Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Douglas Moggach

cast into doubt, and the ideas of spontaneity and self-legislation come to

diverge and conﬂict.

The history of aesthetics provides a clear vantage point for observing the

movements of modern subjectivity. It illustrates attitudes of recognition,

resignation or afﬁrmation towards the culture of fragmentation, but also the

tendency to press beyond it, to seek harmony and reconciliation. Its images

of free self-determination and of particular self-assertion are intimately con-

nected, as the very pressures and tensions of modernity constantly reawaken

the desire for synthesis, and spawn new projects of reconciliation, even as

these again falter. The reﬂexive moment of which Hegel spoke may make

itself felt less in the institutions of modern ethical and political life than in

the persistent discontents of modern subjects with their fragmented world.

The elaboration of the images of harmony and conﬂict is the subject matter

of modern aesthetic thought.

1 Foundations of modern aesthetics

Contributing to the decisive shift to subjectivity that constitutes modern

aesthetics, G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) dissolves objective forms into the

power and motion that produce them, thus into the activity of subjects

(Leibniz 1993,pp.55–117). The movement from stable form to underlying

formative process will be essential in subsequent aesthetic thought, from

the romantics through Marx’s understanding of labour. It is foundational

for the discipline itself. Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62), widely regarded,

together with J. J. Winckelmann (1717–68), as an originator of modern

aesthetics, initially deﬁnes the subject (soul, or anima)asahypokeimenon,an

inert substrate bearing properties, according with the classical metaphysical

meaning; but, applying Leibniz’s conception of form and movement, he also

suggests a new understanding of the subject, as a formative power which

actualises a property, or has that property as its externalisation (Baumgarten

1739,pp.501, 527; Menke 1999,pp.596–7; Paetzold 1992,p.13). When

Hegel deﬁnes personality as an acquisition or an accomplishment, he is

pursuing the line initiated by Baumgarten.

The concept of reﬂection, in the sense of the subject’s relating to form

and distinguishing itself from it, is at the heart of aesthetic responses to

modernity. Are forms to be seen as externalisations or expressions of

subjects’ implicit selves, or do they raise more problematic questions of

alienation, discordance and dissatisfaction? Two positions, originally largely

complementary, though later opposed, were developed by J. G. Herder

484

Aesthetics and politics

(1744–1803) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86). Herder traces the elabo-

ration of objective form from the powers and capacities of subjects. Form is

the manifestation or expression of an implicit subjective content. Further,

his placing of sensuousness and rationality not merely in correspondence,

but in a genetic relationship with the more complex unities of the spiritual

realm emerging from simpler, natural antecedents,

anticipates Schelling

and H

olderlin in their quest for the original unity of thought and being

(Herder 1878,pp.3–43, 1892). In Mendelssohn, reﬂection attends to the

self-aware enjoyment of subjective energies, as distinct from their realisation

in outward forms (Menke 1999,p.601; Paetzold 1992,p.13). This con-

scious separation of subject and object marks the properly aesthetic attitude

(Menke 1999,p.603). The distinction between Mendelssohn and Herder

evolves into an alternative that will be decisive for later romantic thought:

reﬂection as locating a creative force detached from the object, the stance

of irony; or reﬂection as working subjective forces into determinate form,

the stance of expressivism.

The aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) refers aesthetic

judgement neither to an empirical community of taste, as in Shaftesbury

(1671–1713) or David Hume (1711–76), nor to a transcendent Platonic idea,

but to a common-sense or intersubjective assessment. This reference of an

objective form back to its subjective source, echoing Leibniz, is the inverse

to Herder’s process of outward reﬂection; it refers the self-aware subject

not only to its own interiority, as in Mendelssohn, but to the possibility

of shared judgement with others, and to the universal moral idea.

For

Kant (1987), the autonomy of the aesthetic means that it derives its content

from no pre-given norms or interests, but this autonomy is only relative,

since beauty serves as a symbol of morality. Unlike the Platonic doctrine of

the Symposium, beauty does not disclose a metaphysical structure of nature,

but conﬁrms the (inter)subjective presence of practical reason (R

usen 1976,

p. 37;Th

erien 1997,p.759). The beautiful bridges the gulf between nature

and freedom; it is a symbol of ethical life, preﬁguring the end of history

where sensuousness stands under the command of practical reason (Pluhar

1987, pp. lxxxvi–cix).

