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

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Douglas Moggach

by Schlegel and Novalis, marks the emptiness of a self-enclosed subjectivity.

It is a tendency that Hegel assesses as profoundly destructive of the bonds

of ethical life, in which alone the genuine aspirations of the modern self

can be satisﬁed. Though its own role is not negligible, it is not art, but

the rational state and the institutions of civil life, that fulﬁl this promise of

autonomy and transparency.

Among its most noted features, Hegel’s late system advances the con-

troversial thesis of the end of art (Henr ich 1974,pp.295–301; Hofstadter

1974,pp.271–85;Knox1980,pp.1–10; Kuhn 1974,pp.251–69;Winﬁeld

1993,pp.131–44). The Aesthetics derives modern art’s inability to illumi-

nate truth from the unrepresentability of the achievements of reason, in the

complex conﬁguration which they assume for the post-classical, ‘romantic’

subject (Hegel 1964,pp.30–1). As it emerges from the Christian matrix of

the unhappy consciousness, the free and inﬁnite modern personality poses

the issue of aesthetic representation with particular acuity. The increasingly

self-conscious and reﬂexive character of the modern subject is intractable

to artistic representation, without shattering the unity of the artwork and

overburdening it with subjective accretions; this necessary self-referentiality

is the deeper truth expressed (and distorted) by romantic irony. This com-

plexity affects not only the individual artwork, but also rules out, as insuf-

ﬁcient and unattainable, a purely aesthetic justiﬁcation of modernity, or

reconciliation of antagonistic interests within the culture of fragmentation

(Bubner, 1971,p.12; Klinger 1990,p.38;R

usen 1976,p.34). The solution

must be sought elsewhere, in the political relations of the rational modern

state, which realise concretely the demand for autonomy, and in philoso-

phy, where the Idea, the unity of thought and being, attains fully adequate

articulation. Art is not literally exhausted, and will continue to depict the

creative engagement of thought with material causes. But it can no longer

satisfy the highest drives of subjectivity to comprehend its relations with

the world or itself. The multifaceted character of the modern subject, in

its self-awareness and its diversiﬁed activities and relationships, exceeds the

compass of artistic depiction, in contrast to the immediate harmony of

individual and community which classical ar t could convey.

Hegel’s thesis of the end of art bears a strongly polemical character towards

contemporary romantic tendencies. First, because of the expansive partic-

ularity and conﬂicting interests of the modern world, art can no longer

demonstrate to the individual consciousness its own universality and mem-

bership in a community, as it could do in classical antiquity. To overlook

this crucial difference is to mistake the part for the whole, making art into

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an ideological instrument of particularistic interests disguised as universal.

Nor, secondly, can the reﬂexive return to unity be grasped as a restora-

tion of historically outmoded structures. Hegel’s claim about the end of

art is a rejection of the romantic attempt to revivify the medieval past and

to reconstitute modern art on the basis of traditional religious and political

conceptions (Gethmann-Siefert 1986a, pp. 69–72, 1986b, pp. xi–xiii, xxviii).

Some of Hegel’s students, notably Hotho, may have partly yielded to this

tendency, incorporating concessions to romanticism into their renditions

of Hegel (Gethmann-Siefert 1983,pp.229–62). Recent criticism tends to

stress the tension in Hegel’s aesthetics between its systematic character, or

its grounding in the system of absolute knowledge, and its openness to the

phenomenal dimension, to works of art in their particularity and historicity

(Gethmann-Siefert 1981,pp.182–7, 1984, 1991,pp.92–110, 1992). This

tension dissipates under Hotho’s editorial direction.

After Hegel’s death, the struggle for a uniﬁed, republican Germany

becomes intense. Under the leadership of Schelling, the late romantics

take up the defence of the Restoration order. Among their adversaries

was a loose afﬁliation of literary and intellectual ﬁgures known, by 1834,as

Young Germany, on the model of Mazzini’s Young Italy of 1831. Prominent

members of this g roup include Ludwig B

orne (1786–1837), Georg B

uchner

(1813–37), Georg Herwegh (1817–75) and Heinrich Heine (1797–1856).

