Cassirer
on Art and Art-Theories
Suncrates
Lectures on
Philosophy of Culture：Cassirer
1974
CONTENTS
Foreword
PART ONE: Two Rich Sources of Inspiration: Kant & Goethe
I. Kant
(1) Kantian Critical Outlook
(2) Subjectivity (Copernican
Revolution)
(3) Substance (or Reality)
(4) Spontaneity
(5) Form
(6) Schema
(7) Imagination
(8) Critique of Judgement: --
Form and Function
(a)
Unity of Sciences -- The Whole Prior
to the Parts
(b)
Purposiveness of Nature -- Principle
of Formal Purposiveness
(c) Nature of Art -- Concrete
Manifestation
II. Geothe:
(1) "Indissoluble
Correlation"
(2) "Genius" - As
Seeing Unity in Diversity
(3) "Form" -
Dynamic
(4) Art as Creation
(5) Symbolic
'PART TWO: Cassirer on Art -- A
Summary
I. Polarity between Subjective and Objective
(1) Form and Matter..
(2) Language, Science, and
Art
(3) Art and Morality .
(4) Tragedy 'and Comedy
(5) Katharsis
(6) Creation and Appreciation
(Communicability)
(7) Natural Beauty and
Esthetic Beauty
II, Imagination
(1) Romanticism vs.
Classicism
(2) Idealism vs. Realism
(Transcendentalism vs. Naturalism)
(3) Symbolism
III. Pleasure, Play, Art, and Life
(1) Psychologicalism vs.
Metaphysicalism:
Santayana,
Bergson, and Nietzsche
(2) Art and Play--Schiller
(3) Art and Life--New
Orientation, Special
Direction
of Human Life and Experience
PART THREE: Comments and Conclusion
1. Merits
(1)
Revolt against Dualism (2) On Katharsis
(3) On Croce
II. Limitations
(1) On Aristotle
(2) On Tolstoy
(3) On Santayana
(4) On Bergson
(5) On Nietzsche
.
Foreword
This study is
composed of three parts: Introductory, Expository, and Critical. Part I, a brief account of Cassirer’s
aesthetic orientation and position tracing back to his two rich sources of
inspiration—Kant and Goethe; Part II, an exposition of the chapter on art in An Fssay on Man, and Part III, some
critical evaluation of his merits and limitations, especially as revealed in
his criticisms of other philosophers on art.
Strictly speaking, there is no such
thing as can be properly called Cassirer’s theory of art. For never has he had the opportunity to cast
his views on art and art-theories into a full-fledged form worthy of the name
of a system of aesthetics, as Kant, Croce, Tolstoy, Collingwood, and Stephen C.
Pepper of our modem times have done. But
by no means does this imply that he has underrated the role art plays in the whole
sphere of human life experience and cultural achievements. On the contrary, to the function of art he
pays high tribute and holds that art is in a most favorable position to make
the spiritual fulfilled in the physical, the abstract in the concrete, and give
us a more vivid, more colorful image of reality than science. Even the pre-scientific must be traced back
to the primitive arts—an insight of Warburg’s which he finds to be so congenial
to this own. Art is the intensification
of reality; science its condensation. If
Cassirer has not given an independent study to art and art-theories, it is
solely because he firmly believes that according to the principle of organic
interrelatedness, the core of his philosophic conviction, nothing can be
treated in isolation from the rest of the Whole.
The tenor and motif of Cassirer’s
philosophy of culture are aesthetical, as bome out by the deliberately
well-chosen expression “symbolic forms”—both Kantian and Goethean in origin and
spirit. Just as for Paul Tillich,
religion is the substance of culture, and culture, the form of religion, so for
Cassirer, art is the substance of culture, and culture the form of art! As his critic Harry Slochower well notes,
“Cassirer’s philosophy itself reaches its own most cloquent expression in his
discussion on art and literature. Here
his writing is at its most engaging and animated, metaphor, style and imagery
moving in rhythm with the subject discussed,”[1]
The present writer tends to believe his whole philosophy of culture is but, or
primarily, a philosophy of art in a disguise.
Grasp his views on art, you grasp the core of his whole philosophy of
culture as symbolic forms:
“There is no surer way of evading the
world than through art;
There is no surer way of binding
oneself to it than through art.”[2]
On these two lines of Goethe’s Cassirer comments: “This
double determination applies to every kind of creative activity and of symbolic
formation.”[3] Thus he declared, “to the
extent that the human language can express everything--the lowest and the highest,
art can embrace and pervade the whole sphere of human experience.”[4]
Cassirer’s philosophy of culture as symbolic forms, in Robert S.
Hartman’s words, is, so to speak, a “Comprehensive Aesthetics.”[5]
Part One: Introduction
Kant, Goethe, and Cassirer
Throughout Cassirer’s career as
philosopher of culture, Kant and Goethe remain his two inexhaustible sources of
inspiration. In Kant, theoretically, he
finds some guiding principles and insights; in Goethe, concretely, he finds a
paradigm of the creative artist who has exemplified much of the Kantian spirit
and ideal. His acquaintance with both
has left a “permanent deposit” in his own thinking, as is the case with John
Dewey in relation to Hegel. For
brevity’s sake, as for his relation with Kant, we shall briefly focus on those
aspects which mark his deviations, rather than his derivations, from the
master; whereas as for his relation with Goethe, we shall stress mainly on
their common features in general. Let us
take his relation with Kant first.