8 Menke 1999 distinguishes Herder’s and Mendelssohn’s concepts of reﬂection, but sees these less as

possible alternatives to each other than to what he calls the metaphysical subject model attributed

to Hegel and Heidegger (p. 595). He proposes that reﬂexivity and not subjectivity is the more

basic category of aesthetics, but concedes that reﬂection refers to spontaneous activity by a subject

(p. 609).

9 The introduction of intersubjectivity thus offers a further development of the concept of reﬂection.

485

Douglas Moggach

Kant claims that the Critique of Judgement completes his systematic enter-

prise, linking the supersensible with the sensuous, the noumenal with the

phenomenal order. In the judgement of his successors from Schiller onwards,

Kant’s own solution fails. The problem can be traced through various under-

standings of reﬂection, and of subjective spontaneity, in relation to objective

forms, and to autonomy, or rational self-legislation (Pippin 1991,pp.153,

180 n.7). The idea of spontaneity is central to Kant’s account of the free-

dom of the will.

In manifesting Willk

ur or freedom of choice (Kant 1991a,

preface), the will acts spontaneously as its own cause: it admits the rule or

maxim which is to govern its action, independently of any external causes

which might determine it without its own compliance. But for Kant, the

spontaneity of willing must be regulated by autonomous self-legislation and

adherence to universal moral criteria valid for all rational subjects. This

higher determination Kant calls Wille, the moral will. The ends of moral

action require rational sanction unrelated to private interest or appetite;

though Kant distinguishes from this more exigent standard the realm of

right, which deals with the coexistence of freedoms in their external aspect,

independently of motivations (Kant 1991a, pp. 68–90). In actions that count

as autonomous, the spontaneity or freedom of the will comes under the

command of practical reason. Such actions are guided by maxims which

can be willed universally without contradiction. These maxims are derived

neither from motives of sensibility or interest, nor from the supposition of a

teleological order of nature, but from subjectivity itself, pure practical rea-

son (Kant 2002,pp.98–100). After Kant, two divergent lines can be traced,

the one tending to dissociate spontaneity from autonomy, the other to

develop ideas of spontaneity and autonomy into more concrete forms. This

distinction roughly corresponds to that between the early romantics, and

the school of German idealism from Schiller to Hegel and beyond. A sec-

ond differentiation appears in the concept of reﬂection, as the spontaneous

revelation or withdrawal of the subject in relation to objective forms.

2 Aesthetics and revolution

Traditionally, the neo-classical style of the eighteenth century has been

interpreted as a formal system of rules, against which the romantics, notably

in England, react by stressing, and eventually overstressing, the value of

10 Kant 1997,B75/A51, deﬁnes spontaneity as the mind’s power of producing representations out of

itself.

486

Aesthetics and politics

subjective feeling (Bate 1949,pp.166–72); but the critical character of

classicism in respect to pre-revolutionary society should also be recognised

(Butler 1981,pp.18–22). Denis Diderot ( 1713–84), for example, celebrates

the classical ideals of gravity and simplicity against the degrading luxury

of the present (Becq 1984, ii,pp.534–7). J. J. Winckelmann seeks to restore

the spare beauties of classical art by recovering its animating spirit for the

present. Everything accidental or extraneous in art, such as baroque osten-

tation, is to be eliminated, so that the permanent (Platonic) idea shines

forth (Butler 1981,p.19; Raulet 1992,p.151; Winckelmann 1755, 1764).

Balance and control are the essence of an Apollonian classicism (in contrast

to Nietzsche’s proclivity for the disruptive Dionysian, in his refurbished

nineteenth-century version: Desmond 1988,p.120), but the role of the

creative subject is not yet highlighted. The principal difference between

classicism and romanticism is not in their critical bearing, but in their

understanding of the subject.

As the Enlightenment view of the modern subject increasingly perme-

ates all ﬁelds of culture, it shatters the neo-classical restraints which are

themselves an aspect of Enlightenment thought. An aesthetic revolution is

launched, giving rise to the varieties of romanticism and to new forms of

idealism. This revolution in culture is open to many political applications.

