Indeed, whilst gratefully acknowledging the excellent contributions to the theory of art made by the writers who succeeded Kant, Schelling laments that in none of them can he find exact scientific method (Wissenschaftlichkeit),[18] The true point of departure in his theory is in the philosophy of nature, i.e. in that criticism of the teleological judgement which Kant places directly after that of the æsthetic judgement in his third Critique. Teleology is the union of theoretical and practical philosophy; but the system would be incomplete but for the possibility of demonstrating in the subject itself, in the ego, the identity of the two worlds, theoretical and practical; an activity which has, and at the same time has not, consciousness; unconscious as nature, conscious as spirit. This activity is precisely the æsthetic activity: "the general organ of philosophy, keystone of the whole edifice."[19] There are but two ways open to one who is desirous of escaping from common realities: poetry, which transports into the ideal world; and philosophy which annihilates the real world.[20] Strictly speaking, "there is but one sole absolute work of art; it may exist in various exemplars, but in itself it is one, although it may not yet possess existence in its original form." True art is not the impression of one moment, but the representation of infinite life;[21] it is transcendental intuition become objective, and is therefore not only the organ but the document of philosophy. A time will come when philosophy will return to poetry, from which she has detached herself; and from the new philosophy a new mythology will arise.[22] The Absolute is thus the object of art as well as of philosophy (as Schelling insists elsewhere in greater detail): the first represents it in idea (Urbild), the second in its reflexion (Gegenbild): "philosophy portrays ideas, not realities: so is it with art: those same ideas of which real things, as philosophy demonstrates, are imperfect copies, themselves appear in the objective arts as ideas, i.e. in all their perfection, and represent the intellectual world in the world of reflexion."[23] Music is the "very ideal rhythm of Nature and the Universe, which by means of this art makes itself felt in the derivative world"; perfect creations of statuary are "the very ideas of organic nature represented objectively"; the Homeric epic, "the very identity constituting the foundation of history in the Absolute."[24] But while philosophy gives an immediate representation of the Divine, of absolute Identity, art can but give the immediate representation of Indifference; and "since the degree of perfection or reality in a thing becomes higher in proportion as it approaches nearer to the absolute Idea and the fulness of infinite affirmation and in proportion as it comprehends within itself other powers, it is clear that art, above everything else, is in closest relation with philosophy, from which it is distinguished merely by the character of its specification: in everything else it may be considered as the highest power in the ideal world."[25] To the three powers of the real and ideal world correspond in a rising scale the three ideas of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Beauty is neither the mere universal (truth), nor mere reality (action), but the perfect interpenetration of both: "beauty exists when the particular (the real) is so adequate to its concept that the latter, as infinite, enters the finite and presents itself to our contemplation in concrete form. With the appearance of the concept, the real becomes truly similar and equal to the idea, wherein the universal and the particular find their absolute identity. Without ceasing to be rational, the rational becomes at the same time apparent and sensible."[26] But as above the three powers is poised God, their point of union, so Philosophy stands supreme over the three ideas; concerning itself not with truth or morality or even beauty alone, but with that which belongs to all the three in common, deduced from one common source. If philosophy assumes the character of science and truth, while yet remaining superior to truth, this is made possible by the fact that science and truth are its formal determination; "philosophy is science in the sense that truth, goodness and beauty, i.e. science, virtue and art, interpenetrate each other; therefore it is also not science but is that which is common to science, virtue and art." This interpenetration distinguishes philosophy from all other sciences; for instance, if mathematics can dispense with morality and beauty, philosophy cannot do so.[27]

