A common movement in Weisse’s aesthetics has been a move from something subjective - like faculties or experiences of beauty – to something objective - like works of art. This transition is actually quite natural – subjective personality is something that is active in expressing itself in existence outside it. Thus, Weisse says, genius is also something that will express itself in the external world.
One might think that this means just a return to the concept of art, only with the addition that it is made by a genius. Yet, what Weisse is actually speaking about is what could be called in Schellingian terms a frozen genius, that is, a force of nature somehow resembling human consciousness. Here, the product of this force - or indeed, of many forces interacting with one another - is beauty of natural objects arising out of these forces. What makes this natural beauty like a work of genius is the very naturalness by which this beauty is created. Interestingly, in comparison with Hegelian aesthetics, Weisse thus regards natural beauty as occupying a higher position than art.
In addition to the creation of natural beauty - as a product of forces acting as analogues to a human genius – Weisse considers the manner in which we experience this beauty. What is important in this experience, he emphasises, is the ability to perceive both the endless variability of natural objects and their organic unity, which Weisse considers to be two essential elements of natural beauty. This, he says, is possible only through sight, although other sensations can provide additional ingredients to the experience of beauty.
Weisse divides the realm of natural beauty into two broad categories. First of these consists of combinations of various natural objects. The basis of these combinations is formed by inorganic nature and particularly elements - earth, air and water. This basis is then filled by individual organisms, combination of which produces a beautiful landscape.
The second category consists then of these individual organisms in isolation. Weisse notes that while plants and animals can also be beautiful, the highest point of natural beauty in individual objects lies in the human shape, because of its ability to express a more complex, conscious personality.
Just like human genius can produce also ugly products, so can also the unconscious genius of nature, Weisse insists. In case of landscapes, this ugliness consists in elementary nature being deprived of its organic filling and becoming a lifeless desert. Similarly, Weisse continues, the ugliness of individual organisms consists in their decaying and rotting.
Highest form of natural beauty is that of a human organism, but it still is not a very personal form of beauty. Thus, Weisse says, a higher form of beauty is one where the individual personality shines through in its shape. This is what has been traditionally called physiognomy: the idea that characteristics of a personality can be seen in e.g. facial expressions, bodily behaviour and voice.
What is beautiful in physiognomy, Weisse says, is this very expression of a person’s inner personality in such seemingly outward appendages. Of course, just like in the case of natural organisms, the physiognomical traits can also express something ugly and evil. Whether beautiful or ugly, physiognomy of a person does not necessarily correspond with natural beauty or ugliness. Indeed, Weisse says, physiognomical beauty lies in revealing the inner being of a person, which might even disturb the beauty of external appearance.
While physiognomy proper is always something that lies in the immediate bodily expression and behaviour of a person, Weisse admits that something analogous happens in case of more complex actions. His particular example is a personal style seen in works of literature.
Style is for Weisse already a transition to yet another, higher form of beauty. This type of beauty, he says, is not a feature of individual expression, even in the shape of literary style, but of complex human interactions. What Weisse refers to are cultural customs, whether they characterise e.g. dress code or religious rituals. Just like in physiognomy, the true beauty lies in expression of one’s personality, although here there’s is not one, but many personalities interacting.
perjantai 25. marraskuuta 2022
tiistai 22. marraskuuta 2022
Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - From personality to genius
Unlike Hegel, Weisse does not end his aesthetics with art. Indeed, he says, just like the highest form of art or drama requires a living person to act the drama, artistic creations in general still require a living, conscious subject that organically unifies all products of art - as it were, this subject concentrates the whole of the realm of beauty into the shape of a person.
Weisse calls this subject of aesthetic experiences by the ambiguous name Gemüt, which could be translated as heart or soul - the innermost being of a person. Weisse says that Gemüt comes in many shapes, which reflect what a person is, when we ignore their external, bodily appearance: thus we could also translate it as a character or personality.