The problem of binding spontaneity under self-imposed law is one that spans

European culture, even where Kant’s inﬂuence is not directly felt. It is an

epochal problem that Kant poses with great insight and clarity, reﬂecting on

the achievements of his age. Prior to Kant, Rousseau (1712–78), frequently

viewed as an early romantic, seeks the solution to modern decadence and

oppression in rediscover ing and reactivating an uncorrupted subjective core,

endowed with compassion and healthy self-love, which can furnish princi-

ples for consensus and a new social union. English romantics like William

Wo rdswo r t h ( 1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)begin

from a similar perspective, but their reﬂections on the course of the French

Revolution lead many of them to politically conservative and quietistic

conclusions. Arising from Enlightenment critique, the new thinking about

subjectivity and its relations to nature receives a par ticular inﬂection under

the impact of the French Revolution. In a development paralleling the

evolution of Richard Wagner half a century later, Wordsworth moves from

political optimism, and endorsement of revolution, to the idea that political

solutions are too superﬁcial to address the problem of modern subjec-

tivity. In Wordsworth’s case, this conclusion results from radicalising the

principle of subjectivity itself. Attributing poverty to the feudal monopoly

487

Douglas Moggach

of property and power, the ‘forced disproportion of . . . possession’ (cited

in Izenberg 1998,p.127), he initially supported efforts to overthrow this

regime. He collaborated with William Godwin, whose doctrine of political

justice appealed to benevolent propensities locked in the individual con-

science, but as Wordsworth worked out his own version of radical freedom,

it came to resemble an absolute capriciousness, a purely self-regarding spon-

taneity unchecked by any law or rational restraint (Izenberg 1998,p.122;

Wo rdswo r t h 1979,p.821). In this respect, it is much like the anarchistic

egoism later defended by Max Stirner (Stirner 1845). For Wordsworth,

however, such an attitude was unsustainable. He detected it in Jacobin pol-

itics, and was repelled by its effects. As a partial corrective to the hubris of

the modern subject, Wordsworth’s later work advocates recognition of sub-

lime, inﬁnite nature (Wordsworth 1992). Like his contemporary German

romantic A. W. Schlegel (1808;seeBecq1984, ii,p.826), Wordsworth sees

the mind as marked by a duality: a dependency on the absolute creative

power of nature, understood not classically, as a ﬁxed order, but dynam-

ically, as the source of inﬁnite potentiality; and a self-relation by which

the individual consciousness emerges and creates forms for itself (Izenberg

1998,p.125). In a romantic reworking of the classical themes of restraint

and ﬁxed place, Wordsworth proposes that acknowledging the inﬁnity of

nature allows subjects to limit their claims of freedom, and to see their own

activity in a more modest light (Bate 1991; Izenberg 1992). The movement

from fragmented and disordered modern culture to unity is to be achieved

not, as Hegel thought, through rational political institutions, but by a com-

mon state of natural dependency. While (as in Schopenhauer) it is proper

to alleviate suffering where possible (Izenberg 1998,p.129), the problem of

subjectivity is intractable to political remedies.

Other romanticisms reafﬁrm traditional religion as the means of securing

unity and harmony. In the wake of Enlightenment critiques of orthodoxy,

new kinds of justiﬁcation must be found. In Le G

enie du Christianisme,

Franc¸ois-Ren

edeChateaubriand(1768–1848) stresses not the truth, but the

beauty of Christianity, a religion which best promotes the arts and improves

the lot of humanity. The work was published in 1802,intheclimateofthe

Concordat between Napoleonic France and the papacy. Chateaubriand had

contested the historical basis of Christianity in an earlier publication, Essai

sur les R

evolutions (1797), where he argued for the derivation of fundamen-

tal Christian dogmas from Platonic and other ancient sources, and attacked

the despotic rule of the clergy (Chateaubriand 1978a, pp. 404–27). He

speculated, too, on a coming end to Christianity, in either univer sal

488

Aesthetics and politics

enlightenment or barbarism (Chateaubriand 1978a, pp. 428–31).

