A Philosophy of Luxury

Lambert Wiesing, Nancy Ann Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429639715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this thought-provoking book Lambert Wiesing asks simply: What is luxury? Drawing on a fascinating range of examples, he argues that luxury is an aesthetic experience. Unlike experience gained via the senses, such as seeing, hearing or tasting, he argues that luxury is achieved by possessing something – an aspect of philosophy that has been largely neglected. As such, luxury becomes a gesture of individual defiance and a refusal to conform to social expectations of restraint. An increasingly rational and goal-oriented ethos in society makes the appeal of luxury grow even stronger.

Drawing on the ideas of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Martin Heidegger and the novelist Ernst Jünger, as well as sociologists such as Thorstein Veblen and Theodor Adorno, A Philosophy of Luxury will be of great interest to those in philosophy, art, cultural studies and literature as well as sociology.

PART I

Play, then war, anxiety and drugs—and now, luxury

1

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE IDEA OF SELF-EXPERIENCE

The idea of a substitution

Friedrich Schiller is not especially known for having engaged the philosophical problems or phenomena of luxury in-depth; nor does his literary work contain any description relevant to this topic. And yet it is exactly by returning to Schiller’s reflections that someone writing a phenomenology of luxury finds the supporting idea for a proper research perspective. This is the idea that in a philosophical anthropology, luxury would fulfill the systematic function Schiller assigned to play. This programmatic and, possibly, surprising idea could be restated as something like: Luxury instead of play. That is to say that the crucial things Schiller says about play, and in particular what he expects of play, apply to the phenomenon of luxury at least as well, if not better. This project of substitution or transformation does in fact rest on an interpretation of Schiller’s theory of play. Unlike the usual readings of the theory, however, this interpretation is not primarily concerned with what Schiller understood play to be, or to what extent his distinctly special concept of play may be brought to bear on normal phenomena of play—such as card games or football. Even his concept of playing as a coincidentia oppositorum of two basic human capacities—play is, for him, the mental state in which human beings’ double, sensual-rational nature is suspended—does not ultimately affect the transformation of Schiller’s thoughts under consideration here. This intended transformation rather raises questions about the reason Schiller came to speak about play at all: What further expectations and hopes did he associate with a theory of play? What systematic role is given to play in his anthropological argument?

This, in any case, is the thesis: In On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters of 1795—quite apart from what he says there about particular games—Schiller gives play an epistemic function within an anthropological argument. One can say he instrumentalizes play. Schiller has no interest at all in play for play’s sake; he is no ludologist. He comes to speak of play because of his interest in human beings; Schiller is an anthropologist. For Schiller, play is a phenomenon of presence; it is an exceptional experience through which it is possible for a human being to perceive and understand his existence as a human being. Among the qualities of the letters in On the Aesthetic Education of Man that have still not been appreciated, is that if they are interpreted from a contemporary perspective, they have the potential to answer a far more recent and firmly phenomenological question, one that Schiller would hardly have formulated in this way himself. With Schiller, the vague, impossibly broad goal of understanding people becomes a very specific, concrete, question, namely: How can a person describe what it is like to be a human being? Is there an aesthetic experience that can show a human being what makes him human? To say it with somewhat more feeling: Are there moments in life when a human being not only is a human being but also is aware that he is a human being? Can the phenomenal quality of one’s own existence be brought to or intensified in consciousness?

