SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Federico Vercellone, Sarah De Sanctis

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438465890
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman famously declared in 1948 that the impulse of modern art is to destroy beauty. Not long after that, Andy Warhol was reconciling the world of art with the world of everyday life, painting soup cans and soda bottles. In this book, Federico Vercellone provides an account of the decline of beauty as a Platonic ideal from early German Romanticism to the twentieth century. He traces this intellectual trajectory from Goethe, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, through modernism and the avant-garde move ment, to the work of Adorno and Heidegger. Rather than the death or destruction of beauty, Vercellone argues instead that beauty in the twentieth century came back to live in reality and everyday life. He suggests this is a new edition of the classical ideal rather than an abandonment of it, and further makes the case for the ecological significance of this orientation and outlook.

Chapter I

The Romantic Farewell to Beauty

The Airy Premises of a Necessary Catastrophe

As we have just seen, beauty and the twentieth century are the terms of an extreme antithesis that seems to condemn the latter to an unfortunate destiny. No other century has been accused of having deliberately betrayed the canons of beauty, of having lost all faith in it embracing its opposite as an ideal, giving in to ugliness as the most wretched of sinners gives in to the devil. One is tempted to wonder not only if all of this is true, but also how it could have been possible to come to this, and who is to blame for such a big misdeed—to paraphrase the famous aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche announces the death of God by the hand of man.1

Of course, one can embark on a long historical journey to wonder whether this is a specifically twentieth-century topic or rather something that was already there, latently, and that the twentieth century simply brought out. So let’s take one step back, to the nineteenth: the great century of the philosophy of art: that is to say, the great century in which beauty is no longer natural, and it is not metaphysical either—it is artistic. The story, whose main events I review shortly—is very intricate and has a theoretical aspect I would like to point out immediately, as it lies at the heart of the considerations to follow. The point is this: what if beauty, precisely by becoming artistic, betrayed itself and met ugliness? That’s indeed what happens in the nineteenth century under the aegis of artistic bohème, which bears in it the most contradictory thing there is: art proposing itself as an autonomous institution.

The starting point here is Kant’s aesthetics and, in particular, the alternative between aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment—which is not taken as an alternative by Kant, but rather by his idealist and Romantic followers. The two types of judgment are not integrated as Kant wishes; upon closer inspection, they are rather sharply opposed. In the long run, this contraposition leads to the teleological judgment overcoming the aesthetic one. After all, the aesthetic judgment is afflicted by the inevitable contradiction inherent in its disinterested character, which ends up failing to account for many of its objects. In fact, as is known, the whole sphere of “adherent beauty”—encompassing almost all things that we define “beautiful,” from works of art to living beings—ends up escaping disinterest and being subjected to an extrinsic finality.

In fact, we could never decide whether a living being—say, a horse—or a building are beautiful if we didn’t have a precise concept in mind to define them. For these reasons, therefore, it is not surprising that the aesthetic judgment (ahistorical and aconceptual) is not what prevails in early Romanticism,2 overshadowed by a philosophical art of which the Romantics, starting from Fichte, are the main representatives. On the other hand, the teleological judgment takes a secret path that leads further away, through Romanticism and early idealism up to its revival in contemporary art: think, for instance, of Richard Long. The teleological judgment, in fact, is sometimes the ultimate ideal of contemporary art, and we see why and how at the end of the book. What is being proposed, ahead of its time, is a new theory of the form, one that derives from the overcoming of the ancient Platonic distinction between appearance and reality on which art (and in particular, if not exclusively, art as an autonomous institution) had based its foundations. But it is better to speak more about this later, putting the matter aside for now.

As regards the birth of a philosophical art in early Romanticism, it is interesting to recall what Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Philosophische Lehrjahre (Philosophical Apprenticeship). Among other things, he noted that Fichte is the true philosopher of art. The same can be said of Kant who, nevertheless, is perhaps (also, or even more) a philologist of nature: “The French are prominent in wit, the philosophy of nature, politics. The British in natural science, history, empiricism, sentimental poetry. Fichte is a far greater art philosopher than Kant, who is a philologist of nature.”3

Schlegel here manifestly acknowledges his debt to Fichte, whereas Kant identifies and seems to point at a very different direction. Through Fichte, art follows the path of art rooted in the Streben—Schiller’s moral tension. This direction, conjugating art with the instability of the yearning (Goethe stigmatized this view precisely in discussion with Schiller), is opposed by Kant: his teleological judgment seems to indicate a different way, which will be taken up only in the Romantic age.4 In this context, Goethe and the Romantics faced each other in a confrontation of unprecedented scope and meaning.

