XVIII

ÆSTHETIC PSYCHOLOGISM AND OTHER RECENT TENDENCIES

The neo-critical or neo-Kantian movement was powerless to make headway against hedonistic, psychological and moralistic views of the æsthetic fact, although it made every effort to save the concept of spirit from the invading rush of naturalism and materialism.[1] Kant bequeathed to neo-criticism his own failure to understand creative imagination, and the neo-Kantians do not seem to have had the faintest notion of any form of cognition other than the intellectual.

Amongst German philosophers of any renown who clung to æsthetic sensationalism and psychologism was Kirchmann, promoter of a so-called realism, and author of Æsthetic on a Realistic Basis (1868).[2] In his doctrine the æsthetic fact is an image (Bild) of a real; an animated (seelenvolles) image, purified and strengthened, that is, idealized, and divided into the image of pleasure, which is the beautiful, and that of pain, which is the ugly. Beauty admits of a threefold series of varieties or modifications, being determined according to the content as sublime, comic, tragic, etc.; according to the image, as beauty of nature or of art; and according to the idealization as idealistic or naturalistic, formal or spiritual, symbolical or classical. Not having grasped the nature of æsthetic objectification, Kirchmann takes the trouble to draw up a new psychological category of ideal or apparent feelings, arising from artistic images and being attenuations of the feelings of real life.[3]

To the evolution or involution of the Herbartians into physiologists of æsthetic pleasure corresponds a similar evolution or involution of the idealists into adherents of psychologism. The first place must be given to the veteran Theodor Vischer, who in a criticism of his own work pronounced Æsthetic to be "the union of mimics and harmonics" (vereinte Mimik und Harmonik), and Beauty the "harmony of the universe," never actually realized because realized only at infinity, so that when we think to seize it in the Beautiful, we are under an illusion: a transcendent illusion, which is the very essence of the æsthetic fact.[4] His son Robert Yischer coined the word Einfühlung to express the life with which man endows natural objects by means of the æsthetic process.[5] Volkelt, when treating of the Symbol[6] and joining symbolism to pantheism, opposed associationism and favoured a natural teleology immanent in Beauty.

The Herbartian Siebeck (1875) abandoned the formalistic theory and tried to explain the fact of beauty by the concept of the appearance of personality.[7] He distinguishes between objects which please by their content alone (sensuous pleasures), those which please by form alone (moral facts), and those which please by the connexion of content with form (organic and æsthetic facts). In organic facts the form is not outside the content, but is the expression of the reciprocal action and conjunction of the constitutive elements: whereas in æsthetic facts the form is outside the content, and as it were its mere surface; not a means to the end, but an end in itself. Æsthetic intuition is a relation between the sensible and the spiritual, matter and spirit, and is thus form regarded as the appearance of personality. Æsthetic pleasure arises from the spirit's consciousness of discovering itself in the sensible. Siebeck borrows the theory of modifications of the beautiful from the metaphysical idealists, who held that only in such modifications can beauty be found in the concrete, just as humanity can only exist as a man of determinate race and nationality. The sublime is that species of beauty wherein the formal moment of circumscription is lost, and is therefore the unlimited, which is a kind of extensive or intensive infinity; the tragic arises when the harmony is not given but is the result of conflict and development; the comic is a relation of the small to the great; and so on. These traces of idealism, together with his firm hold on the Kantian and Herbartian absoluteness of the judgement of taste, make it impossible to regard Siebeck's Æsthetic as purely psychological and empirical and wholly devoid of philosophical elements.

It is the same with Diez, who, in his Theory of Feeling as Foundation of Æsthetic (1892),[8] tries to explain the artistic activity as a return to the ideal of feeling (Ideal des fühlenden Geistes), parallel with science (ideal of thought), morality (ideal of will) and religion (ideal of personality). But whatever is this so-called feeling? is it the empirical feeling of the psychologists, irreducible to an ideal, or the mystic faculty of communication and conjunction with the Infinite and the Absolute? the absurd "pleasure-value" of Fechner, or the "judgement" of Kant? One is inclined to say that these writers, and others like them, still under the influence of metaphysical views, lack the courage of their opinions: they feel themselves to be in an atmosphere of hostility and speak under reservations or compromises. The psychologist Jodi asserts the existence of elementary æsthetic feelings, as discovered by Herbart, and defines them as "immediate excitations not resting upon associative or reproductive activity or on the fancy," although "in ultimate analysis they must be reduced to the same principles."[9]