The whole human being

The deservedly most famous sentence in Schiller’s Letters goes: “man only plays when he is fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”¹ Here Schiller is using two equally noteworthy and significant formulations: “in the fullest sense of the word a human being” and “only fully a human being when.” If we consider these formulations in light of the classical goal of philosophical anthropology, we see Schiller setting his own course within the field of anthropology. At least in this sentence he is linking anthropology to a question that was new in his time. For the classical goal of anthropology is, and has always been, to answer the question, “What is a human being?” For the most part—although not exclusively of course—philosophical anthropology takes up questions such as: What specific capacities define human beings? or What characteristics set a human being apart from an animal? But when someone like Schiller, in his famous sentence, considers when a human being actually is completely human, or when, in a statement, is it explicitly pointed out that a human being is human in the full sense of the word, such considerations and statements can hardly be understood as answers to anthropology’s classical concerns. They give no definition that indicates what a human being actually is; they are not concerned with the difference between human being and animal. Schiller contends that play allows a human being to be completely human, which means, whatever the exact meaning of the concept of play in this context, in his argumentation it does not fulfill the function of naming the differentia specifica that separate human beings from other forms of life. Schiller does not defend the thesis of homo ludens, if this concept is understood—as it usually is—to designate the exceptional quality of human beings in comparison to other animals, roughly analogous to the characterization rational animal. Were Schiller to assert this thesis, he would have to say that a human being is the only life form to possess the capacity to play. But this is neither Schiller’s view, nor is it, prima facie, a convincing thesis, since many animals such as dogs and cats at least give the appearance of being able to play.

In short, because play, for Schiller, is not the specific quality that makes a life form human, but is taken instead to be a quality that makes a human being fully human, a skeptical question becomes almost inevitable: Are there half humans? How should we imagine a human being who is not complete, to whom the word human applies only partially—that is, someone who does not play? What perfection or completion does a human being in a state of play achieve?

The whole human being conceived as a balanced human being

A look at research in this area shows that for these questions a certain type of answer predominates. We can easily show it using Schiller’s text, but we would miss an important aspect of his argument. This type of answer can be identified by the use of concepts such as suspension, balance, transmission, reconciliation, relaxation, reciprocity, unification or even mutual completion. However these concepts are being put to use, the following model is always in the background: A human being requires two conflicting abilities, one of which will dominate in that person, almost completely in an unfortunate case. The two facilities are his sensuality and his reason. If sensuality succeeds in gaining power over the whole human being, we will have a beast to contend with, according to Schiller. In a case where reason alone dominates, the person becomes a barbarian, the rather odd term Schiller uses for a rigorously rational human being.

Ordinarily, the dualistic model of a human being determines the concept of the whole being as well. The principle of this concept goes: The whole human being is whole because he is not controlled by just one part. In fact, exactly because he can make two demands for control literally play out against one another, he is free of bias and so a free man. So, to be whole is, for Schiller, to be in harmonious peace with one’s divided nature. The key idea in this model is ultimately biological, if not actually medical: The whole human being is one who lives in a species-appropriate way by keeping his conflicting drives in balance.

The whole human being conceived as a human being with self-experience

In the “14th Letter,” at any rate, there is a further description of the whole human being that clearly goes beyond the balance model. There, Schiller links the state of play to more than just a peaceful suspension of antagonistic forces. He turns to the question of what such a person experiences, witnesses and feels when he finds himself in this balanced state of play. One could say that Schiller, with his training as a medical doctor, adds a decidedly phenomenological reflection in order to complete the external medical perspective that therapeutically determines how a person should best live in keeping with the complex structure of opposing drives. Schiller does not explain this in detail, but rather sketches a project that attempts to describe, in first-person singular, what someone living an ideal life from a medical perspective would himself experience and feel in the healthy state of free play. This project can also be formulated in Edmund Husserl’s sense: What is it like for someone to live in a balanced way in Schiller’s sense? This concerns the subjective quality of experience, the phenomenal, experiential character of being-a-whole-person. At this point the questions on which the text is based changes accordingly: How does a player experience being a player? What phenomenal content does this mental state have for the player himself? What does a person in this state feel and sense? Thomas Nagel would ask: What is it like to be a player? Accordingly, the concern is: How does it feel to live in a species-appropriate way?