1. Cassirer and Kant
Cassirer’s attitude towards history is
a “futuristic perspective of the past”—Draw back before one can leap higher, as
we say. This is all the truer of his
attitude towards Kant. “Whenever he
started for any goal he went to the philosophy of Kant as a base from which to
proceed.”[6] Though
an intellectual heir to the Kantian heritage represented by the
(1) Critical Outlook -- Always trying to arrive at a higher synthesis
by examining each possible viewpoint, always looking for a “third view” or a
“via media, so to speak, out of the case, out of any opposite or seemingly
opposite polarities, is typical of the Kantian Critical Outlook. Coupled with
the Hegelian dialectic process, yet with the Hegelian pretense at finality and
absoluteness cut off, this Kantian spirit accounts for Cassirer’s functional
approach: a dialectic interplay of the historical method and the structural
(Gestalten) principle, of the concept of process and that of law, i.e., of
Freedom and Form.
(2) Copernican Revolution and Subjectivity--The startiong point of the
edifice of Kant’s Critical Philosophy consists in a radical change in our
conception of subjectivity, without falling into subjectivism. By “subjectivity” we understand the conditioning
and forming character inherent in the makeup of our faculty, our knowing mind,
that makes possible whatever is valid, universal, certain in our knowledge,
while speaking analogously of Copernicus’ epoch-making contribution tothe world
of astronomy, Kant says:
“An experiment may be tried in metaphysics, so far as the
intuition of objects is concerned. If
the intuition had to conform to the constitution of objects. I do not see how we could know anything of it
a prioril; but if the object (as an
object of the sense) conforms to the constitution of our faculty. I can very well conceive such a possibility.” [7]
The way Kant has brought about his
famous Copernican Revolution in philosophy reminds one of the parable of Mohamed
and the Mountain: Since the mountain would not get to Mohamed, so let Mohamed
get to the Mountain! This is also true
of the way how Cassirer succeeds in bringing forth a new conception of
Substance.
(3) Substance or Reality--Traditionally,
“substance” is taken as some-thing given.
On the one hand, Kant has exalted the status of subjectivity while, on the
other hand, he has dichotomized one and the same Substance or Reality into the
phenomenal and the noumenal. “Whatever
reality we do know is precisely such as conforms to our ways of knowing.”[8]
In other words, our knowledge of the external world is conditioned by our ways
of knowing it. The what presupposes the how,
and is conditoned thereby! Whatever lies
beyond the limits of our ways of knowing is beyond human experience, and
belongs to the world of noumena.
Substance as the Thing-in-Itself (ding-an-sich) is unknown and
unknowable. It is forever beyond
us. Cassirer succeeds in solving, or
rather dissolving, this problem or puzzle in a Mohamedian manner: He proceeds
roughly thus: Since human experience is
such that it cannot reach Substance, let Substance reach human experience,
functionally considered! To put it in the Kantian language, it would read: Since the world of the phenomena cannot
conform to that of the noumena, so let the latter conform to the former! Here is Substance—our Work. It is nothing but what we construct out of
the given. The noumena/phenomena
distinction is illusory. As our
constuctive faculty, with all its conditioning forms, is always at work, always
in the process of making, so is Substance as the result of our Working. Thus the old concept of Substance is
transformed into a concept of Function, the old concept of Essence into a
concept of Relation, the old concept of Being into a concept of Becoming. Such is Cassirer’s dynamic view, his
functionalist version, his new conception, of Substance. It is quite a
liberation from the artificial noumena/ phenomena dichotomy of the master. Instead of any “object,” let us talk about
its objectification.
(4) Spontaneity—Another
notion, no less artificial than the substcnee/ appearance, or noumena/phenomena
dichotomy, is the Kantian trichotomy of the human mind into sensibility,
understanding, and reason, each with its own function. For Kant, sensibility (or intuition) is a
mode of receptivity, working with the pure time-space forms. Spontaneity occurs
only in the pure under-standing. Neither
spontaneity nor receptivity will give us knowledge because each belongs to a
different level or order. receptivity can make knowledge possible only in our
intuition, while the connecting (Verbindung) of these manifolds in intuition
“is a spontaneous act of the power of representation. This act is called by a general name
Synthesis,” which is threefold: Synthesis of apprehension in intuition, of
reproduction in imagination, of recognition in concept.
From Cassirer’s point of view, such a
way of trichotomizing the human faculty, so characteristical of Kant’s
architectonic impulse, is not only artificial but very awkward. It creates more problems rather than solve
them, e.g., How to make possible the joining of receptivity with spontaneity,
of the sensuous with the intellectual, of that which alone can only see with that which alone can only think? of that which itself is blind
with that which itself is empty? “By
schema,” thus suggests Kant. But this creates the whole problem of the Critical
Philosophy over which Kant has pondered and to which he has devoted his third
Critique—Critique of Judgement. Cassirer approaches the same problem in a
different way, first by adopting a different
outlook. He thinks that Kant’s
three-division of human nature into three different levels cannot be taken
literally; the difference of the respective function in each level is a matter
of the difference of degree, not of kind. They are to be conceived as distinguishable,
but not separated, nor separable, from one another. On the contrary, there is a unifying thread
running throughout the whole framework of human nature, that is the
“constitutive” function of the forms, characteristical of the mode of
spontaneity. Thus, spontaneity is
conceived as permeating throughout all our functioning faculty; the Kantian
“regulative principle” is seen to be superfluous or redundant; its job can be taken over by the “constitutive principle,” and just
one principle is good enough. From
this new conception of spontaneity follows all Cassirer’s emphasis on activity,
freedom, creativity, the power of imagination ... ete. A clue for all these is
provided in his new concept of Form.
