Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - All you need is love

The outcome of the previous phase of Weisse’s aesthetic was the web of cultural customs generated from all interpersonal relationships: beautiful life of beautiful people. What is still missing from this web, Weisse notes, is a point of unity, which would make it into a true organic whole. This point of unity or the lifeblood of customs, Weisse suggests, is love. Weisse thus joins thinkers like McTaggart, who would place love as the highest, or the almost highest, pinnacle of a Hegelian-style system of philosophy. Indeed, this is an idea even Hegel himself toyed with.

What Weisse means by love producing an organic unity is simple to understand: in love, we have both a subjective Gemüt - the lover of something beautiful - and related to this lover a beloved objective beauty. Following Plato, Weisse even says that love is the ultimate pinnacle of aesthetic experiences, all others being mere shadows of this absolute experience.

The simplest form of love, Weisse continues, is the one Plato described in his dialogues. Weisse is not referring to what we are nowadays accustomed to call platonic love, which Weisse attaches more to the term friendship. Instead, Weisse means simply the just described relationship, where a lover - an individual human being - loves the beauty of another individual human being. Since the beauty in case is supposed to be individual, it is not the beauty of customs that is meant, but either the natural or physiognomical beauty of the beloved. An important aspect of this relation is also that it can be unidirectional - the beloved need not love the lover, although the love of the lover must be something that the beloved can perceive.

Even in Plato’s dialogues, the appreciation of the physical beauty of the beloved is in ideal case replaced by the more traditional platonic love or love of a mental disposition of the other person. Weisse also points out that this relationship, which he calls friendship, was historically emphasised by Plato’s successor in the history of philosophy, Aristotle. In addition to turning the focus from physical to mental beauty, friendship also makes love a reciprocal relationship, since I cannot be a friend of a person, if they are not my friends.

Friendship is still not the highest form of love, Weisse says, since it still lost something that was already present in Plato’s notion of love. What Weisse is referring to is that Plato’s love was more of an organic unity, with each member having a precise role in the relationship. Friendship, on the other hand, is more of an indefinite relation and in fact admits an indefinite amount of individuals in the same relation - we can have whole groups of friends with as intensive relation as with a pair of friends.

The relation Weisse is clearly heading towards in his account is, obviously, sexual or marital love. Here the indefinite plurality of friendship is replaced by a duality of persons involved. This duality is instigated, Weisse says, by a natural drive that urges human beings to reproduce. It is no wonder that Weisse’s account of sexual love is very consverative - he admits just monogamous relations as aesthetic, although he does accept the possibility of a serial monogamy, and he explicitly characterises all homosexuality as ugly and perverted.

The pinnacle of Weisse’s aesthetics is thus provided by a monogamous, heterosexual marriage, where the lifeblood of human culture is joined with a more crude, sexual relation, which still sustains this culture through production of new generations. Of course, Weisse says, this does not mean that e.g. friendships would be replaced completely by marriages. It’s just that human life, he says, wouldn’t be aesthetically complete and maximally beautiful, if there were no marital love in it.

Still, Weisse says, even marital life is not enough, since beauty is not the highest point of human experience. The transition to the next phase of philosophy is left purposefully vague, because Weisse thinks describing it would be the task of the next philosophical science. Yet, we may find some outlines of this transition in Weisse’s words. Marital love leads to an even better kind of love - that of parents toward their children. This is love of a higher kind in that it is not self-seeking, but cares for the well being of the other - it is not anymore just beauty, but goodness we are speaking of. This then leads to the idea of something beyond humankind, caring for it like a parent does its children - Weisse is moving away from aesthetics to theology.

Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - Visible beauty

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.

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.

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.

Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - The art of space

Music is, Weisse says, a temporal art - unless dressed with visible things, like in opera, there is nothing stable in a piece of music, only ceaseless movement from one note to another. In other words, music is like an activity without any product, creation as doing without creation as what has been done. Weisse notes that if creative activity is to be really creative, art must produce also these stable products. This means moving from temporal to spatial, that is, from tones to visible shapes, from music to plastic arts.

Just like the first type of music meant control over artificially produced tones, forcing measures or melodies on them, the first type of plastic art, Weisse continues, should be control over matter without any intervention of natural shapes that should be imitated, forcing the very will of the artist on matter. We might think that Weisse is here speaking of abstract art, but this wasn’t yet a thing in Weisse’s time. Instead, he is referring to architecture, which he also takes to be the historically first plastic art.

All art involves for Weisse a delimitation of something irrational by a rational measure, just like melodies were structured by rhythm and harmony. Interestingly, Weisse is from now on quite silent about the irrational, which he also calls the proper beauty, but he does keep indicating analogues to rhythm - the more mechanic repetition of sounds - and harmony - the more complex weaving of seeming variations and even destructions of melody into a rational whole.

What corresponds to rhythm in architecture, Weisse says, is the law of symmetry, that is, repetition of certain spatial relations of constructed matter into different directions. This otherwise on-going construction of matter is then limited in Weisse’s idea by the analogue of harmony or the law of statics.This law, Weisse states, is meant to enclose the construction in certain limits and exclude the outside from the inside. The law of statics should incorporate all mathematical rules explaining how the smallest amount of matter can be used to inscribe the greatest amount of space.

Weisse compares the construct of architecture with the visible nature, which is a dwelling for humans - it is a place where we are absorbed into the universal essence of humanity in dreaming, but which provides a stage for our actions during the time we are awake. The constructs of architecture, Weisse suggests, should then be, first and foremost, dwellings for the divine: temples, churches and other holy places. Of course, architects do also plan buildings for more mundane life, but dwellings for the divine still hold a priority in Weisse’s eyes. These dwellings should not just facilitate religious activities, but also embody their spirit in their style. This means, Weisse explains, that different cultures with their different ideals have their own type of architecture - ancient architecture differs from romantic or gothic architecture, while aspects of both are combined in the modern architecture.

A construct of architecture is in a sense an appearance of human personality in a visible shape. This is still not yet explicit in buildings as such, but it can be made more explicit through various decorations picturing plants, animals and humans. Even more explicit than these transitional shapes of art is the very art that distinguished the shape of an individual from their environment, whether it be natural or a construct of architecture. We are of course speaking of sculpture.