They criticise the political and moral bankruptcy of the existing order, pro-

mote the republican constitution and the egalitarian ideals of the French

Revolution, and advocate the emancipation of women. Their realistic and

satirical literary style contrasts with the growing romantic preoccupation

with the abnormal and the fanciful, though a romanticism of the left is still

an important force (e.g. Fourier 1889). Resident in Paris after 1831, Heine

establishes close links with French socialist writers, and combines Hegelian

and Saint-Simonian elements in his own critiques of the Restoration state,

religion and culture.

A Young or Left Hegelian philosophical movement also emerges in the

late 1830s, with increasingly explicit, though distinct, political agendas.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) shares with the Young Germans the defence

of sensuousness against intellectual abstraction. In his work the link of

aesthetics and ethics remains strong. He contrasts aesthetic contemplation

with practical egoism, contending that subjects must limit their needs and

activities in order to live in harmony with the natural world, and not

in competition with others (Feuerbach 1957,p.113). Criticising Feuer-

bach’s passivity, the young Karl Marx (1818–83) interprets labour itself as

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an aesthetic act, vindicating productive action as expressive of freedom and

autonomy, and depicting alienated labour as subjection to heteronomous

control (Marx 1975; Marx and Engels 1976). By late 1843,Marxbegins

to envisage a socialist reorganisation of production to overcome the mod-

ern culture of fragmentation and opposition. His early thought adapts and

modiﬁes, through a Kantian perspective, ideas of self-realisation through

diversiﬁed activity, and the aesthetic transformation of work, which had

been developed by the French romantic socialist Charles Fourier (1772–

1837: see Fourier 1889;Rihs1978).

Among the Left Hegelians, Arnold Ruge (1802–80) and Bruno Bauer

(1809–82) are most closely associated with activist aesthetic approaches to

freedom and republicanism. They follow Kant in linking spontaneity with

self-legislation, and understand autonomy as the rationalisation of political

relations. Objective forms are to correspond to the concept of freedom; this

process involves not simply the expression of a given subjective content,

but self-transformation, since subjects’ particular interests, if they conﬂict

with the general interest, are a potential source of heteronomy. Like Heine

and the Young German authors, Ruge opposes romanticism on political

grounds, seeing it as a conservative rejection of modernity and equality.

The nostalgia for the past in writers like Novalis attests a desire to undo the

liberating work of the French Revolution, and to regress to the hierarchical

social forms of the ancien r

egime. Ruge underlines the contrast between

the romantics and Schiller, whose work heralds personal emancipation, and

advocates social harmony resting not on suppression, but on free mutual

recognition (Bubner 1971,p.10).

In his more systematic approach to aesthetics and art forms, Ruge (fol-

lowing a suggestion in Schiller) takes the comic to typify the emancipatory

attitude of the modern, post-revolutionary subject. Unlike the ironic stance

assumed by the romantics, where subjects’ detachment from the ends of

their activity conﬁnes them to an impotent interiority and thus shores up

the old order, Ruge sees in comedy a subversive challenge to subordination

and inequality. The comic conveys a sense of liberation from existing rela-

tions by showing that these are contemptibly beneath the standards of critical

rationality. It reveals the disparity between the concept of freedom and the

current forms of political rule, and exposes to ridicule the pretensions of

the dominant elites, as the Young Germans had done to devastating effect.

It also looks to the future, anticipating reconciliation and harmony among

liberated and self-conscious subjects, constructing their world according

to their deepening insight into the meaning of freedom (Bubner 1971,

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Aesthetics and politics

p. 10;Ruge1837). These views are attested throughout Ruge’s corpus. His

interest in aesthetics dates to his ﬁrst publication (Ruge 1832).

The use of comedy and satire to undermine political and religious ortho-

doxy is also one of Bruno Bauer’s preferred techniques. In two anonymous

texts (Bauer 1841, 1842a), he adopts the guise of a pietist critic of Hegel

in order to stress the revolutionary consequences of his system. The comic

form in no way detracts from the philosophical seriousness of these works.