(5) Form—Indeed, as Hendel points out, “whenever he started for any
goal he went back to the philosophy of Kant as a base from which to procced. And
it was specifically the Kantian conception of form that was basic for the whole
of his thought.’’ For Kant, the form is
“pure,” in the sense of “free from empirical content”; for Cassirer, the form
is “both pure and concrete;” or rather, he is more concerned with the
“concreteness” or “materiality” of the forms.
This is an old problem: the relation of form and matter (content), of
universal and particular. There is one
crucial point in the Kantian conception of Form which caught Cassirer’s close
attention and turned out to be an enlightening insight: that is the
“constitutive” character of the elements of form and matter, according to
Hendal:
“Even
the content or material of knowledge as an element
must be trans-cendental: it is only distinguishable as a moment (or factor)
in the analysis of knowledge. Concretely we have appearance and experience, and
in experience these elements and factors are a1ready found or, to use Kant’s
expression, they are “constitutive.” This was a point that Cassirer watched carefully
and remarked critically of the master. .
. . ”[9]
But
Cassirer treated these elements of form and matter in a functional and not in
substantive way. The materless fom and
the formless matter are equally inconceivable; there is a material import in
the form just as there is a formal import in the matter. This constitutive function of the forms is
the main theme for Cassirer. With “form”
thus conceived, it is no difficulty to infer that the “transcendental unity of
apperceptions” is not confined to the conceptual realm, i.e., understanding,
and there is a continuity going
throughout the gamut of the whole scale; all are to be interpreted in terms of Cassirer’s
principle of functional unity. In short,
Cassirer’s “Form” is another name for Kant’s “Schema”
(6)
“Schema is the Thing”—“Schema,” as conceived by Kant, is that which has a
footing both in the sensuous and in the intellectual realms. It a sensuous-intellectual form. Hendal says,
The schema’s the thing that caught the
imagination of Cassirer. He interpreted
the whole subsequent post-Kantian philosophy in
It is worth noting in detail how
important Kant’s notion of schema had been in Cassirer’s own thinking. In Kants
Leben und Lehre (1916) he regarded that notion as the focal point of the
constructive thought leading from the Critique
of Pure Reason to the Critique of
Judgement, the latter being expressly described as “an outcome of the
further development of the transcendental schematism.” Furthermore, the variety
of the attempt at a solution made by the post-Kantian philosophers, from Fichte
to Hegel, ... is to be understood as due to the rich suggestiveness of Kant’s
own development of the schema-doctrine, a development towards greater
concreteness. ...
In the Essay on Man he treat of art as a concrete manifestation of the
union of intuitive and structural form (i.e., sensuous and intellectual), in
other words, the schema. Had he not been
led by various other important considerations to the discovery of a more original theme and title for his work, he might well have presented his own philosophy
as an extension of the doctrine of schema, for it is clearly a stage in his
notions towards the concreteness of ‘symbolic form.’”[10]
Hendel is quite
right in pointing out that Cassirer treats art as a concrete manifestation of
the schema—the union of the sensuous and the intellectual forms; but he seems
to have underrated the Kantian impact on Cassirer by ascribing to him the title
of “the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms” as his original discovery. Not only the
theme he deals with, but also the very title of “symbolic forms” he eventually
chooses, are both taken directly from Kant,
(Cf. Section 59, The Critique of
Judgement). What can be properly credited as Cassirer’s originality lies
not in the theme or title of the work, but rather in the way he handles such a
theme, by incorporating into this old theme what is really his own Work, e.g.,
the functional unity and the symbolic character of forms. Compare the following
schematic representation for a glimpse of his advancement beyond the previous
version of the Kantian framework:
|
Kantian
Framework |
Cassirer’s
Advancement |
||
|
|
Faculty |
Product |
|
|
|
Reason |
Moral Ideas |
|
|
12 Categories |
Understanding |
Concepts |
|
|
Schemata |
Imagination |
Images |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Time-Space
Forms |
Sensibility |
Intuitions |
|
|
|
|
|
|
[Notice: Schema for
Kant is restricted somewhere between sensibility and understanding whereas for
Cassirer the symbolic forms are conceived as the unifying thread penetrating
throughout all levels of the human faculty, just as the transcendental unity of
apperceptions for Kant remians restricted within the lower realm of sensibility
whereas it is expanded as the Pure Ego or Transcendental Ego for Hurssel!]
(7) Imagination—with regard to the role the
imagination plays, Kant speaks of it as” an art hidden in the depth of huntan
soul, the true secret of which we shall hardly ever be able to guess and
reveal”;[11] and of the schema as “a product of the productive
imagination. A fuller treatment of its
importance is to be found in the Third Critique, especially in connection with the treatment of art
experience—Aesthetic Judgement. In art
is represented “a new whole, a new total image of reality and of the spiritual
cosmos. And here, at least, imagination can be perfectly satisfied--art is the
manifestation of pure and concrete forms.”[12]
Kant says:
“Now a representation by which an object is given,
that is to become a cognition in general,
requires Imagination, for the
gathering together the manifold of intuition, and Understanding, for the concepts uniting the representations. “This state of free play of the cognitive
faculties in a representation by which an object is given, must be universally
communicable. ...