Just like with architecture, Weisse again suggests two laws providing rationality to statues. First of these - the regulated creation - is here provided by the canon or proportion describing the relations between members of a human body. The second law, which should gather the creations into a unity, is provided in sculpture by the very human form, which sculpture attempts to describe.

Moving from architecture to sculpture means moving to a more concrete element. At the same time as we are moving to a more realist form of art, we are still not finished with the more mental side of human life. Indeed, Weisse notes, although human shaped, statues often represent gods. This links sculpture immediately to ancient ideal with its polytheistic mythology: a statue is like an individual representing universal sagas. True, sculpture can be applied to mere human personalities, Weisse admits, but the products of this artistic process are more often not complete statues, but busts and similar incomplete shapes, which are already transitional stages toward two-dimensional paintings.

Painting, Weisse says, provides a mediating point between architecture and sculpture. The idea is that while architecture creates unified environments and sculpture individuals separated from their environments, a painting can show both a unified environment and individuals within it. What is also new in painting is that the whole materiality of plastic art is reduced to a mere play of colours. Indeed, Weisse suggests that image produced by colours is the essence of material objects, since colours are the first thing we humans experience through vision.

Painting presupposes, Weisse says, all of the visible world. This does not mean that painting would pick beautiful individual objects to make a beautiful work of art. Instead, it weaves all individual objects into a beautiful whole. Thus, while sculpture was dedicated just to bringing about this notion of individuality, in painting these are just elements of something larger. Yet, because the individual objects still form a basis of a painting, a painter should remain true to the nature of these objects and follow laws concerning things like perspective and the use of light and shades. The individual objects as parts of a beautiful painting can even be beautiful, but this beauty is of different sort than beauty of statues, Weisse says. It is not a simple beauty of a body, but a beauty of an image expressing various connections to things inside and outside the painting

An important part in the beauty of a painting is its ability to express even motion and change, and indeed, all processes in nature and human life, as summarised in a single moment. Thus, it gives eternal stability to variability of finite life. This eternal, Weisse suggests, is the divine, which is not anymore represented by a single body, but by the non-visible link tying all the action of the painting into a whole. This divinity is expressed particularly in the so-called history painting, Weisse says, which is explicitly dedicated to expressing the mien of humans in great historical actions. Just like with sculpture, there is also a form of painting with more finite topic, that is, genre painting, dedicated to representing slices of life.

Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - The art of time

The modern ideal of beauty, Weisse suggests, is in a sense a point where beauty coincides with truth. That is, whereas by the idea of truth Weisse means the philosophical understanding of the whole world, both the physical nature and the human history, the modern ideal of beauty means experiencing again this whole world and all that has happened in it as beautiful. The difference is that the modern ideal does not merely passively observe this beauty, but tries to create an image of this living world with the help of some inert matter, which in itself is lifeless. This creation of images of beauty is the definition of art, Weisse says.

Like many German philosophers of the time, Weisse provides a hierarchy of arts. He does not mean to say that works from the arts of the lower level of hierarchy would be automatically less beautiful than works from the arts of the higher level. Indeed, works from any art can have an infinite variety in their degrees of beauty. Instead, the idea of the hierarchy is that the lower levels contain more abstract types of arts, which in themselves point to more concrete types of arts as embodying features that the lower levels lack.

It is then understandable why Weisse would begin from music as the most abstract type of art. Indeed, the place of music in Weisse’s hierarchy might appear surprising, when compared with thinkers like Hegel and Schopenhauer, who placed music much higher in their respective hierarchies of arts, Schopenhauer reserving for it even the highest position. Yet, while both Hegel and Schopenhauer move in their hierarchies from brute physicality toward more immaterial types of art, Weisse chooses to begin from an art that is closest to the mere modern ideal of beauty: while the ideal is nothing but consciousness of beauty, music embodies this beauty in the most fluid type of material or movement of sounds.

Following Hegelian philosophy, Weisse notes that sounds or what we can hear embodies especially time, while what we can see embodies space (sounds appear and vanish, following one another, while colours and figures abide longer and side by side one another). Yet, it is not all sounds (Klang) that music is concerned about, but notes (Ton), that is, purified sounds that are quantitatively related to a whole system of other notes.

A piece of music, Weisse continues, contains firstly a temporal succession of such notes - this is the melody of that piece. As Weisse has constantly emphasised, we can not give any surefire quantitative recipe for making beautiful objects and this is the case also with music: we cannot say beforehand what melody is beautiful, despite music being able to be represented through quantitative notions. A certain regularity is required, and this is provided by the rhythm of the music, although Weisse thinks rhythm is still subservient to the melody. A further, equally indeterminate demand is that a piece of music should let the melody be diversified into different and even dissonant modifications, although from a more higher perspective of the whole composition a harmony would prevail.

In its most abstract phase, Weisse says, music uses such sounds that do not occur in ordinary nature, but are made through mechanical instruments (we have to wonder what Weisse would have thought about synthesisers that take this type of music into its extreme). Because of this divorce from nature, Weisse suggests, instrumental music is closest to the pure consciousness of the modern ideal of beauty. Indeed, he continues, as the most abstract art, capable of expressing nothing more than raw emotions, like joy and pain, it has necessarily been the youngest art, because such a height of abstraction has required plenty of cultivation. Indeed, the modern ideal of art, which is even more abstract, being mere consciousness of beauty, could not have appeared before this most abstract of arts had appeared in history, Weisse concludes.

Although the sounds of instrumental music are artificially created, they are in a sense natural sounds, Weisse reminds us, since all sounds are part of the physical nature. Yet, the more they resemble naturally occurring sounds, such as raindrops, the further away the instrumental music moves from what is proper to its level, Weisse argues. Still, despite the fact that instrumental music imitating natural sounds is a corruption, in Weisse’s eyes, the tendency to make such experiments shows that music has a natural drive toward more natural sounds.

A more proper development of the music into more natural sounds is shown in singing, Weisse says, where instruments are replaced by human voice. Singing is not anymore just an expression of the pure modern ideal of beauty, but adds layers from the whole human life. In its simplest forms, Weisse notes, singing can be used to express all sorts of frivolous topics, which are far from true art (one suspects Weisse would categorise pop music here). This lower form of singing can be saved only by the help of poetry and an instrumental background.

