Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - From beauty to non-beauty and back again

Last time, Weisse had just finished showing the reader a canon that ties individual beautiful objects into a unified whole - a macrocosm behind microcosms. This macrocosm limits the activity of fantasy in finding individual beautiful objects: not everything can be beautiful. This limit, Weisse says, is not expressible through mere numbers. Indeed, he continues, the limit is something beyond what we can understand - it is a force behind, but also beyond what appears beautiful.

This macrocosm or force behind individual beautiful objects Weisse calls the sublime. In other words, we experience sublime, when we experience finite beautiful objects being swallowed into something beyond our comprehension. The sublime can also be called beautiful, but it is a beauty different from the beauty of finite objects. An important difference, Weisse insists, is that the macrocosm can never be experienced as a completed whole, but it can only be approximated. This means also, Weisse says, that the sublime can not be described fully in aesthetic terms. Instead, it must be understood through religious and ethical concepts, like divine and good.

Now that the sublime macrocosm has appeared to us, individual beautiful objects should get their beauty from their relation to this macrocosm. Like the sublime itself, the beautiful objects, as related to it, receive a religious and ethical flavour - they appear graceful or dignified, Weisse says. There still exist beautiful objects without any relation to this divinity, or more precisely, beautiful objects denying their relation to the sublime. Paradoxically, they now seem in comparison with the sublime just plain ugly.

Ugliness, Weisse continues, is thus not just a lack of beauty, but beauty turned upside down. Because the basis of beauty was truth, ugliness is then defined by deception, and while the experience of beauty was one of blessedness, experience of ugliness is one of damnation. Indeed, Weisse says, this experience of ugliness makes us imagine a whole hell full of horrendous ghosts. Even concrete objects we deem ugly seem thus uncanny and frighten us.

Weisse’s notion of ugliness has thus also a link to ethics: what is permanently ugly is that which is evil or turned against the divine. Then again, Weisse says, if we separate ugliness from evil and related ethical notions, it becomes mere instability - seemingly ugly, temporal realities, not sustained by an evil will, vanish like all finite things.

The person observing this disappearance of individual ugliness feels itself as being constant throughout these changes and even as actively cancelling these ugly objects. In other words, this person feels its own power in the play of forces that causes the instability of everything it senses: things external to the observing subject appear frivolous and even ridiculous. As a sudden outburst, such a feeling becomes an experience of comical, Weisse says, and this experience is bodily felt as a trembling of one's whole body in laughter.

In comedic experience, a person recovers itself from a detour through creation and destruction of ordinary finite entities. In other words, Weisse says, a bit of wit or a whiff of irony helps us to isolate ourselves from the world of finity, while the objects of this world appear of lower stature to what is sublime. Yet, we can also have the original experience of beauty, when looking at them, but now this beauty seems childlike or naive. The result of this experience of humour or irony is to notice that these seemingly naive objects can take up their place in the flow of sublimity, which creates an experience of an ideal beauty, which shall be the topic of my next post.

Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics (1830)

(1801-1866)

As a specialist on Hegelian philosophy I’ve come to notice that in studying works engaging with Hegel I must distinguish the picture of Hegel presented in these works from what Hegel really said (or more precisely, what is my picture of what Hegel really said, since I cannot be sure I have deciphered Hegel's meaning correctly). Thus, when reading Weisse’s System der Ästhetik, a work expressly indicated as a development and even an improvement of Hegelian philosophy, I had to constantly remind myself that Weisse is speaking not so much of Hegelianism in itself, but of the view he had of it. For instance, Weisse takes as Hegel’s definition of the topic of philosophy, the idea, that it is the eternal and necessary form of all that exists. True, Hegel does say that idea is eternal and necessary, but one might wonder if this is just a description of this “idea” and leaves out some crucial and defining characteristics.

Weisse’s understanding of Hegelian idea is in line with his understanding of the apex of Hegelian philosophy, where all the previous developments are summed up in the very notion of philosophy itself. For Weisse, this is ultimately just a passive, theoretical move, where the philosopher merely grasps the truth of what has been previously exposed, but does not actively engage or do anything with it. One might argue that the Hegelian philosopher as a living, conscious individual is constantly doing just that, but Weisse thinks that there is rift between this viewpoint of a finite individual and the viewpoint of the Hegelian philosopher supposedly knowing the essence of all there is to know.

Weisse insists that this rift must be bridged. Hegel himself might say that the whole of his philosophy is dedicated to bridging this rift and showing how anyone could become a philosopher, but this is another discussion. Weisse, on the other hand, thinks the bridging should be done through something completely different - an idea of beauty surpassing the idea of truth embodied in the Hegelian philosophy. Weisse thinks he is here following Hegel’s dialectic-speculative method and surpassing Hegelianism by its own means.

