in its transcendental community there are some things - our aesthetic feelings - that we can discuss endlessly and properly from individual points of view and that we can quite literally broaden our humanity as we do so. Such a view, of course, has social and political implications of its own, but that view is ideological in terms different from those stated by Eagleton. For Kant, the antinomy of the judgment of taste - that is, that if we can talk about the judgment of taste at all, then these judgments must be provable - is resolved by the idea of a sensus communis, since it is the feeling about particulars in relation to our faculty of intuition that is communicated by language about these judgments. In this way the judgment of taste in itself provides a new concept to the mind, of the existence of a "substrate," something about which we talk but which cannot itself be intuited. This new concept is the means by which the mind first experiences the ideas both of the supersensible and of purpose. At the same time, the mind becomes aware of itself as that which intuits, so that the substrate of the world and the "supersensible substrate of humanity" become evident simultaneously. 46 Pleasure in the mere existence of things provides the "foundation for an interest in what has by itself pleased without reference to any interest whatever." This "interest without interest" is inherently common and, Kant argues, social, demanding the communication of feelings. From this potential sympathy arises civilization itself. The civilizer is one both inclined and apt to communicate with pleasure to others and who is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others. Again, everyone expects and requires from everyone else this reference to universal communication [of pleasure], as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity itself. Thus, doubtless, in the beginning only those things that attracted the senses, e.g., colors for painting oneself (roucou among the Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois), flowers, mussel shells, beautiful feathers, etc. - but in time beautiful forms also (e.g., in 46

Ch 57-

I5O

DAVID SUMMERS

their canoes and clothes, etc.) which bring with them no gratification or satisfaction of enjoyment - were important in society and were combined with great interest. Until at last civilization, having reached its highest point, makes out of this almost the main business of refined inclination, and sensations are only regarded as of worth in so far as they can be universally communicated. Here, although the pleasure which everyone has in such an object is inconsiderable and in itself without any marked interest, yet the idea of its universal communicability increases its worth in an almost infinite degree.47

Such inferences were to be drawn even more explicitly by Schiller. When Kant gathered the consequences of his idea of common sense, it had the universal, and at least potentially democratic, dimension it had also had for such writers as Vico, Herder, and Thomas Reid (as well as other eighteenth-century writers); 48 but Schiller developed these ideas to truly Utopian proportions. He associated common sense with pure intuition, above the selfish level of simple sensation, below the merely generally human impersonality of the intellect. "Beauty alone do we enjoy at once as individual and as genus, i.e., as representatives of the human genus/' 49 These are Kant's subjective and universal components of taste recast in other terms. As a mean between the sensual and the intellectual, this middle realm of the mind eschews the "rigorous bonds of logic for the free movement of the poetic faculty, or grasping the concrete individuality of things with a sense innocent of preconceptions and faithful to the object/' 50 In Schiller's "Staat des schonen Scheins" (which, like Plato's Republic, is an ideal and is attainable only among small groups of people) "no privilege, no autocracy of any kind, is tolerated."51 In this kingdom of boundless human sympathy people are "free alike of the compulsion to infringe the freedom of others in order to assert their own, as of the necessity to shed their Dignity in order to manifest grace."52 Taste leads esoteric knowledge away from bloodless intellect, from the "Mysteries of Science . . . out into the broad daylight of Common Sense [Gemeinsinn], and transforms a monopoly of the Schools into a common possession of Human Society as a 47 48 49

50

Ch 41. Summers, Judgment of Sense, conclusion. F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and tr. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), pp. 216-17. Ibid., pp. 4 2 - 3 . 5 1 Ibid., pp. 216-17. 5 2 Ibid., pp. 218-19.

Why did Kant call taste a "common sense"?

151

whole. In the kingdom of taste even the mightiest genius must divest itself of majesty and stoop in all humility to the mind of a little child/' 53 It is beauty alone that makes the whole world happy. The idea of common sense which Kant regarded as central to his Critique of Judgment was thus central to a great Enlightenment educational project. And if the terms of the articulation of this project have been lost to sight, these terms were essential for that articulation and thus in one way or another provided a foundation for later visions of a uniquely modern universal democratic order. 53

Ibid., pp. 216-17.

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

5

Art and money

The set of social practices we call "art" is a phenomenon of the society that gave itself the name "modern." Appreciation of products of the arts in the premodern sense of the term (as craft) is seemingly to be found in earlier European, and many other, cultures, and the beginnings of something like the modern conception were already visible in the theory and practice of the cinquecento arti del disegno. However, as P. O. Kristeller has emphasized, "the system of the five major arts, which underlies all modern aesthetics and is so familiar to us all, is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume definitive shape before the eighteenth century."1 One may say even that the conception of art which contemporary use of the word takes for granted was not fully evolved before the later nineteenth century, and perhaps not until the "formalism" of the twentieth, with its transcendent aesthetic centered on the autonomously meaningful object. Nonetheless, the eighteenth-century birth of aesthetics as a discipline concerned with the theory of art and nature as objects of appreciation may be taken as marking the crystallization of a field of activities, concepts, and institutions that since then has played a leading role in social life. Given that modern society has been based like none other in history on commerce, it is a striking paradox that, in discussions of the arts from the eighteenth century to the present, "commercial" has been a synonym for "low." In the same way, "mass" has been a Thanks, for helpful readings of this paper, to Annie Becq, Rochelle Feinstein, John Hope Mason, Maureen Ryan, and Catharine Sousloff. 1

P. O. Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts," in his Renaissance Thought II (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 165. 152

Art and money

153

derogatory term for culture in a globally integrated social order founded on mass production and consumption. Even a Marxist critic like Clement Greenberg in 1939, who described the artistic avantgarde as attached to the capitalist ruling class "by an umbilical cord of gold/7 at the same time characterized the cultural opposition to that avant-garde as the commercialism to which he gave the German name of kitsch. 2 The ideological importance of this conception of art can be seen in the almost reflex action taken to turn aside any threat to it, as when Warhol's Brillo Boxes are taken by aestheticians to exemplify the very distinction between art and mundane commercial products questioned by such work. As Pierre Bourdieu has observed, "Art cannot reveal the truth about art without snatching it away again by turning the revelation into an artistic event/' 3 This is, of course, an effect of "art" only as that is the historically situated social practice we know. The present essay is an attempt to trace the appearance of the ideological opposition of art and commerce as it emerges in the art writing that both reflected and helped structure the development and institutionalization of that practice in the later eighteenth century.

PROGRESS AND DECLINE

Despite its distinctive modernity, central to the construction of art we are discussing here was the reference made in texts and images to an imagined antiquity. There was first of all the idea that modern art represented a revival of the achievements of the Greeks and Romans, after the destruction of culture during the Dark Ages. The initiating work of art history, Vasari's Lives of the Painters, describes "the attainment of perfection in the arts" in the early classical period, followed in the later Roman Empire by "their ruin" and then, at the hands of Cimabue, Giotto, and their successors, "their restoration or, to put it better still, their rebirth." Thus "the beginning of the 2

3

Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch/' in his Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 8. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods/' in Media, Culture and Society, ed. R. Collins et al. (London: Sage, 1986), p. 137. In relation to the following essay see, in addition to his other works on aesthetic experience, Bourdieu's "The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (1987): 201-10.

154

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

good modern style" in sculpture was based on Ghiberti's imitation of "the works of the ancient Romans, which he studied very carefully (as must anyone who wants to do good work).//4 Two centuries later, in a work that fixed the centrality of Hellenic art for German culture, Winckelmann made the imitation of the Greeks the foundation of his discussion of the tasks of modern art, declaring that "the only way for us to become great or, if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients/ 75 By this dialectic of "ancient" and "modern" a present-day institution was projected into the past and so given classic status. The works of the past, despite being to a great extent unknown, also functioned as standards of value against which the achievement of the moderns could be measured. According to Vincenzo Galilei, writing in 1581, the sixteenth-century revival of the art of music was unable to achieve the level of excellence reached by the ancient Greeks.6 Nineteen years later, however, Ottavio Rinuccini stated that the conventional opinion of the inferiority of modern to ancient music "was wholly driven from my mind" by Peri's setting of Dafne.7 Vasari claimed that the modern revival of the visual arts went beyond imitation, emphasizing "the excellence that has made modern art even more glorious than that of the ancient world."8 Pessimism was to surface, however, in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns carried on by writers in a number of European countries from the later seventeenth into the start of the eighteenth century, who debated whether the progress evidently made by the sciences beyond the learning of the ancients could also be claimed for the arts. (Notable here, in the very terminology used, is the 4

5

6

7 8

Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, tr. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), I, p. 32, i i 2 ; for a stimulating discussion of the circumstance that "an essential element of modernity, as the Italians conceived it, lay in the worship of antiquity," see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982] (quotation from p. 1). J. J. Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), tr - E- Heyer and R. C. Norton (La Salle: Open Court, 1987), p. 5. See the translation of selections from the Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 3O2ff. Dedication of Euridice (1600), in Strunk, Music History, p. 368. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, p. 249; see also p. 160, for Brunelleschi's advance over ancient architecture. Such sentiments had been previously expressed in Alberti's Delia pittura of 1435; see the translation by John R. Spencer, On Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 34-40, 58.

Art and money

155

explicit idea of modernity as an epoch defined by contrast to antiquity.) But a darker vision was already implicit in the metaphor of rebirth, for life implies eventual death. It is important to understand, wrote Vasari, that "from the smallest beginnings art attained the greatest heights, only to decline from its noble position to the most degraded status. Seeing this, artists can also realize the nature of the arts we have been discussing: these, like the other arts and like human beings themselves, are born, grow up, become old, and die.//9 According to Hume, it is a fundamental maxim of cultural progress that "when the arts and sciences come to perfection in any state, from that moment they naturally or rather necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive in that nation, where they formerly flourished."10 And Winckelmann described his monumental History of Ancient Art as "intended to show the origin, progress, change, downfall of art" as it developed ineluctably through the stages of "the necessary/7 "beauty/7 and "the superfluous/' Once perfection has been reached, he explained, further advance being impossible, art "must go backwards, because in it, as in all the operations of nature, we cannot think of any stationary point/711 In Diderot's version of this scheme, "In all times and everywhere the bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, and the excellent is followed by the bizarre" and the "mannered/712 While Vasari saw the plastic arts reaching a climax in his own 9 10

11

12

Vasari, Lives of the Artists, p. 46. David Hume, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences" (1742), in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), p. 135. Johann J. Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art (1764), tr. G. H. Lodge (New York: Ungar, 1968), I, pp. 3, 29; II, p. 143. For a discussion of Winckelmann's use of the cycle of progress and decay as the framework of his history, see Alex Potts, "Winckelmann's Construction of History," Art History 5, no. 4 (1982): 377-407. Denis Diderot, Salon de 1767, in Oeuvres completes, ed. H. Dieckmann, J. Proust, and J. Varloot (henceforth DPV) (Paris: Hermann, 1975-), XVI, p. 213; see also the essay De la maniere, in ibid., pp. 529-30. Diderot's remarks are directed specifically against the rococo style of the period of the Regence, in response to which he is arguing for the return to the grand gout embodied in the Antique. The striking similarity, to Diderot's critique, of Clement Greenberg's diagnosis of the cultural decline of capitalism is a remarkable testimony to the stability of the practice of art as a feature of "modern" society: Greenberg evokes an "Alexandrianism" in which the "same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced." In his scheme, of course, the role of the grand gout is played by "avant-garde culture" ("Avant-Garde and Kitsch," p. 4).

I56

PAUL M A T T I C K , JR.

time, in the work of Michelangelo, by the last third of the seventeenth century, Francis Haskell reminds us, "the feeling developed that the age of very great painters was over - painters whose reputations would, like those of Raphael, Titian and Correggio, the Carracci, Poussin and Rubens, continue to grow and to solidify into eternity/713 In the eighteenth century it was commonly accepted that there had been but four great periods in the history of the arts: ancient Athens, Rome under Augustus, the Italian Renaissance (associated particularly with the reigns of Julius II and Leo X), and the age of Louis XIV. As that century approached its close, Sir Joshua Reynolds declared in his lectures to the Royal Academy not only that the work of the ancients is the foundation of all later painting and sculpture, but "that the Art has been in a gradual state of decline, from the Age of Michael Angelo to the present, must be acknowledged/'14 Such ideas were not in as great a conflict with the general progressivism of the eighteenth century as may be imagined. That the Enlightenment, for all the faith in the present and future signaled by its names in various languages, was deeply marked by "historical pessimism" has long been recognized.15 The vision of progress leading to decline had an important source in classical images of human history (and indeed of that of the cosmos itself) as cyclical.16 With 13

14

15

16

Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (London: Phaidon, 1976), p. 22. J. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R. R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 280. This sense of "the discrepancy between a remote, ideal era and the true facts of the present/' as Robert Rosenblum has observed, is given pictorial form in Reynolds's parody of the School of Athens (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin); see Rosenblum, "Reynolds in an International Milieu," in Reynolds, ed. N. Penny (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), p. 44. A similar thought is provoked by such a work as the same artist's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino), which recycles none other than Michelangelo's Sistine image of Isaiah to portray a leading stage actress of the time. See Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). To mention the sources most important for modern European thinkers: Plato expounds a doctrine of cyclical creation and destruction of the world in the Statesman, among other places; Aristotle states as a commonplace in the Metaphysics (1074b.11) that the arts and sciences have many times been lost and regained (see also Politics, 1264a.i, and De caelo, 270b. 19). Polybius's account of history as a cycle of kinds of government was revived in Italy by Villani, Guicciardini, and Machiavelli (the last an important source for later versions of the idea);

Art and money

157

the advance of the eighteenth century, however, we find the idea of degeneracy associated with specific aspects of modernization intrinsic to the rise of a market economy, commonly associated at the time with the concept of "luxury." The critique of luxury, as symptomatic of the worship of money for its own sake rather than as an instrument of social well-being, was itself a well-worn classical theme (as Voltaire observed, "luxury has been railed at for two thousand years in verse and in prose" although "it has always been loved").17 Aristotle's contrast of oikonomia, the proper ordering of the household, with chrematismos, concern with the making of money, was still present within the conceptual structure, as well as the name, of the "political economy" of the eighteenth century. Similarly, Horace's complaint that "when once this corroding lust for profit has infected our minds, can we hope for poems to be written that are worth . . . storing away in cases of polished cypress?" provided a theme for that period's writers on art.18 It was expressed in various forms, as a function of differing historical contexts as well as of the particular interests of different writers, who drew the line, between the commerce needed to provide a social basis for the arts and the excessive love of luxury that corrupts, in different ways; its presence, despite the fundamental differences that distinguish eighteenth-century discourses of art from more recent ones, is a sign of the continuity of those discourses.

17

18

for a discussion in reference to the eighteenth century, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, tr. Peter Gay (New York: Basic Books, 1962), P- 367. Horace, On the Art of Poetry, in Classical Literary Criticism, tr. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 90. In the words of another Latin text central to the education of an eighteenth-century person of letters, Longinus's On the Sublime, "the love of money, that insatiable craving from which we all now suffer, and the love of pleasure make us their slaves . . . , the love of money being a disease that makes us petty-minded'7 [Classical Literary Criticism, p. 157). On classical expressions of the conflict of art and money, see Gregory Nagy, "The 'Professional Muse' and Models of Prestige in Ancient Greece," Cultural Critique 12 (1989): 133—43; and Leonard Woodbury, "Pindar and the Mercenary Muse: Isthmian 2.1-13," Transactions of the American Philological Association 99 (1968): 527-42. For the distinction between money-making and the ends properly aimed at by the exercise of crafts, see Plato, Republic, 345c ff.; and Aristotle, Politics, I.9. On the contrast between oikonomia and "economy," in the modern sense, see the discussion in Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), ch. 5.

158

PAUL MATTICK, JR. LUXURY AND CORRUPTION

On the one hand, it was argued, the opulence of modern society, when compared to the medieval past or to the "rude" or "barbarous" condition of the native cultures of the New World, could be traced to the development of commerce, which stimulated the diversification and improvement of production. Thus it is originally through foreign trade, according to Hume, that men become acquainted with the pleasures of luxury, and the profits of commerce; and their delicacy and industry being once awakened, carry them on to improvements in every branch of domestic as well as foreign trade . . . [Presenting the gayer and more opulent part of the nation with objects of luxury which they never before dreamed of, raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed. . . . Imitation soon diffuses all those arts, while domestic manufacturers emulate the foreign in their improvements, and work up every home commodity to the utmost perfection of which it is susceptible.19 Thus growing wealth leads to a growing taste for luxuries, and with them the arts; in Montesquieu's words, "Wealth is the result of commerce, luxury the consequence of wealth, and the perfection of the arts that of luxury."20 Montesquieu admits, however, that "commerce corrupts pure morals."21 This corruption is above all visible in the decline of patriotism, the readiness to defend one's native land; while commerce makes men more industrious it renders them less courageous. This is due not only to the "softening" effect of devotion to pleasure but also specifically to the fostering of self-centeredness in a market society. "The system of commerce often comes down to this principle: each should work for himself, as I work for myself; I demand nothing from you without offering you its value; so should you do."22 Under such conditions the sentiment of "generosity" withers 19 20

21

22

"Of Commerce" (1752), in Essays, p. 264. "L'effet du commerce sont les richesses, la suite des richesses le luxe, celle du luxe la perfection des arts" {L'esprit des loix, rev. ed., XXL6, in Oeuvres [Amsterdam and Leipzig: Arkstee et Merkus, 1764], II, pp. 291-2). Ibid., p. 257 [Esprit, XX. 1): "Le commerce corrompt les moeurs pures; c'etoit le sujet des plaintes de Platon." A footnote offers as example the Gauls, said by Caesar to have declined to military inferiority due to the commerce of Marseilles. "Le systeme du Commerce se reduit souvent a ce principe: que chacun travaille pour soi, comme je travaille pour moi; je ne vous demande rien qu'en vous en offrant la valeur; faites-en autant" (ibid., p. 25 711).

Art and money

159

as each thinks only of himself. Even Hume, apostle of what Pocock has called "commercial humanism/' distinguishes "innocent" from "vicious" luxury, which appears when gratification "engrosses all a man's expense, and leaves no ability for such acts of duty and generosity as are required by his situation and fortune, especially his willingness to defend his country."23 The central example of the corruption worked by luxury is indeed the abandonment of war, the citizen's duty, to professionals. From a viewpoint like Rousseau's, this is just a special case - one given central importance as the traditional symbol of civic virtue - of a more general effect of the growth of trade: the specialization of function that goes with the division of labor. Gone is the sturdy independence of the model citizen; liberty has vanished with the multiplication of needs satisfiable only by a multitude of others, "since the bonds of servitude are formed merely from the mutual dependence of men and the reciprocal needs that unite them/' 24 which have replaced the fellow feeling of independent equals. "Ancient politicians incessantly talked about morals and virtue, those of our time talk only of business and money" 25 According to Rousseau, the society of the ancient Greeks and Romans decayed when love of country and virtue gave way to vanity and the desire for pleasure, to be satisfied only by luxury and money: "individuals enriched themselves, commerce and the arts flourished, and the state soon perished."26 The ancient world thus furnishes not only a model to which the present may aspire but also the spectacle of decline to serve as a warning. In the modern world, as well, the death of civic virtue will bring that of liberty, as the field of government is left to tyrants and their hired armies. 23

24

25

26

D. H u m e , "Of Refinement in the A r t s / ' in Essays, p. 269; for "commercial humani s m / ' see J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 194. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse of the Origin of Inequality, in On the Social Contract, ed. and tr. D. A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett: 1983], p. 139. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse of the Sciences and Arts, in The First and Second Discourses, ed. and tr. R. D. Masters (New York: St. Martin's, 1964), p. 51. "Quand ces peuples commencerent a degenerer, que la vanite et Pamour du plaisir eurent succede a celui de la patrie et de la vertu, alors le vice et la molesse penetrerent de toutes parts, et il ne fut plus question que de Luxe et d'argent pour y satisfaire. Les particuliers s'enrichirent, le commerce et les arts fleurirent, et l'Etat ne tarda pas a perir" (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fragments politiques, VII ["Le luxe, le commerce et les arts"], in Oeuvres completes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond [Paris: Gallimard (Pleiade), 1964], III, p. 517].

I6O

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

A British version of Rousseau's conception held, as Pocock reminds us apropos of Gibbon's treatment of Rome's decline, that after the corrupting mutation of republic into empire in the ancient world, virtue had been restored in the north in the form of the communities of armed freeholders established by the Gothic invaders. "But the image of Gothic freedom, like that of primitive Roman virtue, rested on the assumption that the form of property which gave the individual arms and independence, liberty and virtue, must necessarily be land."27 With the shift of social power away from the landed gentry toward a centralized state financed not only by taxation but by newly developing instruments of credit, and so toward the world of high finance, rooted in commerce, civic virtue was doomed to decline. With this we touch on a central theme in the eighteenth-century discourse of progress and corruption, one that embodied in a different but related way the conflict between "liberal" activity and mercenary motivation visible in the discussion of the arts: the opposition of agriculture and commerce. The national household was still seen as based on farming, though already imbued with a capitalist form. Physiocratic theory, notably, explained that agriculture alone generated new wealth; thus Quesnay distinguished between "luxury in the way of subsistence" and "luxury in the way of ornamentation," arguing that "an opulent nation which indulges in excessive luxury in the way of ornamentation can very quickly be overwhelmed by its sumptuousness." The science of economic administration of which his Tableau presented the principles was not to be confused "with the trivial and specious science of financial operations whose subject-matter is only the money-stock of the nation and the monetary movements resulting from traffic in money."28 But the ideological conflict between landed property and the new order of the market overflowed this boundary,- even though the point of economic policy was to foster internal and external trade we find Quesnay rehearsing the old complaint that "those engaged in commerce share in the wealth of nations, but the nations do not share in theirs. The merchant is a stranger in his country."29 27

28

29

J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 147. On the eighteenth-century problematic of political virtue, see also idem, The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 14. M. Kuczynski and R. Meek, eds. and trs., Quesnay's Tableau economique (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. i, ii, 21. "Les commerc.ants participent aux richesses des nations, mais les nations ne participent pas aux richesses des commergants. Le negotiant est etranger dans sa

Art and money

161

These ideas, expressed by physiocracy in the form of an economic system, are present throughout the philosophical writing of the time. Rousseau's work, which made such an impact on urban intellectuals throughout Europe, voiced them in the association of the fallen state of humanity with an economically expansive urban culture, in contrast to the healthy virtue of a modest rural existence. In Voltaire's Candide, as in the proliferating literature of the garden, georgic pursuits represented both a haven from and a rational reproach to a world of exploitation, bloodthirstiness, and falsehood motivated by greed for gold. In general, the opposition of city to country contrasts both a site of (idle) consumption with one of production, and wealth based on commercial and financial speculation with that derived from the honest cultivation of landed property. LUXURY AND THE FINE ARTS 3 0

Ruled by the passions, whose force is swelled by the needs incessantly generated by the progress of the arts and sciences, men grow " effeminate": they cease to be warriors and become devotees of pleasure. Sebastien Mercier's Tableau de Pahs, far from being a critique of the modern economy, has as clear subtext an argument for laissezfaire and the advantages for civilization of the division of labor. But even he discovers in luxury a source of the incompetence of generals and their lack of discipline. Luxury encourages indolence, people busy themselves with all the arts that flatter sensual delicacy: they make a major study of these wretched things, and ignore the theory of combat. Brilliant reviews are organized to provide a spectacle for the ladies. We want a soldier turned out and posed like a dancer.31

30

31

patrie" (F. Quesnay, Du commerce, in Francois Quesnay et la physiocratie [Paris, 1958], II, p. 827; cit. Daniel Roche, "Negoce et culture dans la France du XVIIIe siecle," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 25 [1978]: 375). Note in the last phrase the Homeric echo; here again classical culture showed the way. "L'influence du luxe sur les beaux-arts. Vous conviendrez qu'ils ont tous merveilleusement embrouille cette question" (Diderot, Salon de 1767, DPV, XVI, p. 165). "L'imperitie des generaux, leur peu de discipline sont une suite du luxe. Le luxe favorise Pindolence, on s'occupe de tous les arts qui flattent la delicatesse sensuelle: on se fait une etude capitale de ces miseres, & Pon ignore la theorie des combats. On fait des revues brillantes, pour donner un spectable a des dames. On veut qu'un soldat soit tourne & aligne comme un danseur" ([Sebastien Mercier], Tableau de Paris, nouvelle edition [Amsterdam, 1782], II, pp. 14-15).

162

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

One result of such a state of affairs is the degeneration of the very arts which have been such a powerful agent of social decline. In Rousseau's dire words, "the dissolution of morals, a necessary consequence of luxury, leads in turn to the corruption of taste/7 Taste itself is feminized (here again we have a reference to the rococo), sacrificed by men to "the tyrants of their liberty/' women, who are governed naturally by passion rather than by the stern dictates of reason and duty.32 It is clear to Rousseau that under circumstances such as characterize modern commercial society, an artist has no choice but to "lower his genius to the level of his time/' 3 3 This idea of the moral decline of the arts as an aspect of the general corruption of society underlies the discussion of the condition of music in Barthelemy's Voyages du jeune Anacharsis of 1788. "[N]ow that music has made such great progress it has lost the noble privilege of instructing and improving men/ 7 observes the pupil of Plato with whom the young Scythian is conversing in an Athens prefigurative of eighteenth-century Paris. Music has lost its former social use, the encouragement of virtue, because it "only serves today to give pleasure." Itself corrupted by new melodic and harmonic riches, it is no longer capable of inspiring citizenship. "In our society workmen and mercenaries decide the fate of music. They fill the theatres; they attend the musical competitions and they set themselves up as arbiters of taste. . . . No, music will never rise again after its fall."34 32

33

Typically, Hume, at home as Rousseau was not in t h e emerging commercial culture, asks, "What better school for manners" there could be "than the company of virtuous women, where the mutual endeavour to please must insensibly polish the mind." In fact, he observes, the ancients 7 exclusion of "the fair sex" from "the polite world" may be the reason why they "have not left us one piece of pleasantry that is excellent. . . . This, therefore, is one considerable improvement which the polite arts have received from gallantry, and from courts where it first arose" ("Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," in Essays, p. 134). Rousseau, Discourse of the Sciences and Arts, pp. 53, 52. On gender categories in eighteenth-century art theory, see my "Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in t h e Constitution of Art," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (1990): 293-303; and John Barrell, " T h e Dangerous Goddess': Masculinity, Prestige, and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain," Cultural Critique 12 (1989): 101-31.