The purely psychological and associationistic tendency becomes clearly defined in Professor Teodor Lipps and his school. Lipps criticizes and rejects a whole series of æsthetic theories: (a) of play; (b) of pleasure; (c) of art as recognition of real life, even if displeasing; (d) of emotion and passional excitation; (e) syncretism, attributing to art beside the primary purpose of play and pleasure the further ends of recognition of life, in its reality, revelation of individuality, commotion, freedom from a weight, or free play of the imagination. His theory differs little at bottom from that of Jouffroy, for in his thesis he assumes artistic beauty to be the sympathetic. "The object of sympathy is our objectified ego, transposed into others and therefore discovered in them. We feel ourselves in others and we feel others in ourselves. In others, or by means of them, we feel ourselves happy, free, enlarged, elevated, or the contrary of all these. The æsthetic feeling of sympathy is not a mere mode of æsthetic enjoyment, it is that enjoyment itself. All æsthetic enjoyment is founded, in the last analysis, singly and wholly upon sympathy; even that caused by geometrical, architectonic, tectonic, ceramic, etc., lines and forms." "Whenever in a work of art we find a personality (not a defect of the man, but something positively human) which harmonizes with and awakes an echo in the possibilities and tendencies of our own life and vital activities: whenever we find positive, objective humanity, pure and free from all real interests lying outside the work of art, as art only can reproduce it and æsthetic contemplation alone can demand; the harmony, the resonance, fills us with joy. The value of personality is ethical value: outside it there is no possibility or determination of ethical character. All artistic and in general æsthetic enjoyment is, therefore, the enjoyment of something which has ethical value (eines ethische Werthvollen); not as element of a complex, but as object of æsthetic intuition."[10]

The æsthetic fact is thus deprived of all its own value and allowed merely a reflexion from the value of morality.

Without lingering over Lipps's pupils (such as Stern and others[11]) and writers of similar tendency (such as Biese, with his theory of anthropomorphism and universal metaphor;[12] or Konrad Lange, who propounds a thesis that art is conscious self-deception),[13] we will call attention to Professor Karl Groos (1892), who comes within measurable distance of the concept of æsthetic activity as a theoretic value.[14] Between the two poles of consciousness, sensibility and intellect, are several intermediate grades, amongst which lies intuition or fancy, whose product, the image or appearance (Schein), is midway between sensation and concept. The image is full like sensation, but regulated like the concept; it has neither the inexhaustible richness of the former, or the barren nudity of the latter. Of the nature of image or appearance is the æsthetic fact; which is distinguished from the simple, ordinary image not by its quality, but by its intensity alone: the æsthetic image is merely a simple image occupying the summit of consciousness. Representations pass through consciousness like a crowd of people hurrying over a bridge, each bent on his own business; but when a passer-by halts on the bridge and looks at the scene, then is it holiday, then arises the æsthetic fact. This is therefore not passivity but activity; according to the formula adopted by Groos it is internal imitation (innere Nachahnung).[15] It may be objected against the theory that every image, so far as it is an image at all, must occupy the summit of consciousness if only for an instant; and that the mere image is either the product of an activity just as is the æsthetic image, or it is not a real image at all. It may also be objected that the definition of the image as something sharing in the nature of sensation and concept may lead back to intellectual intuition and the other mysterious faculties of the metaphysical school, for which Groos professes abhorrence. His division of the æsthetic fact into form and content is even less happy. He recognizes four classes of content: associative (in the strict sense), symbolic, typical, individual:[16] and into his inquiries he introduces, quite unnecessarily, the concepts of infusion of personality and of play. In connexion with the latter he remarks that "internal imitation is the noblest game of man,"[17] and adds that "the concept of play applies fully to contemplation, but not to æsthetic production, save in the case of primitive peoples."[18]