What is lacking in Weisse’s account is the crucial idea that the outcome of such a move should be based on its very starting point. That is, we shouldn’t just find a supposed inadequacy in the starting point and suggest a way to amend it, but we should be able to transform the very starting point by its own means to the end point. In other words, we should be able to start with a philosopher recognising the truth of philosophy and showing how this very experience can become or at least give rise to an aesthetic experience of beauty. This is a path that one could very well take, since a recognition of a deep and meaningful truth could be described as aesthetic. Still, it is not the path that Weisse takes. On the contrary, he thinks that such a recognition of truth is by itself not capable of being an aesthetic experience, which for him requires something surpassing mere truth.

Beauty is then for Weisse, in terms taken from Hegel’s philosophy, an Aufhebung of truth, that is, it contains truth, but only as one aspect in a greater whole. What this more is that is added to the truth is that beauty appears in the viewpoint of finite individuals, that is, in the ordinary human life. Still, Weisse insists, beauty also presupposes truth, which means for Weisse that aesthetic theories not understanding Hegelian viewpoint will not express the truth of beauty.

Like truth, Weisse says, beauty is still something connected to Geist or life of conscious beings. Here Weisse points to the notion of fantasy (Phantasie), as used by Fichte and romantics. Fantasy, Weisse says, is something different from mere imagination (Einbildungskraft), which means simply our ability to have mental images of things we have perceived, but are not currently perceiving. Fantasy, on the other hand, should be a higher capacity of representing things pertaining to the very nature of consciousness. In other words, fantasy should be a capacity by which we can think of things like beauty as embodied.

Beauty, as fantasised, is then not just a word we understand, but something that we can perceive and feel, Weisse says. In other words, in fantasy we experience beauty as something that is distinct from our consciousness and that makes us feel as being part of something more universal than us as individuals. In comparison, our finite selves feel utterly insignificant. We are here witnessing another dialectical movement, in which consciousness has an experience of beauty and then ascribes this feeling to an object different from itself as the subject. In other words, we have moved from beauty as a subjective experience to a beautiful object conceived as causing this experience.

While the truth of philosophy is something that is infinite in the sense that in it the philosopher knows that philosophy could potentially understand anything coming across, in the experience of beauty this potentiality is in a sense actualised. This does not mean, Weisse explains, that we would experience an infinite amount of beautiful objects all at once, but that we experience more and more beautiful objects, without any limit. Furthermore, it means that no individual beautiful object or any finite sum of them manages to completely satisfy our notion of beauty, but shows only some limited aspects of it.

Each of these beautiful objects, Weisse says, although agreeing with others by awakening the experience of beauty in us, is still unique in its own way. Weisse clarifies that this uniqueness does not mean just that each beautiful object exists at its own specific time and place, but also that beautiful objects differ in their characteristics. Because beautiful objects still are Aufhebung of truth, while truth already contains the essence of everything studied at previous levels of philosophy, they in their turn contain in a sense the whole world in them. In other words, beautiful objects are microcosms. How a whole world could be expressed in a singular object is a mystery that can never be fully explained by philosophy, Weisse thinks.

Each of these beautiful objects must be a real object in our world and not just a figment of imagination, Weisse says. Beauty must be embodied, but this is as far as necessity goes, he continues. In other words, there’s a degree of arbitrariness and almost of a free choice in picking out what we actually experience as beautiful. This picking out involves then a new dialectical movement. The beautiful object is also something more than just beautiful or it has a number of other characteristics. Beauty is then relegated into a level of a property among other properties.

As comparable with other properties of the object, Weisse explains, beauty becomes a quantitative characteristic: a thing can be more or less beautiful, depending on its other characteristics. Still, Weisse adds, beauty differs from other characteristics of a thing by expressing all of the thing and not just a single feature. Weisse describes this relation also by saying that beauty is not part of the appearance of the thing, but its whole appearance. In other words, beauty indicates a complex relation among the other features of the thing - it is their rule, canon or measure for measures. Weisse also emphasises that beauty as a rule or measure cannot be expressed through a simple numeric equation - beauty lies not just in e.g. symmetry. In this sense beauty could also be called irrational, just like irrational numbers cannot be expressed through mere multiplications and divisions.

The canon of beauty ties the disparate realm of beautiful objects into a unified whole, Weisse says. At the same time, it creates some limits to what can be called beautiful, even if these limits cannot be clearly expressed. In other words, by changing the characteristics of beautiful things, we could slowly turn them into something that is not beautiful. I shall study the outcome of this dialectical transition in the next post.