Specifically, Weisse notes that personalities can be divided into two opposite shapes, which he calls somewhat confusingly Seele and Geist - two words again meaning soul or spirit or in general the innermost being of a person. Weisse explains the division with a few analogies: Seele is more like music - the most abstract form of art - and found especially with women, while Geist is more like poetry - the most developed form of art - and found especially with men.
Knowing the usual gender stereotypes of the time suggests that the difference of Seele and Geist in Weisse’s system lies in the difference of passive and active personalities. Indeed, Weisse explicitly says that in the traditional fourfold classification of personalities, Seele corresponds to a melancholic or sensitive personality, while Geist corresponds to choleric or irritable personality. Of the remaining personality types, phlegmatic corresponds to a complete lack of Gemüt, while sanguine personality corresponds to a balanced Gemüt.
This basic personality, Weisse says, connects a finite human being to something infinite beyond it - the true source of beauty. Thus, personality also affects ordinary human life and gives it a purpose to fulfil. At the same time, the otherwise restful personality becomes active and tries to achieve something in the external world. Here, Weisse says, personality turns into talent.
Personalities were already manifold, Weisse says, and the same dividedness continues in an even more radical manner with talents. We can define a general purpose of having a talent - Weisse calls this purpose taste, implying especially a talent for appreciating and creating aesthetical things. Yet, he notes, not all talented activities are aesthetic in kind, but the very same process of personality becoming a talent can lead into scientific or political activities.
As a talent, a personality is engaged with achieving something beyond itself. Yet, the personality can also take as its purpose its own self-expression, forming an organic unity of all its activities. This development, Weisse says, heightens a simple talent into a genius. Genius is then, in a sense, a return to the personality from external activities of a talent. Yet, while mere personality is something passive - something a person just is - genius means precisely expressing oneself through one’s activities. Such a genius, Weisse concludes, links itself to the higher order of the world, being essentially a personification of the whole world order.
Although reflecting in itself the whole world, Weisse says, genius is always also an individual personification of the world. In this sense, he continues, we can differentiate genius in general from all individual geniuses and their individual genial works. Indeed, he says, an individual genius can correspond more or less well with the general ideal of a genius. Indeed, some genius can even go so far as to completely separate oneself from the universal background. Such a perverted genius can then use its capacity of creation for creating something evil or ugly.
Weisse calls this subject of aesthetic experiences by the ambiguous name Gemüt, which could be translated as heart or soul - the innermost being of a person. Weisse says that Gemüt comes in many shapes, which reflect what a person is, when we ignore their external, bodily appearance: thus we could also translate it as a character or personality.
Specifically, Weisse notes that personalities can be divided into two opposite shapes, which he calls somewhat confusingly Seele and Geist - two words again meaning soul or spirit or in general the innermost being of a person. Weisse explains the division with a few analogies: Seele is more like music - the most abstract form of art - and found especially with women, while Geist is more like poetry - the most developed form of art - and found especially with men.
Knowing the usual gender stereotypes of the time suggests that the difference of Seele and Geist in Weisse’s system lies in the difference of passive and active personalities. Indeed, Weisse explicitly says that in the traditional fourfold classification of personalities, Seele corresponds to a melancholic or sensitive personality, while Geist corresponds to choleric or irritable personality. Of the remaining personality types, phlegmatic corresponds to a complete lack of Gemüt, while sanguine personality corresponds to a balanced Gemüt.
This basic personality, Weisse says, connects a finite human being to something infinite beyond it - the true source of beauty. Thus, personality also affects ordinary human life and gives it a purpose to fulfil. At the same time, the otherwise restful personality becomes active and tries to achieve something in the external world. Here, Weisse says, personality turns into talent.
Personalities were already manifold, Weisse says, and the same dividedness continues in an even more radical manner with talents. We can define a general purpose of having a talent - Weisse calls this purpose taste, implying especially a talent for appreciating and creating aesthetical things. Yet, he notes, not all talented activities are aesthetic in kind, but the very same process of personality becoming a talent can lead into scientific or political activities.