The subjective universal communicability of the mode
of representation in a judgement of taste, ... can refer to nothing esle than
the state of mind in the free play of the Imagination and the Understanding.”[13]
Such a eulogistic
view of the role of Imagination was fully appreciated by Cassirer; Imagination
becomes for him the very source of Freedom, Activity, Creativity, Spontaneity,
etc. The original Kantian insight into
the fusion of imagination and understanding is reinterpreted in terms of the
dialectic interplay of Freedom and Form as two indispensable and
intercomplementary functioning moments.
No wonder Cassirer had to laugh heartily when he was told by Hilbert the
modern Euclid that one of the latter’s former pupil, without enough
imagination, had become a poet and was doing fine![14]
[It is noteworthy that even Stephen C. Pepper, the greatest of
the American philosophers of art since George Santayana and John Dewey. Has
also his contextualistic theory of beauty on the same Kntian insight into (1)
genius as the faculty of the formation of aesthetic ideas; (2) the “happy
relation” of imagination and understanding as productive of aesthetic ideas;
(3) the mutual enrighment of the conceptual and the non-conceptual for the
emergence of aesthetic quality; and (4) the primacy of imagination in aesthetic
experience wherein the understanding is at its service, thou in intellelctual
activities the relation is just reversed.
A Kantian note is perceivable in Pepper’s major works from Aesthetic Quality to Concept and Quality.]
(8)
Critique of Judgement -- Cassirer considers Kant’s Third Critique as the maturest work of a
philosopher. It brings to the
fulfillment of the thought of the previous Criiques.
In Kant’s own view, there he attempted to reconcile the moral freedom of man
with the universal lawfulness of nature.
Without going into any details of its discussion on such topics as genius,
creativity, taste, universal communicability, etc. Let us confine our
observations only to the main themes of the Third
Critique and their significances for
Cassirer. The three great problems treated in the Third Critique are: (1) the unity of
natural (empirical) sciences; (2) the purposiveness of nature; and (3)
the nature of art. From Cassirer’s point
of view, all these three questions can
be reduced to one question: the question of form and its function, since
each one of these problems has to do with the “formation of that which is
individual.” In the first case the each of the particular law of the physical
world has its specific character and meaning only by reference to the total
system of concepts of the special sciences to which it belongs; in other words,
if any individual law is apprehended, the whole must be conceptually in
mind. In the second case there is the phenomenon
of “individual forms --organic being in
which the “whole” is realized as essentially determining the nature and
function of the parts. This is what Kant
calls “the principle of formal purposiveness.” In the third case the most
direct and immediate apprehension of individuality and forms is in art, which
is a concrete representation where the phenomenon is experienced as the Whole,
being determinant of the parts and disclosing itself through them. Here form is both pure and concrete. Hence, a relational view of individual and
universal.[15]
Owing to the teaching of the Third Critique, Cassirer was enabled to arrive at two of his leading
principles: (1) Principle of the Whole as prior to the Parts, and (2) Principle
of the Formal Purposivenss, both originating from the notion of an organic
Whole. This very notion of an “organic whole” is not due to
the ingenuity of Kant alone; it can be traced back to Aristotle and
earlier; it was prevailing in the
Renaissance men; favored so much by Leibniz, Hegel, Dewey, Whitehead, and a host of others, those who call
themselves holistic. But in Kant
Cassirer finds its most systematical and theoretical treatment and
justification while, more surprisingly, in Goethe he finds its most eloquent,
its most successful embodiment, and its most impressive exemplification.
2. Cassirer and Goethe
To the question whether Goethe was a philosopher? Santayana
replies: “Goethe was the wisest of mankind, too wise to be a philosopher in the
technical sense.”[16]
Like Cassirer, Goethe, too, was a great
admirer of Kant. He wrote after reading The Critique of Judgement:
“Here I saw my
most diverse thought brought together, artisitic and natural production handled
the same way; the power of aesthetic and teleological judgment mutually
illuminating each other,... I rejoice that poetic art and comparative natural
knowledge are so closely related, since both are subjected to the [same] power
of judgement.”[17]
We are further told by Eckermann in his Convereations of Goethe that Kant was
esteemed by Goethe as the highest philosopher in the modern time, whose
influence upon his advanced age is an “important circumstance”; and whose doctrine “still continues to work and
have penetrated deeply into our German civilization.”[18]
As to his congeniality in thought with Kant, Goethe remarks thus:
“Kant never took any notice of me, though
from my own nature I went a way like his own.
I wrote my Metamorphosis of Plants
before I knew anything about Kant; and yet it is wholly in the spirit of
his doctrine. The separation of subject from object, and further, the opinion
that each creature exists for its own sake, and that cork-trees do not grow
that we may stop our bottles--this Kant shared with me, and I am rejoiced to
meet him on such ground.”[19]
Goethe
came to find, however, that there is still
something remaining to be done after the Kantian tradition:
“In the German philosophy there are
still two works to do. Kant did an
infinite deal, by writing The Critique of
Pure Reason; but the circle is not yet complete. Now, some able man should write The
Critique of the Sense and Understanding of Man; and if it could be as well
done, we should have little more to desire in German philosophy.”[20]
Undoubtedly,
Goethe’s observations were pregnant with inspiring insight for such an “able
man” as Cassirer, who was to complete the circle by writing a Critique of Culture! His whole system of the philosophy of
symbolic forms is dedicated as a fulfillment of Kant’s unfinished task. In lieu of this, it is seen that the greatest
common feature between Cassirer and Goethe lies precisely in their affinity
with Kant. The most distinctive features
we find in Goethe, which are also characteristically congenial to Cassirer, can
be summed up as follows:
(1) “Indissoluble Correlaltion” (Kant’s
term) -- According to Cassirer, “Goethe appears to be the highest development
in the historical relation between Form and Freedom.*11 Every complete poem of Goethe’s shows perfect
blending of motion and structure, of individuality and totality, being and
becoming, i.e., Freedom and Form. This
is due to Goethe’s view of “genius” and “form”.