Bauer’s doctrine of universal self-consciousness is deeply aesthetic in inspi-

ration, based on an idea of formative activity in which, subjectively, the

beautiful unity of the self is achieved through the transcendence of partic-

ular interest, and objectively, sublime and unrelenting struggle is waged to

make the outer order accord with the demands of conscious freedom. He

opposes the weight of substantiality, or of unreﬂective historical traditions,

to the form-giving and critical power of the self, as the agency of cultural

and political transformation. Objectivity can be read as the record of human

strivings for emancipation; the substantial represents a teleological order of

freedom, in which each new stage builds upon and corrects the deﬁciencies

of the preceding.

In contrast to his own position, Bauer criticises the passive ‘beautiful soul’

of Schleiermacher for its appeal to the immediacy and particularity of the

subject, powerless in face of the ineffable absolute. Though Schleierma-

cher’s position is far more subtle and complex, Bauer’s attitude is reﬂective

of Hegel’s own polemics against pietism in the Preface to the second (1827)

edition of the Encyclopaedia (Hegel 1989,pp.5–18) and in his correspon-

dence (Hegel 1961,p.202). Pietism renounces reason as an instrument

of liberation. It thus contributes to freezing the historical movement, and

imprisoning creative spirit in its own alienated works. These consequences

ensue because the universal power of shaping reality has been displaced

into an alien realm beyond self-consciousness. The rigid particularity of

subjects, and the transcendent absolutism of religious cults and of political

power, sustain each other and support a mundane order of irrationality and

domination.

Bauer reverses the theoretical priority of religion to art within Hegelian

absolute spirit. In religion, self-consciousness is alienated and appears to

be passive, receiving law and revelation from outside itself. Thought here

succumbs to a dialectical illusion: it deceives itself about its own activities,

attributing them to a transcendent source. Art, in contrast, displays the

activity of thought, though conﬁning it in a material element. In afﬁrm-

ing productive freedom, art demonstrates its close kinship to philosophy.

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While its materiality leaves the artwork partly opaque to reason, art is also

emblematic of the formative power of thought, its ability to reshape objec-

tive existence. In an article on Beethoven (Bauer 1842b), Bauer stresses the

common aim of art and philosophy, the awakening of the powers of spirit to

untrammelled extension. Art, especially music, expresses the intuition and

the aspiration of freedom, not only making accessible the content of philos-

ophy, but arousing practical reason and action more compellingly than can

theoretical speculation alone (cf. Burnham 1995). This formulation recalls

Schelling’s ideas of 1800, where art overcomes the one-sided conceptuality

of philosophy. In his unpublished Jena manuscripts, Hegel, like Schiller,

had contrasted the musical-restless sublime and the plastic-restful beautiful

(Lypp 1990,p.105). For Bauer, too, music is sublime, symbolising his theory

of self-consciousness and its hold on material existence. The autonomy of

the aesthetic is only partial, however, as it maintains close ties to practical

reason, historical perfectionism and political and cultural change.

6 The denial of autonomy and aesthetic redemption:

Schopenhauer and Wagner

As processes of social change accelerate with the onset of industrialism and

its attendant problems of poverty, displacement and resistance, the culture of

diremption can also give rise to despair at the prospects of reconciliation and

community. A profound disillusionment with the achievements of moder-

nity, and with the project of political emancipation, takes hold in aesthetic

thinking, especially after the failed revolutions of 1848. Though he published

his major work in 1819, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) anticipates this