What is worth noting, however, is that Schiller does not answer these questions as one might expect, namely with such a sentence as: in a state of play, the player is aware of being a player. Nor does Schiller say, even having emphasized it, that in play a human being becomes phenomenally aware of the balance of his double nature. It should be noted, however, that this does not mean he would reject it. Schiller, too, takes the position that a player knows what it is like to be a player. It’s just that he does not put any particular emphasis on the statement, first, because it is trivial, and second, because it would deflect him from his real thesis, which says that in a state of play, a human being knows what it is like to be a human being; he gets a kind of intuition in himself about what matters to human existence. That is clearly a far-reaching thesis, bringing aesthetic and anthropological intentions together.

Schiller’s argument depends on making two different phenomenal contents equal: Anyone who knows what it is like to be a player will, as a result, know what it is like to be a human being—although the two are not the same at all. For the concepts, player and human being have neither the same sense nor the same meaning. So Schiller is, finally, making unlike things the same. For him, the mental state of playing, seen from the subjective perspective of the player, involves becoming aware of more than just the state of play. And this being-more-than is only thinkable because the state of playing, as such, has a symbolic quality for Schiller, through which more can be experienced and observed than just the state of playing itself.

With this, Schiller has given a second answer to the question of what a whole human being is: A whole human being is not whole only because he has organized his drives in a medically unobjectionable way, but because in bringing his conflicting interests into harmony, he has entered into an exceptional mental state in which he himself feels that he is a human being—that is, in which his specific mode of existence as a living being becomes apparent to him.

The effect of playing: an experience of self

The difference at hand can be described using the two concepts, cause and effect: The cause for someone finding himself in a particularly healthy state is that the conflicting double nature of human beings has been suspended. This is, in turn, bound up with the effect, which is that this human being experiences his being as human. So the concept of the whole human being refers to not only the unity of two drives, but also to a unity of being and perceiving, or more concretely, of being human and perceiving oneself as human, of biological being and experienced being. The crucial point is this: Being human in the first sense, namely in the biological one, applies to Schiller as well as to barbarians and savages. But in fact these others are not whole human beings for him because it is not given to them to know what it is like to be human. In Schiller’s view, then, they are not human in the full sense of the word.

The extraordinary step in the argument—we might more accurately call it the second part of Schiller’s two-part step—can be seen more clearly in comparison with Aristotle. For the first step in Schiller’s argument is to be found, in a sense, in the Nicomachean Ethics. There, Aristotle is not primarily concerned with the classical question “What is a human being?” Rather he begins, very much as Schiller did, with the question: When is a human being living according to his nature and so species-appropriately? Aristotle’s answer is clear: Only a man who is working scientifically and theoretically—at best philosophizing—is using the capacity that distinguishes him from an animal. Aristotle would say, with no ifs, ands or buts: A man philosophizes only when he is a human being in the full sense of the word, and he is only fully human when he is philosophizing. For Schiller, it was barbarians and savages who were not entirely and not properly human; for Aristotle, shockingly, it was slaves and women, making it acceptable, in his view, for them to be treated as they were at the time. Apart from this very ethical position making his ethics highly problematic, we are concerned with the following formal step in the argument. Aristotle, too, develops a concept of the whole human being, and to this extent makes a first step similar to Schiller’s; but he did not see it in connection with an anthropological experience of self—at least the writing that has come down to us contains nothing of the kind. In Aristotle, one does not find the idea that philosophy is ultimately a practice of self-experience in which a human being senses that he is a human being. But the search for such a practice, for the Lebensgefühl it provides, is typical of Schiller. And as far as the value of philosophy practiced in this way goes, Schiller’s view should be clear: He would not say that a human becomes aware or becomes aesthetically more intensely aware of his being human by practicing philosophy. One would have to agree with him on this point: The practice o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword to the English edition
• Introduction
• PART I: Play, then war, anxiety and drugs—and now, luxury
• PART II: Luxury: the Dadaism of possession
• Detailed Table of Contents
• Bibliography
• Index