As a talent, a personality is engaged with achieving something beyond itself. Yet, the personality can also take as its purpose its own self-expression, forming an organic unity of all its activities. This development, Weisse says, heightens a simple talent into a genius. Genius is then, in a sense, a return to the personality from external activities of a talent. Yet, while mere personality is something passive - something a person just is - genius means precisely expressing oneself through one’s activities. Such a genius, Weisse concludes, links itself to the higher order of the world, being essentially a personification of the whole world order.
Although reflecting in itself the whole world, Weisse says, genius is always also an individual personification of the world. In this sense, he continues, we can differentiate genius in general from all individual geniuses and their individual genial works. Indeed, he says, an individual genius can correspond more or less well with the general ideal of a genius. Indeed, some genius can even go so far as to completely separate oneself from the universal background. Such a perverted genius can then use its capacity of creation for creating something evil or ugly.
lauantai 5. marraskuuta 2022
Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - Poetry
A painting, Weisse says, is already a frozen image of a temporal action. It is a shame that Weisse did not yet live in a time of comics, which would have provided him with a clear mediating type of art, which shows a series of such frozen images and thus creates an appearance of a temporal succession or narrative. As it is, Weisse just immediately moves from painting to poetry, which is for him a return to a temporal art, just like music was, but on a more developed level: while music, at least in its purest form, only presents us pure motions, poetry can describe also events of an everyday life, and indeed, everything in nature and history. Furthermore, Weisse continues, the temporal poetry appears also in a spatial, stable shape, when it is not just spoken, but also written down.
Like all art, Weisse says, poetry involves giving shape to an external material. In poetry, this material is language, whether spoken or written. Language is dealt in poetry like notes in music - it is not the individual words or notes that matter, but their proportions and rule-bound connections to one another. Indeed, Weisse notes, like music, poetry use metre and rhythm to give a quantitative structure to its material. In addition to this quantitative regularity, poems are qualitatively structured through the use of assonance or similarity of sounds, especially notifiable in rhyming. Rhythm and rhyming share the same goal of making language more regulated in its external appearance. A third component, Weisse suggests, affects the inner meaning of language by freeing it from the shackles of strict conceptual divisions - this is the use of metaphors.
The simplest shape of poetry, Weisse insists, is the simple narration of some temporal event, different from a mere description of a static situation. This narration is the providence of an epic. Because of its simple nature, Weisse explains, epic also has the simplest rhythm. Furthermore, epic is objective in the sense that what the poem says is determined not by the author’s frame of mind but by the external events narrated. Thus, there are e.g. no rules how many characters an epic can contain: as many as the story requires. Although determined by the object narrated, epic also has a creative person or an author behind it. Yet, the subject of the narrator is not of interest in epic, Weisse insists, being completely impartial (Weisse has obviously not thought about the possibility of an unreliable narrator).
What then an epic should narrate? Weisse thinks that it shouldn’t be something presently happening nor something that is just about to come, but something that has happened in a past that has already finished (clearly, Weisse is thinking of e.g. Homer describing the Trojan war that had happened a long time before Homer’s own lifetime). This past event is then presented in the epic as being generated by the interaction of clearly delineated characters or heroes with each other and with their indistinct background, ruled by the iron fist of necessity. What is important for the epic in this interaction is not the actual events, paradoxically, but the characters expressing themselves through these actions.
Weisse is clearly describing especially ancient epics - and of course, the ancient epic or Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. He does admit that epics are determined by the historical background of their author, just because the author of an epic has to describe the events as fitting in with what their cultural background supposes as laws of what the world is like. More specifically, Weiss groups ancient and romantic epics together, because both presuppose some mythology as their foundation. Modern epic, on the other hand, Weisse regards as having replaced mythology with human history and philosophical discussions. Modern epic poetry is then divided into many different genres, according to the various types of events narrated, but brought together under the name of a novel.
In epic, narration tries to be as invisible as possible and not be something distinct from the ideal to be narrated. Still, Weisse admits, narration is always something different from the ideal narrated. When this difference is understood, it creates a feeling of discrepancy between the two: the narrator either remembers a past ideal or longs for a future ideal. This subjective feeling of remembrance and longing is expressly exemplified, Weisse says, by lyric poetry.