Groos does however free himself from the "modifications of Beauty," because, æsthetic activity having been identified with internal imitation, it is clear that whatever is not internal imitation is excluded from that activity as something different. "All Beauty (beauty understood in the sense of 'sympathetic') belongs to the æsthetic activity, but not every æsthetic fact is beautiful." Beauty, then, is the representation of the sensuously pleasant; ugliness, the representation of the unpleasant; the sublime, that of a mighty thing (Gewaltiges) in a simple form; the comic, that of an inferiority which arouses in us a pleasing sense of our own superiority. And so forth.[19] With great good sense Groos holds up to derision the office assigned to the ugly by Schasler and Hartmann with their superficial dialectic. To say that an ellipse contains an element of ugliness in comparison with the circle because it is symmetrical about its two axes only and not about infinite diameters is like saying "wine has a relatively unpleasant taste because in it is lacking (ist aufgehoben) the pleasant taste of beer."[20] Lipps too, in his writings upon Æsthetic, recognizes that the comic (of which he gives an accurate psychological analysis)[21] has in itself no æsthetic value; but his moralistic views lead him to outline a theory of it not unlike that of the overcoming of the ugly; he explains it as a process leading to a higher æsthetic value (i.e. sympathy).[22]

Work such as that of Groos and, occasionally, of Lipps is of some value towards the elimination of errors, as well as confining æsthetic research to the field of internal analysis. Merit of the same kind belongs to the work of a Frenchman, Véron,[23] who controverts the Absolute Beauty of academical Æsthetic and, after accusing Taine of confounding Art with Science and Æsthetic with Logic, remarks that if it be the duty of art to make manifest the essence of things, their one dominating quality, then "the greatest artists would be those who have best succeeded in exhibiting this essence ... and the greatest works would resemble each other more closely than any others and would clearly demonstrate their common identity, whereas the exact opposite happens."[24] But one looks in vain for scientific method in Véron; a precursor of Guyau,[25] he asserts that art is at bottom two different things; there are two arts: one decorative, whose end is beauty, that is to say the pleasure of eye and ear resulting from determinate dispositions of fines, forms, colours, sounds, rhythms, movements, fight and shade, without necessary interventions of ideas and feelings, and capable of being studied by Optics and Acoustics: the other, expressive, which gives "the agitated expression of human personality." He considers that decorative art prevails in the ancient world, and expressive art in the modern.[26]

We cannot here examine in detail the æsthetic theories of artists and men of letters; the scientific and historicist prejudices, the theory of experiment and human document, which underlie the realism of Zola, or the moralism which underlies the problem-art of Ibsen and the Scandinavian school. Gustave Flaubert wrote of art profoundly, better perhaps than any other Frenchman has ever written, not in special treatises but throughout his letters, which were published after his death.[27]

Under the influence of Véron and his hatred for the concept of beauty, Leo Tolstoy wrote his book on art,[28] which, according to the great Russian artist, communicates feelings in the same way in which words communicate thoughts. The meaning of this theory is made clear by the parallel he drew between Art and Science, and his conclusion that "the mission of art is to render sensible and capable of assimilation that which could not be assimilated under the form of argumentation"; and that "true science examines truths considered as important for a certain society at a given epoch and fixes them in the consciousness of man, whereas art transports them from the domain of knowledge to that of feeling."[29] There is therefore no such thing as art for art's sake, any more than science for science' sake. Every human function should be directed to increase morality and to suppress violence. This amounts to saying that nearly all art, from the beginning of the world, is false. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Raphæl, Michæl Angelo, Bach, Beethoven are (according to Tolstoy) "artificial reputations created by critics."[30]

Amongst artists rather than amongst philosophers must be reckoned Friedrich Nietzsche, whom we should wrong (as we said of Ruskin) by trying to expound his æsthetic doctrines in scientific language and then holding them up to the facile criticism which, so translated, they would draw upon themselves. In none of his books, not even in his first, The Birth of Tragedy,[31] in spite of the title, does he offer us a real theory of art; what appears to be theory is the mere expression of the author's feelings and tendencies. He shows a kind of anxiety concerning the value and aim of art and the problem of its inferiority or superiority to science and philosophy, a state of mind characteristic of the Romantic period of which Nietzsche was, in many respects, a belated but magnificent representative. To Romanticism, as well as to Schopenhauer, belong the elements of thought which issued in the distinction between Apollinesque art (that of serene contemplation, to which belong the epic and sculpture) and Dionysiac art (the art of agitation and tumult, such as music and the drama). The thought is vague and does not bear criticism; but it is supported by a flight of inspiration which lifts the mind to a spiritual region seldom if ever reached again in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The most notable æsthetic students of that time were perhaps a group of persons engaged in constructing theories of particular arts. And since—as we have seen[32]—philosophical laws or theories of individual arts are inconceivable, it was inevitable that the ideas presented by such thinkers should be (as indeed they are) nothing more than general æsthetic conclusions. First may be mentioned the acute Bohemian critic Eduard Hanslick, who published his work On Musical Beauty in 1854; it was often reprinted and was translated into various languages.[33] Hanslick waged war against Richard Wagner and in general against the pretension of finding concepts, feelings and other definite contents in music. "In the most insignificant musical works, where the most powerful microscope can discover nothing, we are now asked to recognize a Night Before the Battle, a Summer Night in Norway, a Longing for the Sea, or some such absurdity, should the cover have the audacity to affirm that this is the subject of the piece."[34] With equal vivacity he protests against the sentimental hearers who, instead of enjoying the work of art, set themselves to extract pathological effects of passionate excitement and practical activity. If it be true that Greek music produced effects of this kind, "if it needed but a few Phrygian strains to animate troops with courage in the face of the enemy, or a melody in the Dorian mode to ensure the fidelity of a wife whose husband was far away, then the loss of Greek music is a melancholy thing for generals and husbands; but æstheticians and composers need not regret it."[35] "If every senseless Requiem, every noisy funeral march, every wailing Adagio had the power of depressing us, who could put up with existence under such conditions? But let a real musical work confront us, clear-eyed and glowing with beauty, and we feel ourselves enslaved by its invincible fascination even if its material is all the sorrows of the age."[36]