Yet, Weisse continues, singing can have a higher purpose, namely, when it strengthens the relation of a finite observer to the divine. While worldly singing usually works with one or two singers, religious singing often requires a whole chorus of voices. A further difference is, Weisse concludes, that religious choral music does not require the help of instruments to become real art.

In choral music, finite human life is immediately unified with the ideal consciousness of beauty, through which the humans try to connect to the divine they yearn to find, Weisse says. Yet, finite life can also be put into opposition to the ideal consciousness, as something lowly and unworthy of serious interest. Yet, just like in the earlier stage of comical, this frivolous finite life can also help to show the ideal, by revealing its own unworthiness and contradictoriness.

This revelation is achieved by the final phase of music, Weisse notes, that is, opera, where music is used to embody the drama of life. Opera in a very literal sense combines the previous types of music, by connecting instrumental music to singing, thus proving Weisse’s earlier point that if singing of lowly matters is to become an art, it must be helped by musical instruments. So, opera can be taken as the final truth of music.

Yet, opera shows also the very reason why music is ultimately not the most satisfying vehicle of art, Weisse emphasises. In order to express the ordinary human life, music requires a more robust shape of embodiment. Indeed, opera has to rely on the help of other arts - it uses visual arts to provide the setting and poetry to create something to be sung. Even more so, Weisse remarks, opera must be embodied by living people, who express the beauty of life through gestures and facial expressions - or even by activities like dancing and pantomime. In other words, in opera music wants to become visible, which is also the key to the next stage in Weisse’s hierarchy of arts.

Christian Hermann Weisse: System of aesthetics - History of an ideal beauty

The development of beauty, with Weisse, had to contend with immediate beauty not necessarily conforming to the sublime infinity beyond it and being thus ugly. Now, while we can see what an ideal beauty corresponding to the sublime should be like, he continues, originally the discovery of ideal beauty required the effort of generations, and indeed, several historical cultures.

Weisse connects the notion of ideal beauty especially to the notion of mythology. Mythologies at their best are for Weisse not just arbitrary creations of fantasy, but reflect the life and thoughts of a people. A mythology sums up the hopes and fears of a culture in a symbolic shape of mythical personalities. These symbols, Weisse says, resemble the previous aesthetic shape of comical humour, in that they both rise above the ordinary life of finite, momentary and decaying shapes, the difference being that while humour merely notes and rises above this decay, mythological symbols try to grasp something stable from this play of finite entities.

Mythology as such is not yet beauty. It is no surprise that Weisse would follow the general trend in thinking that the ancient Greek were the people responsible for transforming mythology into an ideal beauty, because Hellenic mythology was a particularly natural creation of the spirit of Greek life. Hellenic mythology, as Weisse envisions it, had two different types of mythological shapes. Firstly, the mythology tells about heroes living in the distant past, who express the essence of what the Greek thought being a Greek meant. Secondly, the heroes interact with the beautiful gods, who represent various aspects of the superhuman realm beyond human history.This mythology is then embodied in the Hellenic cult, which represents the relations of humans to this supernatural realm.

Just like Hellenic ideal was a result of historical development, it was also subject to further development, Weisse notes. While in Hellenic mythology gods were characterised by their beauty, such an external appearance was revealed to be frivolous compared to god being a self-conscious entity: beauty is replaced by something more valuable. This does not mean that beauty was completely ignored after this historical transformation, but its place in the hierarchy of values was just lowered.

With this transformation, Weisse explains, the ancient ideal of beauty turned into a romantic ideal, with its own mythology. While Hellenic gods were present as beautiful shapes, romantic God is something beyond the mythological or legendary figures - an unreachable infinity. This doesn’t mean that romantic God would never be thought to appear in the finite world, Weisse admits, but the relation of the divine and the finite was just reversed. While Hellenic gods were embodied divinities, romantic God could divinise a body - an obvious reference to the notion of incarnation. Furthermore, Weisse continues, unlike with Hellenic gods, this appearance of the romantic God in the world of finity was meant to be just temporary and God returned to the realm beyond.

The divination or at least spiritualisation of the corporeal world in the romantic mythology happened also in an opposite fashion from incarnation, Weisse notes. The finite world or at least some part of it still appeared to be severed from God - in terms of earlier concepts, it was an ugly world. Now, this inherent ugliness of the human world, Weisse continues, was presented in a non-bodily form as evil spirits opposing God. Indeed, often the beautiful gods of antiquity were now interpreted as these evil spirits or demons. Human world was then seen as a battleground between the spiritual forces of good and evil.

This battle was not supposed to be never ending, Weisse notes, but it was assumed to end with the overcoming of the forces of evil. Yet, this final victory was not really thought of as occurring at some definite point of time, but only in the hazy future - or, one might say, it had already been won, since nothing could hinder God's plans. This victory or salvation of the finite world was wrapped in the notion of divine love of the finite world.

While Hegel had ended the development of aesthetics with romanticism, which made his contemporaries assume he had assumed the death of aesthetics, Weisse continues further. Indeed, this very next step he assumes is inherent in the notion of divine love of finity - like the romantic God was supposed to do in the future or have done in an atemporal manner, we humans have again come to appreciate the beauty of the world around us. When this change has happened, yet another form of ideal has appeared - the modern ideal.

While many German romantics had supposed that a new ideal would require a new mythology, Weisse comments that all we really need now is the science of beauty itself or speculative aesthetics. Indeed, we need not even a complete aesthetical theory, but just a certainty that beauty is something equally eternal as truth and God are. This certainty is then accompanied with the historical appreciation of the former shapes of ideal beauty and with the expectation of further beauties of innumerable measure.

The historical development of the aesthetic ideals has stopped now, Weisse emphasises, but this does not mean that no further beauties would not be found. Instead, quite the opposite has happened, since by understanding beauty as such, we have liberated it from any necessary connection to further mythologies. We have thus learned to appreciate beautiful objects, which each in their unique manner express the modern ideal of beauty. In other words, Weisse implies, we now appreciate art for its own sake, not just as an expression of religious notions.

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.