34

Jean Jacques Barthelemy, Voyages du jeune Anacharsis en Grece (Paris, 1788), pp. 245-69; translated in P. le Huray and J. Day, eds., Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 121-9.

Art and money

163

As Diderot wrote in his commentary on the Salon of 1763, although it is individual genius that makes the arts bloom, "it is the general taste that perfects the artists/ 7 Less censorious than Rousseau, he suggested on this occasion that the stimulation of that taste - in France alone among modern nations - by the Salon had postponed the decadence of painting in that country, perhaps by a hundred years. But the art of speech was already gone, for "true eloquence appears only in the context of great public interests. . . . To speak well, one must be a tribune of the people. . . . After the loss of liberty, there were no more orators in Athens or in Rome/' 35 Four years later Diderot opened his survey of the Salon of 1767 with the sad reflection that the springs of art were being exhausted ("Tout s'epuise"). This he explained in part by the rise of speculation in art by collectors, for whom as individuals, rather than the nation, artists were now painting their best works. Most generally, it is luxury "that degrades great talents, by subjecting them to small works, and that degrades great subjects by reducing them to scenes of revelry/' Or, as Diderot was to put it in the Pensees detachees sur la peinture, first drafted ten years later, "At the moment when the artist thinks of money, he loses his feeling for beauty/' 36 The Salon de IJ6J goes on to take up this theme in greater (physiocratic) detail, explaining that it is not wealth per se that leads to the downfall of the arts, but the kind of wealth involved. A prince who favors agriculture over usury and tax farming will lead his nation to luxury indeed, but a luxury meeting the interest of society and not that of the "fantasy, passion, prejudices, opinions" of indi35

"C'est le genie d'un seul qui fait eclore les arts; c'est le gout general qui perfectionne les artistes" (Diderot, Salon de 1763, DPV, XIII, p. 340). The meaning of the term le peuple, bearers of le gout general, used two sentences later is soon clarified. Why were there among the ancients such great musicians? "(J'est que la musique faisait partie de 1'education generate: on presentait une lyre a tout enfant bien ne." 36 "N'oubliez pas parmi les obstacles a la perfection et a la duree des beaux-arts, je ne dis pas la richesse d'un peuple, mais ce luxe qui degrade les grands talents, en les assujettissant a de petits ouvrages, et les grands sujets en les reduisant a la bambochade" (Diderot, Salon de 1767, DPV, XVI, p. 62); "Au moment ou l'artiste pense a l'argent, il perd le sentiment du beau" [Pensees detachees sur la peinture [ca. 1776], in Oeuvres esthetiques, ed. P. Verniere [Paris: Gamier, 1988], p. 829). For an enlightening discussion of Diderot, "man of the Enlightenment with an acute if not woeful sense of decadence and degradation," see A. Becq, "Diderot, historien de Tart?" Dix-huitieme siecle 19 (1987): 423-38.

164

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

viduals. "Painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, and all the arts grow from the soil, they are also children of good Ceres; and I answer you that wherever they originate in that sort of luxury they will flourish and will always flourish/' But according to Diderot's historical pessimism, this happy condition cannot last. In the fragment of a dialogue on luxury, thematically as well as chronologically related to the 1767 Salon critique, he explains that agriculture itself engenders commerce, industry, and wealth, thus leading to social and artistic decadence. The only solution to this paradox he suggests seems a flimsy one, especially given the social dynamics Diderot believed he saw at work: if the rulers of wealthy nations would strip from gold its character as representation of merit and abolish the venality of public office, then the wealthy could have all the palaces, pictures, statues, fine wines, and beautiful women they want, without claiming the merit of state functions, and citizens would become enlightened and virtuous. 37 It is luxury based on money, "with which one can buy everything/' which "becomes the common measure of everything," and of which one needs ever more, that "degrades and destroys the fine arts, because the fine arts, their progress, and their survival require true opulence, and this luxury is only the fatal mask of a nearly universal poverty, whose development it accelerates and aggravates." The arts under these conditions are either subjected to the caprices of the rich or "abandoned to the mercy of the indigent multitude, which strives, by poor productions of every sort, to give itself the credit and the look of wealth." 38 As Barthelemy decried the invasion of the opera by "workmen and mercenaries," so Diderot laments the disruption of social order that results from the corrosive effect of a money-centered economy: When a handful of speculators in public funds possessed fantastic riches, lived in palaces, made a public spectacle of their shameful opulence, all 37 38

Diderot, Satire contre le luxe, a la maniere de Perse (1767?), DPV, XVI, p. 555. "Si l'agriculture est la plus favorisee des conditions, les hommes seront entraines ou leur plus grand interet les poussera, et il n'y aura fantaisie, passion, prejuges, opinions qui tiennent. . . . Les peintres, les poetes, les sculpteurs, les musiciens et la foule des arts adjacents naissent de la terre, ce sont aussi les enfants de la bonne Ceres; et je vous reponds que partout ou ils tireront leur origine de cette sorte de luxe ils fleuriront et fleuriront a jamais. . . . I/argent, avec lequel on peut se procurer tout, devint la mesure commune de tout. II fallut avoir de 1'argent, et quoi

Art and money

165

ranks were mixed up; a grievous emulation appeared, a demented and cruel struggle between all the orders of society.39 Thus the rise of a money economy displaces both nobility in the arts and that representative of the social order based on landed property.

ART AND COMMERCE

The service to the arts rendered, in Diderot's eyes, by the Salon in France was also that hoped for in Britain by Sir Joshua Reynolds from the institution of the Royal Academy in 1769: "that the dignity of the dying Art (to make use of an expression of PLINY) may be revived under the Reign of GEORGE THE THIRD/ 7 4 0 In 1780 he celebrated the opening of Somerset House as seat of the academy with the thought that the estimation in which we stand in respect to our neighbors, will be in proportion to the degrees in which we excel or are inferior to them in the acquisition of intellectual excellence, of which Trade and its consequential riches must be acknowledged to give the means; but a people whose whole attention is absorbed in those means, and who forget the end, can aspire but little above the rank of a barbarous nation.41 This conception lay behind Reynolds's low evaluation of Venetian and Dutch painting, which "depart from the great purposes of painting" and aim "at applause by inferior qualities/' 42 The attack is complex. The Venetians, says Reynolds, draw attention to their craft skills rather than to the "intellectual dignity . . . that enobles the painter's art" and "lays the line between him and the mere mechan-

39 41

encore? de l'argent. . . . c/est celui-la [cette sorte de luxe] qui degrade et aneantit les beaux-arts, parce que les beaux-arts, leur progres et leur duree demandent une opulence reelle, et que ce luxe-c.i n'est que le masque fatal d'une misere presque generale, qu'il accelere et qu'il aggrave. . . . C'est sous une pareille constitution que les beaux-arts n'ont que le rebut des conditions subalternes,- c'est sous un ordre de choses aussi extraordinaire, aussi pervers qu'ils sont subordonnes a la fantaisie et aux caprices d'une poignee d'hommes riches, ennuyes, fastidieux, dont le gout est aussi corrompu que les moeurs, ou abandonnes a la merci de la multitude indigente qui s'efforce, par de mauvaises productions en tout genre, de se donner le credit et le relief de la richesse" (Diderot, Salon de 1767, DPV, XVI, pp. 62, 166-8). Satire, DPV, XVI, p. 553. 4 0 Reynolds, Discourses on Art, p. 21. Ibid., p. 169. 4 2 Ibid., p. 63.

166

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

ick," who produces not art but mere ornament. 43 As a result, the art of Venice and that of Holland share an emphasis on color, which appeals to the eye and reflects an orientation to sensuality and elegance rather than to the uplifting dignity of subject matter basic to history painting. In Holland the departure from themes of general ethical interest is carried the farthest, for their history pieces ''are so far from giving a general view of human life, that they exhibit all the minute particulars of a nation differing in several respects from the rest of mankind/ 744 In John Barrell's words, "what distinguishes Venice and Holland" in Reynolds's view "is the single-mindedness of their pursuit of trade as an end in itself/'45 Such a conception was hardly peculiar to Reynolds; Holland in particular was practically a synonym for commerce in the eighteenth century. The brief paragraph devoted to painters in Diderot's survey of the Low Countries in 1774 asks only rhetorically whether it isn't "commerce that has narrowed the minds of these marvelous men? However skillful the Dutch painters might have been, they rarely raised themselves to purity of taste and grand ideas and character."46 Indeed, this was not only an outsider's view, for the topic of the corruption of virtue by commerce was a central one in the Hollanders' discourse about themselves even during the seventeenth-century high point of their prosperity. Commerce directs the mind to concrete matters and to particular interests, and so Dutch art - as Winckelmann tells us - derives its "forms and figures" from observation of particulars rather than from the synthesis of ideal beauty from observations of many objects. Hence "the trifling beauties that make the works of Dutch painters 43

44 45

46

Ibid., pp. 43, 57. Reynolds's remarks on Dutch (and Flemish] painting in his Journey to Flanders and Holland frequently pays homage to their masterly skill, while reminding us that "it is to the eye only that the works of this school are addressed," not to the mind {The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. H. W. Beechey [London: Bohn, 1851], II, p. 205). Reynolds, Discourses on Art, p. 69. J. Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 73. "On connait suffisamment les grands maitres de l'ecole hollandaise. Ne serait-ce pas Pesprit de commerce qui a retreci la tete de ces h o m m e s merveilleux? Quelque habiles qu'aient ete les peintres hollandais, ils se sont rarement eleves a la purete du gout et a la grandeur des idees et du caractere" (D. Diderot, Voyage en Hollande, in Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux [Paris: Gamier, 1876], vol. 17, p. 430).

Art and money

167

so popular" are at an infinite distance from the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur of Raphael's works. 47 As Reynolds's text indicates, the political theme opposing art's uplifting capacities to the deleterious effects of modern trade and luxury could express a more particular interest of artists, the definition of their pursuits as fine aits in distinction to "mechanical" crafts or trades. Institutional statement of this conception was one of the motives of the foundation of the Royal Academy, as well as of the exclusion of (largely reproductive) printmakers from membership in it. Despite the vastly different circumstances, a similar motivation was visible in the rules of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture established in Paris in 1648, which decided that all members, under penalty of being expelled, would refrain from keeping an open shop for displaying their work, from exhibiting it in windows or outside their place of residence, from posting any commercial sign or inscription, or from doing anything which might confuse the honorable rank of Academician with the debased and mercenary rank of Guild Master.48 Though great gains were made in the effort to counter this confusion, a multitude of texts show that the status of the visual arts remained in question throughout the 1700s.49 By the end of the century, when art had largely been redefined as a "liberal" occupation, the system of court commissions that had structured the highprestige end of the profession was giving way to production for a relatively open market. Ideologically as well as practically, the academic system which had served the liberation of the artist from the medieval guild structure came into conflict with the extension of the market as a general model for the linking of production with consumption into cultural fields as well as all others. 50 47 48

49

50

Winckelmann, Reflections, pp. 21, 43. A. de Montaiglon, ed., Memoires pour servh a l'histoire de 1 'Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture depuis 1648 jusqu'en 1664 (Paris, 1853), I., pp. 61-2; cit. P. Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], pp. 8-9. For the seventeenth-century controversy over the painters' attempt to raise their status, see T. Crow, Painters and Public Life in EighteenthCentury Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), ch. 1, esp. pp. 25, 31. A useful as well as entertaining survey is offered in Jean Chatelus, Peindre a Paris au XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Jacqueline Chambon, 1991), pp. i2sff. See the excellent analysis of Annie Becq, "Expositions, peintres et critiques: vers l'image moderne de l'artiste," Dix-huitieme siecle 14 (1982]: 131-49, esp.

168

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

This conflict appears, notably, in the lament of many later eighteenth-century writers over the displacement of the grand by the petit gout, the shift of taste from history painting to portraits, landscapes, and genre works. The portrait, other than that of the monarch or other great noble, naturally suggests the self-love of the individual celebrating his or her wealth and power; often compared to the multiplication of mirrors in the apartments of the wealthy, it was also the bread and butter of a multitude of artists. A 1777 article in the Journal de Pahs condemned, along with portraiture, the 'low and ignoble" subjects of Flemish painting, "unfortunately more fashionable than ever with its scenes of revelry"51 It might seem that the critical as well as commercial success of Chardin and Greuze, painters of still life and genre scenes, constitutes an exception to this rule of official taste. But these artists, lauded in particular by Diderot himself, are exceptions that prove the rule. Thus Chardin was praised (by Raynal) for the charm of his images, which "offers a strong criticism of the Flemish painters in general," whereas Greuze, hailed by Diderot as the inventor of a new genre of "moral painting," demonstrated to another commentator that "the least noble style nevertheless has its nobility."52 While the "grand taste" seemed to be giving way in France to "little pictures," "noble and sublime" art to "superficial and momentary beauties," history painting to genre pictures, 53 in England painters were still attempting to establish the claims of the great style. In that country, Patricia Crown has argued, in the eyes of its critics the "complexity, variety, multiplicity, nuance, irregularity,

51 52

53

pp. 144ft., w h i c h discuss David's experiments in the first years of the nineteenth century w i t h t h e public exhibition of his works for an admission fee, outside the framework of t h e salon. It is interesting that David sought to justify this attempt by reference to earlier English practice in his use of the term "exhibition," a word used in France, as opposed to "exposition/' to m e a n commercial, shop-window displays. In this David anticipated Courbet, whose "exhibition" of his works in a pavilion outside the gate of t h e Exposition universelle of 1855 was another historical pointer toward the coming of t h e modern gallery-structured art market (see Patricia Mainardi, "Courbet's Exhibitionism," Gazette des beaux-arts, Dec. 1991, pp. 253-66). Chatelus, Peindre a Pahs, p. 171. Quotations cited i n Crow, Painters and Public Life, pp. 137, 141; for Diderot on Greuze, see his Salon de 1763, DPV, XIII, pp. 3 9 3 - 4 . K. Pomian, "Marchands, connaisseurs, curieux a Paris au XVIII e siecle," Revue de l'art 43 (1979): 33. This extremely interesting article is the chief source of the information about French collecting cited in the remainder of this section.

Art and money

169

and lack of subordination" that characterized the rococo style pertained "to early- and mid-eighteenth century society as well as to art." We thus encounter in the classicizing texts of early eighteenthcentury writers on art like Shaftesbury, Richardson, and Webb themes identified above in the discourses of French theorists, notably the illegitimacy of the aesthetic preferences of the lower orders, artisans, tradesmen, and in particular women; what was then called the "modern" style, applied in the making of furniture and decoration as well as pictures, was deemed "effeminate in subject as well as form," for "like women it was little and licentious." 54 These theoretical disputes had a practical equivalent in the quarrels of the 1750s over the choice of pictures and the public to be admitted to the exhibitions mounted by painters under the auspices of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. The very name of this society suggests the problem posed for artists seeking the encouragement of the grand gout in England and the promotion of history painting in place of the portraiture that constituted the basic stock in trade of English artists, a problem ultimately resolved, however temporarily, by the institutional power of the Royal Academy.55 It is an irony typical of, and indeed essential to, the ideological relation of art and money that the critique of Dutch painting as the expression of a commercial culture had a specific commercial significance for artists and critics. In both France and England, the growing interest of collectors in Dutch and Flemish painting probably reflected the rise of a new group of collectors with a taste different from that of earlier dominant connoisseurs (the number of French collectors seems to have increased from around 150 during the period 1700-20 to at least 500 during 1750-90). This was part of the background to Diderot's complaint about the rise of speculation in the art market and its deleterious effect on artistic quality. The growth and differentiation of the art public disrupted at once the supremacy in matters of taste of earlier aristocratic collectors, the influence (and paid advisory services) of critic-connoisseurs, and the commercial success of painting in the grand style, while initiating 54

55

Patricia Crown, "British Rococo as Social and Political Style/' Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 3 (1990): 281. See Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), ch. 4.

I7O

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

the rise of the art dealer as a key figure in the movement of taste and directing that movement toward the dominance of landscape and genre painting in the later nineteenth century. Kzrysztof Pomian suggests that the shift in interest from Italian and Italianate painting on grand classical, biblical, and nationalhistorical themes to Dutch and Flemish genre painting involved a change of the focus of judgment from the norms spelled out by such writers as Reynolds and Diderot to questions of attribution, in which picture merchants themselves had the upper hand. However, Pomian stresses, this victory of attribution over art-theoretical judgment was confined to the market, outside which aesthetics managed to maintain its supremacy: In these places a victory for neoclassicism and a return in strength of the Italians was gathering force, at the very moment when the "little Flemish and Dutch paintings'7 triumphed in the market. And it was in these places that the new type of connoisseur, who would dethrone the merchant, was formed: the art critic and art historian.56

ILLUSIONS OF DISINTEREST

Along with art history and criticism, the advent of aesthetics above all in Germany, where Baumgarten first gave the field its name — both reflected the emerging practice of production and enjoyment of the fine arts as increasingly detached from their earlier functional contexts, and played a role in the definition of this practice as conceptually opposed to trade. This can be seen, for instance, in the "reading debate" carried on by German writers at the century's end, when the growing demand for "light" reading matter poetry based on popular forms, as well as periodicals and gothic and romance novels, many directed specifically at female readers rapidly outran that for philosophically uplifting texts. This development was viewed by "serious" writers, themselves increasingly dependent on the market for a living, as a sign of cultural degeneration due to the commercial orientation of literary production. The challenge posed by the appeal of Thvialliteratur had an important influ56

Pomian, "Marchands, connaisseurs, curieux," p. 34. On English collecting of Dutch pictures after the 1740s, see Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 60-2, 122-3; an( 3 Pears, The Discovery of Painting, pp. 168-9.

Art and money

171

ence on the formulation of aesthetic theory, strengthening the emphasis on architectonic structure, on aesthetic distance, on originality in composition, and on the noncommercial character of the work of true art. 57 Martha Woodmansee's essay on Schiller in Chapter 6 of this volume demonstrates how philosophical questions about the function of art resonated with matters of concrete interest to him as a writer living by the pen. Even for a philosopher like Kant, little concerned with the fine arts as practiced in Paris and London and not competing in the marketplace of belles lettres, the opposition of aesthetic and commercial concerns appears as a simple presupposition. In Winckelmann's Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works the historical distance between ancient and modern appears intermittently as a fall from grace, in which the corrupting effect of a commercial economy plays a central role. Explaining the special access of the ancient Greeks to "good taste/' for instance, Winckelmann emphasizes the role played by the classical gymnasium as a school of art, where (thanks to the absence of "our present-day criteria of respectability") "natural beauty revealed itself naked for the instruction of the artist." The nude body in its most beautiful form was exhibited there in so many different, authentic, and noble positions and poses not obtainable today by the hired models in our academies. Truth springs from inner sentiment, and the draughtsman who wants to impart truth to his academy studies cannot preserve even a shadow of it unless he himself is able to replace that which the unmoved and indifferent soul of his model does not feel or is unable to express by actions appropriate to a given sentiment or passion.58

Here authenticity and nobility, embodied (ideally, at least) in the "inner sentiment" of the artist, are opposed to the gracelessness of the hired model, whose movements reflect not the free spirit of his 57

See Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik an der Thvialliteratur seit der Aufkldrung: Studien zur Geschichte des modernen Kitschbeghffs (Munich: Fink, 1971); Martha Woodmansee, "The Interests in Disinterestedness: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Emergency of the Theory of Aesthetic Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Germany/' Modern Language Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1984): 22-47; a n d idem, "Toward a Genealogy of the Aesthetic: The German Reading Debate of the 1790s," Cultural

58

Winckelmann, Reflections,

Critique 11 (1988-9): 203-21.

p. 13 (translation modified).

172

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

personality but the requirements of his drawing-master employer. But the artist too suffers the distortions of the money-oriented society, for "an artist of our times . . . feels compelled to work more for bread than for honor/' 59 Not only is his product at the mercy of its purchaser, who may choose to place it in positions quite unsuitable for proper viewing,60 but he is more or less required by the pressures of earning a livelihood to depend on the practical techniques he has picked up in his apprenticeship rather than engaging in the rigorous research into the principles of formal truth that allowed Michelangelo to come so near to the achievement of antiquity. Winckelmann's account of art is, to say the least, philosophically naive in comparison with Kant's, but themes present in his work reappear in the Third Critique. For Kant taste is not just ennobling and art not just an education in natural grace; the experience of beauty is in his system an essential element of the spiritual progress of humankind toward the realization of our rational nature. But the features in Kant's eyes essential to the fine arts (as opposed to the merely "agreeable" arts, like table conversation and games) involve the familiar oppositions, not only to the "mechanical" or manual but also to effort performed for a monetary reward. The basic principle is that "we should not call anything art except a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason."61 Art is also clearly distinguished, as it had not been two and even one hundred years earlier, from science. Thus freedom implies, on the one hand, the absence of governance by rules, characteristic of science. Art is the product of the creative genius, for whom technical training and the imitation of the ancients serve to shape a soul that will spontaneously generate new forms. For "genius is the exemplary originality of a subject's natural endowment in the fiee use of his cognitive powers."62 The emphasis on an exercise of reason specific to the arts establishes their autonomy: they are to be guided not by demands external to their own formal natures but by principles internal to the sphere of art (Kant distinguishes "paintings properly so called," which are "there merely to be looked at" from 59 61

62

Ibid., p. 55 (translation modified). 6 0 Ibid., pp. 67-9. I. Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), tr. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 170. Ibid., p. 186.

Art and money

173

those "intended to teach us, e.g., history or natural science").63 On the other hand, Art is likewise to be distinguished from craft [Handwerke]. The first is also called free art, the second could be called mercenary art [Lohnkunst]. We regard free art [as an art] that could only turn out purposive (i.e., succeed) if it is play, in other words, an occupation that is agreeable on its own account; mercenary art we regard as labor, i.e., as an occupation that on its own account is disagreeable (burdensome) and that attracts us only through its effect (e.g., pay [Lohn]) so that people can be coerced into it.64 This passage, not unrelated to the status preoccupations of eighteenth-century artists, evokes elements basic to Kant's theory of taste as "the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest."65 The experience of beauty is the experience of an object as "purposive" - as having, we might say, the character of design - but without actually having a defined purpose for the viewer, who is caught up in no relation of action (including that of scientific cognizing) with it. Hence the object is a "free beauty," exemplifying design in the abstract and in principle representing nothing under a determinate concept; given Kant's (inter-) subjective conception of beauty this reflects the fact that the viewer's judgment of taste can be considered free of any idea of functions which the object might serve for him or her and therefore involves "no concept [as to] what the object is [meant] to represent; our imagination is playing, as it were, while it contemplates the shape, and such a concept would only restrict its freedom."66 The concept of "interest" at work here includes both morality (we have an interest in the good) and the common eighteenth-century sense of that word which "centered on economic advantage as its core meaning."67 The contemplative realm of the aesthetic is contrasted, therefore, with realms of action: that of the good, object of the Practical Reason, and that of the "agreeable" (pleasing to the senses) and of those things answering to "material" needs. (Thus, in 63

64 67

Ibid., p. 193. Such passages explain Clement Greenberg's tracing of his conception of "modernism" to the Kantian aesthetic (if we allow the transformation of the "autonomous reason" at work in art into the "logic of the medium"). Ibid., pp. 170, 171. 6 5 Ibid., p. 53. 6 6 Ibid., p. 77. A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 32. Hirschman presents a useful chronicle of the evolution of

174

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

the case of cooking, "only when their need has been satisfied can we tell who in a multitude of people has taste and who does not." 68 Freedom, at least of the will, is essential to morality; the freedom of aesthetic play signifies the bracketing of material desire and so of the economic domain to which those desires look for satisfaction. Aesthetic appreciation requires neither ownership nor consumption, but only perception. Kant's treatment of the nature of art in this way involves a complex drawing together of many conceptual strands in the idea of freedom. The production of beautiful things must have an aristocratic character opposed to labor: "anything studied and painstaking must be avoided in art." The idea of "play" is central because it is the opposite of "work." And the concept of labor involved here is that of wage labor: art must be free in a double sense, including that "of not being a mercenary occupation [Lohngeschdft] and hence a kind of labor, whose magnitude can be judged, exacted, or paid for according to a determinate standard" and "the sense that, though the mind is occupying itself, yet it feels satisfied and aroused (independently of any pay [Lohn]) without looking to some other purpose."69 The aristocratic flavor of aesthetic experience is if anything more pronounced in Kant's doctrine of the sublime, the experience of the superiority of the reason to the imagination, bound to the representation of empirical material. Like the experience of the beautiful, that of the sublime presupposes the satisfaction of material needs, in this case that for physical safety: "Just as we cannot pass judgment on the beautiful if we are seized by inclination and appetite, so we cannot pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid." But paradoxically physical safety allows us to respond to the thrill of danger viewed and therefore "to regard as small the [objects] of our [natural] concerns: property, health, and life." The genuineness of this appreciation of human response to aestheticized peril Kant sees as proved by the esteem given by society to a person "who does not yield to danger but promptly sets to work with vigor and full deliberation." This character is best exemplified by the warrior,

68

"interest" from a general sense of "concerns, aspirations, and advantage" (p. 32) to Shaftesbury's definition of it as the "desire for those conveniences, by which we are provided for, and maintained" and Hume's use of the "interested affection" as synonymous with the "love of gain" (p. 37). Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 52. 6 9 Ibid., p. 190.

Art and money

175

so that ''no matter how much people may dispute, when they compare the statesman with the general, as to which one deserves the superior respect, an aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the general." For "even war has something sublime about it," whereas peace, in contrast, "tends to make prevalent a mere[ly] commercial spirit," which brings with it "base selfishness, cowardice, and softness."70 In such a passage we may recognize, in this student of Hume and Rousseau, the discourse of civic virtue and its decline under the influence of commerce - here to be countered by the transmutation of aristocratic values into a spiritual principle. If work, as wage labor, is marked by the anti-artistic character of mercenary culture, it is not surprising that play will appear to incarnate the aesthetic impulse. It was in Schiller's Aesthetic Education that this theme received its fullest development at the end of the eighteenth century. For Schiller too "the character of our age" is established by way of "an astonishing contrast between contemporary forms of humanity and earlier ones, especially the Greek." With the development of the division of labor, the unified human personality of the ancients has been split into fragments, so that "we see not merely individuals, but whole classes of men, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain."71 When a society "insists on special skills being developed with a degree of intensity which is only commensurate with its readiness to absolve the individual citizen from developing himself in extensity - can we wonder that the remaining aptitudes of the psyche are neglected in order to give undivided attention to the one which will bring honor and profit [welche ehrt und lohnt}2."72 It is the task of art, expression of the drive to play, to reconstitute the fragmented human person, "to restore by means of a higher art the totality of our nature which the arts themselves have destroyed."73 If art is to be the instrument of humankind's education to a more advanced order of social being, it must be resistant to the characteristic forces of the present age. The artist must protect himself from the corruption of modernity: "Let him direct his gaze upwards, 70 71

72

Ibid., pp. 120-2. F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and tr. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 31, 33. Ibid., p. 37. 7 3 Ibid., p. 43.

