BOOKS

The aesthetic turn

NANDAGOPAL R. MENON

The German Aesthetic Tradition by Kai Hammermeister; Cambridge University Press, 2002; pages 278, Rs.995.

THE word "aesthetics" is derived from the Greek aisthesis meaning "perception". Evidently, the etymon has nothing much to do with the word's modern sense - understood as a "set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art" and as a "branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste" - except, of course, that sensual perception is essential to decide whether something or somebody is beautiful or not. Before the word acquired the sense "concerned with beauty" and "theory of art" in the mid-18th century and passed into common parlance in the late 19th century, it referred to the philosophical theory of sense perception.

This aesthetic turn - a new semantic orientation that is intertwined with the emergence of philosophical aesthetics as an independent discipline - is a distinctly German event. Although the treatment of philosophical aesthetics as a separate discipline is traced back to the writings and lectures of the German thinker Alexander Baumgarten, it is with his more distinguished and famous contemporary, Immanuel Kant, and, more precisely, Kant's Critique of Judgment, that the term acquired its modern-day meaning. The book under review traces the genesis and development of philosophical aesthetics through a survey of the contributions made by main figures in German philosophy, from Baumgarten to Theodore Adorno.

Explaining the centrality of German aesthetic thought to the subsequent development of the discipline, Hammermeister notes that "philosophical aesthetics as a discipline is thoroughly grounded in German thought and, hence, cannot be understood without a detailed knowledge of this tradition". This tradition reached its acme in the thought of the pioneers of German idealism - Kant, Friedrich Schiller, F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. In fact, according to Hammermeister, the influence of the thought of these German masters have been so decisive that the entire history of philosophical aesthetics post-German idealism has been characterised by quarrels with, and renewal of, paradigms developed in this age.

The Western philosophical tradition, right from the pre-Socratics, raised and grappled with questions related to art and beauty. However, this history of engagement was characterised by either a Platonic condemnation of art as being twice removed from reality or, at best, a treatment of it as "imbedded in a social, pedagogical, theological or merely economic programme that regulated its production". It was only in the 18th century and in the thought of German idealist philosophers that art was delivered from this secondary status and deemed fit enough for independent inquiry in the subject of philosophical aesthetics. The relatively recent origin of the discipline owed a lot to the domination of a philosophical paradigm that denigrated "the objects of senses in favour of a rationality cleansed of subjectivity". In other words, the birth and evolution of philosophical aesthetics also signified a gradual but decisive break with dominant schools of thought such as Platonism, Cartesianism and rationalism.

More important, the credibility gained by art's "truth-claims" also indicates a larger "crisis" faced by philosophy since the resurgence of the natural sciences with the Newtonian revolution. Hans-Georg Gadamer notes: "Only when philosophy and metaphysics got into crisis in relation to the cognitive claims of the sciences did they discover again their proximity to poetry which they had denied since Plato... Since then it makes sense to acknowledge the autonomous claim to truth of literature, but this takes place at the price of an unexplained relationship to the truth of scientific knowledge" (translated from the German and quoted in "German Idealism and the arts" by Andrew Bowie; The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, Ed. Karl Ameriks; Cambridge University Press, 2000; page 239).

Hammermeister's narrative begins at this turning point in the history of Western philosophy. Employing a comparative and analytical approach, he considers the contributions of each thinker from three distinct perspectives - "[T]he philosopher's ontological discussion of art, the epistemic role attributed to art and beauty, and the practical function the writer locates in art works." Viewed from these three perspectives, `The Age of Paradigms' finds its most influential and passionate exponent in Schelling. Although Kant and Schiller did make path-breaking contributions to the development of philosophical aesthetics, Schelling is the aesthetician par excellence. Emphatically rejecting Kant's definition of beauty as merely a state of mind and Schiller's stress on the socio-political functions of beauty and art, Schelling glorifies art as "the capstone of the philosophical system" that transcends the dichotomy of subject and object and provides access to the otherwise incomprehensible primordial "absolute". (The "absolute" of Schelling and other romantic philosophers such as Friedrich Holderlin and Friedrich Schlegel, the "ego" of J.G. Fichte and the Geist (spirit/mind/consciousness) of Hegel are basically attempts to circumvent the various dualisms that dominate Kantian thought, especially that of perceptible (phenomena) and non-perceptible (noumena) objects of knowledge and intuition and concept.)

In other words, Schelling claims for art what Plato called anamnesis (recollection) - the process through which true knowledge of the eternal and immutable eidos (forms or ideas) is attained. Schelling's magnum opus, The System of Transcendental Idealism, published when he was only 25, closes with a paean to art: "[A]rt is at once the only true and eternal organon and document of philosophy that always anew documents what philosophy cannot externally represent... [A]rt is therefore the Highest to the philosopher... " In this sense, art has surpassed all other fields of inquiry; in fact, it provides access to the truth that constitutes the foundation of all scientific and philosophical reflection. Although the later Schelling, notably in his lecture Philosophy of Art, rejected art's superior status, his claim to fame and influence rests on his original formulation.

It was left to Hegel, the last of the major German idealists, to deny squarely the uniqueness of art's "truth-claim" and reaffirm the supremacy of philosophy. Art is only a stage to be overcome in the march of the Hegelian Geist from "sensuous certainty" (its most primitive or naive form) to "absolute knowing" (its mature and self-knowing form). In the Lecture on Aesthetics of 1828-29, Hegel observes: "Art no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truth obtains existence for itself. One may well hope that art will continue to advance and perfect itself, but its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit. In all these relationships, art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past" (quoted in Heidegger's Philosophy of Art by Julian Young; Cambridge University Press, 2001; page 8). Historically, "art as manifestation of truth" was the norm only during the Classical Greek period and its "art-religion". Art lost its pre-eminence with the advent of the "revealed religion" of Christianity; in fact, "beautiful art" ceased to exist with the demise of Classical Greece. Hegel goes on to make the controversial proclamation of the "end of art" and the Geist continues its march to ultimately reach the stage of "absolute knowing" in philosophy. Hegel says: "[T]ruth in the fullest sense of the word depends on the conceptual knowledge that only philosophy can achieve, and compared to which the truth of art seems to fall short."