In Beauty are contained truth and goodness, necessity and liberty. When beauty appears to be in conflict with truth, the truth in question is a finite truth with which beauty ought not to agree, because, as we have seen, the art of naturalism and of the merely characteristic is a false art.[28] The individual forms of art, being in themselves representatives of the infinite and the universe, are called Ideas.[29] Considered from the point of view of reality, Ideas are gods; their essence, their "in-itself," is in fact equivalent to God; every idea is an idea so far as it is God in a particular form; every idea, therefore, is equal to God, but to a particular god. Characteristic of all the gods is pure limitation and indivisible absoluteness: Minerva is the idea of wisdom united with strength, but she is lacking in womanly tenderness; Juno is power without wisdom and without the sweet attraction of love, for which she is forced to borrow the cestus of Venus; Venus again has not the weighty wisdom of Minerva. What would become of these ideas if deprived of their limitations? They would cease to be objects of Imagination.[30] Imagination is a faculty which has no connexion with pure intellect or with reason (Vernunft) and is distinct from fancy (Einbildungskraft) which collects and arranges the products of art, whereas imagination intuits them, forms them out of itself, represents them. Imagination is to fancy as intellectual intuition is to reason: it is therefore the intellectual intuition of art.[31] "Reason" no longer suffices in a philosophy such as this: intellectual intuition, which for Kant was a limiting concept, is now asserted as really existing: intellect sinks to a subordinate place: even the genuine imagination which operates in art is overshadowed by this new-fangled Imagination, twin with intellectual Intuition, who sometimes changes places with this sister of hers. Mythology is proclaimed a necessary condition of all art: mythology which is not allegory, for in the latter the particular signifies only the universal, while the former is already itself the universal; which explains how easy it is to allegorize, and how fascinating are such poems as those of Homer which lend themselves to such interpretations. Christian, as well as Hellenic, art has its mythology: Christ; the persons of the Trinity; the Virgin mother of God.[32] The fine between mythology and art is as shadowy as that between art and philosophy.

The year 1815 saw the publication of Solger's principal work, Erwin, a long philosophical dialogue on the beautiful; subsequently in 1819 he gave a course of lectures on Æsthetic which were published posthumously. He was one of those who found but a glimpse of truth in Kant and held the post-Kantians in very slight estimation, particularly Fichte; in Schelling, who begins from the original unity of the subjective and the objective, he detects for the first time a speculative principle not adequately developed, since Schelling had never triumphed dialectically over the difficulties of intellectual intuition.[33]

Solger was one of those who conceived of Imagination as totally distinct from Fancy: fancy (says he) belongs to common cognition and is none other than "the human consciousness, in so far as it continues, in temporal succession, infinitely reasserting an original intuition"; it presupposes the distinctions between common cognition, abstraction and judgement, concept and representation, amongst which "it acts as mediator by giving to the general concept the form of individual representation; and to the latter the form of a general concept; in this manner it has its being among the antitheses of the ordinary understanding." Imagination is totally different; proceeding "from the original unity of the antitheses in the Idea, it acts so that the elements in opposition, separated as they are from the idea, find themselves united in the reality; by its means we are capable of apprehending objects higher than those of common cognition and of recognizing in them the idea itself as real: also, in art, it is the faculty of transforming the idea into reality." It presents itself in three modes or degrees: as Imagination of the Imagination, which conceives the whole as idea, and activity as nothing more than the development of the idea in reality; as Sensibility of the Imagination, in so far as it expresses the life of the idea in the real and reduces the one to the other; lastly (and here we have the highest grade of artistic activity, corresponding with Dialectic in philosophy) as Intellect of the Imagination or artistic Dialectic, conceiving idea and reality in such a way that one passes over into the other, that is to say, into reality. Other divisions and subdivisions are made on which it is not necessary to dwell. Imagination is said to produce the Irony essential to true art: this is the Irony of Tieck and Novalis, of whom Solger is in a sense a follower.[34]

Solger joins Schelling in placing beauty in the region of the Idea, inaccessible to common consciousness. It is distinct from the idea of Truth, because instead of dissolving the appearances of common consciousness after the manner of truth, art accomplishes the miracle of making appearance dissolve itself while still remaining appearance; artistic thought, therefore, is practical, not theoretical. Furthermore, it is distinct from the idea of Goodness, with which at first sight it would seem to be closely related, because in the case of Goodness the union of ideal with real, of the simple with the multiple, of the infinite with the finite, is not real and complete, but remains ideal, a mere ought-to-be. It is related more closely to Religion, which thinks the Idea as the abyss of life where our individual conscience must lose itself in order to become "essential" (wesentlich), while in beauty and art the Idea manifests itself by gathering into itself the world of distinctions between universal and particular and placing itself in their place. Artistic activity is more than theoretical, it is of a practical nature, but realized and perfected; art, therefore, belongs not to theoretical philosophy (as Kant thought, according to Solger), but to practical. Necessarily attached on one side to infinity, it cannot have common nature as its object; for example, art is absent from a portrait, and the ancients showed their discrimination in selecting gods and heroes for objects in sculpture since every deity—even in limited and particular form—always signifies a determinate modification of the Idea.[35]