176

PAUL MATTICK, JR.

to the dignity of his calling and the universal Law, not downwards towards Fortune and the needs of daily life." And he must seek an audience among people of similar temperament: 'Those who know no other criterion of value than the effort of earning or the tangible profit, how should they be capable of appreciating the unobtrusive effect of taste on the outward appearance and on the mind and character of men?" 74 Taste, by fostering harmony in the individual, will bring harmony into society. Providing a spiritual experience of the physical world, it opens the way to a realm of experience in which the interests of reason are reconciled with the interests of the senses. Art thus holds out the promise of a future happiness for humankind, but even under current conditions it provides "an ideal semblance which ennobles the reality of common day." Taste, that is, throws a veil of decorum over those physical desires which, in their naked form, affront the dignity of free beings; and by a delightful illusion of freedom, conceals from us our degrading kinship with matter. On the wings of taste even that art which must cringe for payment can lift itself out of the dust.75

With these words, nearly the concluding ones of Schiller's book, a conflict at the heart of the modern practice of art - that the commodity status of artworks hinges on their representation of an interest superior to that of mundane commerce - has achieved frank expression, if only in the form of the wistful hope that it can be overcome. Fundamental to this practice is the idea that art's production differs from all other production in its freedom from the market. Hence art is like play, not work; hence, considered as work, it engages the whole person, not the fragmented laborer of today; hence it is a fully creative effort, not constrained by a mechanical process; hence it is "disinterested," not aiming at the satisfaction of material needs. In reality, however, art's rise to autonomous status itself involved the tendential replacement of work to the order of premodern patronage by production for the market. It is therefore not surprising that the "delightful illusion" of art's separateness from the commercial culture which in fact produced it in its modern form has proved impossible to sustain, and that the history of this 74

Ibid., pp. 57, 65.

75

Ibid., pp. 201, 219.

Art and money

177

institution to the present day has seen artists alternate between claims to a higher calling and complaints of insufficient payment for their practice of it. From the side of the consumer, the worship of art has expressed the claim of capitalist society's higher orders to rise above the confines of commerce as worthy inheritors of the aristocratic culture of the past. Here involvement with the autonomous artwork represents detachment from the claims of practical life, even while its ownership and enjoyment require both money and the time made possible by money and so signify financial success along with cultural superiority. It is indeed the new uses made of images, music, writing, and the rest - notably for the construction of a mode of sensibility characterized by distance from material necessity and so free to cultivate responsiveness to experience - that appear as the autonomy of art. Essential to this concept is not just the liberation of the arts from their former social functions but their conceptual separation from the everyday life under the sway of economic interest that the bourgeoisie in reality shares with its social inferiors, apart from those moments devoted to the detachment essential to the aesthetic attitude. In fact, the acquisition of the aesthetic attitude derives from and marks a position of privilege in the very realm of economics from which that attitude officially declares its independence. And although the conception of art as transcendent of social reality provides a naturalist disguise for the actual historical process within which it came into existence and for the socioeconomic prerequisites - leisure and education - of its enjoyment, the truth, as we have seen, will out. If Baudelaire was moved by the Salon of 1859 to compare poetry and progress to "two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred/' it was the same poet who had addressed his criticism of the Salon of 1846 "To the Bourgeois": "for as not one of you today can do without power, so not one of you has the right to do without poetry."76 76

Charles Baudelaire, Art in Pahs, 1845-1862, tr. Jonathan Mayne (Oxford: Phaidon, 1965), pp. 154, 41.

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

6

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics: rereading Schiller's Aesthetic Letters

It would be hard to find a more extravagant claim for the power of art than Friedrich Schiller's statement near the beginning of the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man that "it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom."1 Schiller makes this statement in defense of the aesthetic inquiry he intends to pursue in the letters. As these began appearing in his journal, Horen, in the mid-1790s, Schiller's readers were preoccupied with the revolutionary political struggle convulsing France. With this "most perfect of all the works to be achieved by the art of man - the construction of true political freedom" - hanging in the balance, Schiller writes, "is it not, to say the least, untimely" to propose to divert readers7 attention to the fine arts (pp. 7—9)? It would be, he agrees, did not the tendency of events indicate such a measure - had not the struggle for liberty turned into a Reign of Terror. To Schiller the violent turn of events in France signifies that men are not ready for the freedom they are demanding. "Man has roused himself from his long indolence and self-deception and, by an impressive majority, is demanding restitution of his inalienable rights," I wish to acknowledge the generous support of the National Humanities Center and the Andrew H. Mellon Foundation at Harvard University and to thank Richard T. Gray and Lawrence D. Needham for their helpful comments and suggestions. As the essay is appearing simultaneously in my book The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, I am grateful to Columbia University Press for permission. 1

On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and tr. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 9. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given in the text. I have made minor changes in Wilkinson and Willoughby;s translations.

178

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

179

Schiller writes in Letter Five. But man "is not just demanding this." In France now, as in America, he is "rising up to seize by force what, in his opinion, has been wrongfully denied him." The absolutist state is tottering, its rotting foundations giving way, and there seems to be a physical possibility of setting law upon the throne, of honouring man at last as an end in himself, and making true freedom the basis of political associations. Vain hope! The moral possibility is lacking, and a moment so prodigal of opportunity finds a generation unprepared to receive it. (P. 25)

Far from establishing a rational state in the place of the Old Regime, the citizens of the new French republic are extending the rule of force. They have proved unable to govern themselves. The lesson to be drawn from the bloody course the revolution was taking is that men are as yet unequipped for self-rule. In this grave deficiency lies the rationale for the Aesthetic Letters. He is justified in diverting attention to the fine arts, Schiller writes, because only aesthetic education can equip men for self-government. Or, as he puts it in the passage from which I quoted at the outset: "if man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom" (p. 9). In short, Schiller defines his project in the Aesthetic Letters in expressly political terms. He construes "freedom" in keeping with the emancipatory political goals of the Enlightenment, and he makes freedom thus construed the ultimate object of occupation with the arts. Aesthetic education is to result in a rational state - a state governed by principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Why, then, does he depart from this project midstream? Schiller's readers, even his most sympathetic readers - his editors and translators - have long been troubled by the presence in the Aesthetic Letters of another project, one that runs along parallel to, eventually displacing, the political project just sketched.2 The goal of this sec2

The deep ambivalence in Schiller's aesthetic theory is noted, for example, by Reginald Snell in his introduction to what is still the most widely used English translation (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, tr. Reginald Snell [New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965], pp. 14-16) and by Kate Hamburger in her afterword to what is undoubtedly the most widely used German edition (Ueber die dsthetische Erziehung [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1965], p. 149). It was first analyzed in

I8O

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

ond project is not so much to emancipate humanity as to render emancipation unnecessary. That is to say, by the end of the Aesthetic Letters what had been designated the indispensable instrument of emancipation seems to have become identical with it: the experience of beauty in art has become a terminal value. At the end of the Aesthetic Letters aesthetic experience is portrayed as itself the locus of freedom. "Freedom" has lost the distinctly political inflection given it at the beginning of the Aesthetic Letters and come to denote the kind of freedom to dream that is the consolation of the subjects of even the most repressive regimes. The present essay seeks to shed light on this slippage by examining the cultural-political context in which the Aesthetic Letters took shape. I shall focus on a controversy over the nature and function of poetry which Schiller initiated in a review of the collected poems of one of the most popular writers of the period, Gottfried August Burger. On Burger's Poems [Ueber Burgers Gedichte], a virtual blueprint of the theory of art elaborated in the Aesthetic Letters, reveals quite different considerations at the root of Schiller's extravagant claim for the power of art from those he mentions at the beginning of the Aesthetic Letters - not an impassioned interest in human emancipation by peaceful means, but the very material existential considerations of a professional writer in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. This "occasional" writing makes sense of the puzzling trajectory of the Aesthetic Letters, I propose, by suggesting that the emancipatory project announced with such fanfare at the beginning of them is but a pre-text for the narrowly aesthetic project that gradually displaces it, culminating in the cult of art celebrated at the Aesthetic Letters7 conclusion. detail by Hans Lutz in Schillers Anschauungen von Kultur und Natur (Berlin: E. Ebering, 1928), pp. 169-233. In their dual-language edition Wilkinson and Willoughby mount a herculean effort to refute Snell's conclusion that the Aesthetic Letters contain "two completely unreconciled, and irreconcilable, strata of thought" [On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, p. xliii). Although - or perhaps because - their defense of Schiller's argument runs a dense ninety pages, doubts about its coherence continue to be raised. See, e.g., Dieter Borchmeyer's lucid treatment of the Aesthetic Letters in Die Weimarer Klassik (K6nigstein/Ts.: Athenaum Verlag, 1980), II, pp. 203-11, esp. 209-10; and Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990], pp. 11 off.

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

181

I The aim of the poet is either to benefit, or to amuse, or to make his words at once please and give lessons of life. . . . He has gained every vote who has mingled profit with pleasure by delighting the reader at once and instructing him. This is the book that makes the fortune of the [booksellers] Sosii, that crosses the seas, and gives a long life of fame to its author. (Horace)* In Gottfried August Burger (1747-94) the instrumentalist principles that guided literary practice down through the eighteenth century found one of their most effective partisans. Burger believed with Horace that a poem ought "at once [to] please and give lessons of life." Whether or not the poem succeeds he considered a matter for its recipients to decide, and he thought that in thus deciding they determined the poem's value. Burger is chiefly remembered by English-speaking readers for Lenore, a chilling ballad about a girl carried to an early grave by the ghost of her beloved, which took England by storm in the 1790s. The "immediate inspiration of Wordsworth's interest in the ballad/' 4 Lenore helped to catalyze the revolution in English poetry that got under way with the publication in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads. The notice which accompanied the Lenore translation by William Taylor of Norwich in the Monthly Magazine for March 1796, where Wordsworth and Coleridge first became acquainted with Burger, suggests the nature of the German poet's appeal. Burger is every where distinguished for manly sentiment and force of style. His extraordinary powers of language are founded on a rejection of the conventional phraseology of regular poetry, in favour of popular forms of expression, caught by the listening artist from the voice of agitated nature. 3

4

'The Art of Poetry/' in Horace for English Readers, tr. E. C. Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), p. 357. Stephen Maxfield Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 86. For Lenore's reception in England, see Evelyn B. Jolles, G. A. Burgers Ballade "Lenore" in England (Regensburg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1974). For Burger's influence on the theory of poetry that underlies the Lyrical Ballads, see my "Die poetologische Debatte um Burgers Lenore," in Verlorene Klassik! ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), pp. 237-49.

182

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

Imitative harmony he pursues almost to excess: the onomatopoeia is his prevailing figure; the interjection, his favorite part of speech: arrangement, rhythm, sound, rime, are always with him, an echo to the sense. The hurrying vigour of his impetuous diction is unrivalled; yet, it is so natural, even in its sublimity, that his poetry is singularly fitted to become national popular song.5 Burger, who died two years before the appearance of Taylor's notice, would surely have felt vindicated by its judgment on his poetry as "fitted to become national popular song," for this had been his aim from the beginning. As a young poet in the 1770s, Burger joined the other Storm and Stress genies in calling for the reform of German literature. His ideas about the direction reform ought to take in poetry are set forth in Confessions on Popular Poetry [HerzensAusguss ilber Volks-Poesie], which he published in 1776 in the Deutsches Museum. A short essay that takes its inspiration from Herder's reflections on "Ossian und die Lieder alter Volker" in Von deutscher Art und Kunst - the collection of 1773 which did more than any other single publication to kindle the literary revival Burger's Confessions are the nearest thing to a formal program for poetry that the poet would develop.6 Addressing contemporary poets in the direct and personal style of his verse, Burger begins his Confessions by demanding to be told why German poetry should be so exclusive, why Apollo and his muses should reside on top of Olympus, where their song delights only the gods and "the few who have strength and wind enough" to ascend the mountain's steep cliffs. Should they not descend and walk the earth, as Apollo did in days of old among the shepherds of Arcadia? Should they not leave their radiant garments on high, those garments that have so often blinded mortal eyes, and don human nature? And frequent the homes of mortals, both palaces and 5

6

Monthly Magazine, Mar. 1796, p. 118. Quoted in Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. 218. The Confessions appeared as Part II of a slightly longer, fragmentary work entitled Aus Daniel Wunderlichs Buch. For Herder's influence, see Burger's letter to Boie, 18 June 1773, in Briefe von und an Gottfried August Burger, ed. Adolf Strodtmann (Berlin: Gebriider Paetel, 1874), v °l- */ P- I 2 2 . The influence both direct and indirect/through Herder, of James Macpherson and Thomas Percy is also audible in Burger's ideas.

"Ait" as a weapon in cultural politics

183

huts, and write poetry that is equally clear and entertaining for all humankind? ^

Burger considers broad accessibility essential to poetry, and he faults German poets for doing so little to achieve it. They complain of being appreciated by only a few, yet they write in an idiom so "learned" and "foreign" that they are inaccessible to the majority of their countrymen. Alluding to the heavy French and Greco-Roman influences upon the poetry of the period, Burger complains that German poets would rather paint heavenly than human scenes and would rather paint like the people of other times and places than like their own. That is why their songs are not heard "on the lips of the people." They have nothing of relevance to say to the people. Calling the learnedness that so elevates them above their readership "sheer pedantry," Burger enjoins German poets to stop expecting "the many who live on earth" to climb up to them; the poets should instead descend from their lofty heights. Rather than take their cues, secondhand, from the literature of other nations, they should draw their inspiration from the world in which they live. Echoing Luther's well-known insight into what is required of a translator to produce a Bible that captures the imagination of the German people, Burger's command to poets is "Get to know the people intimately, explore their imagination and their feeling so you can fill the former with appropriate images and gauge the latter correctly" (p. 317). This, Burger writes, is the recipe for success among all classes of people: I promise that the song of whoever accomplishes this will enchant the sophisticated sage as much as the rough forest dweller, the lady at her dressing table as well as the daughter of nature behind her flax and in the bleach-yard. This is the true non plus ultra of poetry. (P. 318)

Not only is broad appeal essential, it is for Burger the ultimate test of a poem's excellence. All poetry, he states in the preface to his collected Poems in 1778, "can and should be popular. For that is the seal of its perfection [Vollkommenheit]" (p. 328). 7

Gottfried August Burger, Werke in einem Band (Weimar: Volks-Verlag, 1962], p. 316. Subsequent references to Burger's theoretical writings are to this edition and will be given in the text. Translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

184

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

The centrality of popularity in Burger's theory of poetry reflects the intense concern of German Aufkldrer, or philosophers of Enlightenment, with the formation of a common culture, but his program for extending the boundaries of culture departs sharply from theirs. They aimed to draw ever larger numbers into the orb they themselves had delineated. Theirs was a pedagogical program designed to impose culture from above. Burger's contains no such condescension. As Klaus Berghahn has shown, it aimed not to raise the masses into a predefined culture but to enfranchise them. 8 Burger identifies with the uneducated - the "peasants, shepherds, hunters, miners, journeymen, boilermen, hatchel carriers, sailors, teamsters, trollops, Tyrolians and Tyroliennes" (p. 322) - whom he hopes to reach in his verse. His aim is to become their spokesman, not their teacher, and in this way to stimulate culture from below. It is in this spirit that Burger urges the would-be poet to "get to know the people": "eavesdrop on the ballads and popular songs under the linden in the village, in the bleach-yard, and in the spinning room" (p. 319). From the songs on the lips of common people the would-be poet may hope to glean the language and subject matter from which to fashion verse that all of his countrymen can recognize as an expression of themselves. As evidence for the soundness of his program, Burger adduces the great national epics. This is how they evolved, he argues,- it was "the muse of romance and ballad" who sang Orlando Furioso, the Faerie Queene, Fingal and Temora, and - believe it or not - the Iliad and the Odyssey. . . . Truly! These poems were nothing but ballads, romances, and folk songs to the people to whom they were originally sung. And that is exactly why they achieved national acclaim. (P. 320)

Burger is confident of similarly spectacular results from the reform of German poetry he advocates. "Give us a great national poem of this kind," he urges German poets, "and we shall make it our pocket book" (p. 321). 8

Klaus L. Berghahn, "Volkstumlichkeit ohne Volk?" in Populahtdt und Thvialitdt, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum Verlag, J974)/ PP- 6off. See also Helga Geyer-Ryan, Der andeie Roman: Versuch tiber die verdrdngte Aesthetik des Populdren (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen's Verlag, 1983), pp. 91-8; and Hans-Jurgen Ketzer, " 'Ihr letztes Ziel ist es, dass sie Vergniigen verursachen sollen/" Weimarer Beitrdge 33 (1987): 1145-58.

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

185

What enables these masterpieces to speak to so many people, according to Burger, is that they speak not only to the understanding like "the so-called higher poetry" but also, and more important, to the imagination and the senses (p. 319). This became Burger's aim, and although he never attempted anything on the scale of the works he names, many of his poems equal these in their mastery of the techniques of engaging all of the reader's faculties. Burger excelled especially in the formally simple, "spontaneous" lyric and in the more complex form of the ballad. In both forms he ranged thematically from the most intimate matters of the heart to problems as public and political as the persistence of feudalism. His goal throughout was to bring his material alive for his readers - to enable them to imagine it as vividly as if they were actually experiencing it. 9 To see how Burger sought to achieve such immediacy, let us look at his masterpiece Lenore alongside Taylor's occasionally somewhat free English rendering.10 In a steady stream of translations, imitations, and adaptations the poem gradually overran all Europe, helping more than any other German work of the period - including, J. G. Robertson believes, Goethe's Werther, which appeared a few months later - to call the Romantic movement to life.11 The contemporaneity of the poem contributes to its immediacy. It unfolds against the backdrop of the Seven Years' War (1756-63), which many of its original readers would have experienced either directly or indirectly. Peace has been declared when the poem opens. The returning 9

10

11

See Burger's reiteration of this goal in the preface to the second edition of Gedichte (1789), where he discusses how the poet can ensure that everything he wants the reader to see will "spring into the eye of his imagination," that everything he wants the reader to feel will "strike the right chord of his sensibility" [Weike, p. 352). "LENORA. A Ballad, from Burger/' tr. William Taylor, Monthly Magazine i. (Mar. 1796): 135-7. Quoted in Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads," pp. 277-83. J. G. Robertson, A History of German Literature, 6th ed., ed. Dorothy Reich (Elmsford, N.Y.: London House and Maxwell, 1970), p. 247. According to Burger's German editors Lenore produced a play, a novel, an opera, and an operetta as well as many a painting and illustration; it was set to music by no less than sixteen composers, including Franz Liszt; and it was translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Bulgarian, Russian, and Latin as well as English, which alone produced at least thirty different translations (Gottfried August Burger, Sdmtliche Werke, ed. Giinter Hantzschel and Hiltrud Hantzschel [Munich: Carl Hanser, 1987], p. 1214). See also Jolles, G. A. Burgers Ballade "Lenore" in England.

186

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

soldiers pass through Lenore's village, but her beloved Wilhelm is not among them. Concluding that he has fallen, Lenore despairs: O Mutter, Mutter! hin ist hin! Nun fahre Weil und alles hin! Bei Gott ist kein Erbarmen. O weh, o weh mir Armen! [O mother, mother! William's gone! What's all besyde to me? There is no mercye, sure, above! All, all were spar'd but hee!] Shocked at her daughter's impiety, Lenore's mother bids her pray What happens is God's will. Lenore must forget Wilhelm and think of her immortal soul: Ach, Kind, vergiss dein irdisch Leid, Und denk an Gott und Seligkeit! So wird doch deiner Seelen Der Brautigam nicht fehlen. [My girl, forget thine earthly woe, And think on God and bliss; For so, at least, shall not thy soule Its heavenly bridegroom miss.] But Lenore will not be consoled. Wringing her hands and beating her breast, she exclaims: Lisch aus, mein Licht, auf ewig aus! Stirb hin, stirb hin in Nacht und Graus! Ohn' ihn mag ich auf Erden, Mag dort nicht selig werden. [Go out, go out, my lamp of life; In endless darkness die; Without him I must loathe the earth, Without him scorne the skye.] Night then falls and Lenore, having reached the depth of despair, retires. Und aussen, horch! ging's trap trap trap, Als wie von Rosseshufen; Und klirrend stieg ein Reiter ab, An des Gelanders Stufen;

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

187

[When harke! abroade she hearde the trampe Of nimble-hoofed steed; She hearde a knight with clank alighte, And climb the staire in speede.] A voice asks Lenore to open the door. It is Wilhelm, who entreats her to elope with him: Auf meinen Rappen hinter mich! Muss heut noch hundert Meilen Mit dir in's Brautbett' eilen. [Aryse, and mount behinde; To-night we'le ride a thousand miles, The bridal bed to finde.] At first reluctant because of the lateness of the hour, Lenore at last mounts the steed, and the lovers ride off at a gallop: Und hurre, hurre, hop hop hop! Ging's fort in sausendem Galopp, Dass Ross und Reiter schnoben, Und Kies und Funken stoben. [And hurry-skurry forth they go, Unheeding wet or dry; And horse and rider snort and blow, And sparkling pebbles fly] Several times repeated, these lines operate as a refrain, contributing to the tempo of the wild ride, which accelerates with every stanza. As mountains, trees, hedges, towns, and villages hurtle past the couple, Wilhelm repeats the eerie question: Hurra! Die To ten reiten schnell! Graut Liebchen auch vor Toten? [Hurrah! the dead can ride apace; Dost feare to ride with mee?] Wilhelm/s query is but one of the many signs that this is no ordinary elopement. Having passed a funeral procession, the ghostly couple reaches a cemetery, and there Wilhelm is horribly transformed: Ha sieh! Ha sieh! im Augenblick, Huhu! ein grasslich Wunder! Des Reiters Roller, Stuck fur Stuck,

188

MARTHA WOODMANSEE Fiel ab, wie miirber Zunder. Zum Schadel, ohne Zopf und Schopf, Zum nackten Schadel ward sein Kopf; Sein Korper zum Gerippe, Mit Stundenglas und Hippe. [And when hee from his steede alytte, His armour, black as cinder, Did moulder, moulder all awaye, As were it made of tinder. His head became a naked scull; Nor haire nor eyne had hee; His body grew a skeleton, Whilome so blythe of blee. And att his drye and boney heele No spur was left to be; And inn his witherde hande you might The scythe and houre-glasse see.]

Thus is Lenore punished for doubting God's wisdom in taking Wilhelm from her. Her heart stops at this horrible sight, and as she expires, spirits perform a Totentanz, singing: Geduld! Geduld! Wenn's Herz auch bricht! Mit Gott im Himmel hadre nicht! Des Leibes bist du ledig; Gott sei der Seele gnadig! [Be patient; tho' thyne herte should breke, Arrayne not Heven;s decree; Thou nowe art of thie bodie refte, Thie soule forgiven bee!] These final lines drive home the moral of the tale, making it a parable of transgression justly punished. It is difficult to imagine a more exacting implementation than Lenore of Horace's instrumentalist injunction to the poet to "delight the reader at once and instruct him." In the original the poem extends to thirty-two stanzas of eight lines each, but it is still capable of chilling the spine even in as drastic an abridgment as this. Burger's mastery of pace, his galloping rhythms, his vivid visual imagery and onomatopoeic sound effects cooperate to produce a tension difficult to surpass before the invention of moving pictures.

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

189

Burger seems to have taken great pleasure in his skill in creating powerful sensory effects. In a letter to his friend Boie written while he was working on Lenore he boasts, for example, that his landlady, to whom he read the poem aloud, "starts up at night in bed [from it]. I'm not even allowed to remind her of [Lenore], Indeed, I myself can't work on it in the evening, for it even makes me shudder a little. When you read it for the first time to our friends in Gottingen, borrow a skull from some medical student, place it next to a dim lamp, and then read. Their hair will stand on end as in Macbeth/' 12 Burger had translated Macbeth into German, but he must be referring to lines he will appropriate from Hamlet to announce Lenore's completion. "I have a tale to unfold/7 he writes Boie several months later, whose lightest word Will harrow up your souls, freeze your young blood, Make your two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres Your knotty and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porcupine. (Act I, V, 15-20)13

Nor is Burger overreaching. Readers of the Gottinger MusenAlmanach fiir 1774, where Lenore was first published, agreed on its power. Indeed, some were sufficiently shaken to express resentment at such an assault on their nerves. "When I read it, it took hold of me so/' Herder complained, that that afternoon I saw naked skulls on all the church pews. The deuce of a man, to terrify people that way! Why and for what purpose? I wish some one else would sing in the same way about the devil fetching the poet.14

Subsequent ballads like Des Pfarrers Tochter von Taubenhain (also translated by Taylor for the Monthly Magazine, where it appeared as The Lass of Fair Wone) and Der wilde fager (translated by

Walter Scott and entitled The Chase) employed the techniques perfected in Lenore to more social-critical ends. Formally even more 12 13 14

Letter to Boie, 27 May 1773, in Briefe, vol. 1, p. 120. Letter to Boie, 12 Aug. 1773, in ibid., p. 132. Letter to Christian Gottlob Heyne, Nov. 1773. Quoted in William Little, Gottfried August Burger (New York: Twayne, 1974), p. 106. The translation is Little's.