ACCORDING to Hammermeister, 20th century German philosophical aesthetics was, by and large, concerned with refining and renewing the idealist paradigms, especially those developed by Kant, Schiller and Schelling. The author claims that while the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer and the Marxist Georg Lukacs gave a new lease of life to the Kantian and Schillerian paradigms, Schelling's aesthetic thought played a decisive role in the development of the philosophy of art of Martin Heidegger, Gadamer and Adorno. Arguably, Heidegger stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries at least in terms of the immense influence his oeuvre exercised over the development of such diverse fields as phenomenology, existentialism, biblical studies and theology, and philosophical hermeneutics. Born into a lower middle class Catholic family in Messkirch in Germany's Black Forest region, Heidegger was originally trained to become a Jesuit priest. However, ill-health and a gradual loss of faith in the "system of Catholicism" ultimately paved the way for Heidegger's rejection of his "basic philosophical convictions of Aristotlean-Scholastic philosophy". Heidegger's revolutionary re-reading of the entire Western philosophical tradition and his path-breaking contributions to the subject is usually divided into two phases - one that covers his break with Catholicism (1917-19) and ends with the publication of the classic Being and Time (1927), and the second beginning around the early 1930s and lasting until his death, including his disastrous and contemptible involvement with the Nazis.

Heidegger's aesthetic thought develops in the latter period, the first concise expression of which is found in the public lecture, "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935). Heidegger suggests that all great art is a "truth-event", that is, an occasion in and through which truth dis-closes itself. (This proposition bears a striking similarity to the early Schelling's notion of art. Nevertheless, unlike the latter, Heidegger does not treat art as the only "organon of truth".) A great work of art is an "event" that "installs" in it and thereby defines and dis-closes to a people their "world". Heidegger's "world" is not a geographical or physical entity; it is the aggregate of the shared meanings, practices, beliefs, concerns and so on that form the hidden, primary and essential backdrop of a community's life. Hence the "world" is an "opening" or a "clearing" in which a community's efforts to understand itself and its actions become intelligible and acquire meaning. Heidegger explains this point by citing the example of the Greek temple of Poseidon at Paestum (Lucania), Italy: "It is the templework that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human beings. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people" (quoted in "Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology and politics" by Hubert L. Dreyfus; The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Ed. Charles Guignon; Cambridge University Press, 1996; page 297).

However, the "world" as dis-closed in the work of art cannot be grasped conceptually or rationally because each work of art contains in it an element - what Heidegger calls "earth" - that resists such attempts. In fact, the simultaneous presence of "world" and "earth" - whose relationship is characterised by a constant struggle - explains why all interpretations fail to completely understand the essence of a great work of art. Dreyfus says: "This struggle is a necessary aspect of the way meaning inheres in human practices. It is a fruitful struggle in that the conflict of interpretations it sets up generates a culture's history" (ibid., page 300).

Now, Heidegger generalises that any "all-governing expanse" that lets "truth set itself to work" in it can fulfil the function of a great work of art. He lists four such instances: "Another way in which truth occurs is the act that founds a political state. Still another way in which truth comes to shine forth is the nearness of that which is not simply a being, but the being that is most of all. Still another way in which truth grounds itself is the essential sacrifice. Still another way in which truth becomes is the thinker's questioning, which, as the thinking of being, names being in its question-worthiness" (quoted in ibid., pages 300-301).

THE book is a comprehensive, lucid and relatively jargon-free introduction to the history and significance of German philosophical aesthetics. It is probably the best primer available in English on the subject for non-specialist readers. However, it needs to be noted that the author's predilection for the idealist paradigms prevents him, to a large extent, from giving a fair judgment about the contributions of later thinkers. This is specifically evident in Hammermeister's treatment of the aesthetic theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose thought constitutes the bedrock of the reaction against German idealism and its version of philosophical aesthetics. The author says that none of them managed to achieve the level of sophistication, let alone surpass or challenge successfully, the paradigms developed by the idealist masters. For instance, assessing Schopenhauer's contribution, he writes: "Despite the forcefulness of his writing and the self-assured declaration of superiority over Hegel especially, Schopenhauer's thinking achieves neither the conceptual rigour nor the systematic breadth of his idealist precursors... "

It is also noteworthy that Hammermeister's otherwise laudable method of situating the aesthetic thought of philosophers in the context of their overall contributions and in relation to other thinkers falters in the instance of one controversial and important thinker - Heidegger. This is all the more striking since he condemns aspects of Lukacs' "aesthetics that border on the ridiculous", mainly because of the "Marxist-Lenininist perspective" it is based on. The author ignores Heidegger's willing collusion with the Nazis and his adherence to the Nazi worldview, especially during his short-lived tenure as the Rector of Freiburg University, a post to which he was appointed soon after Hitler came to power. Also ignored are the facts that Heidegger never condemned the Holocaust or expressed regret for joining the Nazis and the political and anti-democratic overtones of his later writings. In fact, the author makes the mendacious claim that the "fact that Heidegger drops the political references in his writings on art in the 1950s and 1960s could be understood as a result of his disappointment with the National Socialists [not Nazis!]".

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