Hanslick maintained that the sole aim of music is form, musical beauty. This affirmation won him the goodwill of the Herbartians, who hastened to welcome such a vigorous and unexpected ally; by way of returning the compliment, Hanslick felt obliged in later editions of his work to mention Herbart himself and his faithful disciple Robert Zimmermann who had given (so he said) "full development to the great æsthetic principle of Form."[37] The praises of the Herbartians and the courteous declarations of Hanslick both arose from a misunderstanding: for the words "beauty" and "form" have one meaning for the former and quite another for the latter. Hanslick never thought that symmetry, purely acoustical relations and pleasures of the ear constituted musical beauty;[38] mathematics, he held, are utterly useless to musical Æsthetic.[39] Musical beauty is spiritual and significative: it has thoughts, undoubtedly; but those thoughts are musical. "Sonorous forms are not empty, but perfectly filled; they cannot be compared with simple lines delimiting a space; they are the spirit assuming body and extracting from itself the stuff of its own incarnation. Rather than an arabesque, music is a picture; but a picture whose subject can neither be expressed in words nor enclosed in precise concept. There are in music both meaning and connexion, but these are of a specifically musical nature; music is a language we understand and speak, but which it is not possible to translate."[40] Hanslick asserts that though music does not portray the quality of feelings, it does portray their dynamic aspect or tone: if not the substantives, then the adjectives: it depicts not "murmuring tenderness" or "impetuous courage," but the "murmuring" and the "impetuous."[41] The backbone of the book is the denial that form and content can ever be separated in music. "In music there can be no content in opposition to the form, since there can be no form outside the content." "Take a motive, the first that comes into your head; what is its content, what its form? where does this begin, and that end? ... What do you wish to call content? The sounds? Very well: but they have already received a form. What will you call form? Also the sounds? but they are form already filled; form supplied with content."[42] Such observations denote acute penetration of the nature of art, though not scientifically formulated or framed into a system. Hanslick thought he was dealing with peculiarities of music,[43] instead of with the universal and constitutive character of every form of art, and this prevented him from taking larger views.

Another specialist æsthetician is Conrad Fiedler, author of many essays on the figurative arts, the most important being his Origin of Artistic Activity (1887).[44] No one, perhaps, has better or more eloquently emphasized the activistic character of art, which he compares with language. "Art begins exactly where intuition (perception) ends. The artist is not differentiated from other people by any special perceptive attitude enabling him to perceive more or with greater intensity, or endowing his eye with any special power of selecting, collecting, transforming, ennobling or illuminating; but rather by his peculiar gift of being able to pass immediately from perception to intuitive expression; his relation with nature is not perceptive, but expressive." "A man standing passively at gaze may well imagine himself in possession of the visible world as an immense, rich, varied whole: the entire absence of fatigue with which he traverses the infinite mass of visual impressions, the rapidity with which representations dart across his consciousness, convince him that he stands in the midst of an immense visible world, although he may quite well be unable at any one instant to represent it to himself as a whole. But this world, so great, so rich, so immeasurable, disappears the moment art seeks to become its master. The very first effort to emerge from this twilight and arrive at clear vision restricts the circle of things to be seen. Artistic activity may be conceived as continuation of that concentration by which consciousness makes the first step towards clear vision, which it reaches only by self-limitation." Spiritual process and bodily process are here an indivisible whole, which is expression.