I9O

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

flamboyant than Lenore, The Chase tells the story of a count so consumed by a passion for hunting that he allows nothing to stand in his way. He ravages a farmer's fields and a shepherd's flocks and in defiance of God even violates a hermit's cottage before he is finally stopped and a voice speaking from the heavens condemns him to expiate his sins as a hunter by living until Judgment Day as a hunted creature. At the opposite end of the spectrum thematically but marked by equal intensity are Burger's love lyrics. In a variety of forms and styles from the tightly wrought The Lass I Woo [Das Madel, das ich meine] to the volcanic Elegy When Molly Wanted to Tear Herself Away [Elegie, als Molly sich losreissen wollte] he gives expression to his evolving feelings for Augusta ("Molly") Leonhart, with whom he fell passionately in love shortly before marrying her sister Dorette. Many of these were set to music, as were Burger's ballads, by composers from Haydn to Beethoven. Thus arranged to be sung at social gatherings around the piano, they could more readily serve the function in people's lives which Burger demands in the Confessions when he calls for poetry that frequents palaces and huts as freely as in ancient times - there to cheer and console, to entertain and to stir to action: "Living breath . . . to bless and benefit humankind in this vale of tears!" (p. 320). In his challenge to Burger in On Burger's Poems, Schiller will pronounce these uses the domain of "occasional verse," and exhorting the poet to "disentangle himself from the present and, bold and free, soar up into the world of the ideal" (p. 258), he will oppose to Burger's conception of poetry as a kind of "pocket-book" companion to life in this world the proposition that it is the poet's job to present the reader an other, better world.15 Burger, however, had anticipated this departure from his program. In the preface to the 1789 edition of his Poems [Gedichte], which occasioned Schiller's assault on the Horatian principles that govern Burger's practice, he had warned: 15

Schillers Werke, National Ausgabe, vol. 22, ed. Herbert Meyer (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1958), pp. 257-8. Schiller may not have been the first to use the term "occasional poem" [Gelegenheitsgedicht) to disparage verse written to accomplish a specific purpose, but he was surely the first to extend the abuse to poems designed to accomplish any purpose narrower and more mundane than harmonizing the faculties. See Wolfgang Segebrecht, Das Gelegenheitsgedicht: Ein Beitrag zui Geschichte und Poetik der deutschen Lyrik (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1977), esp. pp. 283-6.

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

191

Anyone who denies [the primacy of popularity] in theory or in practice puts the whole business of poetry on a false track and works against its true purpose. He draws this universal, human art out of the sphere of influence that it belongs to, pulls it away from the marketplace of life, and exiles it to a narrow cell like that in which the surveyor measures and calculates or in which the metaphysician expounds on something obscure or unintelligible before his few students. (Pp. 352-3) Burger accurately predicts the consequences of the "metaphysics" which Schiller will elaborate for poetry: its banishment from "the marketplace of life" to the academy, where it is sustained by scholars and the small circles of disciples they are able to win for it through their lectures. Favorable reaction to his poetry in the magazines encouraged Burger to bring out a separate volume. Published in 1778 with engravings by the famous and much sought after Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801), this first edition of Burger's Poems was in every respect a success. Burger had negotiated a handsome contract with the Gottingen printer Johan Christian Dietrich guaranteeing him 800 Reichstaler, and within only six months he managed to accumulate some twelve hundred subscribers. Before the book went to press the number had grown to around two thousand and included eighteen heads of state - among them the queen of England - and an impressive number of well-known statesmen and literati. 16 Similarly, the reviews, although not all favorable, could wax as enthusiastic as this encomium by Wieland in the Teutscher Mercur: Who will not soon know Burger's Poems by heart? In what home, in what comer of Germany will they not be sung? I at least know of nothing of this sort more perfect in any language; nothing that is so fitting, so enjoyable, so amiable and pleasant to both connoisseurs and amateurs, youths and men, the people and the clergy, to each according to his sensitivity. . . . True popular poetry . . . so lovely, so polished, so perfect! And with all that, as light as a breath of air. And with all this ease and grace, it is so lively and pithy, so full of strength and vigor! Body and spirit, image and thing, thought and expression, inner music and the outer melody of the versification, everything always complete and whole! And in which poet does the 16

Wolfgang von Wurzbach, Gottfried August Burger: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1900], pp. 148-9. Cf. Burger, Sdmtliche Werke, pp. iO42ff.

192

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

utile dulci flow together more purely more sweetly more strongly than in this one?17

Not only were critics as discriminating as Wieland much impressed with Burger's first volume,- it appears also to have been as big a hit with the general audience as Wieland predicted. Three pirate editions of the volume had appeared by 1779;18 and it inspired such a rash of imitations that Burger would feel it necessary to address himself to the problem in the preface of his next edition. By the time this new, enlarged edition of Poems appeared in 1789, Burger was one of Germany's most popular poets - in a word, something of the Volksdichter he had called for in his Confessions. It must therefore have come as a shock to him, and to the literary world as a whole, to read in the review of the volume carried in January 1791 by the Allgemeine Liteiatur-Zeitung that he did not even ''deserve the name of poet." The review, entitled On Burger's Poems [Ueber Burgers Gedichte], appeared anonymously; however, word spread quickly that its author was Friedrich Schiller. II Schiller's devastating review represents a turning point not only in the fortunes of Burger's poetry but also in Schiller's own thought and in the cultural politics of Germany.19 The young Schiller conceived of literature instrumentally, much as Burger. In early theoretical 17

18 19

Teutscher Mercur 3 (July 1778): 92-3; repr. in Burger, Sdmtliche Werke, pp. 10712. The translation is mine. Wurzbach, Gottfried August Burger, p. 153. Cf. Burger, Sdmtliche Werke, p. 1074. See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 54ff. Of the substantial literature on this decisive moment in German cultural politics, I am indebted especially to Berghahn, "Volkstumlichkeit ohne Volk?"; Christa Burger, Der Ursprung der burgerlichen Institution Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), pp. 119-39; Rudolf Dau, "Friedrich Schiller und die Trivialliteratur/; Weimarer Beitrdge 16, no. 9 (1970): 162-89,- Geyer-Ryan, Der andere Roman, pp. 79-98; and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur seit der Aufkldrung (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1971), esp. pp. 73-81; and for its survey of the literature, Walter Muller-Seidel, "Schillers Kontroverse mit Burger und ihr geschichtlicher Sinn/' Formenwandel: Festschrift fur Paul Bockmann (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1964), pp. 294-318. On the bifurcation of culture which this moment signals, see the essays collected in Christa Burger et al., ed., Zur Dichotomisierung von hoher und niederer Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982).

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

193

writings like his famous essay "What Can a Good Permanent Theater Actually Accomplish?" ["Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubiihne eigentlich wirken?"] (1784), he defends the theater on the grounds of its diverse uses in the lives of its audience. ''More than any other public institution," he writes there, "the theater is a school of practical wisdom, a guide to bourgeois life, an unfailing key to the secret doors of the human soul." 20 In his review of Burger, however, Schiller departs from this thoroughly Horatian view of the uses of literature and inaugurates an entirely new poetic program. Drawing on ideas first articulated by Karl Philipp Moritz, 21 he derogates the variety of mundane uses to which poetry may be put and assigns it instead a single, more grandiose function: the quasimetaphysical function that will fall to art in the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Near the beginning of the review Schiller writes: With the isolation and fragmentation of our mental faculties, necessitated by the expansion of knowledge and the division of labor, it is poetry almost alone that reunites the separate faculties of the soul, that employs head and heart, shrewdness and ingenuity, reason and imagination, in a harmonious alliance, that so to speak restores the whole person in us.22 Here poetry acquires the task of healing the wounds inflicted on man by life in the modern world - specifically, of unifying and reconciling mental powers that the need to specialize has caused to work independently of one another, or not at all. This radical reorientation of poetry's function reads like a prospectus for the Aesthetic Letters. There Schiller, having argued in the interest of his political project that "wholeness of character" is a necessary condition of freedom (Letter Four), will extend the analysis he initiates here of the devastating effect of "progress" on the individual psyche so as to include its effect on the relations between individuals and among classes (Letters Five and Six). And finding only alienation, 20

21

22

Schillers Werke, National Ausgabe, vol. 20, pt. i, ed. Benno von Wiese (Weimar: Hermann Buhlaus Nachfolger, 1962), p. 95. The translation is mine. For Moritz's originary role in the development we are exploring, see my "The Interests in Disinterestedness: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Emergence of the Theory of Aesthetic Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Germany/' Modern Language Quarterly 45, no. 1 (Mar. 1984): 2 2 - 4 7 . Schillers Werke, National Ausgabe, vol. 22, p. 245. Subsequent references to the review will be to this edition and will be given in the text. Translations are mine.

194

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

dissension, and disintegration all around, he will prescribe aesthetic education. Art alone, he will urge, has the power to restore harmony in all these different spheres - to reverse the debilitating side effects of progress and heal the divisions that tear us apart both individually and socially. It was not in the interest of furthering any kind of emancipatory political project, however, that Schiller initially put forward these high romantic ideas. His aim in the review of Burger's volume was rather the much narrower - indeed, as we shall see, counterrevolutionary - one of enhancing the prestige of the craft he wanted to practice. To Schiller, Burger's program to expand the audience for poetry, far from revitalizing the craft, threatened to render it even more marginal than it had already become in modern society. Having remarked the relative "indifference" of "our philosophizing age/; (p. 245) to literature in general, he notes that although drama is in some measure protected by the central role which theaters play in the social life of our communities, and its freer form enables prose fiction to incorporate change easily and thus keep up with changing times, poetry is being sustained only by "yearly almanacs, social singing, the love of music among our ladies" (p. 245). To Schiller such organs of mass dissemination 23 are but "a weak dam against the decline of lyric poetry" (p. 245) because the vast audiences they deliver may be had only by poets willing to cater to them. It is with such opportunism that Schiller charges Burger. Burger himself had supplied the cue. So successful had been his call for the renewal of German poetry that in the preface to the new edition of his Poems, which Schiller reviewed, he had felt obliged to dissociate himself from the host of imitators who had heeded it so energetically. Chiding them for mistaking the chaff for the wheat, he had protested: "If I am really the popular poet [ Volksdichter] they are saying I am, I scarcely owe it to my Hopp Hopp, Hurre Hurre, Huhu, etc., scarcely to this or that forceful expression that I may have snatched up by mistake, scarcely to the fact that I put a few popular 23

For the evolution of the almanac, or anthology, the most important medium of mass dissemination not only of poetry but also of stories and essays, see Maria Lanckoronska and Arthur Rumann, Geschichte der deutschen Taschenbucher und Almanache aus der klassisch-romantischen Zeit (Munich: E. Heimeran, 1954).

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

195

tales into verse and rhyme" (p. 352). But his protestations were wasted on Schiller. As Schiller sees it, the effects in which Burger indulges, far from being an occasional lapse, are an essential feature of his verse and the inevitable consequence of his poetic program. Burger has been obliged to take such extraordinary measures in order to capture, and hold, the attention of a broad audience. What he fails to recognize, according to Schiller, is that in doing so he has rendered his verse irrelevant to more sophisticated readers. The cultivated man cannot possibly seek refreshment for the heart and spirit in an immature youth, cannot possibly want to find in poems those prejudices and common manners, that emptiness of spirit, that repel him in real life. It is his right to demand from the poet who is to be the kind of cherished companion through life that Horace was to the Romans that he be his intellectual and moral equal, because even in hours of recreation he does not want to sink beneath himself. Hence it is not enough to depict feeling in heightened colors; one must also feel in a heightened way. Enthusiasm alone is not enough; one demands the enthusiasm of a cultivated spirit. (P. 246)

In his examination of Burger's verse Schiller will simply expand the catalogue of failings he begins here. The immaturity, the deficiency of spirit, the enthusiasm, and the vulgarity that endear Burger's verse to common readers cannot but "repel" the elite. Without expressly contesting the worthiness of Burger's goal of reaching all classes, then, Schiller takes strong issue with his strategy. In ancient times it might have been possible to locate the material with which to fashion verse of universal appeal by eavesdropping, as Burger had put it, "under the village linden trees, in the bleach-yard, and in the spinning rooms" (p. 319). But times have changed, Schiller writes: Our world is no longer Homer's world, where all members of society were at roughly the same stage with respect to feeling and opinion and therefore could easily recognize themselves in the same descriptions and encounter themselves in the same feelings. There is now a great gulf between the elect of a nation and the masses. (P. 247) Riven into distinct classes by "the expansion of knowledge and the division of labor," the entity Burger purports to be addressing, the

I96

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

people, no longer exists as such, Schiller argues, and thus can no longer be addressed by the poet in a single poem - not at any rate in poems fashioned from the language and sentiments of the uneducated. According to Schiller, such poetry cannot hold the interest of the elite. If the gulf separating these classes is to be bridged and a common culture reestablished, some other means will need to be found, some means of "satisfying the fastidious taste of the connoisseur without thereby becoming unpalatable to the masses, accommodating the childish understanding of the people without sacrificing any of the dignity of art" (p. 248). To Burger's populist program for poetry Schiller thus opposes an "art of the ideal." It does not take extensive familiarity with the theory and practice of Burger or independent evidence of his popularity to discern that Schiller's disparaging remarks shed more light on the genesis of his own aesthetic than on their target. Indeed, were it not for such invective, the "art of the ideal" would cut as ineffable a figure here in the review as it does in the Aesthetic Letters. Having introduced it in the later work as the only kind of art that will concern him, Schiller goes on to explain only that "this kind of art must abandon actuality and soar with becoming boldness above our wants and needs, for art is a daughter of freedom and takes her orders from the necessity inherent in minds, not from the exigencies of matter" (p. 7). It is not easy for the reader to visualize this crucial player in the treatise about to unfold. The "art of the ideal" is also subject to handwaving in the review, but here the reader's efforts are facilitated by the very substantiality of its other: the emancipatory and egalitarian orientation of Burger. The "art of the ideal" evolves in reaction to this orientation. This is especially noteworthy insomuch as in December 1790, when Schiller composed the review, the aspirations expressed by Burger seemed to progressive intellectuals everywhere to be on the verge of becoming reality. The revolution under way in France was in its most inspiring phase. The violence which was to alienate so many intellectuals and which, as we have noted, provides the rationale for the Aesthetic Letters, was still many months away. (Louis XVI was executed in January 1793; Marie Antoinette in October of that year.) At a historical moment when so much discursive activity was being

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

197

carried on in the name of the people, Schiller sought to write them out of his model of poetry.24 To reach all readers irrespective of differences of background and educations, "the poet should choose his subject matter only from situations and feelings that pertain to the human being as a human being/' Schiller writes (p. 248). In the interest of universality of appeal he must strive to exclude from his representations, whether they be of "a form, a feeling, or an action within himself or outside himself/7 everything that is merely local or idiosyncratic - "everything arising from experiences, conclusions, and accomplishments come by in specific and artificial circumstances" (p. 253). In what do these consist then? When Schiller descends from the heights of pure speculation to spell out the implications of his exhortation for poetic practice, the referent of the merely local and accidental, and hence the target of what sounds like a rather conventional neoclassical exhortation to "idealize," turns out to be the very features supposed to enthrall the mass audience while (allegedly) offending the elite. At issue is whether Burger has succeeded in "elevating the particular and local to the universal" (p. 253). Having complained that this "art of idealization is most notably absent in Herr B. when he depicts feelings" (p. 255), Schiller "wonder[s] how it was possible" for the critics who praised the great beauty of Burger's poem The Song of Songs to My Beloved [Das hohe Lied von der Einzigen] "to forgive so many sins against good taste" and overlook the fact that the poet's enthusiasm not infrequently borders on madness, that his fire often becomes fury, that for just this reason the emotional state in which one lays down the poem is not the beneficent, harmonious state in which we want to see the poet put us. (P. 256)

And again, as evidence of "how sloppily Herr B. idealizes," Schiller discusses the following stanza from Burger's lyric The Two Lovers [Die beiden Liebenden]: 24

For an overview of Schiller's ideas on the revolution, see Karol Sauerland, "Goethes, Schillers, Fr. Schlegels und Novalis' Reaktionen auf die neuen politischen, konstitutionellen und sozialphilosophischen Fragen, die die franzosische Revolution aufwarf," Dass eine Nation die ander verstehen moge: Festschrift fur Marian Szyrocki, ed. Norbert Honsza (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), pp. 62135-

198

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

Im Denken ist sie Pallas ganz Und Juno ganz an edelm Gange, Terpsichore beim Freudentanz, Euterpe neidet sie im Sange; Ihr weicht Aglaja, wenn sie lacht, Melpomene bei sanfter Klage, Die Wollust ist sie in der Nacht, Die holde Sittsamkeit bei Tage. [She is Pallas in her thoughts And Juno in her noble gait, Terpsichore in her dance, Euterpe envies her in song; She bests Aglaia when she laughs, Melpomene in soft complaint. At night she's pleasure, straight and true, And blessed virtue once it's day.] This opulent play of colors cannot fail to charm and dazzle us at first sight, especially those readers who are susceptible only to the sensuous and who, like children, admire only what is gaudy. But how little do portraits of this kind have to offer the more refined artistic sense, which is satisfied not by richness but by wise economy, not by the material but only by the beauty of form, not by the ingredients but only by the skill with which they are blended! (Pp. 253-4) Such practical applications of the principle of idealization tell us more about Schiller than about the verse he is criticizing, for they show not that this verse is especially private or particular, but simply that it is emotive and sensuous. And far from preventing readers from recognizing themselves in the poet's representations, these features evidently cause them to recognize themselves all too readily, to respond, that is, all too powerfully and immediately - the vast majority of readers, at any rate. To "idealize" with Schiller, then, means to purge one's verse of all such affective qualities. He would have the poet supply a purer and intellectually richer text for the outpouring of affects that seek expression in language - whether of love, joy, reverence, sorrow, or hope. By giving them expression he would become master of these affects and make their rough, shapeless, often bestial eruption more noble while they are still on the lips of the people. (P. 249)

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

199

Schiller himself designates the process of idealization he is advocating "ennoblement" or "refinement" {Veredlung) (p. 253) in order to suggest the power of verse that is above all cerebral to elevate its users socially and distinguish them from the multitude of "vulgar" readers.25 He notes that, by contrast, Burger "frequently mingles with the people, to whom he ought merely to condescend, and instead of elevating them to himself jokingly and playfully, he is often pleased to make himself their equal" (p. 250). The review exhibits, then, none of the sympathy for revolutionary ideals that one might have expected so early in the progress of the revolution from a poet who two years later in 1792 was to be named an honorary citizen of the French republic for his services to the people. Instead, Schiller disenfranchises them: they enter his model of poetry only as minors - "children," for whom all of the important decisions are made by others. The people have no vote in Schiller's poetic in the sense that although their needs and desires matter, it is for the poet alone to determine what these are, or ought to be, as well as how best to satisfy them. Whether or not he has succeeded in a given poem, moreover, is for the poet alone to decide, and in thus deciding he determines his work's value. Herr B. thus by no means exaggerates when he declares the "popularity of a poem the seal of its perfection/7 But when he makes this claim he tacitly assumes what many a reader might completely overlook: that the first, essential condition for the perfection of a poem is that it possess an absolute intrinsic value which is entirely independent of the powers of comprehension of its readers. (Pp. 249-50) Thus does Schiller rule the response of readers irrelevant to a poem's value. Deliberately misreading Burger in order to enlist his support for a theoretical departure Burger would never have agreed to, Schiller notes that if it is merely the seal of perfection, popularity could not be of any essential relevance to a work's value. Having assigned poetry so high-minded a purpose, having sketched 25

For the grammar underlying Schiller's distinctions, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 27-124. For their articulation in concrete reading pedagogies, see my "Toward a Genealogy of the Aesthetic: The German Reading Debate of the 1790s," Cultural Critique 11 (Winter 1988-9): 203-21.

2OO

MARTHA

WOODMANSEE

a poetic so very much at odds with the expectations of the vast majority of actual readers, it has become critical for Schiller to devise a means of measuring poetic value which does not require that a poem actually be appreciated. In the place of the response of readers, therefore, whom debased taste renders unreliable judges, Schiller proposes that we take only the poem's "intrinsic," or strictly poetic, properties into consideration. The impetus for this momentous departure from instrumentalist principles appears to have been existential: Schiller is apprehensive about the "decline" in prestige of his chosen craft of verse. Anticipating Hegel's more famous statement of art's supersession by philosophy, Schiller suggests that poetry was once in the vanguard; the vehicle of important, often sacred ideas, it resided near the center of power before it was displaced by "philosophy," both natural and speculative (p. 245). Viewed in this light Burger's conquest of new audiences for verse can hardly have seemed a contribution, for, as Schiller sees it, these new readers were being acquired at the expense of the powerful. Anticipating today's conservative culture critics confronted by blues, jazz, or rock and roll, Schiller refuses to see in the resources tapped by Burger a source of significant new vitality rather than a symptom of decline. This "revival from below" notwithstanding, therefore, he imagines that the genre is in danger of becoming extinct unless it is "possible to define a worthy task" for it. "Perhaps it could be shown," he thus continues, "that if poetry has to take second place to higher intellectual occupations on the one hand, it has become all the more necessary on the other"; and he thereupon tenders the proposition, which will play so essential a role in the Aesthetic Letters, that "poetry almost alone" is capable of restoring human wholeness (p. 245). It was in the interest of rescuing the art of poetry, then, in the sense of restoring it to prestige, that Schiller first set out down the high romantic road. In treating Burger so critically he presents himself as "taking up the cause of art" (p. 258). Ill Schiller's deep existential investment in this cause is evident in his correspondence. His essay in defense of the theater was conceived in 1784, several years after the prodigious success of The Robbers

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

201

induced him to give up his medical studies and make a career of writing, and its idealism reflects the young playwright's confidence that he will find a public sufficiently large and well educated to support the kind of dramatic work from which the essay promises so many benefits. By 1791, however, when the review of Burger's collected poems appeared, everything looked very different to Schiller. His next two dramas, Fiesko and Kabale und Liebe, although they did not create anything like the stir The Robbers had, were read and performed throughout Germany, and both were translated into French and English. However, in the absence of the protections that would eventually be provided by copyright laws, Schiller was not able to realize any substantial income from them. 26 To prosper in so unregulated a market he would have had to produce as rapidly as Iffland (1759-1814), who had been with the Mannheim theater for four years when Schiller received a one-year contract as resident dramatist there in 1783. A master of the sentimental drama, Iffland could turn out a successful play in a few weeks. (He wrote some sixty-five in all.) But Schiller found it impossible to make the concessions that this kind of productivity requires. His contract called for three plays: Fiesko and Kabale und Liebe, which were nearly finished when Schiller accepted the post, and one entirely new play. But by the end of the year he had barely begun the new play, the ambitious Don Carlos (it would not be completed for three more years), and his contract was not renewed. Unemployed and in deep financial debt, Schiller would have to seek more lucrative avenues of expression. "It may surprise you to learn that I propose to play this role in the world," Schiller wrote friends of his plan to found a miscellany, but "the German public forces its writers to choose according to commercial calculations rather than the dictates of genius. I shall devote all my energies to this Thalia, but I won't deny that I would have employed them in another sphere if my condition placed me beyond business considerations."27 Conceived in the fall of 1784, a few 26

27

See my "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author/ 7 ' Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 425-48. Letter to Huber, 7 Dec. 1784, in Schillers Briefe, ed. Fritz Jonas (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, n.d.), vol. i, p. 223. This and subsequent translations of the letters are mine.

2O2

MARTHA

WOODMANSEE

months after the termination of his contract with the Mannheim theater, the plan attests to Schiller's recognition that he will have to increase his productivity and pay greater heed to the market if he aims to live by the pen. Schiller makes an energetic effort to do so, but judging from his correspondence, rarely without the reluctance - the element of resentment - he exhibits here, and with scant success financially. His grasp of the literary market and of the measures required to break into it is demonstrated in this analysis of what it would take to revitalize the Thalia. That "your plan is too earnest, too respectable - how should I say? too refined - to be the basis of a journal intended to reach many hands/' he writes his friend Korner, who was contemplating becoming co-editor, "is evident from the response to our philosophical letters in the Thalia. In terms of your plan they are exceedingly appropriate and beautiful - but how many readers found them so?" Cagliostros and Starks, Flamels, ghostseers, secret chronicles, travel narratives, in any event, piquant stories, casual strolls through the current political and the ancient historical worlds - these are subjects for miscellanies. Above all, we would have to make it a rule to choose our material either from what is current - that is, from the latest things in circulation in the reading world - or from the most remote pastures, where we could count on the bizarre and the strange to interest readers. He does not mean to discourage Korner, Schiller hastens to add, from eventually inserting more demanding material, but first one has to get the organ off the ground: Interesting - light and elegantly treated situations, characters, etc. from history, didactic stories, portraits of manners, dramatic performances, in all events, popular and yet pleasing expositions of philosophical, preferably moral, matter, art criticism, satirical sketches, Meissnerian dialogues and the like must be our debut. But above all else i) the bookseller must do his part to ensure circulation; 2) issues must follow one another rapidly and regularly; 3) the price should not be too high; 4) it should include writers with names to recommend it. My name counts certainly, but not exactly with all classes whose money we're after; to get these we'd have to parade, for example, a Garve, Engel, Gotter, or Biester and his ilk (I don't mean the people but the types).28 28

Letter to Korner, 12 June 1788, in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 76-7. Cagliostro, an Italian swindler who specialized in spiritualism and alchemy, was famous for the scandal

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

203

In this survey of the market in which he was attempting to secure a foothold, Schiller counsels compromise: meet readers on their own ground initially in the hope that, once hooked, they may be coaxed into accepting more demanding fare. It is in such terms, Rudolf Dau observes, that Schiller's diverse activities of the eighties and nineties must be understood.29 In addition to launching the Thalia, which he managed to keep alive under varying fortunes until 1795, Schiller undertook numerous other editorial projects, he threw himself into historical writing, and with his novel The Ghostseer [Dei Geisterseher], he even made foray into popular fiction. In the last project, which tells the story of a German prince in Venice who falls victim to the machinations of a secret society, the marketing principles Schiller urges on Korner are executed to the letter. In addition to exploiting for its theme the popular interest in the occult that had been aroused by the escapades of the charlatan Cagliostro, the novel combines secret report and travel narrative, it contains a touch of the piquant and the political, "the bizarre and the strange," and a dose of popular philosophy. Response to the novel was correspondingly positive. It had been conceived to improve the circulation of the Thalia, in which it appeared serially in 1787-9, and the first installment evidently struck a sufficiently sympathetic chord with readers for Schiller to jest of drawing the project out as long as possible. "I thank the lucky star that led me to the Ghostseer/7 he writes Korner in the same letter. "Deride me as much as you will, but I intend to work it to death, and it won't get away in less than 30 sheets. I would be an idiot to disregard the praise of wise men and fools. Goschen [Schiller's publisher] can pay me well for it. . . . A time is eventually going to come when I can write something without any ulterior motives at all/' 30 In fact, however, the time did not come until a patron stepped forward to support him. The success of The Ghostseer did not improve Schiller's financial situation substantially. Goschen may have

29 30

he precipitated in 1785 at the French court. Johann August Starck (1741-1816], head preacher at the court of Darmstadt, secretly converted to Catholicism. Nicolas Flamel, a fourteenth-century French alchemist, was reported to have lived until the beginning of the eighteenth century. August Gottlieb Meissner, Christian Garve, Johann Jacob Engel, Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter, and Johann Erich Biester were all respected, middlebrow men of letters in Schiller's day. Rudolf Dau, "Friedrich Schiller und die Trivialliteratur," p. 175. Letter to Korner, 12 June 1788, in Schillers Briefe, vol. 2, p. 74. See also his letter to Korner, 15 May 1788, in ibid., pp. 6 1 - 3 .