Unlike epic poetry, which was meant to just simply narrate things and thus did not afford a very large degree of variation for narrative styles, lyrical poetry is meant to just describe the emotional status of a particular individual and thus has many possible styles, depending on what is meant to be told, Weisse explains. Similarly, he continues, different cultures have all their own forms of lyrical poetry. In broad brush strokes, ancient lyrical poetry is especially affiliated with the backward looking remembrance of the past, while romantic poetry has as its basic principle the longing of the poet to a future ideal. The third major type of lyrical poetry - that corresponding to the modern ideal - works then as a mediator between past and future.
In lyrics, the author concentrates on themselves and their own emotions and ignores the objective events narrated in the epic. The next move should then be, Weisse notes, a return to the narration of something objective. Yet, what is narrated has been changed, he continues. In epic poetry, the author described actions of divine and heroic persons. After the turn to subjectivity in lyrics, the author should know that art helps to bridge the gap between the ordinary and the divine life. It is then not anymore divine and heroic actions that are narrated, but events of a more historical type: this happens in the dramatic poetry.
Whatever the event narrated in a dramatic form of art, this event must at first seem quite opposed to an ideal beauty, Weisse notes. This opposition can be expressed in a dramatic form as a tragic fate, where ideal beauty is crushed by the cold hand of actual historical events. Then again, Weisse says, it can be dealt with in a comical fashion, by showing the eventual limitedness and ridiculousness of historical events and a subsequent revelation of ideal as what is stable and permanent in human life. While these two elements can appear in isolation, in tragedies and comedies, they can also be mixed in other types of drama.
Just like epic and lyrical poetry, dramatic poetry is also affected by the culture, Weisse notes. Here ancient drama plays a subservient role for Weisse: ancient tragedies are retellings of tales from mythological ideals, while ancient comedies, on the contrary, provide mythologically inspired caricatures of the ridiculous features of human life. The mythological background shackles ancient drama with external restrictions, like the chorus or unities of place and time. In romantic and especially modern culture, on the other hand, dramatic art removes these shackles of mythology and enables a variety of different types of drama combining tragic and comic elements and thus showing that ideal beauty and human life are separate, but still connected.
Drama is the highest form of art for Weisse. Yet, it is not the highest shape of beauty, he adds, because even drama as such still lacks life. This need for a living humanity is prefigured in the need to use actors to present the drama to an audience. Acting, Weisse says, is then similar to an art, but not identifiable as an independent art form, because it does not create anything stable (one wonders what Weisse would have thought of movies). Acting is then more of an accessory to drama - an attempt to reach something art cannot.
Like all art, Weisse says, poetry involves giving shape to an external material. In poetry, this material is language, whether spoken or written. Language is dealt in poetry like notes in music - it is not the individual words or notes that matter, but their proportions and rule-bound connections to one another. Indeed, Weisse notes, like music, poetry use metre and rhythm to give a quantitative structure to its material. In addition to this quantitative regularity, poems are qualitatively structured through the use of assonance or similarity of sounds, especially notifiable in rhyming. Rhythm and rhyming share the same goal of making language more regulated in its external appearance. A third component, Weisse suggests, affects the inner meaning of language by freeing it from the shackles of strict conceptual divisions - this is the use of metaphors.
The simplest shape of poetry, Weisse insists, is the simple narration of some temporal event, different from a mere description of a static situation. This narration is the providence of an epic. Because of its simple nature, Weisse explains, epic also has the simplest rhythm. Furthermore, epic is objective in the sense that what the poem says is determined not by the author’s frame of mind but by the external events narrated. Thus, there are e.g. no rules how many characters an epic can contain: as many as the story requires. Although determined by the object narrated, epic also has a creative person or an author behind it. Yet, the subject of the narrator is not of interest in epic, Weisse insists, being completely impartial (Weisse has obviously not thought about the possibility of an unreliable narrator).