"This activity, simply because it is spiritual, must consist of forms wholly determinate, tangible, sensibly demonstrative." Art is not in a state of subjection to science. Like the man of science, the artist desires to escape from the natural perceptive state and to make the world his own; but there are regions to which we can penetrate not by the forms of thought and science but only through art. Art is, strictly speaking, not imitation of nature; for what is nature save this confused mass of perceptions and representations, whose real poverty has been demonstrated already? In another sense, however, art may be called imitation of nature inasmuch as its aim is not to expound concepts or to arouse emotions, that is to create values of intellect and feeling. Art does create both these values, if you like to say so; but only in one quite peculiar quality, which consists in complete visibility (Sichtbarkeit). Here we have the same sane conception, the same lively comprehension of the true nature of art which we found in Hanslick, only expressed in a more rigorous and philosophical manner. With Fiedler is connected his friend Adolf Hildebrand, who brought into high relief the activistic, or architectonic as opposed to imitative, character of art, illustrating his theoretical discussions especially from sculpture, the art which he himself followed.[45]

What we chiefly miss in Fiedler and others of the same tendency is the conception of the æsthetic fact not as something exceptional, produced by exceptionally gifted men, but as a ceaseless activity of man as such; for man possesses the world, so far as he does possess it, only in the form of representation-expressions, and only knows in so far as he creates.[46] Nor are these writers justified in treating language as parallel with art, or art with language; for comparisons are drawn between things at least partially different, whereas art and language are identical.

The same criticism can be made in the case of the French philosopher Bergson, who in his book on Laughter[47] states a theory of art very similar to that of Fiedler and makes the same mistake of conceiving the artistic faculty as something distinct and exceptional in comparison with the language of everyday use. In ordinary life, says Bergson, the individuality of things escapes us; we see only as much of them as our practical needs demand. Language helps this simplification; since all names, proper names excepted, are names of kinds or classes. Now and then, however, nature, as if in a fit of absence of mind, creates souls of a more divisible and detached kind (artists), who discover and reveal the riches hidden under the colourless signs and labels of everyday life, and help others (non-artists) to catch a glimpse of what they themselves see, employing for this purpose colours, forms, rhythmic connexions of words, and those rhythms of life and breath even more intimate to man, the sounds and notes of music.

A healthy return to Baumgarten, a revival and correction of the old philosopher's theories in the light of later discoveries, might perhaps have given Æsthetic some assistance, after the collapse of the old idealistic metaphysic, towards thinking the concept of art in its universality and discovering its identity with pure and true intuitive knowledge. But Conrad Hermann, who preached the return to Baumgarten[48] in 1876, did bad service to what might have been a good cause. According to him Æsthetic and Logic are normative sciences; but Logic does not contain, as does Æsthetic, "a definite category of external objects exclusively and specifically adequate to the faculty of thought"; and on the other hand "the products and results of scientific thought are not so external and sensibly intuitive as those of artistic invention." Logic and Æsthetic alike refer not to the empirical thinking and feeling of the soul, but to pure and absolute sensation and thought. Art constructs a representation standing midway between the individual and the universal. Beauty expresses specific perfection, the essential or, so to speak, the rightful (seinsollend) character of things. Form is "the external sensible limit, or mode of appearance of a thing, in opposition to the kernel of the thing itself and to its essential and substantial content." Content and form are both æsthetic, and the æsthetic interest concerns the entirety of the beautiful object. The artistic activity has no special organ such as thought possesses in speech. The æsthetician, like the lexicographer, has the task of compiling a dictionary of tones and colours and of the different meanings which may possibly be attached to them.[49] We can see that Hermann accepted side by side the most inconsistent propositions. He welcomes even the æsthetic law of the golden section, and applies it to tragedy; the longer segment of the Une is the tragic hero; the punishment which overtakes him (the entire line) exceeds his crime in the same proportion in which he oversteps the common measure (the shorter segment of the line).[50] It reads almost like a joke.

Without direct reference to Baumgarten, a proposal that Æsthetic be reformed and treated as the "science of intuitive knowledge" was made in a miserable little work by one Willy Nef (1898),[51] who makes the dumb animals share his "intuitive knowledge," in which he distinguishes a formal side (intuition) and a material side or content (knowledge), and considers the everyday relations between men, their games and their art, as belonging to intuitive knowledge.