2O4

MARTHA

WOODMANSEE

paid handsome honoraria,31 but so unregulated was the German book market that all but a fraction of the profits generated by the novel went to those in the expanding entertainment industry who pirated it, translated it, imitated it, or, indeed, simply continued it, for Schiller was not able to finish the novel himself.32 He was illsuited to the task he had set himself, and once assured of a captive audience, he began to try to mold the novel into a weightier, philosophical work. 33 When this proved impossible to accomplish effectively midstream, he tired of the project, and even the prospect of further, much needed honoraria could not persuade him to return to it. 34 More satisfying to Schiller intellectually was the historical writing to which he also turned during this period. In history he felt he had found a subject for which there was unquestionable demand as well as a genre sorely in need of the special skills of the playwright. Since "history is a necessity/7 he wrote Korner early in 1788, "no small thanks will go to the writer who transforms it from an arid discipline into an enticing one and strews pleasures where one would have had to put up with finding only toil." Schiller felt himself preeminently qualified to perform this service, for did not his peculiar genius lie in breathing life into ideas, in investing "dry bones with muscles and nerves"?35 Accordingly he hoped to achieve as a historian the fame and fortune - the "economic fame," as he wryly termed it 36 - that had so far been denied him as a playwright. In words that betray his mounting bitterness at being thus forever diverted from his calling, he explains to Korner that with a historical work of half the merit I will achieve more recognition in the so-called learned and bourgeois worlds than with the greatest expense of spirit on the frivolity of a tragedy. 31

32

33 34 35 36

Letters to Goschen, 25 Nov. 1792 and 26 Apr. 1799, in ibid., vol. 3, pp. 229-30; vol. 6, pp. 2 7 - 8 . It was thus as a fragment that The Ghostseer finally appeared in book form in 1789. Having devoted five issues of the Thalia to it, Schiller held back the final, "farewell" installment to prevent the pirates from beating Goschen to press and depriving h i m of a profit (letter to Goschen, 19 June 1788, in Schillers Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 79-80). Letter to Korner, 22 Jan. 1789, in ibid., p. 211. See also pp. 214-15. Letter to Friedrich Unger, 26 July 1800, in ibid., vol. 6, pp. 178-9. Letter to Korner, 7 Jan. 1788, in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 2 - 3 . Letter to Korner, 17 Mar. 1788, in ibid., p. 30.

"Kit" as a weapon in cultural politics

205

Don't think I'm jesting. . . . Isn't solidity the criterion by which merit is measured? Isn't the instructive, that is, what passes itself off as instructive, of a much higher order than the merely beautiful or entertaining? Thus judges the mob - and thus judge the scholars. If people admire a great poet, they revere a Robertsohn - and if this Robertsohn had written with poetic flair, he would be revered and admired. Who says that / won't be able to do that - or, more precisely, that I won't be able to make people think I have? For my [Don] Carlos, the result of three years of hard work, I was rewarded with aversion. My Dutch history, the work of five, at most six, months, may just make a distinguished man of me.37 Schiller had calculated correctly. His work in history did bring him the recognition for which he yearned. He was extremely productive in the five years he devoted to it, between 1787 and 1792, completing in addition to the Revolt of the Netherlands [Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande], to which he here alludes, another substantial work, his Thirty Years' War [Geschichte des dreissigjdhrigen Krieges], and countless shorter studies, sketches, introductions, and forewords in conjunction with the various editorial projects he took on. His industry also paid off in the sense that the recognition it earned him in the learned world led to his appointment in 1789 as professor of history in Jena. The post was unfortunately unsalaried, however, making him entirely dependent on student fees, so it did not ensure him a livelihood. Schiller's correspondence at the end of the decade is thus even more haunted by financial worries than it had been at the beginning, and early in 1791 he became critically ill. It is understandable, therefore, that he was so grateful for the patronage extended him later that year by the Danish duke of Augustenburg. In Schiller's view the German reading public, whose enthusiastic reception of his first play had given him the courage to flee the grasp of the duke of Wurttemberg and seek his fortune as a writer, had proved as indifferent to his "genius'7 as had that petty tyrant. Now, however, through the largesse of another nobleman he was to be liberated from the tyranny of the public. He was to receive 1,000 thalers a year for three years with no conditions whatsoever and then, if he chose to settle in Copenhagen, a government sinecure of some kind. The gift struck Schiller as a miraculous reversal 37

Letter to Korner, 7 Jan. 1788, in ibid., pp. 2-3.

2O6

MARTHA

WOODMANSEE

of fortune, as he explains to the Danish poet Jens Baggesen, who had been instrumental in securing it for him: From the time of my intellectual birth I have struggled with fortune, and since learning to appreciate intellectual freedom I have been condemned to do without it. A rash step ten years ago deprived me forever of the means of supporting myself by anything other than writing. I chose this vocation before I had assayed its demands, surveyed its difficulties. I was overwhelmed by the necessity of practicing it before knowledge and intellectual maturity had made me a match for it. That I sense this, that I did not allow my ideal of a writer's task to be contained within the same narrow limits in which I myself was confined, I credit to the goodwill of heaven, which has thereby held out the possibility of progress to me. But under the circumstances this just compounded my misfortune. For I now saw everything I created as immature and vastly beneath the ideal that lived within me. While sensing all this potential for perfection I had to rush before the public prematurely. Myself so in need of instruction, I had to pose against my will as man's teacher. Each product, under such circumstances only tolerably successful, made me feel all the more keenly how much potential fortune was suppressing in me. The masterpieces of other writers saddened me because I lost hope of ever partaking of the happy leisure they enjoyed, in which alone works of genius can ripen. What would I not have given for two or three quiet years off from writing to devote to study - just to developing my ideas, to bringing my ideals to maturity. I now know that it is impossible in the German world of letters to satisfy the strict demands of art and simultaneously procure the minimum of support for one's industry. I have been struggling to reconcile the two for ten years, but to make it even in some measure possible has cost me my health. 38 Schiller expresses his gratitude for the duke's patronage by denouncing the institution which was replacing patronage.39 But note that it is not just for failing to support him in pursuing his inclinations as a writer that the literary market comes under his fire. Schiller generalizes and mystifies, casting the "literary life" he relates as an object lesson in the irreconcilability of the demands of the market and what he terms the "strict demands of art/7 With the aid of the stipend Schiller expected to be in a position to pay off his debts and, freed of financial worries, to begin to realize his 38 39

Letter to Baggesen, 16 Dec. 1791, in ibid., vol. 3, pp. 178-9. For the details, especially the posturing on both sides to avoid the appearance of patronage extended or received, see Klaus-Detlef Miiller, "Schiller und das

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

207

"ideal of the writer's task." 40 The first step in his "self-realization" seems to have involved an effort to recuperate theoretically the experiences he relates in this letter. That is, before returning to the drama to complete in rapid succession his Wallenstein trilogy, Maria Stuart, Die fungfrau von Orleans, Die Braut von Messina, and Wilhelm Tell, Schiller first turned his attention to philosophy.41 The Aesthetic Letters and Naive and Sentimental Poetry are the most famous products of this period of intense reading and reflection, in which Schiller explores the implications for art in general of his experience as a professional writer. He had already taken a decisive step in this direction a year earlier in his review of Burger, for the review, as we have seen, promotes as the sole instrument of human salvation poetry produced in studied indifference to the desires, whether for instruction or diversion, of a buying public, which is depicted as being so base that it is beneath a serious poet's consideration. Once liberated from dependence on this public, Schiller is free to develop this idea and, above all, to erase the signs of its provenance in his own struggle as a professional writer for the attention of that public. Composed in the courtly setting of Weimar in the form of letters to his noble patron, his aesthetic retains so few such signs that it has been possible even for students of aesthetics as materialist as Terry Eagleton to read it as fundamentally progressive - the product of "the dismal collapse of revolutionary hopes." 42 Still, to more "resisting" readers schooled in Mazenat: Zu den Entstehungsbedingungen der 'Briefe iiber die asthetische Erziehung des M e n s c h e n , ' " Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, 1984), pp. 151-67, esp. issrf. 40 "What I have yearned for so ardently all m y life is about to come to pass/' Schiller writes Korner upon learning of the stipend. "I will [soon] be able to do just as I please, to pay off m y debts, and, free of worry about where m y next meal will come from, to live entirely according to m y own mental schemes. For once I will finally have the leisure to learn and to gather and to work for eternity" (13 Dec. 1791, in Schillers Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 174-5). 41 It was at this time that he finally delved into Kant, tackling the Critique of Judgment just after he completed the review of Burger, in the winter of 1791, before daring to attempt the first Critique at the end of the year. The Aesthetic Letters reflect Kant's influence - indeed, Schiller mentions Kant explicitly at the beginning of t h e m - but the review suggests that he developed the key categories of his aesthetic independently of Kant, finding in the latter the corroboration he needed to efface their material existential foundation. 42 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 106.

2O8

MARTHA WOODMANSEE

Schiller's "occasional" writings, signs of the theory's provenance remain - for example, the unexpected assertion in Letter Two that to qualify for the high metaphysical task assigned to it an art object must be strictly "not for profit." Why is that? we ask. "The verdict of this epoch does not by any means seem to be going in favour of art, at least not the kind of art to which alone [his] inquiry is directed," Schiller writes. The times are increasingly hostile to "the art of the ideal." It is presently "material needs" [das Bedurfnis] that "reign supreme, bending a degraded humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke. Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage. Weighed in this crude balance, the insubstantial merits of art scarce tip the scale, and, bereft of all encouragement, she shuns the noisy market-place of our century. (Pp. 6-7) In such patent examples of making a virtue of necessity the generous portion of ressentiment which marks Schiller's theorizing is barely disguised. It is a measure of his power as a theorist that such passages of the Aesthetic Letters go unnoticed, drowned out by his heroic rhetoric. We began our discussion by noting the Aesthetic Letters7 puzzling trajectory, their conflation of two distinct and seemingly incompatible projects: the expressly political project carried by this heroic rhetoric, a project which, for all its idealism, has the transformation of this world as its goal; and a rather narrowly aesthetic project, which takes what was at first presented as the instrument of peaceful political change - aesthetic education - and turns this into a goal sufficient unto itself. This second project, which gradually overwhelms the political project to prevail at the end of the Aesthetic Letters, is also asserted to have freedom as its goal, but it is strictly psychic - the freedom we experience in a world of semblance, or make-believe, where unrealized and unrealizable desires are fulfilled, if only momentarily and imaginatively.43 In the aesthetic state, Schiller writes in the penultimate paragraph of the Aesthetic Letters, "the fetters of serfdom fall away," making everyone a "free citizen [having equal rights with the noblest]," "the ideal of equality [is] fulfilled," and the "individual" is reconciled with the "species" 43

Borchmeyer, Die Weimarer Klassiik, II, pp. 209-10.

"Art" as a weapon in cultural politics

209

(pp. 217-19). Liberte, egalite, fraternite. All of the aspirations of the revolution may be savored in the experience of beautiful art. Read in the light of Schiller's "occasional" writings, this celebration of art for its own sake is hardly surprising. Schiller's first allegiance was to his craft.

JOHN HOPE MASON

7

Thinking about genius in the eighteenth century

In the period known to British historians as "the long eighteenth century/7 that is, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the word "genius" came to assume its modern meaning. Before this time it had referred either to a nonhuman spirit which acted as an individual's guardian, providing advice or support in the form of superhuman wisdom or strength, or to a universal spirit of generation. During this period it came to be applied to a particular kind of inventive human being whose natural talent [ingenium) made possible the outstanding achievements previously believed to have been brought about by a (or the) genius. The external or universal spirit became an individual with outstanding natural powers. The modern concept of genius is, therefore, one aspect of that overall change in which the balance between the gods7 bounty and human achievement shifted decisively toward the latter. Just as political rule came to be justified not by divine right or historical precedent but rather in terms of (more or less) democratic consent, or as, later, May Day ceased to be a celebration of the earth's fertility and became an assertion of the power of labor, so genius became a wholly human phenomenon, independently productive and deriving its value from itself. The sentiment which gave rise to the democratic imperative of Rousseau's Contrat social was the same as that which informed Blake's statement, "I must create a system or be An earlier version of this article was given at a conference on the Enlightenment at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, where it benefited from the contributions of Roland Mortier, Wolfgang Pross, Peter Hans Reill, and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann.

210

Genius in the eighteenth century

211

enslaved by another man's/' 1 This is the modern view: human beings must make their own world - there is no one else to do it for them - and they are confident that they have the power and ability to do so. However, when we look in detail at the way this transition occurred, we find that the process was not straightforward. With respect to genius, in particular, the concept which came to prevail was one which set it apart from the overall change with which it was evidently connected. The activity of a genius was depicted as qualitatively different from anything related to politics or economics. Far from being regarded as one aspect of the new man-made reality, genius was seen almost as something that could save us from it. How did this happen? What other ways of thinking about genius were there, and why did they come to be discarded? I "If we will rightly estimate things, as they come to our use, and cast up several expenses about them, what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour, we shall find that in most of them ninety-nine out of one hundred are wholly to be put on the account of labour/72 This statement, in Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690), is an indication of the shift toward human selfsufficiency that was to become commonplace over the next century. It is one expression of a theme that occupies a central place in Locke's writings: the decisive importance of human making. In his epistemology a person comes into the world with nothing given, the mind a tabula rasa. As a result, individuals have no choice but to "think and know for themselves."3 We learn from what we experience; from the simple ideas we receive, we actively make the complex ideas which come to constitute knowledge. Since everyone's experience is fresh, no true knowledge can be secondhand, and since everyone's experience may be different (and we are each different 1 2

3

William Blake, Collected Works, ed. G. M. Keynes (Oxford, 1976], p. 629. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, V, para. 40; ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1988), p. 296. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Liv.23; ed. P. H. Niddith (Oxford, 1975), p. 100.

212

JOHN HOPE MASON

anyway), we can only arrive at knowledge in an individual way, each of us making it for him- or herself. Likewise, in Locke's political theory, right in property derives from labor, obligation in society stems from "consenting with others to make one body politic under one government/' 4 and the supreme authority of the legislative branch of government arises from the fact that it alone makes law. In his Essay Locke himself pointed out the similarity of the kind of making that occurs in our minds and that which takes place in "the great visible world of things": "Man's power and its way of operation [are] muchwhat the same in the material and intellectual world."5 We can attribute the predominance of this theme in Locke's thought to a number of factors. One of them, undoubtedly, was the influence of Descartes, with his call for self-reliance in philosophy and his assertion of human mastery over nature. But other aspects of Locke's life were equally, if not more, important: his Protestant upbringing (with its emphasis on individual effort), his association with the Royal Society (with its Baconian ambition of "enlarging the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible"6), his connection with the republican politics of the opposition to James II, his experience of the new commercial and financial world of the Dutch republic. The essential foundation of Locke's thought was his belief in God; but what he built on that foundation was clearly connected with a world in which value was coming to be seen as humanly made. Nowhere was this so obviously the case as with economic activity. The prosperity of the Dutch republic derived neither from natural resources nor from conquest. The country was virtually a tabula rasa. Its wealth came from industry and invention, hard work and frugal living, overseas expansion and internal innovations. The last were of particular significance, for the new kinds of insurance, company organization, banking, and finance, which the Dutch invented, opened up areas of economic possibility that were without precedent. Together with the increased amount of trade and (in Britain) of manufacture, this resulted in commerce being seen less in static terms, regulated from above by government in order to achieve a balance, and more as something dynamic, expanding and oriented 4 6

Locke, Second Treatise, VIII, para. 97; p. 332. 5 Locke, Essay, Il.xii.i; p. 163. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, World's Classics Edition (Oxford, 1951), p. 288.

Genius in the eighteenth century

213

toward the future. In this perspective, dependence on what was inherited was fatal; Addison's man of landed wealth, Sir Roger de Coverley, had to give way to the man of movable wealth, Sir Andrew Freeport. As Defoe was fond of writing, "an estate's a pond, but a trade is a spring, . . . an inexhaustible current, which not only fills the pond and keeps it full, but is continually running over, and fills all the lower ponds and places about it."7 These economic developments were like the Copernican revolution, altering the way in which reality was perceived, from a closed world to an infinite universe. In 1623 Misselden published The Circle of Commerce; in 1734 Melon could write, "The progress of industry has no limits; we must assume that it will always increase/78 Like the Copernican revolution this change brought with it a new insecurity; people were cut loose from the framework in which they previously had been held. As the earth had lost its position at the center of a universe and humanity had lost its place in a hierarchy of matter and spirit, so economic value lost any fixed basis and became vulnerable to invisible forces like credit. However, while the uncertainties engendered by Copernicus were taken to have been triumphantly resolved by Newton, the uncertainties of this economic revolution seemed inescapable. Instability became endemic. In the words of Hume, whose thought was the most comprehensive attempt to understand this change, "whatever is, may not be."9 The fact that something was true yesterday cannot be taken as assurance that it will be true tomorrow. Real life is not like mathematics. At the same time, however, instability was welcome, because it was also opportunity. In the fact-based fictions of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders Defoe showed how uncertainty and disaster could be not only overcome but the occasion for remarkable achievement, the realization of otherwise unknown powers of action and invention. What is static, predictable, or known cannot provide the stimulation which, in Hume's view, all human beings seek. That is 7

8

9

Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 2nd ed. (1727; repr., New York, 1969), I, p. 310. Jean Frangis Melon, Essai politique surle commerce, in Economistes-financiers du XVHI^me siecle, ed. E. Daire (Paris, 1843), p. 737. David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Xll.iii, para. 132; ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1902), p. 164. Cf. his "Of Commerce/' in Essays Moral, Political, Literary, World's Classics Edition (Oxford, 1963), pp. 259-60.

214

JOHN HOPE MASON

why the mind "naturally seeks after foreign objects, which may produce a lively sensation, and agitate the spirits/710 Whether a man is occupied in philosophy, hunting (or, as Ferguson added, business), his pleasure "consists in the action of the mind and body; the motion, the attention, the difficulty, and the uncertainty/ 711 Hume was here articulating one of the great themes of the eighteenth century: man is born for action. The instability of the human realm was more than matched by the ability to make use of new opportunities. In many areas such opportunity was still denied, but not in commerce where, above all, there were situations of the kind which Hume saw as stimulating - not only uncertainty and difficulty but also antagonism and conflict. "Tis a quality very observable in human nature, that any opposition which does not entirely discourage and intimidate us, has rather a contrary effect, and inspires us with a more than ordinary grandeur and magnanimity. In collecting our force to overcome the opposition, we invigorate the soul, and give it an elevation with which otherwise it would never have been acquainted. . . . This is also true in the inverse. Opposition not only enlarges the soul; but the soul, when full of courage and magnanimity, in a manner seeks opposition.7712 This passage was full of polemical intent. It was a commonplace of Christian neoPlatonism, familiar to Hume's readers from the poems of Mallet, Thomson, and Young, that the love of God or union with God "enlarges77 the soul. Hume asserted that the reverse was true: not love but opposition, not union but conflict, enlarge the soul. This emphasis on the benefits of conflict was part of a larger problem. Hume was able to win approval for rivalry by referring to it as "emulation,77 which many classical writers had praised and which enjoyed wide esteem in the eighteenth century. But what was the difference between emulation and envy? How was the noble striving for public applause distinguished from ruthless self-advancement? The problem was an old one ; it had been a recurrent theme in republican writing. It now took on new meaning, however, because this new area of activity demanded the qualities of energy and in10

11

12

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, II.ii.4; ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1978), p. 353Ibid., II.iii.iO; p. 451. See also Hume, Essays, p. 150; and A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. D. Forbes (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 49-50. Hume, Treatise, II.iii.8; pp. 433-4.

Genius in the eighteenth century

215

vention previously associated with emulation, but in a context of an entirely different kind, one in which there was no clearly identifiable res publica. The old rules no longer applied: "custom has driven us beyond the limits of our morals in many things, which trade makes necessary, and which we cannot now avoid."13 If nothing was fixed, and nothing in the social world could be relied on, you could only rely on yourself. And if others felt the same, then even less could they be trusted and even greater must be the emphasis on the individual. Furthermore, as the new sciences described entities in terms not of essences but rather of operations, so in this new world what someone was could not be assessed apart from what he or she did. The lack of fixed identity which Hume described in his Treatise was manifest in a character like Moll Flanders. In these circumstances what a person required was not unchanging rectitude, but protean resourcefulness. The pursuit of material wealth had long been condemned by classical and Christian moralists under the general heading of luxury. For them, such a condition was marked by the prevalence of avarice, envy, and pride, and the contraction of value into the self - an "atheistical narrow spirit, centering all our cares upon private interest/' 14 But what in moral terms might be bad was now seen in productive terms to be good. As Mandeville showed with sardonic brilliance in The Fable of the Bees (1729), it was precisely the "private vices" that led to "public benefits." All human beings, in his account, are driven by pride, self-liking, or vainglory. Our need for approval and craving for distinction cause our "uneasiness" and result in a "continual striving to outdo one another." But this is the motor of development. It is envy which "sets the poor to work, adds spurs to industry, and encourages the skilful artificer to search after further improvements," thus making a continual "plus ultra . . . for the ingenious."15 Mandeville's insight was not new, but the changing circumstances gave it a new centrality and significance. No one disputed its valid13 14

15

Defoe, Complete English Tradesman, I, p. 234. G. Berkeley, An Essay towards preventing the ruin of Great Britain, in Works, ed. T. E. Jessop (London, 1953), VI, p. 79. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, 1924), I, p. 135; II, p. 138; I, p. 130.

2l6

JOHN HOPE MASON

ity; first in Britain, then in France, then in Germany, it became an unwelcome commonplace. Social and economic advance was not furthered by what was morally good. If reason and justice had always prevailed, wrote Turgot, "the human race would have remained in a state of mediocrite." Fortunately, that had not been the case; "the tumultuous, dangerous passions became a principle of action and therefore of progress. . . . In the same way, violent fermentation is essential to the making of fine wines." 16 II To see the first part of the eighteenth century in these terms - as a time when the past ceased to provide guidance, and instability became pervasive, when apparently limitless possibilities began to appear, accompanied by a new sense of potential but clashing with moral norms - is to understand why the new aesthetic categories of the sublime, originality, and genius arose in this period. These ideas reflected, expressed, and helped to define the experience of this new world. The Hellenistic treatise attributed in the eighteenth century to Longinus had been known since the sixteenth century, but only after Boileau had made his translation in 1674 did it begin to arouse general interest. The work was a handbook of rhetoric, about how to write in order to produce a particular effect, and although it points out the gains that may result from not slavishly following rules, its emphasis is always on the element of judgment, skill, and calculation in literary composition, the need for the "curb" as well as the "spur."17 For Boileau there was no essential disparity between Longinus's aims and the neoclassical precepts he expounded in his Ars poetique. Over the subsequent decades, however, British writers dismantled this rhetorical framework, and discussion of the sublime became the exploration of a (conceptually new) aesthetic experience. By the time the young Burke came to write On the Sublime and Beautiful in the 1750s, he could treat the new category on an equal footing with the old, as a kind of pleasure that was "opposite and contradictory" to that of beauty.18 16 17 18

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Oeuvres, ed. G. Schelle (Paris, 1913), I, pp. 263-4. Longinus, On the Sublime, II.2; tr. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 101. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into . . . the Sublime and Beautiful, III, p. 27; ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1958), p. 125.

Genius in the eighteenth century

217

The principal features of the sublime, as described by Burke's predecessors - Addison, Hume, William Smith, Akenside, and Baillie - were novelty, vastness or limitlessness, energy or power, and moral or emotional confusion. The sublime gloried in what was unexpected and obscure, the energy that carried you beyond the limited and known, the pleasure to be derived from danger or fear, and whatever could convey a dynamic sense of power. Unlike the neoclassical notion of beauty, which because of its attention to harmony and proportion could easily be assimilated with the morally good, the sublime seemed entirely amoral. 'The sublime and virtue are quite different things/' wrote Baillie in 1747.19 The sublime depended not on the observance of rules but rather on boldness, daring, and imagination. The element of novelty became an aesthetic value in its own right, as originality. Although Young maintained in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) that the subject was a new one, his essay shows the same preoccupations that we find in Defoe and Addison. For Young, as for them, value is evanescent: "it is with thoughts as it is with words, . . . they may grow old and die.;/ There is therefore a need for novelty: "thoughts, when become too common, . . . lose their currency; and we should send new metal to the mint, that is, new meaning to the press/7 In such a world, what is given or inherited will not retain its value: "those that are born rich, by neglecting the cultivation and produce of their own possessions . . . may be beggared at last." Originals, on the other hand, "extend the republic of letters, and add a province to its dominion. . . . The pen of an original writer . . . out of a barren waste calls a blooming spring/7 Such figures are distinguished by their selfreliance, their "original, unindebted energy," and their concern not for existing rules or laws but for what is new.20 Young had a keen sense of a changing world. In the mechanical arts, he believed, "men are ever endeavouring to go beyond their predecessors" and as a result the "arts mechanic are in perpetual progress and increase." The advances of the arts and sciences, with the accompanying changes in "all the accommodations, ornaments, delights and glories of human life," provide the basis for progress in 19 20

John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (London, 1747), p. 25. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759], pp. 13-14, 39, 10, 35. See R. Mortiel, L'ohginalite (Geneva, 1982).

2l8

JOHN HOPE MASON

literature: "these are new food to the genius of a polite writer; these are as the root, and composition as the flower; and as the root spreads and thrives, shall the flower fail?" In his own country, above all, Young felt that there were grounds for optimism. Little more was required from the British, in his view, "in order to give us originals, than a consistency of character, and making their compositions of a piece with their lives."21 On this point, however, Young's hopes were misplaced. He maintained that genius and virtue were in essential harmony,- "all true critics allow, that virtue assists genius, and that the writer will be more able when better is the man." But at the same time he stressed the need for ambition, the value of striving for distinction, and the benefits of emulation. In doing this he was echoing a commonplace of the rhetorical tradition, which had featured in Longinus's treatise and commentaries on it. But what had been true of rhetoric, public speaking on a public cause, had not been seen as true of poetry. On the contrary, the rivalry of poets was proverbial and was widely condemned, because their ambition was usually for personal glory rather than for the public good. When Young insisted that "all eminence and distinction lies out of the beaten path; excursion and deviation are necessary to find it," 22 he was praising what had previously been seen as morally questionable. A similar problem arose from the esteem Young showed for imagination. Since antiquity the imagination had been seen as problematic, because it depended on the senses and was often taken to be in league with them in a perpetual conspiracy against reason: "climbing up into the bed of reason . . . [to] defile it by unchaste and illegitimate embraces, [and] instead of real conceptions and notices of things, impregnate the mind with subventaneous phantasms." 23 The problem was that the imagination in itself was unprincipled, so that even for someone like Pascal, who had reservations about the 21 23

Young, Conjectures, pp. 41, 75-6. 2 2 Ibid., pp. 73, 22. Samuel Parker (1666), quoted in B. Vickers and N. S. Struever, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth (Los Angeles, 1985), p. 43. In this quotation the portrayal of imagination as male and reason as female is unusual. Generally, it was the other way around, as, for instance, in Shaftesbury's Soliloquy, in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London, 1711), I, pp. 3i2ff.; and in Young's own Discourse on Lyric Poetry (London, 1728), pp. 21-2.