mood. To demonstrate not the autonomy but the thraldom of the individual

will, Schopenhauer effects a singular combination of Kantian and Platonic

conceptions, establishing what has been called the metaphysics of pessimism

(Knox 1958,p.129). In this vision, subjects are heteronomously determined

by a transcendent force that impels them constantly onward in meaningless

striving. The solution lies in escape from desiring, a negation of subjectivity

partly achieved through aesthetic insight into the ultimate constituents of

reality (Janaway 1997,p.246;Pinkard2002,pp.333–45). This escape also

secures a release from the mechanistic causality of Newtonian natural sci-

ence, as well as from the insatiable self. Schopenhauer sees the phenomenal

world as entirely governed by the principle of sufﬁcient reason, the causal

laws whereby objects are constituted and known as distinct, and situated in

space and time (Janaway 1997,p.246;Knox1958,p.127; Schopenhauer

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Aesthetics and politics

1818, Book i). This outer world is grasped through concepts, which are

not pure in Kant’s sense, but related to empirical needs and desires, making

possible the manipulation of objects, and directing them towards the evanes-

cent satisfaction of subjective urges. Underlying this sphere is the noumenal

world of the thing-in-itself. For Schopenhauer, this hidden essence is an

irrational power, which he designates as the Will. This is not a personal will,

even of a divine subject, but a blind and endless conatus or striving, acting as

an anonymous force, without ﬁnality (Schopenhauer 1818, Book iv;Taylor

1989,p.442). The Will manifests itself in the phenomenal world in subjects’

own ravenous appetites. It establishes itself very differently in the noumenal

realm, taking the shape of permanent Ideas concealed behind the veil of suf-

ﬁcient reason (Desmond 1988,pp.101–22; Schopenhauer 1818, Book iii),

but accessible in art. These Ideas are not forms of subjective action, or of a

supreme principle of the good, but are objectiﬁcations or patterns assumed

by the voracious Will itself. They stand in a hierarchical relation depending

on the quality and clarity of their manifestation of the ultimate principle

(Knox 1958,p.128).

Schopenhauer repudiates Kant’s appeal to pure practical reason, the capac-

ity for rational self-legislation and autonomy. The empirical practical reason

of the Enlightenment had recognised happiness or the fulﬁlment of need

as a criterion of social progress, but Schopenhauer opts for abnegation and

the elimination of desire. The aesthetic contributes to this end, releasing

the practitioner of its disciplines from the grip of the phenomenal world

and its delusory attractions, and from the ego itself. Aesthetics offers a kind

of disinterestedness, removed from the avidity of want; this is an echo of

Kant’s argument about pure aesthetic judgements. In Schopenhauer, art

refers beyond the phenomenal, to the deeper levels of the Will’s manifes-

tation in the permanent Ideas (Janaway 1997,pp.243–4, 322; Schopen-

hauer 1818, Book iii). Why this more intimate acquaintance with the

Will should be construed as a liberation from it is one of the enduring

mysteries of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. One solution is to maintain that

seeing the world as a whole, and denying individuality, together make pos-

sible a kind of limited philanthropic attitude towards suffering, as one’s

own pain becomes indistinguishable from that of any other being (Jan-

away 1997,pp.322, 326–7). It remains unclear why Ideas as crystallisations

of the Will should have any special status in this emancipation from the

self.

For Schopenhauer, the artist as genius is endowed with a surplus of

representations that bursts the narrow bounds of conventional, pragmatic

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concepts,

and thus embodies Mendelssohn’s conception of the sublime

as the overstepping of limits, analogous to Baumgarten’s extensive clarity

or multiplicity of meanings (Best 1974,pp.173–97, 207–46; Paetzold 1992,

pp. 10, 21). The genius also possesses a penetrating vision into the essence of

Will and the Ideas, casting aside the principle of sufﬁcient reason. Among the

art forms, music occupies the highest place, as it best reveals the overﬂowing

energies of the Will. Tragedy becomes sublime when the destr uction of

the protagonists derives from no fault of their own, when their undoing

appears not as the consequence of their subjective action, but as the work

of an inexorable power (Janaway 1997,p.295). If among the Left Hegelians

the experience of sublimity elicits a greater exertion to establish the reality

of freedom, in Schopenhauer it ser ves to devalue subjective action and to

illustrate its utter futility.