The same concept of art appears in the philosophy of Hegel, whatever may be the minor differences which he felt to separate himself from his predecessors. Little concerned as we are with the shades and varieties of mystical Æsthetic exhibited by each of these thinkers, we are chiefly concerned to lay bare the substantial underlying identity, the mysticism of arbitrarism which gives them their historic place in Æsthetic.

Opening the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Spirit, one need not expect to find any discussion of art in the analysis of the forms of the theoretical Spirit, among definitions of sensibility and intuition, language and symbolism, and various grades of imagination and thought. Hegel places Art in the sphere of absolute Spirit, together with Religion and Philosophy,[36] and in this he regards Kant, Schiller, Schelling and Solger as his precursors, for like them he strongly denies that art has the function of representing the abstract concept, but not that it represents the concrete concept or Idea. Hegel's whole philosophy consists in the affirmation of a concrete concept, unknown to ordinary or scientific thought. "Indeed," says he, "no concept has in our day been more mishandled than the concept in itself and for itself; for by concept is generally meant the abstract determinateness or one-sidedness of representation and intellectualistic thought, with which it is naturally impossible to think either the entirety of truth or concrete beauty."[37] To the realm of the concrete concept belongs art, as one of the three forms wherein the freedom of the spirit is achieved; it is the first form, namely that of immediate, sensible, objective knowledge (the second is religion, a representative consciousness plus worship, an element extraneous to mere art: the third is philosophy, free thought of the absolute spirit).[38]

Beauty and truth are at the same time one yet distinct. "Truth is Idea as Idea, according to its being-in-itself and its universal principle, and so far as it is thought as such. There is no sensible or material existence in Truth; thought contemplates therein nothing but universal idea. But the Idea must also realize itself externally and attain an actual and determinate existence. Truth also as such has existence; but when in its determinate external existence it is immediately for consciousness, and the concept remains immediately one with the external appearance, the Idea is not only true but beautiful. In this way Beauty may be defined as the sensible appearance of the Idea."[39] The Idea is the content of art: its sensible and imaginative configuration; its form: two elements which must interpenetrate and form a whole, hence the necessity that a content destined to become a work of art should show itself capable of such transformation; otherwise we have but an imperfect union of poetic form with prosaic and incongruous content.[40] An ideal content must gleam through the sensible form; the form is spiritualized by this ideal light;[41] artistic imagination does not work in the same way as the passive or receptive fancy, it does not stop at the appearances of sensible reality but searches for the internal truth and rationality of the real. "The rationality of the object selected by him should not be alone in awakening the consciousness of the artist: he should have well meditated upon the essential and the true in all their extension and profundity, for without reflexion a man cannot become conscious of that which is within himself, and all great works of art show that their material has been thought again and again from every side. No successful work of art can issue from light and careless imagination."[42] It is a delusion to fancy that poet and painter need nothing beyond intuitions: "a true poet must reflect and meditate before and during the execution of his poem."[43] But it is always understood that the thought of the poet does not take the form of abstraction.