What then an epic should narrate? Weisse thinks that it shouldn’t be something presently happening nor something that is just about to come, but something that has happened in a past that has already finished (clearly, Weisse is thinking of e.g. Homer describing the Trojan war that had happened a long time before Homer’s own lifetime). This past event is then presented in the epic as being generated by the interaction of clearly delineated characters or heroes with each other and with their indistinct background, ruled by the iron fist of necessity. What is important for the epic in this interaction is not the actual events, paradoxically, but the characters expressing themselves through these actions.
Weisse is clearly describing especially ancient epics - and of course, the ancient epic or Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. He does admit that epics are determined by the historical background of their author, just because the author of an epic has to describe the events as fitting in with what their cultural background supposes as laws of what the world is like. More specifically, Weiss groups ancient and romantic epics together, because both presuppose some mythology as their foundation. Modern epic, on the other hand, Weisse regards as having replaced mythology with human history and philosophical discussions. Modern epic poetry is then divided into many different genres, according to the various types of events narrated, but brought together under the name of a novel.
In epic, narration tries to be as invisible as possible and not be something distinct from the ideal to be narrated. Still, Weisse admits, narration is always something different from the ideal narrated. When this difference is understood, it creates a feeling of discrepancy between the two: the narrator either remembers a past ideal or longs for a future ideal. This subjective feeling of remembrance and longing is expressly exemplified, Weisse says, by lyric poetry.
Unlike epic poetry, which was meant to just simply narrate things and thus did not afford a very large degree of variation for narrative styles, lyrical poetry is meant to just describe the emotional status of a particular individual and thus has many possible styles, depending on what is meant to be told, Weisse explains. Similarly, he continues, different cultures have all their own forms of lyrical poetry. In broad brush strokes, ancient lyrical poetry is especially affiliated with the backward looking remembrance of the past, while romantic poetry has as its basic principle the longing of the poet to a future ideal. The third major type of lyrical poetry - that corresponding to the modern ideal - works then as a mediator between past and future.
In lyrics, the author concentrates on themselves and their own emotions and ignores the objective events narrated in the epic. The next move should then be, Weisse notes, a return to the narration of something objective. Yet, what is narrated has been changed, he continues. In epic poetry, the author described actions of divine and heroic persons. After the turn to subjectivity in lyrics, the author should know that art helps to bridge the gap between the ordinary and the divine life. It is then not anymore divine and heroic actions that are narrated, but events of a more historical type: this happens in the dramatic poetry.
Whatever the event narrated in a dramatic form of art, this event must at first seem quite opposed to an ideal beauty, Weisse notes. This opposition can be expressed in a dramatic form as a tragic fate, where ideal beauty is crushed by the cold hand of actual historical events. Then again, Weisse says, it can be dealt with in a comical fashion, by showing the eventual limitedness and ridiculousness of historical events and a subsequent revelation of ideal as what is stable and permanent in human life. While these two elements can appear in isolation, in tragedies and comedies, they can also be mixed in other types of drama.
Just like epic and lyrical poetry, dramatic poetry is also affected by the culture, Weisse notes. Here ancient drama plays a subservient role for Weisse: ancient tragedies are retellings of tales from mythological ideals, while ancient comedies, on the contrary, provide mythologically inspired caricatures of the ridiculous features of human life. The mythological background shackles ancient drama with external restrictions, like the chorus or unities of place and time. In romantic and especially modern culture, on the other hand, dramatic art removes these shackles of mythology and enables a variety of different types of drama combining tragic and comic elements and thus showing that ideal beauty and human life are separate, but still connected.
Drama is the highest form of art for Weisse. Yet, it is not the highest shape of beauty, he adds, because even drama as such still lacks life. This need for a living humanity is prefigured in the need to use actors to present the drama to an audience. Acting, Weisse says, is then similar to an art, but not identifiable as an independent art form, because it does not create anything stable (one wonders what Weisse would have thought of movies). Acting is then more of an accessory to drama - an attempt to reach something art cannot.
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