The issue at stake is very clear on both sides: if form were to abandon life, there would be a catastrophe with unforeseeable consequences. For the side of the Streben, forms, animated by infinite tension, chase life, which escaped them; for Goethe and what could be defined “Romantic naturalism” from Novalis to Schelling, it is the gaze that was blurred, but things have always been the same way: the living logos has never ceased to exist. This is a conflict between real and ideal, and Goethe has been lucidly aware of it ever since his debate with Schiller, in the background of which echoes Kant’s thought. In his essay “Influence of Recent Philosophy,” Goethe states, in this regard:

Due to his friendship and sympathy for me perhaps more than for his conviction, in his Aesthetics Letters Schiller did not treat the good Mother (Nature) with the harshness of language that had made his Grace and Dignity unlovable; but because I, being just as stubborn and hard-headed as him, not only exalted the superiority of Greek poetic imagination, and the poetry founded on and derived from it, but deemed this way as the only just and desirable one, he was pushed towards more thoughtful reflections, and precisely this conflict is what originated the essays on Naive and Sentimental Poetry. The two ways to imagine and write poetry had to adapt and recognise each other, side by side, with the same rank.

So he lay the first stone of the whole new aesthetics; in fact, the adjectives Hellenic and Romantic, or any other synonym there may be, can be traced back to the point where, for the first time, there was discussion of the superiority of the real process or of the ideal procedure.5

As is well known, the crucial thinker for the poetics of the first Romantics is not so much Schiller—who, for Goethe, is the one who leads the way—but rather Fichte. However, Fichte’s influence is introduced within a singular combination with the Platonic revival of the end of the century, of which Friedrich Schlegel himself is one of the main protagonists.6 For Schlegel, the point is to connect ideas with life in its elusive and fundamentally ineffable nature, seeing this movement as something that is not simply negative but that should be profited from. Based on this, ideas acquire a dynamic character that leads them to achieve a connection with life itself, finding their deepest nature in their relation to it—according to an approach that sees Plato himself as a sort of neo-Platonic, in line with his reception at the time. In other words, ideas must be realized in life if they don’t want to misunderstand themselves and become mere empty shells, failing their main task—that of shaping things.

In order for this not to happen, it is necessary to enact a sort of morphological revolution, joining the Platonic idea and the Kantian one, taking the idea as the horizon of an infinite yearning for.7 Therefore, what happens in this context? According to what Schlegel himself states in his Pariser Vorlesungen, Plato is the creator of a philosophy, not of a system. Plato’s philosophy is not closed off but answers the need of an infinite search. Philosophy can thus be represented as an unsatisfied aspiration, an indefinite maturation of thought that does not and cannot find a definitive structure, if not at the cost of self-betrayal:

It has already been noted that Plato only had a philosophy, but not a system, and that philosophy in general is a search, an aspiration to science, rather than a science in itself, and this applies in particular to Plato’s philosophy. He never gave a definitive version of his thought and attempted to artistically represent this eternal becoming, formation and development of his ideas in his dialogues.8

This leads to the conception that not only thought but also artworks are in constant becoming, and this happens precisely because the artwork is the model of a form sought in life—a yearning that is itself artistic because it is dramatic, full of tension and expectations. If the latter weren’t met, the consequences would be notable. The main one would be the failure of beauty as an ideal of a measure that is not only and not mainly artistic but—in line with the ancient view—cosmic (all of which shows that the success of an artwork does not concern only the artwork itself, nor does it mainly concern the art sphere). “Art lives on its own ideal and on the possibility to embody it; but the ideal of art is not properly artistic.”9 So, the failure of beauty should be understood in a perspective that is essentially metaphysical, but also historical and metaphysical at the same time, as it bears with it a present that is far from indifferent to the end of its adventure.

Friedrich Schlegel articulates the issue with his brother in a letter dated 28 August 1793, underlining the alternative between system and ideal. He outlines here an infinite progress, the ideal of an unendliche Perfektibilität, an endless perfectibility that he would soon take up and refine in dialogue with Condorcet:10

I must take into my care two things that you deny, the system and the ideal. I know that the scandalous abuse of senseless and soulless sophists has significantly dirtied these words; but you see only that and choose denial, being unjustly suspicious of the precious eloquent testimonies of our divine nobility. What we call soul in works of art (in poetry I’d rather define it as the heart), what we call spirit and ethical dignity in man, and God in creation —living connection—this is the system with regards to the concepts. There is only one real system—the great hidden eternal nature, or the truth. But if you imagine all human thought as a whole, then it becomes evident that the truth, the accomplished unity, is the inevitable direction of all thought, even though it can never be reached. … And let me add that the spirit of the system leads only to multilateralism—which may seem paradoxical, but is definitely undeniable.11