Some critics[44] affirm that the æsthetic movement from Schelling to Hegel is a revived Baumgartenism on the ground that this movement regarded art as a mediator of philosophical concepts; they mention the fact that a follower of Schelling, one Ast, was moved by the trend of his system to substitute didactic poetry for drama as the highest form of art.[45] Putting aside some isolated and accidental deviations, there is no truth in this affirmation: these philosophers are hostile to intellectualistic and moralistic views, frequently entering upon definite and explicit polemic against them. Schelling wrote: "Æsthetic production is in its origin an absolutely free production.... This independence on any extraneous purpose constitutes the sanctity and purity of art, enabling it to repel all connexion with mere pleasure, a connexion which is a mark of barbarism, or with utility, which cannot be demanded of art save at times when the loftiest form of the human spirit is found in utilitarian discoveries. The same reasons forbid an alliance with morality and hold even science at arm's length, although nearest by reason of her disinterestedness; having her aim, however, outside herself, she must restrict herself definitely to serve as means to something higher than herself: the arts."[46] Hegel says, "Art contains no universal as such." "If the aim of instruction is treated as an aim, so that the nature of the content represented appears for itself directly, as an abstract proposition, prosaic reflexion, or general theory, and is not merely contained indirectly and implicitly in the concrete artistic form, the result of such a separation is to reduce the sensible and imaginative form, the true constituent of a work of art, to an idle ornament, a covering (Hülle) presented simply as a covering, an appearance maintained as mere appearance. The very nature of the work of art is thus completely altered, for a work of art must not present to intuition a content in its universality, but this universal individualized and converted into a sensible individual."[47] It is a bad sign, he adds, when an artist sets himself about his work from a motive of abstract ideas instead of that of the fulness of life (Überfülle des Lebens).[48] The aim of art lies in itself, in presentation of truth in a sensible form; any other aim is altogether extraneous.[49] It would not be hard to prove, certainly, that by separating art from pure representation and imagination and making it in some sense the vehicle of the concept, the universal, the infinite, these philosophers were facing in the direction of the road opened by Baumgarten. But to prove this would mean accepting as a presupposition the dilemma that if art be not pure imagination, it must be sensuous and subordinate to reason; and it is just this presupposition and dilemma that the metaphysical idealists denied. The road they tried to follow was to conceive a faculty which should be neither imagination nor intellect but should partake of both; an intellectual intuition or intuitive intellect, a mental imagination after the fashion of Plotinus.

In a greater degree than any of his predecessors Hegel emphasized the cognitive character of art. But this very merit brought him into a difficulty more easily avoided by the rest. Art being placed in the sphere of absolute Spirit, in company with Religion and Philosophy, how will she be able to hold her own in such powerful and aggressive company, especially in that of Philosophy, which in the Hegelian system stands at the summit of all spiritual evolution? If Art and Religion fulfilled functions other than the knowledge of the Absolute, they would be inferior levels of the Spirit, but yet necessary and indispensable. But if they have in view the same end as Philosophy and are allowed to compete with it, what value can they retain? None whatever; or, at the very most, they may have that sort of value which attaches to transitory historical phases in the life of humanity. The principles of Hegel's system are at bottom rationalistic and hostile to religion, and hostile no less to art. A strange and painful consequence for a man like Hegel, endowed with a warmly æsthetic spirit and a fervid lover of the arts; almost a repetition of the hard fate endured by Plato. But as the Greek philosopher, in obedience to the presumed command of religion, did not hesitate to condemn the mimetic art and the Homeric poetry he loved, so the German refused to evade the logical exigencies of his system and proclaimed the mortality, nay, the very death, of art. "We have assigned," he says, "a very high place to art: but it must be recollected that neither in content nor in form can art be considered the most perfect means of bringing before the consciousness of the mind its true interests. Precisely by reason of its form, art is limited to a particular content. Only a definite circle or grade of truth can be made visible in a work of art; that is to say, such truth as may be transfused into the sensible and adequately presented in that form, as were the Greek gods. But there is a deeper conception of truth, by which it is not so intimately allied to the sensible as to permit of its being received or expressed suitably in material fashion. To this class belongs the Christian conception of truth; and, furthermore, the spirit of our modern world, more especially that of our religion and our mental evolution, seems to have passed the point at which art is the best road to the apprehension of the Absolute. The peculiar character of artistic production no longer satisfies our highest aspirations.... Thought and reflexion have superseded fine art." Many reasons have been adduced in order to account for the moribund condition of modern art; in especial, the prevalence of material and political interests; the true reason, says Hegel, consists of the inferiority in grade of art in comparison with pure thought. "Art in its highest form is and for us must remain a thing of the past"; and just because the thing has vanished, one can reason about it philosophically.[50] The Æsthetic of Hegel is thus a funeral oration: he passes in review the successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption and lays the whole in its grave, leaving Philosophy to write its epitaph.