His

recantation after 1799, when he began composing Le G

enie in English

exile, involved a renewed aesthetic appreciation of Christian doctrine and

ceremonies, and of its vision of world order, rather than an assertion of

literal truth. Christian art occupies a higher standpoint than classical, pagan

art, because of its more profound grasp of the relation of ﬁnite and inﬁnite

(though the distinction is nuanced: the Greeks practised a nature religion,

but their art and philosophy appealed, at their best, to the spirit, not the

senses: Becq 1984, ii,pp.821–2). The deeper Christian understanding of

spirituality ﬁnds expression in works of architecture, painting and litera-

ture of unparalleled richness, from Gothic cathedrals and medieval religious

depictions, to the writings of Pascal and F

enelon. Christianity thus offers

an aesthetic education whose effects are to promote civilisation and to

tame savage passions, including those unleashed by the recent revolutionary

tumults in France. The Church had originally salvaged culture from the

ruins of the Roman Empire, and was still a beacon of hope in the mod-

ern world (Chateaubriand 1978b). Chateaubriand attempts to appease the

new, post-Enlightenment subjectivity by demonstrating that the traditional

religious order is in accord with its aesthetic aspirations.

3 Spontaneity and autonomy: Schiller and H

olderlin

In his lectures on the histor y of philosophy, Hegel connects the devel-

opment of post-Kantian thought in Germany with the dynamics of the

French Revolution (Hegel 1971,p.314). The young Engels would echo

this idea, accentuating, however, the pallor of this reﬂected movement. In an

unfavourable comparison of Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) with Goethe, he

credits the latter with a keener insight into German political backwardness

and incompetence, even though Goethe himself was unable to overcome

these limits in his own work. Engels accuses Schiller, in contrast, of lacking

Goethe’s hard realism. Schiller, he claims, seeks ﬂight into the abstractions of

Kantian idealism, retreating into an illusory inner freedom that leaves intact

the structures of political and economic oppression. Schiller thus becomes

a spokesman of the German ideology in its pejorative sense. Engels depicts

Schiller’s idea of aesthetic education as an apolitical utopianism, masking the

11 The full title is Essai Historique, Politique et Moral sur les R

evolutions Anciennes et Modernes, Consider

ees

dans leurs Rapports avec la R

evolution Franc¸aise. Despite his radically changed viewpoint after 1799,

Chateaubriand reprinted the work in 1826. His formulation of possible futures anticipates early

twentieth-century ideas of ‘socialisme ou barbarie’.

489

Douglas Moggach

‘prosaic wretchedness’ of material conditions in Germany with a pretentious

and vacuous intellectual wretchedness (Engels 1972a, p. 232).

More recently, the idea of an aesthetic revolution, in which Schiller,

the early romantics and the post-Kantian idealists are participants, has been

applied to the German case. Here this intellectual movement appears not as

a surrogate, or a consolation, for failed political action, but as a complement

and guide to political transformation. The early German romantics and

idealists share with Schiller an ambitious cultural programme in which

religion, science and social life, as well as politics, would be profoundly

reformed (Jaeschke 1990,p.2). The political and philosophical trajectories

soon deviate, and after 1799 many among the romantics come to uphold

orthodoxy in church and state. Schiller did not take this conservative turn.

Despite his disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution, his

aim was not to repudiate politics in favour of individualistic self-cultivation,

but to advocate ‘a better society of interrelated human beings’ (Wilkinson

and Willoughby 1967, pp. lxxxii–lxxxiii), in which aesthetic education was

a necessary but insufﬁcient condition for promoting a more comprehensive

ethical life.

Schiller broadens Kant’s account of autonomy, and recasts spontaneity as

self-formation. He proposes a system of aesthetic education in which spon-

taneity trains and elevates itself to a moral standpoint, where the demands

of duty and of sensibility are no longer in conﬂict. Autonomy does not refer

only to an internal condition: it is not conﬁned to the determination of

maxims for action, but sets the subject in an institutional matrix, in which

freedom, intuited as real, permeates social and political relations (Pippin

1991,p.180 n.13). Schiller thus anticipates Hegel’s critique of Kant, and his

elaboration of modern ethical life.