The idea, the form and life are thus introduced in a constant dialogue at a distance—uninterrupted and risky—between Goethe and the Romantics.12 This dialogue does not simply involve philosophy but also art, according to a fruitful interchange between the two, of which Romanticism is in many ways the herald, and which spells out precisely in the title—echoing Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—of Schlegel’s Philosophical Apprenticeship (Philosophische Lehrjahre). Thus poetry, like philosophy, aims at the living individuality. The becoming of the form, which must open up for the living so as not to stiffen and become self-absorbed, is thus exposed to an obvious risk: that of an (almost oxymoronic) idea of an open form that must overcome its boundaries. It is a sort of revolution of the form and its intrinsic meaning. But it is not enough to focus on this level. What is at stake is not just the semantics of the form, but also its scope as a principle of the distinction of beings—both one from the other and from the chaos preceding them—according to the original Hesiodic myth of Aphrodite’s birth.

Therefore, what is being announced is the need of a real morphological revolution. This is made evident by the situation of deep imbalance between being and its idea. In this way we get closer to a nihilistic abyss: the forms and the living beings are driven to a risky and fascinating game of mirrors, which transforms both, forcing them to a gruelling confrontation. The form that does not contain, that no longer grasps, looks at reality and perceives it as an endless fragmentation that it wants to resolve. Thought, looking for a renewed and newly appropriate form, is led, in turn, to an almost obligatory step: to bear upon itself the risk of fragmentation.

To learn about reality in detail in its secret, ineffable nature, thought has to become itself a fragment according to a practice that—as is well known—was widely used by Romantic authors and by Friedrich Schlegel in particular. So, the philosophy that chose fragmentation did so as it had to face the fragmentation of the world itself. Therefore, this thought speaks by a kind of extreme ontological nominalism; it looks at reality up into its infinitesimal traits; and, to promote its own path, it adopts not a conceptual principle but a new morphological ideal, assuming in this context the appearance of one last bastion against the advance of nihilism—that is, of the dynamics and centrifugal instances of modernity, so compelling as to escape any formal control.

Facing fragmentation, paradoxically this thought must not only make an extreme unifying gesture, that of a sudden unification of the disiecta membra through projects such as a new Bible, the total work of art, the book of books, etc.13 In fact, in this way it also it carries out an absolutely unusual metaphorical power, bringing together everything with everything, echoing the different elements through contacts and unusual harmonies. On the other hand, the metaphor can be overturned into catachresis, thus recognizing the failure of form in its going back to itself, no longer able to accommodate its content, and thereby destined to wrap itself up in a tautological self-reflection.

This is certainly one of the risks of the Romantic art form that is highlighted by Hegel (who predates the phenomenon by locating the birth of modernity in Christianity),14 but this also coincides with a dilation of the borders and meaning of the problem of the form according to an orientation that—as we see better in the next chapter—is adopted by Nietzsche. In fact, Nietzsche saw nihilism as essentially a sort of formal failure, the logoi falling back on themselves. Indeed, for Nietzsche, nihilism is nothing more than this: the irredeemable autonomization of the logoi from reality, so that they fall back on themselves as pale, inert, and powerless forms, while being develops a wild and conflictual nature under the guise of the will to power.

This almost definitely marks the final disappearance of Goethe’s viewpoint and his passionate defense of the continuity of art, idea, and nature. Thus disappears the possibility to refer to models or types as Goethe had done by resorting to the idea of the original plant and that of the intermaxillary bone: those were ideas that unified the spheres of plant and animal nature, thereby also allowing them to differentiate themselves. What happens here is a sort of major catastrophe: it is the end of that poetic and poietic side of thought, connected with the idea and therefore with the form, on which the Romantic gaze had focused. Thus, what is lost is the intuition that marks thought from its very beginning and without which thought could not even work, or at least communicate.

Form, Style, Entropy

Returning now to the antithesis set out above between...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Beauty and the Twentieth Century
• Chapter I. The Romantic Farewell to Beauty
• Chapter II. The Non-containing Form: From Nietzsche to Spengler
• Chapter III. From Modernity to the Avant-Garde
• Chapter IV. From Negativity to the Event: Adorno after Heidegger
• Chapter V. The Dissolution of the Artwork and the Rebirth of Ancient Beauty
• Conclusion. Classicism, Again
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover