Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling on Art, 1807: Critic of 20th Century Art

"Plastic Art [painting and sculpture] ...stands as a uniting link between the soul and Nature, and can be apprehended only in the living center of both."  (275)  It does so by expressing spiritual thoughts.  This initial thought from "On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature" (found in What is Art? ed. Alexander Sesonske, New York, Oxford U. Press, 1965) indicates a break from Schelling's master, Kant, in that there is no deep division between the soul and nature.  (The translation is by Eliot Cabot and may be found here in part as well.  Google provides it for "free."  This edition is The German Classics:  Masterpieces of German Literature translated into English, Vol. 5.) He believes this relation is found in other arts too, for example poetry.  Both nature and art are productive forces and this is what unifies the arts.  Moreover, the original source of plastic art is nature.  So, for Shelling, as opposed to, for example,  contemporary writers like Dom Lopes, there is a coherence to the whole structure of art, and this is found in the relation between nature and art (made up of the various arts).

Further, when people say that art imitates nature, we need to consider which sense of "nature" is being used.  One sense is that: "Nature is nothing more than the lifeless aggregate of an indeterminable crowd of objects, or the space in which....[the proponent of this theory] imagines things placed."  Another person might see it vaguely as the soil of his nourishment.  But "to the inspired speaker alone [Nature is] the holy, ever creative original energy of the world, which generates and busily evolves all things out of itself." That's Schelling's position, and it seems generally right.   Of course, as atheists, we need not take the claims for this ground to be literally "holy" or even see a literal "creative original energy" acting in the world, although the latter correlates roughly with the idea of evolution (as long as evolution is conceived of in a way that allows for some directive elements....admittedly not a strictly Darwinian notion of evolution).  If art imitating nature means this Schelling believes it is highly significant.  

Schelling thinks it makes no sense to imitate a nature that is without life.  He rejects the notion of Nature as a "dumb," "life-less" image and the imitation of this in artistic materials.  Some philosophers of his time believed that, in imitating nature, only the beautiful and the prefect should be represented.  But this leaves open the question of how the imitator distinguishes the beautiful perfect parts from the others, the ones that should not be imitated.  Since it is actually easier to imitate the ugly it is tempting for the imitator not to be concerned with this.  

Schelling also argues against the notion of imitation of abstract form.  In this, we might regard him as a critic of Clive Bell's and Roger Fry's formalism before their time.  He says that regarding "in things not their principle, but the empty abstract form" we will find that the result will not say anything to our souls or hearts. (276)  But the perfection of a thing is "the creative life in it, its power to exist." So those who believe nature is dead cannot create beauty and truth through artistic imitation.  (Bell and Fry, of course, rejected the very idea of imitation.  But their formalism is not acceptable to Schelling.)

Schelling admired Winckleman for restoring the role of soul in art, raising it into the "realm of spiritual freedom":  "he taught that the production of ideal Nature, of Nature elevated above the Actual, together with the expression of spiritual conception, is the highest aim of Art."  However, people continued to see Nature itself as lifeless.  We can see that this move of Schelling's allies him with the American transcendentalists in the aesthetics of nature (not surprising since they were inspired by Coleridge, who was inspired by Schelling.)  Schelling prefers the idea of ideal forms of nature being animated by "positive insight into their nature." (276)  Seeing nature as lifeless led to replacing nature with "the sublime works of Antiquity" whose outward forms could be imitated in the classroom, but without their spirit.  They are only animated when we bring to them "the spiritual eye to penetrate through the veil and feel the stirring energy within." (276)  This seems like good advice to artists.  Another position taught "the secret of the soul, but not that of the body" missing the "vital mean" between these two extremes.  So, for Winckleman, on one side there was "beauty in idea" flowing from the soul, and on the other was "beauty of forms."  What connects the two?  "Or by what power is the soul created together with the body, at once and as if with one breath?"  (277)  How can forms be produced from the idea?  

At this point Schelling introduces a bit of metaphysics, the idea of Limit (the material and determined world) and Unlimited (the realm of freedom).  From this comes his criticism of Bell/Fry formalism.  (This is important since everyone believes that this formalism is destroyed by contextualism.  But if there is an alternative formalism which also destroys Bell/Fry formalism, then isn't there a possible competitor to contemporary contextualism....not saying it is false so much as incomplete?)  This is worth quoting at length:

Art after Winckleman went to a retrograde method since it strove "from the form to come to the essence."  "But not thus is the Unlimited reached; it is not attainable by mere enhancement of the Limited.  Hence, such works as have had their beginning in form, with all elaborateness on that side [consider much contemporary abstract art!] show, in token of their origin, an incurable want at the very point where we expect the consummate, the essential, the final.  The miracle by which the Limited should be raised to the Unlimited, the human become divine, is wanting; the magic circle is drawn...."  (277)   

Don't read "Unlimited" as God.  Read is rather as the moment of Freedom where the human becomes god-like.  This, for the aesthetic atheist (see my earlier posts on this), does all the work religion needs to do without the excessive metaphysics and authority-based dogmatic belief.   For this to work as a philosophy of life, the divine-like, the holy, the Unlimited, and freedom itself, can be a fiction, can be "ideal" in Kant's sense of not being real, but still absolutely necessary.   

Schelling puts the issue of the relation of the artist and nature in a compelling way.  He asks "How can we, as it were, spiritually melt this apparently rigid form [Nature as quiet and serious beauty], so that the pure energy of things may flow together with the force of our spirit and both become one united mold?"  Isn't that a good question for the artist?  Again, attacking the formalists before their time, he writes, "We must transcend Form, in order to gain it again as intelligible, living, and truly felt."  He continues:  "Consider the most beautiful forms;  what remains behind after you have abstracted from them the creative principle within?  Nothing but mere unessential qualities, such as extension and the relations of space."  Further, he asks,  "Does the fact that one portion of matter exists near another, and distinct from it, contribute anything to its inner essence? or does not not rather contribute nothing?"  Hans Hoffman, the abstract expressionist painter would deny that it contributes nothing.  Fine, but the question is worth asking.

I will end today with this passage, which I take to be profound, although difficult.  Take this not only as a criticism of formalism but even of surrealism and dadaism, i.e. a criticism of 20th century art or better, the philosophy behind a lot of it, a philosophy that denies essences but only because it sees them as eternal and unchanging, failing to recognize essences that are historically relative

"It is no mere contiguous existence, but the manner of it, that makes form;  and this can be determined only by a positive force, and subordinates the manifoldness of the parts to the unity of one idea - from the force that works in the crystal to the force which, comparable to a gentle magnetic current, gives to the particles of matter in the human form that position and arrangement among themselves, through which the idea, the essential unity and beauty, can become visible." (277)  

Is this to exclude a scientific world view?  Not at all:  "Not only...as active principle, but as spirit and effective science, must the essence appear to us in the form, in order that we may truly apprehend it.  For all unity must be spiritual in nature and origin; and what is the aim of all investigation of Nature but to find science therein?  For that wherein there is not Understanding cannot be the object of Understanding; the Unknowing cannot be known..."  (277)







 

Fichte and Schelling

These thoughts are prompted by thinking about Andrew Bowie  Schelling and Modern European Philosophy:  An Introduction (Routledge, 1993), particularly Chapter 1 and by an article on Fichte by Dan Breazele (cited below.)  When told that someone is an idealist the natural response is to think that such a person is unrealistic.  In fact there are surprising affinities between the kinds of realism we find in pragmatist thought (of, for example, John Dewey) and the idealism of Fichte and Schelling.  In my last post I discussed Schelling, but let's move back in time to Fichte, who came philosophically right after Kant.  In my view Fichte was right in opposing Kant's dualism:  the idea of a world of things-in-themselves is untenable.  It makes more sense to dissolve the distinction between consciousness and world, or rather, recognize that the world is the object of consciousness and is within consciousness in that sense.  Moreover, Fichte recognized that Kant's own philosophy posited a common ground to his dualistic world:  the transcendental unity of apperception, the "I think" that must be able to accompany all representations.  Whenever I experience something I am at least vaguely aware that there is an I that is doing so: it is the I, my embodied self, that is the active center of my world.   The world is the world we are conscious of, and this includes all of the stuff in the category of "things we can imagine that we are not directly conscious of."  There is nothing inconsistent between this, by the way, and a hearty belief in the methods and conclusions of science.  The "external world" is a  fiction, but it is a useful one. This is also the case for the "internal world."  However, as an overall metaphysical position, monism is preferable to dualism (no embarrassing gaps, not unprovable entities).  Nor do we want to opt for the mechanistic reductionist version of materialism which is the most popular form of monism.  Fichte and Schelling were to be admired for trying to find a role for freedom in a monistic world.  Freedom, as understood by Kant, was an irruption of a thing-in-itself, the soul, into the world of experienced things, one that poses inescapable problems.  There is no real evidence for such a thing as an immaterial soul, for example.  More sensible is to find freedom in the world as we experience it.  How do we experience freedom?  We experience it through a sense of creative flow.  We also experience it through the absence of that experience, i.e. through the blockage of creative flow.  When one feels that one's activity is unlimited, that one has unlimited potential, this is freedom.  (It is possible, however, that one can have a sense of freedom and not be free, as for instance as the effect of a drug.  Feelings are not guarantees of truth.)  For Fichte the essence of the I was spontaneous creative activity unhindered by external forces.  What we today mean by "the I" is certainly a lot more than that, but we feel most ourselves when we have this sense of spontaneous creative and unhindered activity -  so perhaps this is Fichte's point.  This feeling is pretty much the equivalent to the feeling of happiness.  When it is associated with the senses, it is aesthetic.  

Fichte also has a requirement for intersubjectivity.  The I requires recognition of other selves to be conscious of itself.  This goes along with my last post on the goal of the artist who wishes to achieve greatness.  Self-consciousness is a matter of creating one's own self in the context of intersubjectivity in which one follows the Socratic quest of self-examination.  The grasping and articulation of essences is the experience of freedom.

One thing I cannot agree with in Fichte is the notion of pure thing-hood as utter necessity.  First, the experience of freedom is also an experience of necessity, of free necessity as opposed to constrained necessity.  Second, things are participants in our world, having their own meaning-content for us.  When we experience  things as full of potential or as having a certain aura (as being aesthetic) this is also an experience of freedom.  (See
Breazeale, Dan, "Johann Gottlieb Fichte", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

As an atheist, I find it necessary to do some translation when reading the idealists.  When the idealist talks about the Absolute this is usually a thinly disguised notion of God.  The idealists consider The Absolute the ground of existence.  Some, for example F. H. Jacobi, saw it as a ground that cannot be articulated.  A possible translation of this idea into terms that make sense to an atheist is that when we achieve the experience of freedom we sense oneness with the matter at hand, and in a way that cannot be articulated except through metaphor.

In Breazeale's article on Fichte he writes, that for Fichte: 


"the systematic unity of the Critical philosophy—specifically, the unity of theoretical and practical reason, of the First and Second Critiques—was insufficiently evident in Kant's own presentation of his philosophy and that the most promising way to display the unity in question would be to provide both theoretical and practical philosophy with a common foundation. The first task for philosophy, Fichte therefore concluded, is to discover a single, self-evident starting point or first principle from which one could then somehow “derive” both theoretical and practical philosophy, which is to say, our experience of ourselves as finite cognizers and as finite agents. Not only would such a strategy guarantee the systematic unity of philosophy itself, but, more importantly, it would also display what Kant hinted at but never demonstrated: viz., the underlying unity of reason itself." (op. cit.)

This seems right to me, but my question to Fichte is:  why limit the need to combining theoretical and practical philosophy (only the first two of Kant's three great critiques)?  Isn't it necessary to derive theoretical, practical and critical judgment (aesthetic) together:  only this would "guarantee the systematic unity of philosophy itself" and also, I suspect, the "underlying unit of reason itself."  But this would involve experiencing ourselves not just as finite cognizers and agents but as both finite and infinite:  finite, since conditioned by our lives, and infinite insofar as we are able to use our creative imaginations to transcend our lives, inasmuch as we are able to experience creative flow and engage with the world in this way. 

Breazeale also says that Fichte believed that what Kant called “intellectual intuition,” "though certainly justified as a denial of the possibility of any non-sensory awareness of external objects, is nevertheless difficult to reconcile with certain other Kantian doctrines regarding the I's immediate presence to itself both as a (theoretically) cognizing subject (the doctrine of the transcendental apperception) and as a (practically) striving moral agent (the doctrine of the categorical imperative)."  Yes, there can be no intellectual intuition as non-sensory awareness of external objects, but there can be as awareness of essences that are as much constructed as revealed, that awareness being fundamentally tied to the body, i.e. to ourselves as sensing beings, a being that is not only cognizing and practically striving but also self-expressing through making and through active perception. 

I also like Fichte's view, also described by Berazeale, that we need to assume freedom as the starting point of our system of thinking, while at the same time recognizing the legitimacy of skepticism concerning this freedom.  (Of course, I understand freedom not in the Kantian way as acting according the the laws of practical reason, but as experiencing creative flow.  This can also happen in the realm of practical reason however.  It is not limited to art and aesthetic experience.  I am thinking specifically right now of the life of Grace Lee Boggs  Chinese-American philosopher recently featured on the PBS series P.O.V.  "American Revolutionary:  The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs" June 30, 2014.  Boggs is a Socratic hero in that she uses (she is 99 years old!) the power of philosophical dialogue to challenge assumptions as she engages in a lifelong revolutionary struggle.)  

It is a shame that Fichte said nothing original about art or aesthetics since this has led to neglect of his metaphysical position by aestheticians and philosophers of art.