(2) “Genius”--While Shaftesbury gives
the conception of “genius” as “the productive, formative , creative
agency in art -a conception which directly influenced German intellectual
history in the 18th century, notably Lessing and Kant.[21] Goethe has conceived genius as that which
sees connection and unity in diversity. In Gocthe’s conception of genius,
Cassirer finds the fulfillment of Kant’s intention, the “Indissoluble
correlation” not only of permanence and change, but also of man and nature,
form and content, intuition and intelligence, art in nature and nature in
art. He pays this tribute to Goethe:
“There prevails in his
writings a relationship of the ‘particular’ to the ‘universal’ such as can
hardly be found elsewhere in the history of philosophy or of natural science,
... The particular and the universal are not only intimately connected but
...they are interpenetrating one
another. The factual and the theoretical
were not opposite poles to him...The highest thing would be to realize
everything factual as being itself
theoretical ...[22]
Further, this leads to his
view of “form,” due to his Greek studies in Italy:
(3) “Form”—--The Greek
view of Form (Type, Pattern, Ideal) becomes for Goethe a principle, a leading
principle of life and nature.
“He finds the greatness of
Homer, like that of all Greek writers, has lain solely in his power of seeing
this world in all its grandeur, its beauty, its outward forms and inner
relationships, and in describing what he saw, ...”[23]
Thus writes Humphrey Trevelyan In Goethe and the Greeks:
“He sat in the public gardens and read again with
wonder and joy that enchanted island of the Phaeacians. But now he saw that it was not enchanted, not
fairyland that could never exist. Homer
had described the world that he saw around him.
That world--its hills, its plants, its colors, the sea, the men--was the
ideal world, but not in the sense that it existed only in the beautifying
imagination of the poet. It was ideal
because in it “All Nature’s intentions were perfectly realized. Nothing was
half-expressed or distorted. ... By doing so, he had himself made Nature’s intention
manifested; he had created as even Nature could only sometimes create. For Goethe the Odysseys ceases at this moment to be a poem; it seemed Nature Herself.”[24]
He studies Greek sculpture, too, in
which he finds the secret of all arts: the principle of Form; he wrote (to
Charlotte):
“The human form is asserting its right ... I have found a
principle which will lead me, like Ariandne’sthread, through the labyrinth of
the human structure.”[25]
This
principle leads him to an apprehension of the nature of things, through the
vision of types (rather than individuals); such as the Urmensch, Urpflanze, etc
(i.e., Platonic Forms or Ideas); In the work of art, Homer for instance, it is
the Urmensch as visible, tangible, measurable form, that is revealed to
us. “These noble works of art are at the
same time the noblest works of Nature,
produced by men according to true and natural laws.”[26]
Those forms, for Goethe, are not merely static spatial or geometrical patterns
or figures, they are dynamic, Cassirer explains the dynamic aspect of Form in
terms of temporal moment:
“Form belongs not only to space but to
time as well, and it must assert itself in the temporal, ... It is remarkable
how everything developed logically and consistently from this one original and
basic concept of Goethe.”[27]
Notice
that this very dynamic notion of Form, and the emphasis on its being “visible,
tangible, measurable,” are both characteristical of Cassirer’s neo-Kantian concept of Forms as pure and sensuous
(concrete).
(4) Art as
Creation—Perhaps Cassirer and Goethe come most close to each other
in their view of beauty as the result of our creative, constructive effort;
thus an exalted view of esthetic beauty as contrasted with the so-called
natural beauty, which looks pale as compared to the great works of art. This tendency is most vividly shown in
Goethe’s admiration of Rubens:
“... the figures cast their shadows into the picture; the
group of trees, on the contrary, cast theirs towards the spectator. We have, thus, light from two different
sides, which is contrary to nature.” (said Eckermann.)
“That is the point,” Goethe returned, ... “It is by this
that Rubens proves himself great, and show to the world that he, with a free
spirit, stands above Nature, and treats her conformably to his purposes. The double light is certainly a violent expedient,
and you certainly say that it is contrary to Nature. But if it is contrary to Nature, I still say
it is higher than Nature; I say it is the bold stroke of the master, by which,
he, in a genial manner, proclaims to the world that art is not entirely subject
to natural necessity, but has laws of its own.”
“The artist has a twofold relation to nature; he is at once
her master and her slave, he is her slave, inasmuch as he must work with
earthly things, in order to be understood; but he is her master, inasmuch as he
subjects these earthly means to his higher intentions, and renders them
subservient.”[28]
This is also exactly Cassirer’s view of
art as symbolic, expounded in An Essay on
Man. The so-called “earthly things
or means” for Goethe have become “the sensuos medium,” “the conretizing
factors” for Cassirer. The artist’s
“free spirit” with which one stands above Nature is for Cassirer the
Neo-Kantian notion of subjectivity, spontaneity, creativity, in short, Freedom.