The basic problem for Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man, written in

1794–5, contemporaneously with the publication of Fichte’s ﬁrst Wis-

senschaftslehre, is to discover connections without eliminating differences

(Wilkinson and Willoughby 1967, p. lxxxviii). Schiller envisages a new

kind of politics compatible with modern individuality and its differentiated

forms. How is it possible to secure harmony without producing uniformity,

and without suppressing spontaneity? Aesthetics provides the outlines of a

solution to the growing diversity of interests in modern political and social

12 Cf. Luk

acs 1954,pp.11–96, but, for a contrary view, Popitz 1953 and Marcuse 1955. On Schiller,

Goethe and romanticism, see Sharpe 1995,pp.52–3. The following discussion of Schiller incorporates

material from Moggach 2007, with kind permission of the publisher.

490

Aesthetics and politics

life. In unifying the manifold forms of individuality, a universal interest is

not to be authoritatively imposed, as the French Revolution attempted in

vain, but must evolve in a spontaneous movement, whereby the particulars

make themselves ﬁt to represent a general will. They reshape themselves

aesthetically in light of their under standing of a common good. As Schiller

puts it: ‘A political constitution will still be very imperfect if it can bring

about unity only by the suppression [Aufhebung] of multiplicity’ (Schiller

1967, Letter IV. 3).

Further, he afﬁrms, ‘The state ought not to honour

only the objective and generic, but also the subjective and speciﬁc char-

acter of the individuals’ (Schiller 1967, Letter IV. 3)

who are its citizens.

This inability to accommodate diversity is one of the failures of the French

Revolution, in Schiller’s assessment. He acknowledges difference, and seeks

to balance diversity with commonality of purpose. According to his polit-

ical ideal, ‘the triumphant form rests just as far from uniformity as from

confusion’ (Schiller 1967, Letter IV. 7).

Aesthetic education is part of the

process which reconciles the particular and the universal both within sub-

jects and in their interrelationships.

Schiller is particularly attentive to the conditions of modern subjectivity

and freedom in which the problem of difference is posed. The harmony

of particular and universal interests can no longer simply be presupposed,

but must be created. How it is created is the decisive point. The whole-

ness and harmony of the Greeks represents a beautiful, given unity, largely

undifferentiated in interest and function, and thus is no longer an attain-

able modern ideal. In present conditions, the attempt to restore this unity

directly is repressive, as in the efforts to establish the uniformity and identity

of citizens in the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries viewed

diversity as an illegitimate differentiation in rights, privileges and juridical

status among estates. Diversity was thus a bulwark of the old order and of

despotic rule (Maza 2002,p.122), to be effaced before the common identity

of citizens endowed with equal rights.

Schiller resists the logic of imposition or standardisation, but he also

distinguishes the inequalities of the ancien r

egime from the emergent special-

isations of modern civil society. The problem of differential rights and of the

arrogance of power provides the themes for Schiller’s dramatic works, such

as Die R

auber (1781), Don Carlos (1787)andWilhelm Tell (1804). His theoret-

ical writings stress the newer forms of social distinction. Schiller presents the

problem of specialisation as a result of the growth of scientiﬁc knowledge,

13 My translation, DM. 14 My translation, DM. 15 My translation, DM.

491

Douglas Moggach

and of new political and administrative arrangements, but his illustrations

evoke the new technical division of labour (Schiller 1967, Letter VI. 8).

Like Adam Smith, Schiller judges the modern specialisation of labour to

be historically necessary, but detrimental to the individual producer, whose

activity and perspectives on self, society and the world are truncated and

deformed. ‘Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole,

man himself develops into nothing but a fragment’ (Schiller 1967, Letter

VI. 7). If such specialisation beneﬁts the species in promoting a quantitative

advance in knowledge, it is injurious to the mutilated individuals who enact

the process. The new diversity is highly problematic, disintegrating the per-

sonality and society, but it also contains elements of resolution, a reﬂexive

turn to community, understood aesthetically.