The work of Richard Wagner (1813–83) manifests complex and contra-

dictory philosophical inﬂuences illustrative of both these tendencies. His

early operas (Das Liebesverbot 1836, Der ﬂiegende Holl

ander 1843, Tannh

auser

1845, Lohengrin 1850) depict themes derived from Young Germany, and

from materialist currents in Left Hegelianism, notably from Feuerbach: love

as the essential social bond, self-realisation through the rehabilitation of the

physical and the sensuous, and the opposition between individual spontane-

ity and social repression. After participating in the unsuccessful revolution

in Dresden in 1848–9, together with the Left Hegelian and future anarchist

Michael Bakunin (1814–76), Wagner narrowly escaped to Zurich. There

he published The Art Work of the Future (1849), its title echoing Feuerbach’s

Philosophy of the Future of 1843. Wagner restates the romantic programme

of a new mythology for the modern world, and outlines the requirements

for a uniﬁed work of art, combining poetry and music, on the model of

Greek drama (Magee 2000,pp.89, 177; Wagner 1993, 1994). The har-

mony of Greek life, and the corresponding integration of its art forms, had

been broken by fragmented modern culture, and by the dire inﬂuence of

Christianity. The other-worldliness of this relig ion had not been beneﬁ-

cial to art and culture (as Chateaubriand believed), but was disastrous and

repressive.

In an anonymous text attributed to Wagner, and published on the eve

of the decisive confrontations of 1849, the author defends the aesthetic

revolution as establishing the right to free creation, and legitimating the

27 Knox 1958,p.140, observes that in releasing the artist from the principle of sufﬁcient reason,

Schopenhauer blurs the distinction between genius and madness.

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Aesthetics and politics

forcible overthrow of state and property relations. The impending insurrec-

tion announces its aims:

I will destroy from the ground up the order of things in which you live ...Iwilldestroy

all illusions that have control over man. I will destroy the rule of one man over others,

of the dead over the living, of matter over spirit; I will break the power of the mighty, of

the law and of property. Let his own will [Wille] be the master of man, his own pleasure

his only law, his own strength his whole property, for what is holy is only the free man, and

there is nothing higher than he ...

Let the illusion be shattered, that makes man subject to his own work, to property.

The highest good for man is his creative power. That is the source from which all

happiness springs. Not in the product,butinproducing itself, in the activation of your

powers, lies your true, highest satisfaction. (Wagner 1974,pp.114–16)

These ideas are given musical expression in Wagner’s operas. Describing

his four-part Ring des Niebelungen, whose libretti he wrote between 1848

and 1852, Wagner remained consistent with his revolutionary views. He

explained his intentions to evoke in the opera

an existence free from pain. But I meant in the presentation of the whole Nibelung

myth to [show] . . . how from the ﬁrst wrongdoing a whole world of injustice arose,

and subsequently fell to pieces, in order to teach us the lesson that we must recognise

injustice and tear it up by the roots, and raise in its stead a r ighteous world. (Cited in

Magee 2000,p.58)

The original injustice is the institution of power, property and contract,

which can only be maintained by constraint, and which opposes the sponta-

neous manifestation of love and freedom. This letter dates from 1856, when

Wagner had already undergone a radical change in perspective, a conversion

to the philosophy of Schopenhauer in autumn 1854 (Magee 2000,p.133).

Political emancipation could no longer address the fundamental issues of

human freedom and satisfaction, as the problem of alienation was ontolog-

ical, not historical. Wagner did not modify his original libretti, however, in

which, seemingly anticipating his later evolution, he shows that the new

order based on love cannot succeed either (Magee 2000,pp.135–6).

Tristan und Isolde (1859/1865)andParsifal (1882) are works that most

clearly reﬂect Schopenhauer’s inﬂuence, but still contain an admixture of

Wagner’s earlier views on the emancipation of the body. Their use of

medieval tales of the Grail and of Christian symbolism depicts the decep-

tiveness of earthly goods and desire, while maintaining the prospect of

28 My translation, DM; emphasis in original.

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redemption through physical love. After breaking with Wagner, his former

close friend, in 1876, Nietzsche will attack him for the sickly romanti-

cism of these works, distinguishing the Dionysian from the romantic as the

difference between overﬂowing and impoverished life (Nietzsche 1921a).