(5)
Symbolic--It has been said that there is a trilogy in Goethe’s
artistic life, namely, romantic, classic, and symbolic. Goethe has underdone a
series of change or transformation in his artisitic life and career. He was a
romantic, when his concern was with the individual, the characteristic; from
romantic he changed to being classic, when his concern was with the type, the
ideal, the form; and finally he passed to his third manner: symbolic. The French critic Sherer says that Tasso and Iphigenia mark a new phase in the literary career of Goethe:
“He has given up the aim of rendering by poetry what is
characterisitc or individual; his concern is henceforth with the ideal, that is
to say, with the transformation of things through beauty, from romantic Goethe
had changed to being classic. The two
elements, that of immediate or passionate feeling, and that of well-considered
combination of means, balance one another, and give birth to finished works.”[29]
And
then he passed to the symbolic:
“As Goethe grew older and colder,
(there) arose his last manner. He had
passed from representing characters to representing ideals, he is now
to pass from the ideal to the symbol. ... This last tendency is evident in the
continuation of Wilhelm Meister and
the second Faust.[30]
For Cassirer, the
development of European artistic life is epitomized in that of Goethe’s: From
the characteristic (romantic) to the classic, from the classic to the symbolic,
represented by Werther, Iphigenia and
Faust, respectively. Most important
of all is the third manner he passed to, the Symbolic. On the last phase the most self-revealing
confession comes from Goethe himself when he told Echermann:
(Of the Faust) “the first
part is almost entirely subjective; it proceeds entirely from a perplexed
impassioned individual, and his semidark-ness is probably highly pleasing to
mankind. But in the second part there is
scarely anything of the subjective; here is seen a higher, broader, clearer,
more passionless world, and he who has not looked around him and had some experience
will not know what to make of it.”(dated Feb. 17, 1828)
Moreover, on the
symbolic as above the understanding, Goethe admitted:
“I am rather of
the opinion that the more incommensurable, and the more incomprehensible to the
understanding a poetic production is, so much the better it is.” (dated May 6,
l827).
With
the above orientation in mind, we are now in a position to better appreciate
what an inspiring prototype of the creative artist Cassirer finds In
Goethe! Goethe’s conception of genius,
of forms, of the relation of particular to universal, of part and whole, of
individual and ideal, of motion and structure, of Freedom and Form, of art as
Nature’s concrete manifestation, of art as Man’s creative wrok, and finally of
art the symbolic, etc. All these are incorporated into Cassirer’s own thought
as a permanent deposit. No wonder critics like Harry Slochower says thus: “In Cassirer’s discussion of Goethe, one
senses something like complete identification between author and subject.”[31] It is such a perfect blending of the Kantian
insight with the Goethean spirit that makes the backbone of Cassirer’s
Philosophy of Art as a clue to his Philosophy of Culture in terms of the
symbolic Forms.
Part Two: Art
and Art Theories
The following is a summary of the chapter on art in An Essay on Man. It is divided into
three sections; in each section he will present the topic in a form of polarity
expressed in a variety of contrary terms, from pair to pair, until we are
finally shown in the course of presentation that all such distinctions,
oppositions, antagonisms, appear to be illusory.
1. The
Objective vs. The Subjective
In the first section, as characteristical of his way of presentation,
he starts with a brief historical account of the aesthetics in Germany; traces
it up to Alexander Baungarten’s Aesthetica
in 1750 as the first attempt to construct a logic of the imagination where
art still possessed no independent value of its own, and credits Kant’s Critique of Judgement in 1790 as the
first “clear and convincing proof of the autonomy of art”;[32]
then he shifts to the consideration of the first pair of polarities: an
objective pole and a subjective pole, depending on the emphasis on the one or
the other. Thus we are confronted with
two seemingly opposing types of aesthetic theories, both influential in
history: the mimetic and the characteristic, or the representational and the
expressional; the imitative and the expressive, theories of art.
“Language and art tire constantly oscillating between two opposite
poles, an objective and a subjective pole.
No theory of language or art could forget to suppress either of these
poles, though the stress may be laid now on the one and now on the other.”[33]
On the one hand,
we have the imitative theory that the aim of art is to imitate nature, and
imitation is considered as a fundamental instinct, beginning with Plato and
Aristotle, and predominating the whole history of western esthetics until the
first half of the 18th century, with Batteus as its last champion;
on the other hand, if the stress is laid on the subjective pole, we have the expressive
or characteristic (Goethe’s term) theory of art, initiated by Rousseau, who
marks a turning point in the history of ideas and of art as well; “art is not a
description or reproduction of the empirical world but an overflow of emotions
and passions”[34]
Indeed, with Wordsworth, all expressive or characteristic art is “the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”[35]
Yet the radical champion of this school, besides Croce, would be Oscar Wilde,
who paradoxically proclaims that nature imitates art, rather than the other way
round. Though the radical theories of imitation do not intend to restrict the
world of art to a merely mechanical reproduction, a copy, of reality, and to a
certain extent they all have to make allowance for the creativeness of the
artist, yet, obviously, the spontaneity, the productive power of the artist is
nevertheless a disturbing rather than a constructive factor. It is really not easy to reconcile these two
demands. truth to the objective reality and influence by the spontaneitv or the
subjectivity of the artist. The way
Cassirer succeeds in reconciling them is none other than the Kantinn one: In
the first place, he points out the stumbling blocks of either extreme position:
that the copy-theory in art will find itself untenable simply because a radical
theory of imitation is impossible in principle: the reality of nature is beyond
us; and even the theory in its revised form--conceiving art as an improvement
on model--as the neo-classicist maintains, is no less questionable; For how can
we improve on our model without disfiguring it? how can
we transcend the reality of things without transgressing the laws of
truth?”[36] While on the other hand, the expressive
theory of art, in its insistence on the overflow of powerful emotions and
passion, entirely neglects the other moments, e.g., material factors which make
possible the formative process, such as the colors, the lines, rhythms, and
words; the moment of purposiveness, the teleological structure, involved in the
constructive process. “Even in lyrical
poetry emotion is not the only and decisive feature. To be swayed by emotion is sentimentality,
not art. Art, in its process of
objectification, will perform its very function not only as expressive or
representative, but as interpretative.