Genius in the eighteenth century

219

status given to reason, it was the preeminent source of error;24 and Puritan writers were fond of quoting Genesis 8:21, which, in the King James translation, reads "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth/' 25 In the first part of the eighteenth century the imagination did come to be rehabilitated to a certain extent, as the emotions came to be esteemed, the senses became seen as contributing valuably to perception, and the unstable character of commercial society (with its reliance on fashion and credit) gave the imagination new currency. Addison's series of articles in The Spectator on "The Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712) were an indication of this change. Yet Dr. Johnson could still write that the imagination was "a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of restraint." 26 The very qualities which made imagination problematic, however (its being "vagrant," "impatient," and pushing against limits), also made it the source of originality and invention. As such it was seen as an essential component of genius. Young's admiration for "the strong wings of imagination" was by no means new.27 But normally the imagination had been seen as needing control. In Pope's comments on Homer (1715) and Shakespeare (1725), for example, he associated genius with fertility, energy, invention, and originality, as Young did. However, Pope also referred to imagination's "dangerous art,"28 and he made use of the ancient precept that ingenium needed to be guided by ars.29 During this period this opposition took the form of a contrast of wit and judgment, fancy and understanding, and genius and taste. But just as discussion of the sublime moved out of the rhetorical framework, in order to recognize pleasures of an amoral kind, so discussion of genius moved away from this ancient opposition in order to explore the character of imagination in its own right. Blackwell's An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) set out

to describe the "natural causes" that had produced the poet in terms 24 25 26

27 28

29

Blaise Pascal, Pensees, ed. L. Lafuma (Paris, 1952), no. 44. J. Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, Everyman Edition (London 1955), p. 145. Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no. 125 (28 May 1751). See also idem, Rasselas, ed. D. J. Enright (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), ch. 44. Young, Conjectures, p. 13. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, II, line 143, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt (London, 1968), p. 520. Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, I, lines 8off., in Poems, p. 146.

22O

JOHN HOPE MASON

not of psychology or literary practice but rather of geographical, political, and social circumstances. Homer was, of course, remarkable for his imagination - "it is this that distinguishes the real poet" - but the question Blackwell raised was what formed his imagination. And the answer he gave was a characterization of external conditions remarkably similar to the account previously given to the imagination's inner workings: freedom and absence of restraint ("in Greece . . . nature was obstructed in none of her operations; and no rule or prescription gave a check to rapture and enthusiasm"); a wandering life ("much travelling/7 for poets and "strollers" are "men of the quickest and truest feelings"); lack of education and book-learning ("the less of it the better"); unstable, often turbulent times ("it was when Greece was ill-settled, when violence prevailed in many places, amidst the confusion of wandering tribes, that Homer produced his immortal poem"); and a language in its primitive condition, which meant that it was then "expressive . . . of the highest passions . . . full of metaphor . . . of the boldest, daring and most natural kind."30 The freedom Blackwell wrote of might have been that of a curious and carefree child (and in this respect, there is an interesting similarity between Locke's account of a child's mentality and later descriptions of the imagination).31 But the energy was associated with strife, turbulence, and disorder. On both these points his characterization had much in common with Vico's account in La scienza nuova of poetry as the natural expression of a primitive mentality, which "felt and imagined" as children do. 32 Such an imagination 30

Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London,

31

Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, para. 167, in The Educational Writings of Locke, ed. J. L. Axtell (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 273-4: "the natural temper of children disposes their minds to wander. Novelty alone takes them; whatever that presents, they are presently eager to have a taste of, and are as soon satiated with it. They quickly grow weary of the same thing, and so have almost their whole delight in change and variety." Denis Diderot, Elements de physiologie, ed. J. Mayer (Paris, 1964], p. 250: "the imaginative man walks about in his head like a busybody in a palace, every m o m e n t going off in a different direction at the sight of something of interest. He goes backward and forward and never leaves. The imagination is the image of childhood, which is attracted by everything without distinction." Giambattista Vico, The New Science, paras. 375 and 376; tr. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Cornell, 1968), pp. 116-17. This kind of creation was, as Vico indicated, "infinitely different from that of God." It was the product not of knowledge but of a "wholly corporeal imagination [una corpolentissima fantasia]." Mandeville had

1735), pp. 4, 148, 104, 71, i 2 i , 125, 65, 4 0 - 1 .

32

Genius in the eighteenth century

221

was intensely physical, drawing its strength from the body, and quite amoral. First nature, wrote Vico, which was "poetic or creative [poetica o sia creatice]," was also "all fierce and cruel/ 733 The association of genius with strife and turbulence came to be widely diffused through works like Thomas Gray's The Bard (1757) and the poems of Ossian (1760-3), set "amidst rocks and torrents and whirlwinds and battles." 34 But the fullest development of Blackwell's treatment occurs in the writings of Diderot. In his Discours sur la poesie dramatique (1758) he asked, "What does a poet need?" and answered: "Poetry wants something tremendous, barbaric, and wild [enorme, barbare, sauvage]. It is when the fury of civil war or fanaticism puts swords in men's hands, and blood flows in great waves on the ground, that the laurels of Apollo are shaken and become green. . . . They fade away in times of peace and leisure."35 Unlike Blackwell, however, Diderot did not confine his attention to historical or social circumstances; he looked more narrowly to individual psychology and physiology and more extensively to nature as a whole. The genius, as Blackwell insisted, was someone who derived his energy from being uncultivated, uncivilized, close to nature. (For all the writers discussed here the genius was a male figure.) Diderot agreed ("there is no intermediary between genius and nature"), 36 but he did not leave the matter there, for the question which then arose was: what is nature? The ambitions and achievements of the new science had been based on a view of the natural world in which matter operated according to fixed laws, like a machine. In itself, matter was regarded as being inert; both its movement and the laws according to which it moved were given to it by God. For Descartes, God's existence was as necessary scientifically as it was epistemologically and Newton re-

33 34 35

36

similarly insisted that invention did not come about by "reasoning a priori": "they are very seldom the same sort of people: those that invent arts, and improvements in them, and those that enquire into the reason of things" [Fable, II, pp. 144-5). All these writers were drawing on the Epicurean Kulturgeschichte in Lucretius, De rerum natura, bk. 5. Vico, New Science, para. 916; p. 336. Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation the Poems of Ossian (London, 1763], p. 69. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres esthetiques, ed. P. Verniere (Paris, 1959), p. 261. See H. Dieckmann, "Diderot's Conception of Genius," Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1940): 151-82; and J. Chouillet, L'esthetique des Lumieres (Paris, 1974), pp. I28ff. Refutation d'Helvetius, in Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux (Paris, 1875-7), II, p. 411.

222

JOHN HOPE MASON

garded his scientific discoveries as a triumphant vindication and defense of the divine Creator. In the middle years of the eighteenth century an alternative view of nature began to command attention which avoided any dependence on God or external agency and the dualism which that entailed. The natural world, like the political world of the Contrat social or the economic world of The Wealth of Nations, was seen to consist of self-animating agents. Although this view drew inspiration from Epicurean philosophy, its principal scientific support came from medicine and biology, the work of Needham, la Mettrie, Maupertuis, Bordeu, and Haller. What fascinated these men, in different ways, was not so much the beauty and mathematical regularity of the starry heavens as the energy and capacity for development of animal bodies. For Diderot, the genius was a manifestation of this kind of nature in action. As the latter was in continual movement and conflict, yet endlessly productive - "une copulation universelle"37 - so the genius was depicted in the Entretiens sur le fils nature! (1757) as caught up in a violent storm, or in a state of ecstatic, quasi-sexual rapture. Far from being associated with harmony, genius was a product of imbalance and disorder - "genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine" 38 - and the energy a genius displayed could be devoted as much to works of evil as to anything consonant with the good. In the discussion of genie in Le Neveu de Rameau the amorality of the genius is accepted (the argument in the dialogue is about a possible justification), and insofar as the Neveu himself can be seen as genius, he provides a vivid example of what Vico had termed poetic wisdom - a combination of a child's playfulness and self-obsession with an adult's physicality. For the Neveu, beauty in music should not be the echo of the impersonal harmony of the spheres but rather the expression of "the animal cry of passion."39 In his later writings Diderot came to attribute genius less to an identity or fusion with nature and more to a detachment from it. 37

38 39

Denis Diderot, Pensees sur 1'interpretation de la nature, L, in Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. P. Verniere (Paris, 1956), p. 229. The article "Genie" in vol. 7 of the Encyclopedie (1757), to which (it is generally agreed] Diderot made a major contribution, described the principal characteristics of genius as energy, independence (of rules, inhibitions, etc.), susceptibility, and fertility. Diderot, Elements de physiologie, p. 296. Denis Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau, ed. J. Fabre (Geneva, 1950), p. 86.

Genius in the eighteenth century

223

The genius was the person in conscious control of his emotional impulses and susceptibilities. But this was in no respect a return to the neoclassical emphasis on judgment and reason, for in the fullest exposition he gave of this conception, the Paradoxe sur le comedien, Diderot likened the genius to the actor. Instead of being at the mercy of strong feelings he was the manipulator of them: someone with an "equal aptitude for all kinds of characters and roles/ 740 He was a Proteus, a chameleon; infinitely adaptable and always convincing; deceiving us, the audience, into thinking he was the character he was playing but being himself none of them. Who really was he? "Everyone and no one." 41 The actor had been persistently attacked by moralists from Solon onward because of the sexuality of the theater, the vanity of display, the deceit of impersonation, and, worst of all, the lack of any stable personality, any fixed principle. In making use of this comparison, Diderot was not suggesting, therefore, that conscious control or the exercise of judgment necessarily implied a concern for morality. His later writings, as much as the earlier, portrayed the genius as amoral. For Rousseau, likewise, genius was a principle of disorder. Although he rarely discussed the subject in aesthetic terms, a preoccupation with the problem runs through his work. It was, for him, an intensely personal issue since he was, with his extraordinary originality and his commanding eloquence, a genius in person. He provided the model for much of what Diderot portrayed in the characters of Dorval and the Neveu, and he lived out many of the qualities which Diderot described elsewhere.42 Rousseau's illumination, which inspired his Discours sur les arts and les sciences (1751), was an insight into the amorality of literary or artistic creation. When he then realized that the fureur de se distinguer which characterized writers also applied to people in advanced societies generally, that is, when he saw the similarities between literary invention and economic productivity, he moved from the extrapola40 42

Diderot, Oeuvres esthetiques, p. 306. 4 1 Ibid., p. 341. In particular, his sense of himself as being highly changeable, like a chameleon; see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, ed. B. Gagnebin et al. (Paris, 1959-), I, p. 1108; also I, pp. 12, 36,128, 818. A similar characteristic was seen as true of Goethe, by himself (see his Selbstschilderung, in Werke, ed. E. Trunz [Hamburg, 1948-64], X, p. 5 30], and was seen as true of Mozart, by others (see Mozart: Dokumente seines Lebens, ed. O. E. Deutsch and J. H. Eibl, 2d ed. [Munich, 1981], p. 182).

224

JOHN HOPE MASON

tion of a personal experience to a comprehensive condemnation of contemporary society.43 Although many of his terms were ancient, the phenomenon he was describing was exactly what had been discussed before him by Mandeville, Defoe, Hume, and Montesquieu: there is an unavoidable conflict between the drive for innovation and the pursuit of the good. Genius defined in terms of originality was the epitome of that contraction of value into the self which became a general feature of the modern world, and it raised the problems of solipsism and relativism. Rousseau's first solution to this difficulty was a social order where shared values and activities prevented the need for excessive self-assertion. Aware that this was impossible in an advanced country like France, he then devised another solution, in Emile (1762), where he suggested how a quasi-Stoic independence could be achieved in which the individual was both self-limiting and immune to bad social influences. This independence was underpinned and, so to speak, guaranteed by a belief in God, but this belief itself remained intensely personal, reinforced by the argument from design but essentially dependent on inner feeling. As such, it was more an expression of the problem (of value contracting into the self) than an answer to it. Rousseau was therefore led to devise a third kind of solution, the prolonged exercise in self-justification which constitutes his autobiographical works. This brought him full circle, for the only way he could justify himself was by writing. Rousseau repeatedly insisted that he was not an auteur (i.e., like other writers); but he was in fact no more than a writer, acting in a manner similar to what he had described in his first Discours. The fureur de se distinguer he had condemned in that work now became a proud assertion of uniqueness: "I am not made like anyone else I have seen. I dare to suggest that I am not made like anyone else who exists. If I am no better, at least I am different [Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre]."44 The originality which had put the writer outside desirable norms now became an entirely self-generated claim to value. When taken together with his critique of contemporary society 43

44

See m y article "Reading Rousseau's First Discourse," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 249 (1987): 251-66. Rousseau, Confessions, bk. I, in Oeuvres completes, I, p. 5.

Genius in the eighteenth century

225

(and his refusal to compromise with that), Rousseau's autobiographical writings gave his posthumous reputation immense moral stature. Their story of misunderstanding and persecution cast him in the role of virtuous innocent and society in the role of malevolent oppressor; in his own lifetime he had been identified with Socrates, and after his death his tomb became an object of pilgrimage. Yet the independence and detachment which enabled Rousseau both to diagnose his society with such acute perception and to convey his insights with such force had been achieved only at terrible cost to others. He had taken the five children he had fathered to the Foundlings7 Home in Paris, where the mortality rate was even higher than in a poor household like that which he shared with the children's mother. What grimmer example could there be of the unscrupulous and amoral character of genius? Ill In Germany reflection about genius took a strikingly different form from that evident in the British and French writers discussed above. For the latter the qualities of energy and invention displayed by genius were connected with the imagination. Given the empirical assumptions common to these writers, this meant that a significant role was played by physical or sensual factors and by external circumstances. What an imagination produced depended on the nature of an individual body in a specific social and historical situation. 45 In Germany, by contrast, genius came to be connected (implicitly, if not always explicitly) with intuition, the power that had earlier been regarded as an attribute of angels and that "the spirits of just men made perfect shall have in a future state/ 746 In other words, genius was related to the direct, unmediated perception of the truth, unclouded by the senses and unaffected by historical contingency. The immediate source of this notion of genius was the philosophy of Leibniz. The Leibnizian monad was endowed with qualities of both energy and invention; the first was a manifestation of the monad's own inner active force, and the second was a product of its 45

46

It was La Mettrie, concerned to give the body its due, and Hume, concerned to give social and historical circumstances their due, who were the first thinkers in the early modern period who made the imagination the dominant faculty of the mind. Locke, Essay, IV.xvii.14; p. 683.

226

JOHN HOPE MASON

rationality. The highest kind of created monad was spirit, or "Fame raisonnable." This is an "image of the divinity" and as such "the spirit does not only have a perception of the works of God but is even capable of producing on a smaller scale something which resembles them." 47 For this reason it could be called "a little divinity in its own realm/' 48 In this perspective, the more spiritual a person is, the more ability he will have to be productive. This idea was not new, but Leibniz transformed it decisively. He did not make the monads recipients of a generally available (even if only adopted by a few) spiritual force; he saw it as inherent in the monad itself. Furthermore, each monad was unique. Giving this aspect of his thought the utmost emphasis, Leibniz assessed the degree of perfection by the degree to which action was independent. To acknowledge influence from outside was to be imperfect. The consequence of such a belief was that someone distinguished by both self-sufficiency and uniqueness (two qualities which came to be, by definition, those of genius), and who was active in a field where both self-sufficiency and uniqueness could be most fully achieved (i.e., the making of imaginary worlds), would be perceived as attaining one of the highest forms of human existence. Leibniz stressed the wisdom and beauty of God, rather than his power, and the overall harmony of the universe (the recognition of which took away the significance of what might otherwise seem evil). These aesthetic qualities were an integral part of his metaphysics. Given the immense influence of his philosophy on eighteenthcentury German thought, it is therefore not surprising that when aesthetics came to be discussed independently from metaphysics, these same qualities remained paramount. In Baumgarten's writings we see the first indications of a distinct concept of genius; it was characterized by qualities of harmony, proportion, and order,49 and these became regular features of German treatments of the subject. Mendelssohn, for example, wrote: "Genius requires a perfection of all the powers of the soul, and a harmony among them, aiming at a 47

48 49

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Phncipes de la nature et de la grace, para. 14, in Philosophische Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1882), VI, p. 604. Leibniz, Monadologie, para. 83, in Philosophische Schriften, VI, p. 621. Alexander Baumgarten, Aesthetica, paras. 38 and 44. In his Metaphysica, paras. 589ffv Baumgarten had described poetic invention [facultas fingendi poetica) as that of making a unified whole [unum totum).

Genius in the eighteenth century

227

single goal."50 What the genius achieved was "intuitive knowledge";51 he could see beyond the contingent to the essential heart of things. "The works of true genius/7 observed Sulzer, "have the stamp of nature itself."52 In similar vein Lessing, in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, depicted genius as not copying the actual world but making a possible world, one with qualities of wholeness, harmony, and evident purpose. In this way he imitated the activity of "the highest genius" (i.e., God).53 This last idea had been articulated previously by Shaftesbury in a passage that subsequently became well known in Germany. In his Soliloquy (1710) he had written: "The man who truly and in a just sense deserves the name of poet, and who as a real master, or architect in the kind, can describe both men and manners, and give to an action its just body and proportion . . . is indeed a second Maker: a just Prometheus under Jove. Like that sovereign artist or universal plastic nature, he forms a whole, coherent and proportioned in itself." Shaftesbury exalted the poet because unlike the painter and sculptor he did not "design merely after bodies" but did rather "copy from another life . . . the graces and perfections of minds." It was this knowledge of "the inward form and structure of his fellowcreature" that made the poet a "moral artist who can thus imitate the Creator."54 This identification of genius with the divine Creator was little disturbed by the Sturm und Drang. It is true that there was an element of amoral self-assertion in many of the writings associated with this movement, but most of the specific statements about genius employ terms similar to those used by Mendelssohn and Lessing. Herder's essays in Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), for 50

51

52

53

54

Moses Mendelssohn, Betrachtungen iiber die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schonen Kiinste &) Wissenschaft, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. F. Bamberger et al. (Stuttgart, 1971), I, p. 171. Friedrich Gabriel Resewitz, Versuch iiber das Genie (1759], quoted in P. Grappin, La theorie du genie dans le preclassicisme allemand (Paris, 1952), p. 131. See C. R. Bingham, "The Rise and Development of the Idea of Genius in EighteenthCentury G e r m a n Literature" (D.phil. diss., Oxford University, 1958), pp. 568ff. Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kiinste, 2d ed. (Leipzig, 1792), I, p. 365a, art. "Genie." Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, no. 34, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. P. Rilla (Berlin, 1968), VI, p. 175. Shaftsbury, Characteristics, I, pp. 2 0 6 - 7 .

228

JOHN HOPE MASON

example, bear the mark of his reading of Shaftesbury. His praise of Shakespeare, like Goethe's praise of Erwin von Steinbach, is for the power of genius to realize those aesthetic qualities of unity and wholeness which reveal his similarity to "eine Weltseele" (Herder) or "der gottgleiche Genius" (Goethe).55 Herder's comments on Ossian do come close to the notion of genius being related to the wild and barbaric. But behind this text we sense the presence of Hamann; that is, behind the feeling for a primitive language stood the belief in an original language, that of God creating the world or of Adam naming the animals. 56 A similar emphasis on this gift of intuition occurs in Goethe's observations on Falconet, where it is seen as a product of harmony.57 Ideas of both the sublime and originality could be assimilated to this view. Longinus himself gave the feeling for the vast and unlimited a quasi-Platonic meaning. The "unconquerable passion" which nature has "implanted in our souls . . . for all that is great" is also "for all that is more divine than ourselves"; and it leads us to become aware "how, in everything that concerns us, the extraordinary, the great, and the beautiful play the leading part."58 Addison paraphrased this passage and related it to "the supreme Author of our being."59 Shaftesbury's rapturous evocation of the feelings evoked by wild nature was set within a framework of neo-Platonic 55

56

57

58 59

Johann Gottfried Herder, Von deutscher Art und Kunst, ed. E. Purdie (Oxford, 1924), pp. 114, 129. T h e point was m a d e explicitly by Herder i n Vom Geist der ebrdischen Poesie (1782) {Sdmtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan [Berlin, 1877-1913], XII, pp. 6-7). T h e notion of m a n as "ein zweiter Schopfer," following the example of the JudeoChristian God, had occurred earlier i n his 1769 commentary on Genesis, ch. 1 [Fragmente zu einer 'Archaeologie des Morgenlandes," in Sdmtliche Werke, VI, p. 28), and in the 1773 poem "Die Schopfung" [Sdmtliche Werke, XXIX, pp. 443-4). Goethe, Werke, XII, p. 24. See also Jakob Michael Lenz, Anmerkungen iibers Theater, i n Sturm und Drang: Khtische Schhften, ed. E. Loewenthal (Heidelberg, 1949), pp. 7 2 0 - 3 . Although extravagant claims made in the n a m e of genius were seen as so characteristic of the Sturm und Drang that it became known as the Geniepehode or Geniezeit, m o s t discussion of the mental operations of genius tended to follow previous G e r m a n accounts. For brief surveys of this material see J. Ritter's article "Genie," in Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J. Ritter (Darmstadt, 1971-), III, pp. 2 8 5 - 9 6 ; and C. Hubig, " 'Genie' - Typus oder Original? Vom Paradigma der Kreativitat z u m Kult des Individuums," in Propylden Geschichte der Literatur, ed. E. Wischer (Frankfurt, 1983), IV, pp. 187-210. Longinus, On the Sublime, XXXV.2; p. 146. The Spectator, no. 413 (24 June 1712).

Genius in the eighteenth century

229

metaphysics, and he referred to the "universal mind" as a "mighty genius" with "inspiring power."60 This divine force was also "original soul," 61 and to be like it was therefore to be original. The Christian neo-Platonism that was so prominent in Young's Night Thoughts also lay behind his statement in the Conjectures that we are all "born originals."62 It was also one source for his remark that originality has a "vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius." 63 Not only is man made in the image of God; the better part of him also contains an element of the divine. This was why Young was able to link genius with morality: "with regard to the moral world, conscience, with regard to the intellectual world, genius, is that god within." 64 Another factor contributed to this comparison. Young continued: "Genius can set us right in composition, without the rules of the learned; as conscience sets us right in life, without the laws of the land." Confidence in the validity of individual conscience was a quintessentially Protestant belief, and much of the insistence in the Conjectures on the need for self-reliance - "an original author is born of himself, is his own progenitor"65 - bears the stamp of this religious faith. This was one of the reasons for the impact of Young's work in Germany. To Pietists, in particular, the language of selfreliance made an obvious appeal. A notable feature of the Lutheran world in which most Pietists lived was the drastic separation between the sphere of personal morality and that of political life. This division, deriving from Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms, had its counterpart in the radical dualism of Leibniz's philosophy, where the realm of the spirit and 60 62 63

64

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, II, p. 366. 6 1 Ibid., p. 370. Young, Conjectures, p. 42. Ibid., p. 12. Another source was the Stoic belief in the need to be true to your own nature, or ingenium, which had been linked by Erasmus to the need to write in a manner true to yourself (rather than imitating others). This notion had received emphasis in Shaftesbury's writings, where it had been linked to organic life: "Every particular nature certainly and constantly produces what is good to itself, unless something foreign disturbs or hinders it. . . . Thus even in those plants we see round us, every particular nature thrives, and attains its perfection, if nothing from without obstructs it" {Characteristics, II, pp. 359-60). A further source could have been Dubos's statement in his Reflexions critiques . . . , pt. II, ch. 5 ([Paris, 1719J, I, p. 41), that "le genie est done une plante qui, pour ainsi dire, pousse d'ellememe." Young, Conjectures, p. 31. 6 5 Ibid., p. 68.

23O

JOHN HOPE MASON

necessary truths was completely distinct from that of the material world and contingent truths; the two were never in contact but coincided according to preestablished harmony. When Lessing wrote about freedom in Frederick the Great's Berlin, stating that anything could be said there against religion, but almost nothing about politics, he was commenting on the effects of the Lutheran division.66 When he observed in one of his theological essays that there is an unbridgeable "broad, ugly ditch" set between religion and history, he was reflecting the Leibnizian separation.67 Wherever these two kinds of dualism prevailed, the identification of genius with the spiritual inevitably set it apart from politics and history. This is precisely what happened in the writings of Kant. At the center of Kant's philosophy was a firm belief in the value of human making. The First Critique rests on the assumption that only insofar as we make knowledge out of raw experience can that knowledge be sound. The Second Critique insists that moral value derives only from individuals making choices for themselves; their choices will be moral partly because they accord with laws that are universally discoverable (i.e., impersonal) but also because they are unique to them. Only in this way does someone acquire a moral character.68 Both these assumptions - that only the maker knows and only the independent person can be moral - were old, but Kant put them to work in a new way. His emphasis on human agency and his refusal to allow value to anything that is given were aspects of that Aufkldrung - humanity's coming to maturity - which was taking place in the late eighteenth century. This moment of Aufkldrung was the result of a long historical development, described by Kant in his Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht (1784), in which he asked whether history had any inherent purpose. His answer was positive; it did indeed seem that man was meant "to bring forth everything out of himself . . . entirely as his own work" 69 and that, as if following some "guiding thread," humanity was moving toward greater freedom.70 However, this process was not straightforward, because 66 67

68

69

Letter to Nicolai, 25 Aug. 1769, Gesammelte Werke, IX, p. 327. Lessing, Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, in Gesammelte Werke, VIII, p. 14. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Li.3, in Werke, Akademie Ausgabe (Berlin, 1913), V, p. 98. Immanuel Kant, Idee, iii, in Werke, VIII, p. 19. 7 0 Ibid., ix ; in Werke, VIII, p. 30.