7 Decadence, classicism and alternative modernities:

from Baudelaire to Nietzsche

If it cannot be overcome in social and political life, the futility of existence

decried by Schopenhauer can, however, assume an aesthetically appealing

shape. Nor need one appeal to deeper realities, as Schopenhauer does. An

attention to surf ace phenomena, and a denial of underlying ideas or forces,

characterise the approach of Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) to aesthetics

and modernity. For him, the modern project is not yet complete. Art

remains too much under the sway of ethical and religious notions. Its own

proper subject matter is inconsistent with the classical unities (Klinger 1990,

p. 31); it needs to stress the ugly, the repellent and the disjointed in the

experiences of the modern subject. Appeals to universality and stability must

cede to contingency and alteration (Baudelaire 1964,pp.37–45, 291–300;

Pippin 1991,pp.32–3). The hope of aesthetic reconciliation fades before

an ideal of self-making (Pippin 1991,pp.174 n.25), a spontaneity without

limits, in which style or form becomes a punctiliousness about external

manner and appearance (Taylor 1989,pp.434–42). It is the expression of a

highly particularised self, aware of its distinctiveness and superiority. Such

an attitude stands in sharp contrast to eighteenth-century ideals of manners,

which involved the suppression of particularity, with the intent that all

polished individuals would behave in exactly the same way, as though they

were a single person (Henry Fielding, cited in Hundert 1998,p.332 n.82).

Revivals of classicism in the late nineteenth century offer distinct per-

spectives on the modern project of emancipation. Like Baudelaire, Walter

Pater (1839–94) advocates an art divorced from ethical application. He rep-

resents an attitude of cultivated aestheticism, intended to preserve a domain

of experience unsullied by mundane concerns (Thompson 1977,p.147).

Art is to be walled off against crass material interest, just as the personal-

ity is a wall conﬁning subjects within their private world of impressions.

Pater shares with eighteenth-century classicism an ascetic view of form as

unadorned and simple (Gagnier 2000,pp.54–6;Pater1974,pp.103–25,

190–8), while rejecting the idea of underlying universal forms that charac-

terised the thought of Winckelmann. For Pater and Baudelaire, modern art

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Aesthetics and politics

was still too traditional, because it was tied to ideas of universality originating

in an outmoded metaphysics. They develop instead a speciﬁc version of the

autonomy of art, or art for art’s sake. This autonomy had up till now been

only relative, meaning the emancipation of art from dominant political or

religious interests, or from the need to represent a given natural order or to

dispense directly moral instruction. Yet in Kant, Schiller, Hegel and others,

art had retained its links to morality in complex ways. Artistic autonomy

now means the separation of form from any function extraneous to itself,

whether moral, political or paedagogical (Wilkinson and Willoughby 1967,

pp. clxxvii–clxxxi).

Still in a classical register, but reacting against such views of the autonomy

of art, Matthew Arnold (1822–88) continues to stress its necessary connec-

tion with ethics and public service (Thompson 1977,p.144). He views

aesthetics or culture as self-regulation, promoting the cultivation of a higher

self by individuals and groups, in overt tension with narrow possessive indi-

vidualism (Gagnier 2000,pp.106–7). The elevation above immediate private

interest appears as the condition for social harmony in a society divided by

class. This idea is analogous to the earlier view of Joshua Reynolds that art

contributed to the creation of a public sphere, instituting a republic of taste,

and anticipating a politically active public that was still to be constructed

(Barrell 1986,pp.69–72). With Arnold, in the distinction between aris-

tocratic barbarians, bourgeois philistines and the populace, the awareness

of division goes much deeper than in the eighteenth-century sources, and

imparts a characteristic melancholy to Arnold’s reﬂections. Not the extrava-

gant cultural forms of the old regime, as in Winckelmann, but the miserable

realities of commercial relations, become the objects of critique in this new

classicism.

Avowing the social and political usefulness of an aesthetic approach,

Arnold contrasts classical Greek thinking with the more rigidly legalistic

approach that he traces to biblical sources, and to the Puritan tradition in

England. Modern culture comprises both of these currents, but in unequal

measure, and Arnold seeks to restore a balance by bringing to bear a healthy

Greek scepticism on the dogmatic pronouncements of the politicians of

the day. Narrow and partial perspectives on the disestablishment of the

Irish Church, the question of inheritance rights and other issues can be

challenged and rectiﬁed if the principles underlying them are allowed to

work themselves out in their concrete implications, revealing their real

animating interests. The plasticity of aesthetic thought is of greater value to

the community in determining political orientation than is the unbending

513