In the second place, after laying bare the inadequacy of either positions to
arrive at synthesis of both, a functional unity, Cassirer, proceeds to speak of
the essence of beauty:
“Beauty cannot be defined by
its mere percepi, as “being perceived;” it must be defined in terms of its
activity of the mind, of the function of perceiving and by a characteristic direction of this
function. It does not consist of passive
percepts; it is a mode, a process of
perceptualization. But this process is
not merely subjective in character; on the contrary, it is one of the conditions
of our intuition of an objective world.
The artistic eye is not a passive eye that receives and registers the
impression of things. It is a constructive eye, and it is only by constructive
acts that we can discover the beauty of natural things. The sense of
beauty is the susceptibility to the dynamic life of forms, and this life
cannot be apprehended except by a corresponding dynamic process in ourselves.”[37]
Here we are
listening to a most eloquent champion for the Kantian thesis. But the original
thesis is further elucidated with concrete examples:
“A sharp distinction between the objective and the subjective, the
representative and the expressive in arts is thus difficult to maintain.
When absorbed in the intuition of a great work of art we do not feel a
separation between the subjective and the objective worlds… Beyond these two we
detect a new realm, a realm of plastic, musical, poetical forms; and these
forms have a real universality. Kant
distinguishes sharply between what he calls “esthetic universality”
(Gemeingültigkeit) and the “objective universality” (Allgemeingültigkeit) which
belongs to our logical and scientific judgements. In our aesthetic judgements,
he contends, we are not concerned with the objects as such [der Gegenstand],
but with the pure contemplation of the object [das Objekt]. . . .
The Parthenon frieze or a Mass by Bach, Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel,
or a poem of Leopardi, a sonata of
Beethoven or a novel of Dostoievski are neither merely representative nor
merely expressive. They are symbolic in
a new and deeper sense.”[38]
“The works of the a great lyrical poets—of Goethe or Hölderlin, of
Wordsworth or Shelley—do not give us disjecti
membra poetae, scattered and incoherent fragments of the poet’s life. They are not simply a momentary
outburst of passionate feeling; they reveal a deep unity and continuity. The great tragic and comic writers on the
other hand—Euripides and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Molière—do not entertain us
with detected scenes from the spectacle of life. Taken in themselves these
scenes are but fugitive shadows. But suddenly we be-gin to see behind these
shallows and to envisage a new reality.
Through his characters and actions the comic and the tragic poet reveals
his view of human life as a whole, of its greatness and weakness, its sublimity
and its absurdity.”[39]
Cassirer
goes on, by quoting Goethe as his most powerful witness:
“Art,” wrote Goethe, “does not undertake
to emulate nature in its bredth and depth. It sticks to the surface of natural
phenomena; but it has its own depth, its own power; it crystallizes the highest
moments of these superficatl phenomeba by recognizing in them the character of lawfulness, the
perfection of harmonious proportion, the summit of beauty, the dignity of
significance, the height of passion.”[40]
To sum up, this
is the essence of what has been epitomized as Freedom and Form. For Cassirer, “This fixation of the ‘highest
moments of phenomena is neither an imitation of physical things nor a mere
overflow of powerful feelings. It is an
interpretation of reality—not by concepts but by intuitions; not through the
meditun of thought but through that of sensuous forms.”—that is to say,
“symbolic forms.”[41]
Following the above criticisms on the objective/subjective distinction,
Cassirer passes his genial yet
enlightening judgement almost to all the important issues in esthetics,
such as, form and content (form and matter), art and, morality, art and science,
creation and appreciation, the problem of communicability, the problem of kartharsis,
tragedy and comdey, ... etc; all have been covered in tile first section of his
chapter on art. They are all centered
around the first polarity of the subjective and the objective, which has been
just dismissed as illusory and, as it were, all udercut at one stroke. All such moot issues in traditional
aesthetics can be reinterpreted in the light of the symbolic forms as an Open
Sesame!
(1) Form and Content—Cassirer
may have well contrasted Tolstoy with Croce on form and matter, as the former suppresses
the moment of form while the latter minimize that of content; but from
Cassirer’s point of view, they are both one-sided, simply because, “the context
of a poem cannot be separated from its form—from the verse, the melody, the
rhythm. These formal elements are not
merely external or technical means to reproduce a given intuition; they are a
part and parcel of the artistic intuition itself.”[42] Cassirer’s concern is not merely with the
formal aspect, but the concretization of Forms; nor merely with the material
factor, but the formalization of the latter.