Romanticism and metaphysical idealism had elevated art to such a fantastic height among the clouds that at last they were obliged to admit that it was so far away as to be absolutely useless.

X

SCHOPENHAUER AND HERBART

Nothing, perhaps, shows more clearly how well this imaginative conception of art suited the spirit of the times (not only a particular fashion in philosophy, but the psychological conditions expressed by the Romantic movement) than the fact that the adversaries of the systems of Schelling, Solger and Hegel either agreed with this conception in general or, while believing themselves to be departing widely from it, actually returned to it involuntarily.

Everybody knows with what lack, shall we say, of phlegma philosophicum Arthur Schopenhauer fought against Schelling, Hegel and all the "charlatans" and "professors" who had divided amongst themselves the heritage of Kant. But what was the artistic theory accepted and developed by Schopenhauer?

His theory, like Hegel's own, turns upon the distinction between the concept which is abstraction and the concept which is concrete, or Idea; although Schopenhauer's Ideas are by himself likened to Plato's, and in the particular form in which he presents them more nearly resemble those of Schelling than the Idea of Hegel. They have something in common with intellectual concepts, for like them they are unities representing a plurality of real things: but "the concept is abstract and discursive, entirely indeterminate in its sphere, rigorously precise within its own limits only; the intellect suffices to conceive and understand it, speech expresses it without need for other intermediary, and its own definition exhausts its whole nature; the idea, on the contrary (which may be defined clearly as the adequate representative of the concept) is absolutely intuitive, and although it represents an infinite number of individual things, it is not for that any the less determined in all its aspects. The individual, as individual, cannot know it; in order to conceive it he must strip himself of all will, of all individuality, and raise himself to the state of a pure knowing subject. The idea, therefore, is attained by genius only, or by one who finds himself in a genial disposition attained by that elevation of his cognitive powers inspired usually by genius." "The idea is unity become plurality by means of space and time, forms of one intuitive apperception; the concept, on the contrary, is unity extracted from plurality by means of abstraction, which is the procedure of our intellect: the concept may be described as unitas post yewi the idea, unitas ante rem."[1] Schopenhauer is in the habit of calling ideas the genera of things; but on one occasion he remarks that ideas are of species, not genera; that genera are simply concepts, and that there are natural species, but only logical genera.[2] This psychological illusion as to the existence of ideas for types originates (as we find elsewhere in Schopenhauer) in the habit of converting the empirical classifications of the natural sciences into living realities. "Do you wish to see ideas?" he asks; "look at the clouds which scud across the sky; look at a brooklet leaping over rocks; look at the crystallization of hoar-frost on a window-pane with its designs of trees and flowers. The shapes of the clouds, the ripples of the gushing brook, the configurations of the crystals exist for us individual observers, in themselves they are indifferent. The clouds in themselves are elastic vapour; the brook is an incompressible fluid, mobile, transparent, amorphous, the ice obeys the laws of crystallization: and in these determinations their ideas consist."[3] All these are the immediate objectification of will in its various degrees; and it is these, not their pale copies in real things, that art delineates; whence Plato was right in one sense and wrong in another, and is justified and condemned by Schopenhauer exactly in the same way as by Plotinus of old, as well as by Schopenhauer's worst enemy, the modern Schelling.[4] In consequence, each art has a special category of ideas for its own dominion. Architecture, and in some cases hydraulics, facilitate the clear intuition of those ideas which constitute the lower degrees of objectification—weight, cohesion, resistance, hardness, the general properties of stone and some combinations of light; gardening and (most curious association) landscape painting represent the ideas of vegetable nature; sculpture and animal painting those of zoology; historical painting and the higher forms of sculpture that of the human body; poetry the very idea of man himself.[5] As for music, that (let him who can justify the logical discontinuity) is outside the hierarchy of the other arts. We have seen how Schelling considered it to be representative of the very rhythm of the universe;[6] differing but slightly from this, Schopenhauer affirms that music does not express ideas but, parallel with ideas, Will itself. The analogies between music and the world, between the fundamental bass and crude matter, between the scale and the series of species, between melody and conscious will, led him to the conclusion that music was not, as Leibniz thought, an arithmetic but a metaphysic: exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi.[7]