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.