Friedrich Eduard Beneke: Experiental study of soul as a foundation for all knowledge in its main branches (1820)

(1797-1854)

If you know German philosophy of early 19th century merely from summarised compendiums, you might think that only one line of thinkers followed Immanuel Kant: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. You might have read of Schopenhauer as an afterthought, especially if the compendium dealt with the whole of 19th century, but you would most likely not see any mention of Beneke. Still, he took Kantian philosophy in a direction completely different from any of the other thinkers mentioned above.

Beneke’s Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens in ihren Hauptzügen, a book about “study of soul” or psychology, is an example of this direction. The name of the book already reveals important duality in Beneke’s account of psychology. Firstly, he thinks that psychology should be based on experience and observations. Beneke notes that although empiricism has been an important philosophical school, empirical psychology has not been truly developed since the times of Plato and Aristotle. He remarks that this lack of development has been mostly due to prejudices obscuring this topic, although soul - our own mental life - should be something quite familiar to us. Hence, empiricists have been more successful with natural than human sciences.

Secondly, Beneke notes that psychology is important due to a speculative or idealistic principle. What Beneke means by this principle is not any metaphysical theory about the nature of reality as such nor is it any attempt to explain the essence of soul, like Wolffian rational psychology had been. Instead, Beneke just emphasises the rather obvious truth that we humans can never have any access to any supposedly “neutral”, “completely objective” or God’s viewpoint. Thus, all science is science made by and for humans and study of human beings or psychology must then be the foundation of all science.

Beneke is of the opinion that Kantian philosophy united at least in some sense these two complementary viewpoints. Yet, the problem of Kant’s philosophy and his most famous followers, Beneke suggested, was that they didn’t attempt to make precise observation of human mental life. Beneke himself holds that psychology should use a Euclidean method - his suggestion seems to be that psychology should find the most basic elements of human mental life and explain everything else in mental life through these elements, just like Euclid explained geometry through simple elements, like points and lines.

Beneke’s first task is then to identify basic activities of human mental life. He notes that there are three such activities. The first one of these humans share with all animals, that is, the activity involved with the maintenance of animal body. The second activity consists then of sensory activity, and finally, the third consists of muscular activity. Beneke’s terminology is here somewhat confusing, as he speaks of these activities as being unitary, while still corresponding to multiplicity of faculties, for instance, sensory activity being instantiated by five sensory faculties of touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision. More important than this terminological muddle is Beneke’s remark that it is quite impossible to separate any body and soul within these activities - for instance, we do not have a separate soul using body to receive sensations, but in sensations, and indeed, in all human life, mental and physical aspects are completely intertwined.

Beneke also says that traditionally different senses have been divided into subjective and objective kinds. He opposes this division, because human life does not neatly divide into subjective and objective components - each human being is a subjective individual, but also shares features with other human beings and is in this sense objective. He does admit some gradual difference in the subjectivity and objectivity of senses: smell, taste and touch deal with sensations that are more individual than sounds and visions.

Beneke’s main thesis is that no new faculties are required for explaining human mental life. In one sense this is just a piece of propaganda against previous philosophers: when a Wolffian mentions e.g. a faculty of memory, he is just saying in a curt fashion that humans can, among other things, remember things, but he is not insisting upon any distinct activity of memorising (in fact, many Wolffians wanted to explain these “faculties" or capacities through a single activity).

In another sense, Beneke’s suggestion fails at a deeper level. An important part in Beneke’s reconstruction of mental phenomena is to note that humans can reawaken former, already weakened perceptual activities - this is the foundation of memory and conceptual activities. One might firstly remark that this act of reawakening of perceptual activities - say, imagining a face of an absent person - is an activity quite different from perceiving the face of a present person, because one can clearly imagine things without at the same time perceiving them. It is as if Beneke has confused the similarity of the experiences of perceived and imagined face with the identity of activities behind them. Secondly, even these experiences are clearly of different nature, as was noted already by Hume: perceptions are livelier than imaginations.

With the assumption of reawakening of activities, it is easy for Beneke to reconstruct more complex cognitive activities. Indeed, for Beneke concepts - or conceptual activities, as he prefers - just are activities composed of simple, reawakened activities. For example, concept of flower, in a particular human being, is just the sum of memories of all flowers she has perceived. These concepts might then be connected with muscular activities of tongue etc., thus leading to invention of language.

It is clear that such psychologically understood concepts are very idiosyncratic, because humans might connect very different memories to same word. Indeed, he insists, individual perceptions of same thing are more alike in different persons than their concepts of these things. Concepts might be more universal than perceptions in the sense that many perceptions can awaken same conceptual activities in us, but this doesn’t make these conceptual activities any more necessary.

Despite the idiosyncrasy of concepts, Beneke does not want to say that they would be subjective in comparison with objective perceptions. Beneke is trying to point out that notions like subjectivity and objectivity are a matter of degree. He suggests this as an essential correction of the Kantian idea that space is subjective. This is true of all we experience, Beneke states, but space is still more objective than some other experiences, because it is experienced in a similar manner by all humans.

While conceptual activities are for Beneke unified complexes of activities, judgements are, on the other hand, comparisons of conceptual activities: e.g. in a positive judgement, one notes that a concept is similar to another, in whole or partially. For instance, judgements “this rose is red" means that a conceptual activity of thinking this rose is a part of the conceptual activity of thinking all red things one has perceived. Judgements are then certain, if the concepts involved are clear. Deductions are finally formed of chains of such comparisons of clear concepts.

A clear problem in this rather naive conception of certainty is the problem of induction. How can one be certain that all ravens are black, if one hasn’t perceived all ravens? Beneke’s solution is just to embrace the problem: certain universal judgements require infinity of perceptions. Then again, he admits, there are different grades of certainty, and the more we see perceptions verifying a universal judgement, the more certain the judgement is.

The difference of empirically and a priori certain judgements - and therefore of empirical and a priori sciences - is then only relative and lies in the ease, in which we can find instances verifying them: for a priori certain judgements, all experiences of certain sort provide positive instances. Thus, certainty of mathematics (apparently just geometry) is based on structure of human vision, while certainty of logic is based on structure of human conceptual activities.

As simple as Beneke’s solution of the problem of induction is his solution of Humean problem of causality. In fact, it is for Beneke just one modification of the first problem. A causal judgement, he says, just indicates that one of type of perception always follows another type of perception, and certainty of such a judgement is verified in the same manner as of every other universal judgement. In case of the general principle of causality - every event has its cause - the certainty is based on the very nature of human perception to consist of a series of interconnected events.

As a priori sciences Beneke mentions also aesthetics and ethics, which have to do with feelings or moods. A kind of starting point for Beneke’s account of feelings is provided by the traditional idea of four temperaments. Especially important are the elements out of which Beneke reconstructs the temperaments. These are the complementary aspects of receptivity for external stimuli and force of maintaining inner activity. Both aspects can be stronger or weaker, creating thus four different combinations or temperaments.

The two components of external stimuli and use of inner force are, according to Beneke, also components of feelings, together with basic activities and their combinations or concepts. While there are innumerably many manners to combine different quantities of stimuli and inner force, Beneke underlines three limit cases, corresponding to important aesthetical concepts: state of heightened external stimuli is an experience of pleasurable, state of heightened inner force is an experience of sublimity, and finally, state of balance between stimuli and inner force is an experience of beauty.

Beneke explains these three notions in detail only in relation to basic activities, but these examples suffice. All nourishing activities and lower sensory faculties (smell, taste and touch) are too fleeting to be capable of anything else but the feeling of pleasure, but with other basic activities, Beneke says, all three feelings are present. Thus, quick sounds, variety of irregular shapes and rocking movement are all pleasurable, long sounds, lack of shapes and storm are all sublime, and harmonious sounds, regular shapes and rocking of boat in storm are beautiful.

Kant had famously noted that pleasure wasn’t a topic of what we would call an aesthetical study. In a sense, Beneke concurs, because external stimuli causing pleasures are again very idiosyncratic and therefore mostly incapable of generalisation. Then again, inner force is supposedly something similar from one person to another, which makes sublimity capable of generalisation. Like in other cases, beauty lies also here between pleasure and sublimity, which Beneke uses to account for Kantian idea that judgements of beauty are in a sense both subjective and at least demand universalisation. Now, while Kant had not indicated that a feeling of sublimity would be fully generalisable, he had compared completely idiosyncratic pleasure and subjective, but universality demanding beauty with the objective and fully universal demands of moral principles. In a sense, Beneke follows Kant by taking sublimity as a foundation of the final a priori science or morality.

Beneke’s account of morality is linked to his idea of desire and purposeful activity. Sometimes, he describes, a mental activity, while still active in some sense, points to a more full realisation of itself and thus comes with a yearning toward this fuller realisation - this is a state of desire. Desire as such does not suffice for fulfilling the yearning, and on occasion, desire remains without this actualisation as a mere desire. At other times, desire is fulfilled by an activity, which could then be called purposeful action. While the fulfilling activity can be called purposeful the desiring activity itself is not purposeful - for instance, while an artist creates a work of art through a purposeful activity, aiming to realise an internal idea of an artwork, this internal idea has not come about through any purposeful activity.

Now, human beings make judgements about other humans and their inner mental life through feelings the actions of others generate in them. According to Beneke, it is apparently the feeling of sublimity, from which we can recognise truly moral persons (Beneke thinks that it is especially the individuals and their virtues, which should be the topic of morality). In other words, the feeling of sublime gives an ideal of behaviour, with which to compare concrete human beings. It goes without saying that this ideal lies then not in susceptibility to external stimuli, but on the contrary, in independence from external stimuli.

Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 - Ideas

Between the concrete individual objects and primordial will in itself Schopenhauer places ideas. These ideas are already objects or embodiments of will, but they should not yet be individuals and thus are free of ordinary causality. Instead, Schopenhauer conceives them as paradigmatic or prototypical objects for each level in the hierarchy of embodiments of will. Adding this Platonistic layer to a pseudo-Kantian worldview is, again, no novelty and similar attempts can be found e.g. in the philosophy of Schelling.

Similarly unoriginal is Schopenhauer’s notion as to what kind of cognition is required for conceiving these ideas. When a person conceives an idea, Schopenhauer suggests, she must herself be free of her own individuality and become a pure, timeless subject, who looks upon the idea without any urges of ordinary life and without the shackles of causality. In other words, she must be an artistic genius, capable of grasping what is essential in different genera of objects. Genius, Schopenhauer says, forgets her own individuality and is completely enamoured by her vision of the idea. Thus, Schopenhauer endorses the rather romantic notion of a genius, who has a special connection to the essence of the world. Another side of Schopenhauerian genius is her complete detachment from and even ignorance of practical concerns. Schopenhauer goes even so far as to suggest that no true genius could ever understand mathematics, which is essential for explaining the level of individuals.

Note that what make genius special in eyes of Schopenhauer is her ability to envision the idea. Meaning of works of art, then, is just to convey this vision of idea to other persons, who do not happen to have the abilities of genius. A work of art should, therefore, purge its viewer from all volitions. This might happen, for instance, by the work of art describing something that is completely without any interest, say, an ordinary landscape - or, it might try to forget our individual concerns and highlight on e.g. general tragedies of human life. When volition is cancelled, what is left is distinct type of peaceful pleasure in just watching the work. This state of aesthetic observing, Schopenhauer continues, can be achieved in two different manners - through beauty or through sublimity. Beautiful object lulls will peacefully, while sublime object - such as the conflict of powerful natural forces involved in storm - forcefully submits the individual will under their spell. On the contrary, any sort of titillation is bound to be quite unaesthetic, because it will just awaken the urges of volition.

Now, all of this concerns the subjective side of aesthetic experience - that is, what the object must do to us to convey such an experience. Otherwise, the object could be of any sort, and indeed, Schopenhauer says, everything is beautiful. Of course, some objects can be better in evoking the idea they embody - for instance, humans, according to Schopenhauer, are the most beautiful among all things.

Just like many other post-Kantians, Schopenhauer wants to give a sort of hierarchy of arts, which he bases mainly on the hierarchy of objects depicted. Thus, the lowest step in the hierarchy of arts is taken by architecture, which corresponds to lowest rungs in the hierarchy of phenomena, that is, gravity, hardness and other properties characteristic of mere matter. The level of plant life corresponds to art of gardening and to landscape painting, level of animality to animal sculptures and paintings.

As I have already mentioned, the highest rank of beauty in Schopenhauer’s theory is reserved for humans. Human beauty is also most multifarious in its forms. While sculpture shows best the bodily beauty and grace of human form, painting reveals the beautiful character of humans.

The arts mentioned thus far work directly through senses - they let us directly see the idea embodied in the works of art. Thus, these fine arts should be completely apart from conceptualisation and reasoning, Schopenhauer urges, because concepts and reason have developed for pragmatic use in the world of causality, but not for conceiving ideas. Hence, sculptures and paintings should not be used for symbolising general concepts, because such symbolisms and allegories would just distract from the proper purpose of art - a conclusion Schopenhauer shares with Hegelian aesthetics.

Poetry, on the other hand, has to use a completely different method for evoking the idea, because it is based on the very concepts so foreign to idea. Poetry must use allegories, but in a reverse direction - it must use words to convey images through our imagination. Poetry has then most to do with human actions, and its apex, in Schopenhauer’s view, is tragedy, which shows the utter contradictoriness of human life and its almost inevitable ending in tears, but also its solution, namely, the resignation of one’s individual will.

Completely removed from other arts in Schopenhauerian hierarchy is music, which does not convey any idea. Indeed, music is not meant to give us any aesthetic visions, but it directly produces an emotion in us. In other words, it lets us feel the primordial will, of which idea is merely the first embodiment. Schopenhauer goes even so far as to try to find analogies between different aspects of a composition and the hierarchy of phenomenal objects - a foolhardy attempt reminiscent of German idealism.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia litteraria (1817)

(1772-1834)

Coleridge is best known for his evocative poetry, such as Kubla Khan, but he had his hand also in introducing continental and especially German philosophy into Great Britain. Coleridge’s role was, firstly, quite straightforward as he was the first translator of some works of Schelling in English. Yet, he was more than just a passive translator of German thought. Coleridge was actively engaging with the thoughts of post-Kantian philosophy and preparing a book on the topic. Still, he never managed to prepare a finished philosophical work.

Closest to what we have of philosophy in his published works is Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria. The title suggests that the book would be a biography, and Coleridge does recount some tales e.g. of his journeys on the continent. Yet, the true import of the book lies in an aesthetical question what forms a proper work of poetry.

Incitement for Coleridge’s question lies in theory of poetics by another poet, William Wordsworth. What especially irked Coleridge in Wordsworth’s ideas was latter’s insistence that poetic language differed in no manner from language of good prose, which in no manner differed from language of ordinary people. Coleridge himself notes that while some lines in poems could be part of a prose text, especially if changes in word order, made due to metre and rhyming, would be cancelled, there are some lines which have an inherently poetic nature. Furthermore, this poetic nature is something completely different from crude speech used by rustic people. Coleridge even reprimands Wordsworth for including in his poems dramatic parts, in which ordinary people speak in their own words - if they truly speak in their own words, it is not poetic, if it is poetic, it is not faithful to the language of ordinary people.

Coleridge’s position is quite traditional - one would think he would be even more horrified of a modern poetry - and it is quite difficult to fathom what is this essential ingredient making a text poetic. Coleridge first states the common element in poems and fictional prose texts: they are both meant to cause pleasure, not to convey truth, like philosophical treatises. Thus, Plato’s dialogues are not poems, although they do have a certain poetic flair.

The external signs of poetry, such as rhyming and metre, are not completely external to the idea of poetry in Coleridge’s eyes. The purpose of them is to hold our attention throughout the whole poem and weave all the details described into a coherent whole. It is indeed this attention to wholes or totalities that is the distinguishing mark of poetry for Coleridge - a poem must form an organic system, in which all details, including such seemingly minute things as the tone of the words, must serve the grand purpose of the poem.

Coleridge connects at once this idea of poems as organic wholes to his notion of imagination. Unfortunately, Coleridge doesn’t actually explain what he means by imagination - an anonymous proofreader was of the opinion that Coleridge’s account of imagination was far above the understanding of an ordinary reader, so it was removed from the final published work. We do hear that imagination is different from fancy, which is a mere mechanical association of ideas. Instead, it appears to be closely connected with the basic forces responsible for the generation of human experience. Here Coleridge’s Schellingian tendencies appear most vividly, for Schelling too connected artistic imagination with the primal forces behind human experiences.

Coleridge paints himself as not just an imitator of Schelling. Instead, he just happened to have similar influences as Schelling did, which inevitably led both to similar conclusions. Coleridge mentions explicitly such names as Plato, Plotinus, Giordano Bruno and Jacob Boehme, all of whom were important also to Schelling - and all of whom had tendencies toward mysticism and pointed philosophy towards a search for something ineffable and beyond human experience. Kant was also important for Coleridge, as showing the limits of ordinary reasoning and as hinting about vistas beyond ordinary human experience. Fichte is also appreciated, as pointing out that truth behind everything lies in activity and not in mechanistic matter, but Coleridge disparages him for ignoring nature as an organic totality - all very reminiscent of Schelling.

It is then no wonder that Coleridge has in metaphysics a strikingly Schellingian attitude. We must look at things from both the viewpoint of the object or nature and the viewpoint of subject or intelligence. When we look at nature, Coleridge says, we inevitably come to laws, which are no mere matter, but intellectual things. As laws are supposed to reveal the deep structure of nature, we end up seeing that nature itself is basically intellectual. Of course, this conclusion presupposes that we accept laws as pre-existing patterns of nature’s movements and not just as our subjective generalisations from natural events.

Starting from the viewpoint of the subject, we have the immediate certainty of our own existence. We also appear to be certain of the existence of quite a number of things, which we assume to be completely independent of ourselves. Yet, as we have no gateway to things outside us, these seemingly external things appear to vanish into mere dreams. Coleridge’s wish is to uphold the every-day realism - these things we see are truly real. Paradoxically, his strategy is to hold that they are in a sense ideal. In other words, their existence is connected organically to my own existence, which means that I can be equally certain of their existence as I am of my own existence.

Coleridge’s justification of his position follows also Schellingian routes. He assumes that it is meaningful to speak about truth - something we might well concede to him, since otherwise we might as well stop caring about philosophy. Now, truth - or more likely, true thoughts - are not something self-sufficient, but dependent on the existence of things (if I know a table, the table must first exist). Then again, a series of truths, if it is to be completely reliable, must be based on something self-evident, which is certain to be true by itself. This self-evident truth must then also be based on something existent, which, Coleridge argues, must then be something, which doesn’t require the existence of anything else (notice how closely we are threading through very traditional theological notions).

What is this object of true knowledge? Firstly, it should be the source of all existence, because it shouldn’t be dependent on anything else. Secondly, it shouldn’t be a mere object or an ordinary thing, because such things would always require a further explanation - it would be something beyond ordinary experience. This means, primarily, that the object of ultimate knowledge must actually be also the subject of this ultimate knowledge. In other words, if we ever could approach this state of final knowledge, we would literally turn into God. The closest we can humanly approximate this state is in our self-consciousness, which is at least certain to ourselves, even if it is not absolutely certain. Secondarily, since this primary object of knowledge cannot be a mere passive thing, it should be an activity, that is, it is a process creating itself as its own object. This act of self-creation is then a part of all self-consciousness and it is apparently this power, which the power of poetic imagination should resemble.

This subjective side of Coleridge’s - or Schelling’s philosophy - is equally suspect as the objective side and for quite similar reasons. Why should we assume that the absolute ground of our self-consciousness resembles us and deserves the name of self-consciousness? How do we know that there is such an ultimate ground of knowledge and not just passing, contextually accepted foundations?

I will not decide the issue of the believability of Coleridgean metaphysics here. Instead, I shall end with his attempt to show how the empiricist school of philosophy can also be reconciled with this metaphysical picture. On a superficial level, the two positions appear to be contradictory - one bases knowledge on the divine self-knowledge, the other on immediate sensations. Yet, Coleridge solves this problem simply by stating that the empiricist describes correctly the generation of knowledge - we simply have no starting point for knowledge seeking but our sensations. Still, we can never said to have found an absolute foundation for even our sensations, before we have experienced ourselves the divine self-knowledge, which is ontologically at the basis of even sensations.

François-René de Chateaubriand: Genius of Christianity – Art and literature

When it comes to art, Chateaubriand's outlook is clearly literary – he has almost nothing to say about fine arts, when compared to his extensive take on poetry. Furthermore, even here we could as well repeat most of the criticism we launched against Chateaubriand's take on poetry. He is especially careful to point out that Christianity provides e.g. good topics for paintings. This appears rather pathetic defense of Christianity, because surely the worth of a painting lies in something else than merely their topic, even if a good topic does make it easier to make an aesthetic impression. Most original is probably Chateaubriand's take on architecture, where he points out how e.g. Gothic churches provide a more concrete experience of infinity than Greek temples.

Chateaubriand's take on literature is not that much better. He divides his topic intro three classes: history, rhetoric and philosophy or science. Of these, we might be quick with the rhetoric. Chateaubriand is especially keen to show that people like Church Fathers were good writers. This is again part of Chateaubriand's general strategy to show that Christianity is especially good religion for producing beauty.

History and science are a different matter. Chateaubriand does have a somewhat antiquated notion of history – it is more a literary effort of describing certain series of actual events in an aesthetic fashion than a research into past events. His defense of Christianity as a source of good histories is rather halfhearted. Chateaubriand merely states that Christian historians have been as proficient as Pagan historians and points out in a familiar manner how the Christian nations have had interesting fates worthy of a historian.

Chateaubriand's plea for the worth of Christianity in case of science and philosophy is the least convincing. In this case, religion either seems like a detriment to the work of scientists and philosophers or then at best apparently contributes nothing to their progress. Chateaubriand relies on name dropping, mentioning all the famous mathematicians, scientists, philosophers etc. who were clearly at least religious in general or even Christian in particular. In case of philosophy, he is especially keen to point out that times of heightened Christianity were those with great philosophers. One is somewhat perplexed that Chateaubriand has then nothing to say about the philosophy of Middle Ages, since that was the time with most Christian and even Catholic philosophers, but is satisfied with such modern names as Leibniz and Clarke. The basic problem is, of course, that Chateaubriand is already evaluating the worth of a philosophic work with lenses of a Catholic Christian.

The most convincing part of the third book of the Genius of Christianity is then the one not mentioned in the title of the book. This part has as its topic what Chateaubriand calls harmonies. In practice, these include, on the one hand, harmonies between religious buildings and nature, and secondly, between religious feasts and human life. The first continues Chateaubriand's interest on architecture. Places of Christian worship are not just capable of connecting us to divinity, he says, but they also exist in harmony with the surrounding nature, and even when they are becoming ruins, they show the power of divinity over the nature. The second topic opens up the discussion to the fourth book, which covers the cult of Christianity. Together, they contains ingredients of most importance in Chateaubriand's book – it is the practice and personal experience that has the greatest ability to make people Christian. This is a topic that I shall deal in more detail in the next post.

François-René de Chateaubriand: Genius of Christianity – Christian poetry

In the second part of Genius of Christianity Chateaubriand begins the tactic that will have most repercussions in the history of ideas. Ironically, this inheritance has little to do with philosophy of religion and more with aesthetics, which is in line with the topic of the second part – poetry. While attempting to uphold Christianity, Chateaubriand influenced the romantic movement of literature.

Chateaubriand's tactic plays on many levels, but his main line of offence is simple – Christian poetry simply is better than pagan poetry. Of course, this strategy also fails on many levels. For instance, Chateaubriand fails to take into account all poetry that falls outside either Greek or Jewish influence – there's no mention of e.g. Indian or Chinese poetry.

Chateaubriand suggests, firstly, that Bible itself is somehow deeper and more beautiful poetry than anything produced by Greeks – for instance, Chateaubriand praises the simplicity of the beginning of Genesis story of creation, which with few phrases creates a fantastic image of a world coming into being. One might answer that Homer has his beautiful phrases as well, but the most telling objection to Chateaubriand's tactic is irrelevance – who cares if Bible is more beautiful than Iliad, if we want to know which is truer?

The worth of Chateaubriand's suggestion lies more in his general opinion that all Christian poetry is beautiful. Here he is emphasising especially the usefulness of Christianity – Christian religion has the characteristic of bringing forth more beauty in the world. This is, undoubtedly, more of a pragmatic justification of the practice of believing its tenets, but quite in line with the general stance of Chateaubriand's book.

One might really question the selection of poetic works Chateaubriand takes to be representative of Christian poetry. It is surprising that Dante's Divine Comedy is barely mentioned, while Milton's Paradise Lost is given ample attention. Equally mysterious from modern viewpoint seems the negligence of Shakespeare's literary work and the inclusion of so many French tragedies from authors barely remembered today.

A more interesting line of criticism lies in Chateaubriand's peculiar reason for upholding the greatness of Christian poetry. Chateaubriand appears to say that Christian poetry has a better mixture of characters and topics to use. For instance, Chateaubriand sets the Homeric heros against the knights of the chivalric poetry. While the former are merely self-serving barbarians, the latter fight for a greater cause, namely, the honour of God. Similarly, the Paradise is according to Chateaubriand a mythologically more moral place than Elysian Fields, since getting to former lies not so much in heroics, but in living a good life.

Chateaubriand's argumentation seems here equally shaky. Sure, one could say that Christian poetry deals with more moral topics and has morally better characters. Still, this is no guarantee that a work dealing with such moral matters would itself be aesthetically more worthwhile. We'll see if Chateaubriand's case is more convincing with other arts and literature.

Edmund Burke: A vindication of natural society (1756) and A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1757)

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) is probably best known for his work against French Revolution, but before that he also published these two interesting writings. First of these is, at least according to the editorial introduction, a satirical pastiche aimed against Lord Bolingbroke, leading deist of the time. Bolingbroke had argued that original Christianity had been defiled through centuries of convention by all sorts of mystical rituals, which were disastrous to believers and against reason, thus calling for a return to this supposed natural belief. Burke makes an analogical move and argues that by same token civilized societies are artificial and therefore a return to natural state is in order.

Vindication might be satirical, but Burke's argument can be taken quite seriously. The existence of polities and states has meant almost a constant continuation of territorial skirmishes, often leading to total warfare. If Hobbes had thought that commonwealths were founded as an antidote to constant battle, the medicine proved to be even more poisonous, Burke points out.

Even in times of peace, a commonwealth is not a pleasant place to live, Burke continues. If the power lies in the hand of a single individual, freedom of everyone else is subdued under a tyrannical power. The case is not mush better, if the power is given to a small group of aristocrats, because that just means there are more tyrants to subdue everyone. Even democracies are far from pleasant, because the people or rabble can be even more intolerant in its decisions than all tyrants together – besides, rabble usually just follows some demagogue and thus produced just a new tyranny.

These arguments are interesting, because they sound quite similar to what one might expect from, on the one hand, anarchist, on the other hand, libertarian thinkers – states are a form of oppression that artificially divide the world into hostile areas. Of course, one could be more of a Hobbesian and ask whether living in societies has some positive consequences, which would weigh more than the supposed loss of freedom. Another question is whether the supposed natural or original state of humans is not just another artificial construction, which just reflects the mores of our own times.

Second work I shall study is Burke's book on philosophical aesthetics. It was a success at least on the continent, and such German philosophers as Moses Mendehlsson and Immanuel Kant were inspired by his work. Burke's basic attempt in the book is to explain the difference between two aesthetic notions, sublime and beautiful. Of the two, beauty seems a more familiar concept, so I am going to begin with it, although Burke prefers the opposite order.

A common idea of beauty has been that it has something to do with harmony and is thus mathematical in nature, because harmony is defined by numerical proportions. Burke has a bit of fun with the idea, noting that our sense of beauty is immediate and not dependent on taking exact measurements of e.g. limbs of an animal. A related theory of beautiful has connected beauty with fitness or utility, which is often decidable by mathematical proportions (for instance, an animal with limbs quite out of proportion cannot live). But Burke will have none of this. True, we do find quite unhealthy specimens grotesque, but we do also meet often healthy animals and people that we do not think beautiful.

Instead, Burke characterizes beauty through the notion of love, which beautiful things make us feel. Here, love appears to be used not in any Platonic, but in quite sensuous sense. Indeed, when we hear Burke describing smoothness as one type of beauty and read him describing the lure of a beautiful roundness of female breasts, it becomes rather obvious that Burke's love is more like sexual or at least sensual titillation. Quite noteworthy is then that Burke's description of beautiful seem to come from the perspective of a heterosexual male: beautiful thing must be small and weak,just like beautiful women are supposed to be. We might then say that Burke's notion of beauty is quite conservative, but at least open about its bias.

What is remarkable is that Burke allows a variety of different aesthetic notions: in addition to beautiful, we also have sublime. Of course, the notion of sublime is not Burke's own invention, but goes back to Longinus and his work on the topic. Sublime, Burke notes, is not a species of beautiful, but more like it's opposite. While beauty is connected with love, sublimity is connected with fear – it is pleasure caused by great proportions and immeasurable quantities that overwhelm us. While fear itself is not a pleasant feeling, sublime objects can awaken a sort of second order feeling, in which we reflect on our primal sense of fear and discomfort and find pleasure, when we understand and win our fear.

The notion of sublime is interesting, because it widens the realm of aesthetic notions – thing doesn't have to be traditionally pretty to be aesthetically interesting. Indeed, we could raise the question, whether the two notions truly are all the the aesthetic feelings we are capable of. If our sense of beautiful is caused by sensual titillation and our sense of sublime is caused by fearsome awe, could objects and events causing feelings like nausea or boredom cause also similarly aesthetic emotions as happens in case of sublime objects

Burke has still plenty of interest to say about e.g. the aesthetic effect of words (Burke notes that, unlike many modern thinkers had thought, words need not constantly produce images or representations of things they mean, but they can directly cause feelings, for instance, because of constant use – if virtue has been spoken of in suitably solemn occasions, the mere word will rouse that same solemn feeling again). Still, I am going to leave Burke's aesthetic theories here and move on to another philosopher.