Genius in the eighteenth century

231

the motor of development, both in individuals and in society, was antagonism, competition, ambition, and vanity. Morally, men want peace and harmony; but their natural drives lead them to conflict and discord.71 Yet - and this is the clue to understanding history - it is only by means of the latter that the former is achieved. This analysis owed much to Kant's view of moral development as the surmounting of the obstacles which are set by our desires or inclinations or by external influences. Moral improvement comes about through the psychological equivalents of the Antagonism and ungesellige Geselligkeit described in the historical essay. But Kant's account there was also strongly influenced by his wide reading of contemporary works, among them the writings of Mandeville, Hume, Montesquieu, and, especially (in this context), Rousseau and Ferguson. He accepted Rousseau's assertion that the development of civilization brings increasing conflict and inequality and Ferguson's verdict that commercial society produces greater social fragmentation. "The spirit of commerce," he wrote in his Anthropologie, "is in itself generally unsociable."72 But he did not accept the pessimistic conclusions that Rousseau, in particular, drew from these facts; on the contrary, the eventual outcome would surely be good. As social conflict led to the making of laws, and wars to the making of federations, so in "apparently wild disorder" man advances from an animal condition to one of humanity. 73 There was one kind of human making, however, which did not spring from conflict or disorder. That was art. When Kant came to describe genius in his Third Critique he drew heavily on previous German accounts that characterized it in terms of a harmony of the faculties. It is precisely the Proportion and Stimmung of the productive powers in the genius that create an artwork which arouses that free harmony of the imagination and the understanding (in the spectator) which is the source of our judgment of beauty.74 The genius is a favored child of nature, 75 but unlike in history (where nature wills discord), in the production of art nature wills concord. 71

72 73 74

75

Ibid., iv, in Werke, VIII, p. 2 1 : "der Mensche will Eintracht; aber die N a t u r . . . will Zwietracht." I m m a n u e l Kant, Anthropologie, II.C.2, in Weike, VII, p. 315. Kant, Idee, vii, in Werke, VIII, p. 25. I m m a n u e l Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, para. 49, in Werke, V, p. 318; see also pp. 307, 344. Ibid., para. 49, in Werke, V, p. 318.

232

JOHN HOPE MASON

Kant needed to see genius in this way because this figure occupied a pivotal role in the Third Critique. The overall aim of the work was to effect a reconciliation between the two realms of nature and morality, matter and spirit, necessity and freedom, which were the subjects respectively of the First and Second Critiques. Our aesthetic experience can provide the key to such a reconciliation. First, our experience of beauty leads us to feel that despite our detachment (as free agents) from the natural world we nevertheless belong in it. Second, our experience of art coincides with our sense of nature as having an inherent purposefulness. In both cases, the notion of the genius as producing beautiful objects that seem to have purpose (even though they do not stem from a precise, consciously intended purpose as such) provides the essential link between the human and the natural world. Genius is an attribute of nature in a man, die Natur im Subjekte, which is "powerful in creating another nature/' and in understanding a genius's operations we have an analogy for understanding the overall character and purpose of creation. 76 In this work Kant did not go beyond the limits to knowledge that he had so painstakingly defined in his First Critique. An analogy, he insisted, is quite inadequate to establish any kind of certainty, and intuition (in the traditional sense) is beyond human experience. Yet he conceded that we are able to appreciate what an intuitive understanding would be. 77 Furthermore, the causation involving purposes, which is needed to explain biological (as distinct from physical) nature, is unintelligible to us without the notion of a "moral author" of the world.78 To see nature in terms of biology and nature in man in terms of genius therefore makes possible a reconciliation of man and nature. One aspect of this reconciliation is aesthetic, a matter of harmony. Another is moral, a reconciliation in terms of moral purpose. Throughout the Third Critique Kant points out the ways in which aesthetic experience contributes to or is analogous to morality, just as the genius in his complete autonomy is like the moral individual. This leads him to suggest that not only do human beings belong in the world but they were meant to be effective in it; their moral purposes were meant to be realized. In other words, humans should 76 77

Ibid., paras. 46, 49, i n Werke, V, pp. 307, 314. 78 Ibid., para. 77, in Werke, V, pp. 4O7ff. Ibid., para. 87, in Werke, V, p. 450.

Genius in the eighteenth century

233

be creating a second nature in history, the achievement of which Kant calls Kultur.79 In his earlier ethical writings Kant had asserted that the highest good, the true kingdom of ends, would not be realized in history. His altered perspective on nature made possible this new view, which he elaborated in his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793). However, in that work, as well as in the Third Critique, he continued to see progress occurring through selfishness, rivalry, and conflict.80 We can only arrive at Kultur through "radiant misery [gldnzende Elend]."81 It is difficult to see how these two different attitudes to human production could be made compatible within the limits of Kant's own philosophical enterprise. But while this disparity reveals the way in which genius was always, for Kant, insulated from history, at the same time it explains some of the enormous appeal of his Third Critique. As the moral man was immune to heteronomy, the genius was removed from contingency. And just as his ethical thought set his Pietist convictions on a new basis, so Kant's writings on aesthetics were a reformulation of the essentially neo-Platonic assumptions that he, like so many of his contemporaries in eighteenth-century Germany, took over from Leibniz. IV To describe the eighteenth-century discussion of genius in terms of the contrast drawn here - between a British/French view and a German view - is to make a selective reading. The contrast was neither as clear-cut nor as exclusive as this account suggests.82 79 80 81 82

Ibid., para. 83, in Werke, V, p. 431. I m m a n u e l Kant, Religion, I.i.2, in Werke, VI, p. 27. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, para. 83, in Werke, V, p. 432. It is not difficult to find in French writers (including Diderot himself) remarks about genius that are closer to w h a t I have described as the German conception. For de Jaucourt, for example, the morally admirable emulation is productive and the morally reprehensible envie unproductive [Encyclopedie [Paris, 1751-65j, V, pp. 6 o i b - 6 o 2 a , 734b-735a). For other examples, see A. Becq, Genese de l'esthetique frangaise moderne (Pisa, 1984), pp. 664ft., 7Oiff., 7i4ff. French treatments also tended to derive from a tradition which has not been discussed here, namely, that synthesis of rhetorical and Aristotelian poetics which was constructed in late cinquecento Italy and became t h e orthodox neoclassical aesthetic. In this perspective the process of invention tended to be seen as irregular but the writer's purpose as moral.

234

JOHN HOPE MASON

Goethe's writings, especially in his early years, show many similarities to the thought of Blackwell and Diderot; and his adoption of neither a classical aesthetic nor a quasi-Spinozist Naturphilosophie could relieve him of the problems connected with this notion of genius, as we can see from his continuing preoccupation with the character of Faust and from scattered remarks in his later years. 83 Likewise, certain British works - Shaftesbury's Characteristics, Young's Conjectures, Gerard's Essay on Genius (1774) - which had a major impact in Germany, showed the same concern (as German writers) to align genius with harmony and morality The celebrated passage from Shaftesbury's Soliloquy (quoted above) displays this connection very clearly. In the phrase "a just Prometheus under Jove" the emphases are on "just" and "under." This Prometheus, unlike the figure in Greek myth (or Goethe's Prometheus), is not antagonistic or defiant but obedient to, and in agreement with, Zeus/Jove's moral order. His creations are also perfect by dint of representing mental, rather than sensual, qualities. For Shaftesbury, such a poet was engaged in a task qualitatively different from that of anyone involved in practical affairs. Any doubt about this is set aside by the vehement way in which elsewhere he attacked his scientifically minded contemporaries: "We have a strange fancy to be creators, a violent desire at least to know the knack or secret by which nature does all. . . . For some of these [men] it has actually been under deliberation how to make man." And he condemned "our modern Prometheuses, the mountebanks, who performed such wonders of many kinds here on our earthly stages."84 The true creator, for Shaftesbury, Young, and Kant, was creative in the same way as the Judeo-Christian God - the creator who was also Law-Giver and Judge - in the form in which this figure had been modified by Renaissance neo-Platonism. Ficino had assimilated the Christian God to the neo-Platonic one, whose creativity was an expression as much of harmony as of goodness. This led to God's activity being taken as a model for poets and artists; it was Cristoforo Landino, a member of the neo-Platonic circle in late quat83

84

For example, Goethe's comments on das Ddmonische or his Maxime "Wir sind naturforschend Pantheisten, dichtend Polytheisten, sittlich Monotheisten" (Werke, XII, p. 372). Shaftesbury, Characteristics, II, pp. 189-90, 205.

Genius in the eighteenth century

235

trocento Florence, who first wrote of poets as virtual "creators" and thus implied that their works were products of the same qualities of truth, beauty, and goodness. It is this view which gave rise to the German proverb "Wo man singt, da lasst dich ruhig nieder, / Bose Menschen haben keine Liedei" (Wherever you hear singing, you can settle down in peace; evil people do not have any songs).85 One of the purposes of the contrast presented here is to draw attention to the way in which some of the most influential discussions about genius in the eighteenth century arose in large part out of an attack on, or defense of, this metaphysical belief. Because most accounts of this subject have been written by neo-Kantians or their epigones, this aspect of the matter has usually been obscured.86 But Leibniz or Shaftesbury opposing Locke, and Kant opposing Hume, were in their different ways defending the existence and coherence of a transcendent order in which human beings somehow participated, and their contributions to the idea of genius were shaped by this fact. For Mandeville, Hume, and Diderot, on the other hand, there were no plausible reasons for maintaining a belief in any transcendent reality, a priori truths, or intrinsic moral order. On the contrary, to think seriously about the new kind of world then emerging meant doing without such anachronistic assumptions; the new reality demanded a new way of thinking. What was taken to be new, however, was not as novel as it seemed, for since classical times there had been a view of human creativity which was fundamentally opposed to that of Shaftesbury and Kant. When Mandeville observed that "a most beautiful superstructure may be raised upon a rotten and despicable foundation,"87 or Hume praised the value of conflict, or Diderot emphasized sexuality, they 85

86

87

See E. N . Tigerstedt, "The Poet as Creator: Origins of a Metaphor/ 7 Comparative Literature Studies 5 (1968): 4 5 5 - 8 8 ; M. J. B. Allen, "Ficino and the Timaeus," in Supplementum Festivum ed. J. Hankins et al. (Binghamton, 1987], pp. 399-439, esp. 435ft.; and G. Lieberg, Poeta Creator: Studien zu einer Figur der Antiken Dichtung (Amsterdam, 1982). The proverb was adapted from Johann Gottfried Seume's poem "Die Gesange" (1804); see G. Buchmann, Gefliigelte Worte und Zitatenschatz (Stuttgart, 1961), pp. 1 6 4 - 5 . The belief that devils were tone-deaf had a long history in Christian thought; w h a t Renaissance neo-Platonism added was the idea that they would also be, because of that, unproductive. I have in mind the otherwise admirable writings of Ernst Cassirer and M. H. Abrams, or a study like J. Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). Mandeville, Fable, II, p. 64.

236

JOHN HOPE MASON

were all repeating ideas which had as ancient a lineage as the JudeoChristian tradition, but which since the end of antiquity had been obscured by the predominance of the latter. In the Greek myths of Prometheus and Daedalus, in the writings of Sophocles, Plato, and Epicurus, the human capacity for invention was associated not with unity, order, harmony, permanence, and spirituality, but with multiplicity, disorder, conflict, change, and physicality In the Renaissance this view had been given powerful expression in Machiavelli's The Prince, but that work came to be regarded more as a scandalous aberration than part of a long tradition. 88 In 1739 Hume wrote: "there are different ways of examining the mind as well as the body. One may consider it either as an anatomist or as a painter: either to discover its most secret springs and principles or to describe the grace and beauty of its actions/ 789 Hume's own search for the "secret springs" revealed a world of endemic instability and no fixed identity; permanence was an illusion, reason was not dominant, and conflict was productive. Among German writers, however, the search for the "secret springs" was connected to notions of "grace and beauty"; and this was possible for them because the conditions of their world did not threaten, at a fundamental level, previous assumptions about permanence, tradition, or fixed identity. They could still believe in a particular kind of God or in the existence of certain final causes, because the Aufkldrung was not marked by the same degree of opposition to the Church or established political power as was the case in France, nor did it experience the volatile and turbulent conditions which accompanied economic and political freedom in Britain. In Germany, liberty was associated with authority; individual rights were seen as guaranteed by an absolutist state, economic freedom came to be supervised by bureaucracy, and free thought went together with religious faith.90 There was little urbanization and scarcely any alternative culture of the kind that existed in the alleys of Grub Street in London or in the clandestine book trade in France. 88

89 90

O n this subject see m y article " T h e Character of Creativity: Two Traditions/ 7 History of European Ideas 9 (1988): 6 9 7 - 7 1 5 . The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), I, p. 32. See L. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom (Chicago, 1957); and, for a brief recent account of the Aufkldrung, J. Knudsen, Justus Moser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 3-30.

Genius in the eighteenth century

237

It was of course the case that in Germany, as much as elsewhere, the writer's position in society was undergoing dramatic change. The shift from patronage to freelance gave rise to as many problems (and possibilities) for German writers as it did in Britain and France, and the general emergence of the genius figure in the eighteenth century was clearly connected with this development.91 The notion that a writer's significance increased with the degree of independence and self-sufficiency had an evident relation to conditions in which the labor theory of value prevailed but where material recompense was slight. The fact that it is only in this period that we begin to have full accounts of the actual process of writing, going beyond the previous standardized formulae, is likewise an indication of a desire to validate the activity per se, regardless of judgments passed on the finished product. In one respect German writers experienced this change more acutely than their British or French counterparts; both geographically and socially they felt themselves to be more isolated. Ferguson's remarks in his Essay about the division of labor coming to apply to intellectual activity - "thinking itself, in this age of separations, may become a peculiar craft"92 - were seen as being true of poets. 93 Awareness of this problem was an important element in the Sturm und Drang admiration for Homer, Ossian, and Shakespeare, as well as in Schiller's subsequent idealization of classical Greece.94 Generally speaking, this need for images of writers who were inte91

92 93

94

Among much other recent work see, for instance, G. Peters, Der zerhssene Engel: Geniedsthetik und literahshe Selbstdarstellung in achtzehnten fahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 7off.; M. Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright," Eighteenth Century Studies 17 (1983): 4 2 5 - 4 8 ; and J. Schmidt, Das Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in Deutschland (Darmstadt, 1986), pp. 2ff. Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society p. 183. C. Garve, "Betrachtung einiger Verschiedenheiten in den Werken der altester und neuern Schriftsteller, besonders der Dichter" (1779), in Popularphilosophische Schhften, ed. K. Wolfel (Stuttgart, 1974), pp. 28ff. and 8iff. For Garve, however, the fact that the modern writer was "ein Wanderer" (p. 28) and had no place in a public world did not mean that he was marginal. On the contrary, since almost all of us lead isolated lives now, we need plays and novels more, to find in them h u m a n company and so obtain in fiction what we have lost in reality (pp. 37-8); and although writers in antiquity had a more comprehensive knowledge and gave us a clearer picture of the external world, modern writers can be equally original in showing us a previously u n k n o w n inner world of feelings and impulses (pp. 77-9]. This point had already been made in relation to the Greeks by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Darmstadt, 1973), pp. 134-7.

238

JOHN HOPE MASON

grated into their society was not experienced so intensely elsewhere. And we can see how this sense of isolation contributed to the German conception of genius, since one of the distinguishing characteristics of that view was the creator's autonomy. Whereas conflict demands an opponent, competition needs rivals, and sexuality likes a partner, the pure emanations of harmony or insights of intuition are self-generated and self-contained. If there was an Other, it was God, as Herder (misquoting Ovid) wrote "Est Deus in nobis. //95 Although the doctrinal aspects of this conception seem both idealistic and anachronistic, the social fact to which it related turned out to be prophetic. The isolation of the writer became more widespread as the century drew to a close and social change accelerated. In addition, the elevated status given to artistic activity, by Kant or Moritz or Schiller, provided a role for the writer that was to prove immensely attractive. Since this owed some of its cogency to the German idea of genius, it also served to give that idea further currency. And the appeal of this view was further highlighted by the darkness which spread over other productive activities. The favorable image of the merchant or entrepreneur came to be replaced by unflattering pictures of hard men of business. Imagination, which occupied a central place in Adam Smith's early History of Astronomy and his Theory of Moral Sentiments, plays almost no role in The Wealth of Nations; instead, an unattractive self-interest predominates. In the aftermath of the American and French revolutions the republican tradition, which had exalted political activity for its creative possibilities, came to be either discarded or discredited. When Marx came to envisage his good society in the Grundrisse, one of its hallmarks was the scope it gave for "positive, creative activity"; but by that he meant an artistic occupation like composing music, 96 not economic or political activity. This attitude stemmed directly from 95

96

This misquotation, w h i c h had been c o m m o n since the Renaissance, occurs as the epigraph to Vom Erkennen und Empfinden (1778); Ovid had written "Est deus in nobis" (A god is in us), Fasti, VI. 5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Berlin, 1953], pp. 507, 505. Marx's adherence to this concept of creativity was of central significance in his overall philosophy. It can be seen to have contributed to two of t h e m o s t problematic aspects of his thought: his insistence that Produktionsweisen alone play the decisive role in historical development and his view that a future state of universally emancipated creativity will be not merely morally superior to anything known up till now but also one in which m o s t present-day morality will be superfluous.

Genius in the eighteenth century

239

the view of art put forward by Schiller and the conception of genius on which it relied. In a simple sense this notion was merely a secularization of the Christian view of the Creator, and in an intellectual world which had been dominated by Christianity for centuries it is hardly surprising that a transition of this kind occurred.97 But Christians themselves were aware that their religion had strange gaps. Kant found it odd that "there is little or nothing at all to be said about the good angels/' 98 and around the end of this period a Methodist preacher in Britain was unable to "see any reason why the devil should have all the good tunes/' 99 We could end their bewilderment by pointing out that the problem only arose because of the connection they made between the creative and the moral. We could add that the devil has the good tunes because he, more than anyone else, needs them. And along the same lines, we might conclude that, in the light of what it meant to live in a world that was man-made the world described by Mandeville, Hume, and Diderot - the idealist view of genius prevailed because it in turn met an overwhelming need. 97

98 99

On the religious character of German notions of genius in this period, see R. Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester, 1953), pp. Sjii., 131; and W. Schmidt-Dengler, Genius (Munich, 1978), p. 19. Herder and Lavater were Protestant clergymen (as were Young and Gerard). For an attack on the subsequent cult of genius because of this aspect, see E. Zilsel, Die Geniereligion (1918; Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 53, 87, 127. ZilseFs Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffs (Tubingen, 1926) was a pioneering study of this subject in general. Kant, Religion, II, Anmerkung, in Werke, VI, p. 86. E. W. Broome, The Rev. Rowland Hill (London, 1881), p. 93.

ANNIE BECQ

8

Creation, aesthetics, market: origins of the modern concept of art

The concept of art is a historical one. When Saint Thomas uses the word "art" he means something completely different than a modern thinker, as Etienne Gilson made a point of observing in 1958.1 Gilson was expressing his agreement with the then most recent essay on Thomist aesthetics, that of Umberto Eco, according to whom, "As a matter of fact, the scholastic philosophers never occupied themselves ex professo with art or its aesthetic value."2 And long ago P. O. Kristeller meticulously followed the misadventures of the Greek and Latin equivalents of this term in the West since antiquity, up to the constitution of what he called "the modern system of the fine arts." 3 This was clearly achieved in France around the mideighteenth century with the celebrated treatise of the abbe Batteux, Les beaux-arts reduits a un meme principe, published in 1746 and destined for considerable success both in France and abroad. Underlying the constellation of arts Batteux called "fine" (poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance), to the exclusion of other arts called "liberal" or "mechanical," was a concept naming their common essence, the imitation of beautiful nature, la belle nature. This is not the concept that modern consciousness associates with that of art. The fundamental notions of modern aesthetics crystallize around the idea of creation: in the work of art, understood as an organic totality, are expressed the autonomy of the beautiful and the Translated by Paul Mattick, Jr. 1 2

3

Etienne Gilson, Peinture et realite (Paris: Vrin, 1958), pp. nsff. Umberto Eco, IIproblema estetico in Tommaso d'Aquino, 2d ed. (Milan: Bompiani, 1970), cit. Gilson, Peinture et realite, p. 116, n. 6. Paul O. Kristeller, 'The Modern System of the Arts/7 in idem, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 163-227.

240

Creation, aesthetics, market

241

irreducible originality of the genius whose unique gesture has engendered it. Consequently, this concept of the work, fruit of human activity, has taken the place of the idea of beauty (which designates qualities possibly independent of human activity) as a focus for reflection on the arts. This led to the disappearance, in such reflection, of reference to a natural order, since art is now to be evaluated only with reference to internal criteria specific to it. Some even reserve the name of aesthetics for the discipline specifically preoccupied with artworks alone: for them there is only, strictly speaking, the beautiful of art. It is well known that the use of the term "aesthetics," to which Baumgarten resorted in 1750 for the title of the book that founded this new domain of knowledge, did not spread rapidly in France.4 Resistance to it was great and it was not until the courses and treatises of the Restoration, contemporary with Romanticism, that it was adopted. But the fundamental postulates of this discipline were at work in the reflections of the so-called pre-Romantic generation, during the years in which Michel Foucault has located the constitutive break of the modern episteme, around the concepts of labor, organism, and grammatical system - that is, around categories in terms of which wealth, living things, and words acquired a mode of existence incompatible with representation.5 The 1776 Supplement to the Encyclopedie contained an entry under "Esthetique" borrowed from Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste;6 if this was a sort of official consecration, it is perhaps not surprising that it remained without an immediate sequel. Its discourse of "philosophy of the fine arts" inscribed this text in an ambiguous relationship of simultaneous continuity and rupture with what was called in the mid-eighteenth century, in the literary domain, "philosophical poetics," which sought to base universally valid rules on the analysis of human nature. The "philosophy of the fine arts," without abandoning the formulation of infallible norms, did not put 4

5

6

See H. Tronchon, "Une science a ses debuts en France: L'esthetique" (1912; repr. in Romantisme et Preromantisme [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930]). See Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 23off.; tr. The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 217ft. J. G. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste (Leipzig: M. G. Weidemanns Erben und Reich, 1771-4). On Sulzer, see L. Kerslake in Studies on Voltaire 148 (1976).

242

ANNIE BECQ

philosophy at the service of technique but essentially aimed at knowledge of humanity by way of the activity specific to the fine arts. It considerably developed the psychological analysis of the subject of aesthetic experience, but its focus on the arts did not lead it to break its ties with nature, which remained its guarantee and ultimate model. The original gesture which it was important to imitate was that of the "first artist/7 and the arts could do no better "in their procedures or in the choice of their materials" than to follow "nature scrupulously."7 The distinction between natural beauty and artistic beauty, one of the necessary conditions of the constitution of the aesthetic, is here far from having been completely made; this was typical of the classical age, where reference to the natural order remained the rule. Consequently, in these necessarily incomplete remarks on the origins of the modern concept of art, it will be worthwhile to examine some writings of Diderot's that pose this problem in a particularly interesting way. His article "Beau," written in 1751 and published a year later in the second volume of the Encyclopedic, opened rich perspectives for the emergence of a mode of thought distinct from that which Gilson called the metaphysics of the Beautiful,8 despite its wording and the way in which it includes under "beauty" the productions of nature alongside those of the arts. In fact, Diderot does not reject the idea that beauty can be an aspect of nature, as Baudelaire was to do in 1859 (according to G. Picon, "a too easy solution to an irritating problem"9), but neither does he reduce the beauty of artistic productions to the imitation of that of nature. He reserves beauty neither for nature, of which art would be the (always degraded) reflection, nor for art, which would alone possess the privilege and the secret of form. Within the broad (too broad?) notion of the perception of relationships, in terms of which Diderot here proposes to define beauty, nothing natural is refused that quality: a flower, a fish, or even an inorganic object that can be mistaken for a product of human art. The last paragraph of the entry includes this formula, destined for a fine future: "On a hundred occasions, nature imitates in play the 7 8 9

Supplement to the Encyclopedie, IV, art. "Nature," borrowed from Sulzer. Gilson, Peinture et realite, pp. 123-4. L'echvain et son ombre (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 186.

Creation, aesthetics, market

243

productions of art." This follows the remark that "the beautiful is not always the product of an intelligent cause": the movement of material elements is enough to produce a "prodigious number of surprising relations/7 of which "the cabinets of natural history . . . offer a great many examples."10 How can we not think here of the scallop shell which interrogates the philosopher of Eupalinosl Nature is in no way unformed: in the article "Beau" only stones "thrown by chance on the edge of a quarry" are described in this way.11 But in this case what we are dealing with is neither an individual stone - an object considered "in isolation"12 and inevitably endowed with what Diderot called "real beauty" in that certain structural relations in it are visible to us - nor a pile resulting from a natural process, but a "heap" constituted by chance and in disorder out of the scrap resulting from human labor ("on the edge of a quarry"). The natural order thus has its beauty, but this is not to be transported as such into the artistic order, except (for example) in the absence of any motivation on the painter's part. "If you have to paint a flower," according to the article "Beau," "and it's all the same to you which one to paint, take the most beautiful among the flowers; if you have to paint a tree and your subject does not require it to be an oak or an elm that is withered, broken, blasted, pruned, select the most beautiful tree; if you have to paint a natural object and you are indifferent about which to choose, take the most beautiful."13 The choice of natural beauty, la belle nature, has become the best choice only in the absence of other considerations; the artist accepts it in the case of indifference, whereas engagement in a particular project, on the contrary, can force him to choose an ugly object like that mangled oak of which Diderot also spoke, during the same years (1750-1) in the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb: "Why . . . should it be precisely an old oak, cracked, crooked, pruned, which I would cut 10

11

12

Denis Diderot, Oeuvres completes, ed. H. Dieckmann, J. Proust, and J. Varloot (henceforth DPV) (Paris: Hermann, 1975-), VI (1976), p. 171. The entry under "Natural History Cabinet" in the Encyclopedie, signed by Daubenton, was continued by an addition by Diderot, which distinctly spoke of the universe's beauty in artistic terms: "masses by admiration of which we are transported," "groups that demand our prizing them." DPV, VI, pp. 161-2. No doubt this is the quarry from which has been extracted the "unformed block of marble" to be discussed a few lines later. DPV, VI, p. 162. 13 DPV, VI, p. 159.

244

ANNIE BECQ

down if it were outside my home, that the painter would plant there if he were to paint my cottage? Is this oak beautiful? Is it ugly? Who is right, the owner of the cottage or the painter?" This is the question that Diderot pretended to attribute to "tiresome thinkers" seeking to pick a quarrel with Batteux; playing the devoted disciple he passes it on, exhorting the abbe to begin his book with a chapter on "what is beautiful nature," to teach these awkward customers "once and for all how each art imitates nature in one and the same object" and to demonstrate the falsity of their claim "that all of nature is beautiful and that the only ugliness in nature is that which is out of its place."14 The principle of the imitation of la belle nature is radically questioned here, in the name of a conception of the artist's activity as the production of objects, in line with a project following the internal logic in which their beauty consists, and in the name of the sense of the specificity of the labor proper to each art, given its concrete conditions of practice: realization and consumption or reception. This does not exclude the possibility of introducing natural beauty into the work of art, but it remains minimal ("the number of occasions when the most beautiful could be employed in the imitative arts would be, to the number of occasions when one would prefer the least beautiful, as one to infinity") since artistic beauty cannot be evaluated as a function of natural beauty, and vice versa: "There is neither beauty nor ugliness in the productions of nature considered with regard to the use one could make of them in the imitative arts."15 The term "beautiful" does not have the same meaning in the two domains. Later, in a rarely cited passage of the Salon of 1763, Diderot would ask "what is the source of the transports inspired in us by the firmament during a serene and starry night." His answer goes in the direction of establishing a distinction between natural and artistic beauty essential to the specificity of aesthetic reflection: "It is neither because of its color nor because of the stars with which it sparkles at night that the firmament sends us into transports of admiration. If, from the bottom of a well, you could see only a small circular portion of that sky, you would be quick to agree with my idea. If a woman went to a silk merchant and he offered her a yard or two of firmament - I mean, of the most 14

DPV, IV (1978), pp. 182-3.

15

Art. "Beau/' DPV, VI, p. 159.

Creation, aesthetics, market

245

beautiful blue stuff strewn with brilliant points - I strongly doubt that she would choose to wear it." The emotion experienced in the face of the beauty of the firmament is born from "the immense space that surrounds us, the profound silence that reigns in that space, and other accessory ideas, of which some belong to astronomy and others to religion. When I say astronomy/' Diderot continues, "I am thinking of that popular astronomy that stops at knowing that those twinkling points are prodigious masses, at prodigious distances from us, where they are the centers of an infinity of worlds suspended over our heads and from which the globe we inhabit would be hardly noticed. How we must shudder when we imagine a creator of this enormous machine, filling it, seeing us, listening to us, surrounding us, touching us! These, if I am not mistaken, are the principal sources of our sensation at the sight of the firmament; it is an effect half physical and half religious."16 Since this sentiment is thus a matter of emotions of a physical and religious order, it has nothing in common with that experienced before an object in which human power and freedom are manifested, where one sees, in Marmontel's (later) felicitous expression, "man elevated by his work, art gathering all its forces to fight against nature and surmount the obstacles opposed by nature to its efforts."17 It is then that art truly imitates nature, which "astonishes us," as we can read in a pamphlet on the Salon of 1785 attributed to Carmontel [Le Frondeur), "as much by the variety of its productions as by the small number of its elements and the simplicity of the principle directing its labors; consequently we desire the artist to make use of a similar principle to render limited means fruitful and to imitate less the works of nature than her manner of producing them."18 That the work of art should be that object particularly apt to manifest human activity, to the degree that its gratuitousness manifests pure, supremely free activity, is the conception that the Enlightenment began to formulate. It is a matter no longer of a poetics or metaphysics of the beautiful but of aesthetics when the question is asked what art represents for humankind and what are its reasons 16 18

DPV, XIII (1980), pp. 373-4. 17 Supplement to the Encyclopedie, art. "Beau." Collection Deloynes, Bibliotheque nationale, Cabinet des Estampes, Paris, vol. XIV.

246

ANNIE BECQ

for being - that is to say, both the causes and the ends of that fact which is aesthetic pleasure. The roots of the fine arts are sought in the human essence, understood in various ways: the need to feel; the need to communicate, which led to the invention of languages; the search for vivacity and the heightened intensity of psychic forces, in terms of which Cassirer, following the Leibnizian tradition, defined "aesthetic pleasure",19 the elevation of the macrocosm, according to the theosophical traditions represented at that date notably by Saint-Martin, who assigns to "Spirit-Man" the "ministry" of contributing by his activity to the reintegration of a rent universe.20 It is normal, then, for these reflections to be stated using the singular: insofar as the problem of a goal of human signification is raised, it is a question less of the arts as so many distinct domains and techniques than of Art, conceived as a single activity, in which these different sectors are conceptually unified. Batteux attempts to achieve this systematization around the idea of the imitation of la belle nature, others around "invention's part," and, in the context of doctrines of High Beauty,21 an essential and characteristic theme of the Enlightenment from the 1740s on, the unifying principle tends to be located in expression, in the manifestation of thought, an invisible act by which the unity of the subject is produced and manifested. But this reference to the spiritual or the intellectual - establishing the status of "liberal art" for their activity and their participation in ingenium, prerogative of the poets, long and famously demanded by visual artists - worked to the detriment of the idea of making per se, "an act that enters into an external matter," as Saint Thomas put it,22 that defined art in the broad, medieval, and not specifically aesthetic sense. We know that at the time of the conquest of academic status, the cultural and social promotion of the 19

20 21

22

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 127. L.-Cl. de Saint-Martin, Le ministere de 1'homme-esprit (Paris: Migneret, 1802). Le grand beau: an expression frequently used following the turn of the century to express the aspiration to a simple, serious, elevated art on the part of critics reacting against the gout Regence, the so-called petite maniere, "finicky, frivolous, and petty" (as it is put by F.-V. Toussaint in the Observations pehodiques sur la physique, l'histoire naturelle et les beaux-arts [Paris]. July-Dec. 1757). See A. Becq, Genese de l'esthetique frangaise moderne: De la Raison classique a Vlmagination creatrice, 1680-1814 (Pisa: Pacini, 1984], II, pp. 515-87. Cited by Gilson, Peinture et realite, p. 116.

Creation, aesthetics, market

247

fine arts was achieved at the price of identification with the sciences of the thvium and quadrivium,23 and this move in the direction of the intellect made art into a kind of knowledge, "the intelligible rule/' in Gilson's words, "of an operation in which it is not itself engaged."24 Moreover, is not "genius" above all a power of discovery, vision, and contemplation? The dominant doctrine during the Enlightenment, which constitutes the specificity of the period's aesthetic thought, is that of ideal beauty, le beau ideal discussed in France in the "weak" form of the so-called composite beauty25 (brandished by Falconet among many against the German versions of Winckelmann and Mengs), in which the difference from the natural becomes the absolute discontinuity of a creation.26 It was Diderot who attempted to theorize this difference without recourse to mysticism, in a materialist discourse which, from the article "Beau" on, sought a foundation for the moral-aesthetic abstract notions of order, proportion, harmony, unity, etc., not in an immaterial absolute but in human faculties and needs engaged with the natural universe that must be appropriated. In the introduction to the Salon 0/1767 he explains perfectly how the notion of ideal beauty derives neither from contemplation of an archetype, an innate model, nor from the accumulation of observations.27 Just like concepts, it exists at an absolute distance from the empirical given: "I declare that it is not at all with the aid of an infinity of little individual portraits that one raises oneself to the original and primal model." This is the path taken by "the human spirit in all its researches," including the sciences, which, far from proceeding by taking a cumulative inventory, construct their objects. At the very 23

24 25

26 27

Martin de Charmois's proposal for a Royal Academy, made to and accepted by the Council of State in 1648, made an analogy between the plastic arts and poetry, rhetoric, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. See N . Heinich, "Arts et sciences a l'age classique: professions et institutions culturelles," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 67, no. 8 (Mar. 1987): 4 7 - 7 8 . Gilson, Peinture et realite, p. 118. Beau de reunion: beauty called "composite" because, according to Falconet, for example, "the elements of which it is constituted being scattered among different objects in nature, the whole that our imagination constructs of t h e m is no more than their assembly and their result" ("Quelques idees sur le beau dans Part," in Oeuvres completes, 3d ed. [Paris: Dentu, 1808], II, p. 133). Becq, Genese de l'esthetique francaise, II, pp. 525ff. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres completes, ed. R. Lewinter (henceforth OC) (Paris: Club Franc.ais du Livre, 1969), VII, p. 41.

248

ANNIE BECQ

beginning of the Encyclopedie, the article "Art" pointed out the absolute distance between the objects of knowledge and real objects ("There is no lever in nature such as is presupposed in Varignon's propositions; there is no lever in nature whose conditions can all be calculated"28). Touching the domain of art, the first chapter of the Essais sur la peinture (1765), following a 1760 review of Watelet's Art de peindre in the Correspondence litter air e,29 demonstrated the impossibility of the strict imitation of a natural figure, given the infinite chain of causes and effects that escapes human perception. As a result, the artist can only construct objects analogous to those that nature presents, with which he must always maintain a sort of enlivening contact if he is not to founder in the ready-made solutions of academic proportions, and wishes to remain capable of rendering the secret logic of organic totalities by means of what the Essais (preferring the metaphor of touch) call a "fine touch." No one knew better than Diderot that scientific knowledge is production, that the imitation of forms and colors is construction, that "painting has, so to speak, its sun, which is not that of the universe," as he put it in the 1760 review.30 Still, imitation remains the unpassable horizon of this discourse: "If causes and effects were clear to us," we read in the beginning of chapter 1 of the Essais, "we could do no better than to represent things as they are"; 31 and again in 1777 in the Pensees detachees sur la peinture, with regard to the problem of reflected light: "Frankly, I lose my way here and imagine sometimes that there are no beautiful pictures but nature's own."32 One is tempted to relate this limitation to the way in which the idea of labor in general was at that time conditioned by the dominant mode of production. France's resources under the ancien regime were for the most part agricultural, and production by labor on the land was a matter of creating conditions favorable to the land's productive powers, allowing its fruits to appear, and so less of exercising a properly creative activity than of engaging in a sort of disclosure of a given whose principle remained external to human activity. Even the labor of the artisan did not break this tie with 28 31

DPV, V, p. 41. 2 9 See DPV, XIV and XIII. DPV, XIV, p. 344. 32 OC, XII, p. 367-

30

DPV, XIII, p. 135.

Creation, aesthetics, market

249

nature, whose processes it only, in the last analysis, continued and which furnished it with models for imitation. 33 It was in the framework of exchange, and more precisely in the structure of the market for artworks, the infrastructural level specific to the issues we are discussing, that the notion of imitation found its most obvious conditions of possibility. It is well known that this period was distinguished by the transformation of the art market from the system of private commissions to that of a circle of anonymous potential buyers, whose demand was channeled by intermediaries, the dealers. It was also distinguished by the constitution, after 1648 (founding of the Royal Academy, followed by the inauguration of the official exhibitions, the salons), of what one might call the mixed system of royal patronage. Sociologists like Raymonde Moulin and Pierre Bourdieu have associated the representation of the artist's activity as that of creative genius, supremely free and disinterested, with the mechanisms of production for the market that organized the distance between production and consumption. 34 The artist's product is not subjected to the exigencies of a buyer, and he produces, as Quatremere de Quincy so well put it, works without a purpose,35 that is, without a precise social function, and which, in the best case, will end their days enclosed in a museum, sealed against any disruption of their purely artistic perfection. Bourdieu's connecting the mid-nineteenth-century triumph of the idea of art for art's sake with the rapid expansion of capitalist speculation has, so to speak, precedents in the discourse of the preindustrial age, for example, in the writing of Quatremere de Quincy. This writer famously opposed with vigor the formation of museums, thus taking arms before the fact against the ideology of art for 33

Thus Charles Perrault spoke of "primary inventions which could not escape the natural industry of need" in regard to weaving, which only imitated the spider, whose activity extended natural needs [Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes [Paris, 1688-97], I, pp. 75-7]. See Becq, Genese de l'esthetique jrancaise, II, pp. 214-15.

34

35

See Raymonde Moulin, Le marche de la peinture en France (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 19671; and Pierre Bourdieu, inter alia, "Le marche des biens symboliques," L'annee sociologique 22 (1971): 49-126 (tr. "The Market of Symbolic Goods," Poetics 14, no. 1/2 [1985]: 13-44]. See his Considerations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de Yart (Paris: Crapelet, 1815).

25O

ANNIE BECQ

art's sake, in the name of a refusal to regard aesthetic emotion as nothing but the contemplation of pure form. The institution of museums came down to "proclaiming the uselessness of works of art" and this absence of a social purpose for art, linked to the idea of its autonomy, gave rise to a comparison that is important for our investigation: that of the production of art objects with the production of manufactured objects. What Quatremere rejected was not the idea of art's autonomy in relation to practical utility, luxury, or morality but something in that idea that seemed obscurely like the obverse of the constraints set by an improper commercialization. "One commissions from the artist/' he wrote, "paintings and statues without a purpose as one orders from a furniture manufacturer vases or furniture for which one will find a use." But it is exactly in relation to such "free" works that the idea of the autonomy of the artist's talent has been imagined, "which he is claimed to use to the full only when he deals with subjects without a purpose." Artistic production is then finalized only by exchange: "these labors commissioned without need . . . impose on the one charged with them only the obligation to . . . consummate an exchange."36 Another example (the interpretation of which is riskier but attractive) is a possible reading, in addition to the most obvious one, of the expression marchands de tout, faiseurs de hen ("merchants of everything, makers of nothing") employed in the Encyclopedic article "Mercerie" (merchandise) to describe those who were called marchands-merciers (merchant-merchandisers). A redundant pleonasm, perhaps productive of meaning, this phrase seems to close the activity thus designated on itself. The merchants so described of which Gersaint was one - belonged to the third class in the corporative hierarchy, looking down on the "mechanics" in a way analogous to that by which the painters and sculptors differentiated themselves from artisans. The point was that the mercier did not perform manual labor; he did not produce, like the merchant-artisan, the objects he sold. Strictly speaking, "he does nothing," as the article "Mercier" says, and this negative characteristic on the other hand confers a sort of positivity, even dignity, suggesting a universal aptitude: he "sells everything." We may risk a revelatory play on words in an alternative translation of faiseurs de hen to say 36

Ibid., pp. 38, 41, 21, 30.

Creation, aesthetics, market

251

that in selling he is a "maker from nothing/' producing something (profit or surplus value) from nothing; which is really to say that he is a creator, in the plain meaning of the word. Market and creation: if it is true that the system of the one secretes, so to speak, the concept of the other, inverting the terms may establish a relation between the representation of the artist's activity as imitation and the system of direct commissions, in which the buyer ultimately determines the subject of the work (a notion that served as the organizing principle of sales catalogues before it had to compete with the name of the artist, as K. Pomian has demonstrated37). The artist's activity can then be read like that of the artisans of ancient Greece, as J.-P. Vernant has analyzed their representation: "When considering a product, the ancient Greeks were less concerned with the process of manufacture, the Jtoirjaig, than with the use to which the article was to be put, the %Qf\oi(;. And, for each piece of work, it is this xgf\oi(; that defines the e!5og that the worker embodies in matter. . . . Thus, for each manufactured object, there is a kind of model which the artisan must consider as a norm." The artisan must "conform to this necessary model as far as possible"; it appears as "natural," given, as it were, "separate and above" the workman. Although the work produced is not a natural object, the artisan's activity is "naturalized," and the production of the artist-artisan can be thought of only as execution, imitation of a preexisting idea.38 Moreover, in this type of market the concrete aspects of the labor invested in the fabrication of an object - the nature of the materials (colors, gold), the number of figures, the dimensions, etc. - are presented and taken into account when the price is fixed, within the bounds set by corporative regulations. This follows the pattern in commodity exchange when the use-value aspect dominates, whereas the exchange of exchange values, as we know, tends to erase these aspects. In the case of the work of art that has become a commodity produced for the market, the concrete labor is obscured, as in all 37

38

"Marchands, connaisseurs, curieux a Paris au XVIIIe siecle," in Collectionnneurs, amateurs, et curieux: Paris, Venise, XVIe-XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 163-94. See "Travail et nature dans la Grece ancienne," in J.-P. Vernant, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs II (Paris: Maspero, 1982), pp. 34-5 (tr. Myth and Thought among the Greeks [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983], pp. 261-2).

252

ANNIE BECQ

exchange of this type. Further, it does not contain value, in the true sense of the term, in which it is measured by the quantity of abstract, average, homogeneous labor. Its price is determined by the purchaser's desire; it is the "prestige value" of an artistic object, of which the norms of appreciation are supposed to transcend economic norms and whose irreducibility to a determinate quantity of labor is happily designated by the concept of creation, a mystery obscuring the market, which has itself obscured the concrete labor involved. The mysteries of art consist no longer in guild secrets, which the liberalism of the encyclopedic enterprise will take it upon itself to disclose, but in those of the subjectivity of the genius and of Art, now functioning as the universal equivalent of the arts (whose concrete particularities reside in the materials worked and the specific techniques utilized) and enjoying a sovereign liberty relative to the natural given. Characteristic of the Enlightenment, however, was precisely the coexistence of several systems: the corporative system survived in the artists7 guild, the Maitrise, against which the academic system was constructed, under the protection of the royal patron. That patron's favors were, so to speak, clean money (like the "tribute" that Boileau judged "legitimate," in contrast to the "wages" paid by a "bookseller" to a "mercenary" author39) and required the periodic exposition to the nation's eyes of the masterpieces produced by those who received royal pensions. But, as I have noted on other occasions,40 Diderot demonstrated perfectly that these expositions were already as if corrupted by what one could call the market of merchants, since it was there that reputations were made, paintings acquired their prices, and the eventual purchaser came to make, above all, a good investment. Diderot protested against this drift, even while he used a mercantile argument to persuade the painters, irritated by the critics, to continue to show in the Salon. His protest was ambiguous, like all the aspects of that period of change, in that it appealed to the spirit of speculation to preserve the virtues, themselves ambiguous, of production for the nation. Liberty from the shackles of the corporations, the demands of the commissioning 39 40

See the celebrated passage in the Art poetique (1674), IV; lines 128-33. See, e.g., my "Expositions, peintres et critiques: Vers l'image moderne de l'artiste," Dix-huitieme siecle 14 (1982): 131-49.

Creation, aesthetics, market

253

consumer, or the tyrannical patron cannot, Diderot says, be compromised by serving the state, whose programs assign a purpose to artworks without injuring the disinterested quest for glory by the artist, who is at once subject and citizen; quite to the contrary, the artist's genius may be expected to realize itself in this. But the glory, the pensions, and the commissions of the monarchical or republican state do not always nourish their recipient, and malicious critics were able to destroy the rating of an artist who as a good citizen exhibited at the Salon. Whence the experiment of private expositions made by David after the revolution.41 This initiative constituted an effort, doomed to failure, to invent another type of market, implying another representation of the artist's activity. Even while illuminating the specificity and the dignity of the artist, it preserved his independence as much from public patronage as from mercantile speculation, of which the compensatory inverse consists exactly, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown, in the charismatic conception of art and the artist. As his detractors said, in return for a small price David allowed a simple "inspection" of his famous Sabine Women, which he had refused to exhibit at the Salon. This was to ratify the modern idea that the work of art is not produced as a function of some external finality, in accomplishing which the painter may indeed experience one or another emotion: made to be contemplated in a very personal relationship, the work is the expression of a particular subjective emotion which is primary and which afterward seeks a respondent who perceives it and appreciates it for itself. What David sold was a look, a pleasure, an aesthetic experience that is to say, an intuitive accord with the unity of an imaginary universe, born of a unique creative gesture - an experience the idea of which is here clearly isolated. He sought to establish a direct relationship between producer and consumer, one which clearly has nothing in common with the older private and ultimately tyrannical commission. It is David who chose to paint what he is showing. And his relationship to the viewer remains outside every speculative project, because he is not selling the painting. In this way he by41

I have discussed these experiments in the article cited in n. 40; in Genese de Vesthetique frangaise, II, pp. 804-7; and in my contribution to La Carmagnole des Muses (Paris: Colin, 1988), pp. 87-9.

254

ANNIE BECQ

passes the circuits of the merchants and of art-loving investors, thus preserving the aesthetic quality of the work of art, without for all that pretending scorn for material necessities. The representation of the artist which this is an attempt to formulate is of a man who performs a specific kind of work from which he is not ashamed to live. The aloofness from commodity circuits, as degrading (in the words of the first academicians) as the "atrocities of the Maitrise," makes it possible to accomplish the professionalization which creative "geniuses/7 in a mystified representation of their activity, will later have to impugn to counter their involvement in the mercantile mechanism. It is no accident that this attempt, itself corrupted by the market (David already had a name: one sells only if one has already sold), was swept away by the irresistible development of the dealers' market, in that dawn of the industrial age. If it is true that the representation of the artist's activity as creation went hand in glove with socioeconomic conditions, the historicity of this idea of creation authorizes us to imagine that we understand by it more than an ineffable mystery. The strategy followed by visual artists in the seventeenth century to redefine their arts as "liberal" (and so free themselves from guild regulation) consisted in the identification of their activity with those of various sciences,the triumph of the idea of creation over that of imitation (or even that of invention in the sense of discovery), by way of the ambiguous stage of the concept of ideal beauty, can be considered a return, on a supposedly noble level, of the formative power of making designated by the old term of art, and at the same time a return, against the privileging of intellect, of a certain form of the irrational. But this promotion of making and of the irrational in the representation of the activity of an aesthetic subject, generator of the pure forms of beautiful organic totalities, was accomplished by a sort of repression not only of the intellectualist rationalism of imitation but also of the thought of the collective and anonymous processes of cultural systems and the combinatories of language, of the obscure psychic forces of desire, of repetition, and of the fascination of the indeterminate, the unformed, and death, which haunt artistic experience and which aesthetics must also take into account.

INDEX

academies, 167 Addison, J., 5, 28, 30, 219, 228 aesthetic experience, 26-30, 177, 253; see also disinterestedness aesthetic subject, I 6 - I 7 , 28, 31-2 agriculture contrasted with commerce, 160-1, 163 al-Farabi, 124 Alhazen, 137 Alison, A., 29-30 Aristotle, 61, 72-4, 122, 125-6, 133 art: autonomy of, 6, 8, 172-3, 177, 250; modernity of, 152 Avicenna, 124 Balzac, J.-L. G. de, 65-6 Barthelemy, J. J., 162 Batteux, abbe C, 3, 240, 246 Baudelaire, C, 177, 242 Baumgarten, A. G., 52, 75-82, 123-4, 139, 226 beauty, 4, 80-1, 136, 140—1, 144, 2425; ideal, 247; natural, 111-12, 243-5 Berleant, A., 9 Blackwell, T., 219-20 Boileau, 216, 252 Bouhours, D., 69-72, 87, 90-1 Bourdieu, P., 5, 26, 153, I99n, 249, 253 Burger, G. A., 181-92; Schiller's critique of, 192-200 Burke, E., 29, 216 Carroll, N., 101 Castiglione, B., 59-60 civic humanism, 20

255

"confused" ideas, 52, 77, 82-94, 123, 139 creation, 240, 252, 254 Danto, A., 9—10 David, J. L., 253-4 Defoe, D., 213 Descartes, R., 127-9, 212 detail, see particular Diderot, D., 155, 163-5, 168, 2 2 I ~ 3 / 242-8, 252-3 disinterestedness, 115-16, 173 Eagelton, T., 148-9, 207 Ferguson, A., 2i4n, 237 Foucault, M., 10—ii, 241 freedom, 135, 137, 173-4, 179, 220 gender in aesthetics, 24-5, 28, 34, 37, 41-4, 49-51, 162 genius, 145-6, 254 Gerard, A., 29 Gilpin, W., 32-3 Gilson, E., 240, 242, 247 Goethe, J. W. von, 228, 234 Gracian, B., 54-61 Greenberg, C., 153, i73n gusto, 54-6 Guyer, P., 103, ii7n Haskell, R, 156 Herder, J. G., 189, 227-8, 238 Hobbes, T., 57 Holland: art in, 165-6, 169; prosperity of, 212

256

INDEX

Home, H., io4n, 107 Hume, D., 28-9, 99-111, 155, 158, 159, 213-14, 236 Hutchinson, F., 28 imagination, 132-3, 137, 145, 218-19, 225; and understanding, 140-2 imitation, 248-51 internal sensation, 121-4, 131 Ishiguro, H., 84-5 je ne sais quoi, 63-72, 76, 83, 85-7, 92 Kames, Lord, see Home, H. Kant, I., 111-17, 172-5, 2O7n, 230-3 Kivy, P., 5n, 100 Kristeller, P. O., 3-4, 152, 240 Leibniz, G. W., 76, 82-95, 225-6 Lessing, G. E., 227, 230 Locke, J., 44-9, 211-12 Longinus, 216, 228 luxury, 20-21, 157-65, 215 Makkreel, R., i2on Mandeville, B., 215 Marx, K., 8n, 238-9 Mendelssohn, M., 226-7 Mercier, S., 161 Mere, chevalier de, 62-8 modernity and antiquity, 153-4 Montesquieu, 94, 158 Moritz, K. P., 193 museums, 6, 8-9 Nehamas, A., 4 originality, 217-19, 224, 228-9, 2 4 J particular: contrasted with general, 2 1 25, 48-9, 197-8; derogation of, 18, 38, 166, 197; and judgment of taste, 146-7 Pascal, B., 62, 66-8

passions, seen positively by Leibniz, 90-3 pessimism, 154-7 picturesque, 30-8 Plato, 3, 22 Pocock, J. G. A., 11-12, 20-1, 159, 160 Pomian, K., i68n, 170, 251 Pope, A., 219 Quatremere de Quincy, 5-6, 249-50 Quesnay, F., 160 Radcliffe, A., 33-8 Reid, T, 123, i33n, 136-7 Reynolds, ]., 18-25, io8n, 156, 165-7 Roll, E., 7n Rousseau, J. J., 159, 162, 223-5 Schiller, F., 53, 61, 150-1, 175-7; career as author, 201 — 5 Schor, N., 19, 24 Schumpeter, J., 7 Shaftesbury, 27-8, 228-9, 2 34 Smith, A., 38-44 state, formation of British, 40-1 sublime, 141-2, 174-5, 2 I 6~7, 228 Sulzer, J. G., 227, 241 taste, 95; "feminization" of, 162, 169; judgments of, not subjective, 136-8; see also gusto Tatarkiewicz, W., 3, 4n, 9 Tesauro, E., 60-1 Turgot, A. R. J., 216 Vasari, G., 153—5 Vico, G., 220-1 Williams, R., 9 Winckelmann, J. J., 154, 155, 166, 171-2

Wollstonecraft, M., 50-1 women, limits placed on, 34, 47 Young, E., 217-18, 229