Distinguishing the na

ıve aesthetic style, which bespeaks the immediate

and transparent connections among ancient subjects, from the sentimen-

tal, expressive of the more problematic and reﬂexive modern self (Schiller

1984),

Schiller precedes Hegel in describing modernity as a culture of

oppositions. Applying new concepts of determinability, he views the per-

sonality as the site of abundant and varied potentialities. The division of

labour causes a reduction of this malleability, as individuals become tied

to one restrictive and repetitive function. Anticipating Marx’s critique of

alienated labour, Schiller contends that under modern conditions, individ-

uals face enormous obstacles in achieving a harmonious externalisation of

themselves in the forms of their activity. Instead of expressing the pleni-

tude of human capabilities, their actions become deformed and fragmentary

(Schiller 1967, Letter VI). Hence arises an imperative to redress this state of

alienation, to discover a kind of wholeness and integrity compatible with

the discriminations of modern life.

The political implications of this analysis lie in the critical ideal of an

aesthetic state of beautiful and harmonised life-conditions, and in the idea

of aesthetic education. Schiller thus distinguishes, on the one hand, the

modern, dynamic state of rights based upon individual self-assertion and

mutual exclusion. On the other, extending Fichte’s idea of reciprocity as

conjunctive (Pott 1980,pp.54, 66–70), Schiller describes a possible aesthetic

state as an ideal of collaborative action and mutual recognition (Schiller

1967, Letters XIV. 1 and XVI. 1). This state designates not a ﬁnal, utopian

16 The na

ıve and sentimental have also been read as members of a triad, in which the (tacit) central

term, designating the present, is the culture of diremption; the sentimental would then presage the

synthesis, in which reﬂection and harmony coexist (Sharpe 1995,p.113).

492

Aesthetics and politics

condition, but a process of constant renewal, with invigorating effects on

ethical life. It is order as produced, not given; but produced by free play, not

under duress. Stressing the importance of subjective assent and collaboration,

this idea also stands in opposition to the uniformity and identity of earlier

republican thought, permitting a more complex account of the general will.

According to Schiller’s aesthetic republicanism, ‘Man must learn to desire

more nobly, so that he may not need to will sublimely’ (Schiller 1967, Letter

XXIII. 8). It is not necessary to repress the particular identity, as sublime,

rigoristic versions of republicanism will demand (Moggach 2003,ch.7);

nor may it count as immediately valid, as in juridical accommodations

among existing particular interests (e.g. Kant’s population of intelligent

devils; Kant, 1991b, pp. 112–13). Instead, the particular self provides material

for aesthetic refashioning, a spontaneously generated self-transformation.

Aesthetic education elicits the idea of freedom in those who undertake it.

While art is independent from direct moral instruction, it acts like morality

in exemplifying freedom (Becq 1984, ii,p.848;Beiser2003,p.42). Schiller’s

position has been described not as art for art’s sake, but ‘art for life’s sake’

(Wilkinson and Willoughby 1967, p. clxxxi), enhancing individual and

collective existence. Through aesthetic education, the empirical individual

can correspond to the rational idea of Man, not because the ideal suppresses

the empirical self, but because individuals adapt and elevate themselves to the

stature of the idea (Schiller 1967, Letter IV. 2). The result is not uniformity,

but harmony (Schiller 1967, Letter XIII), not a one-sided subordination and

persistent internal division, but a mutual exchange and active reciprocity.

This unity-in-difference designates the aesthetic condition.

Schiller proposes two concepts of freedom, corresponding to the

Kantian beautiful and sublime. First, he sketches a beautiful concordance of

the faculties of mind (will, understanding and sensibility) within the individ-

ual personality, implying, further, harmony with external nature and with

other subjects. Aesthetic education is a process of self-formation, taming

disruptive passions and controlling them, not by repressive intellect, but by

cultivated taste, which can unobtrusively regulate social interactions. Sec-

ondly, he understands freedom as dignity, the sublime elevation of the self

above natural causality in the determination of ends. The compatibility of

these two conceptions, and Schiller’s success in integrating them, have been

disputed (Sharpe 1995,pp.47–8, 63–4), but his extensions and applications

of Kant were enormously inﬂuential. They depict aesthetic and political

self-determination and moral autonomy as the fulﬁlment of the idea of

spontaneity, not as its denial.

493