In one word, form and matter are to be interfused with each other. This feature has been treated in connection
with the problem of Imagination in
the following section.
(2)
Language, Science, and Art, their Similarities and Differences—Both language and science are characterized by their act or
process of classification towards simplification; and similarly, art implies an
act of condensation and concentration.
But on the other hand there is to be perceived a difference between and
among them: language and science ,
depending upon one and the same process of abstraction or generalization, are
abbreviations of reality; while art, described as a continuous process of
concretion, is an intensification of reality.
What science is searching for is some central common features of a given
object, while art is aims at the particular aspect or uniqueness of it. Art does not limit any sort of conceptual
simplification and deductive generalization, it does not inquire into the qualities or causes of things, it
gives us the intuition of the form of things--a true and genuine
discovery. The artist is just as much a
discoverer of the forms of nature as the scientist is a discoverer of facts and
laws. Leonardo da Vinci has spoken of
the purpose of painting, and sculpture in the words: ‘saper vedere’, which
reminds one of the estheticism of Oscar Wilde, emphasizing on the same view:
‘to look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its
beauty. Then and then only, does it come into existence.”
Contrasted with art, science means abstraction, and abstraction means
impoverishment of reality. Thus it is
seen that in the realm of scienec, the more abstract a formula, the more
efficien is it, hence the more valuable; while in art we have to reverse the
measure or criterion: the more concrete a piece of work, the more appealing is it, hence the more valuable. Here we have arrived at not only a
distinction of art and science, but a measure (or criterion) whereby the
excellence in art is to be judged. As
contrasted with Tolstoi, who maintains that the work of art is to be judged by
the degree of its “infection” (or “infectiousness,” in terms of moral effects,)
Cassirer would argue that not the degree of infection, but the degree of
intensification and illumination is the measure of the excellence in art.
(3)
Art & Morality—This old problem of the relation of art to morality
proves to be one of the most puzzling and in the meatime most thought-provoking
problems in aesthetics; Plato’s unfavaorable attitude towards art and artist is
notoriously well-known to every “lover of wisdom,” and his theory of art has
been considered not as a theory of art, but an attack on art; but interestingly
enough the platonic bias has found its modern voice in Tolstoi, -- who sees in
art a source of infection. “Not only is
infection,” he says, “a sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also
the sole measure of excellence in art.”[43]
Both Plato and Tolstoil and their adherents, too, has laid great stress on the
moral grandeur of tnan’s character and its mbulding process , as the cardinal
concern either in the educational or cultural programme of our philosopher-king
or ki the profound sympathy cherished in the heart of our modern saint who
cares so much for the “ressurection” of mankind through universal love, and
nothing but love; but from Cassirer’s point of view, they seeiii to have
neglected a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form. Their sole justifying ground for their attack
on art lies rather in the fear that art, with its powerful infectiousness, will
make our life at the mercy of passion.
Here again they fail to see the moment of form: the passion itself is
one thing, the image or form of passion is quite another. Cassirer quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“The purpose of
playing, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror
up to nature; to show virtue her own feature; scorn, her own image, and the
very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.”[44]
“But the imaste of a passion
is riot the passion itself,” Cassirer continues:
“The works of the
great lyrical poets—of Goethe or Hölderlin, of Wordsworth or Shelley—do not
give us disjecti membra poetae,
scattered and incoherent fragments of the poet’s life. They are not simply a momentary outburst of passionate feeling;
they reveal a deep unity and continuity.
The great tragic and comic writers on the other hand—Euripides and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Molière—do not
entertain us with detached scenes from the spectacle of life. Taken in themselves these scenes are but
fugitive shadows. But suddenly we begin
to see behind these shadows and to envisage a new reality. Through his
characters and actions the comic and the tragic poet reveals his view of human
life as a whole, of’its greatness and
weakness, its sublimity and its absurdity.[45]
He further quotes Goethe for support:
“Art does not
undertake to emulate nature in its breadth and depth. It sticks to the surface of natural
phenomena; but it has its own depth, its own power; it crystallizes the
Iiigliest moments of these superficialphenoriiena by recognizing in them the
character of lawfulness, the perfection ofharrionious proportion, the summit of
beauty, the dignity of significance, the height of passion.”[46]
To sum up, this is the essence of what has been
epitomized as Freedom and Form. For
Cassirer, “This fixation of the ‘highest moments of phenomena’ is neither an
imitation of physical things nor a mere overflow of powerful feelings. It is an interpretation of reality--not by
concepts but by intuitions; not through the medium of thought but through that
of sensuous forms.”[47]
The problem of
art and morality is a sub-problem of form and content; Cassirer’s reasonings here is foreshadowed in
his discussion on form and content, as summarized (1). Now let us turn to his views on tragedy and
comedy.
(4) Tragesy and Comedy—“The distinction
between tragic and comic arts is much more a conventional than a necessary
one. It relates to the content and
motives but not to the form and essence of art. Plato has long denied the
existence of these artificial and traditional boundaries.”[48] In Symposium
(223) and Philebus (48ff),
Socrates was described to compel Agathon the tragic poet and Aristophanese the
comic genius “to admit that the true tragedian is the true artist in comedy,
and vice versa.” In comedy as well in tragedy, Plato maintains (in Philebus), we experience a mixed feeling
of pleasure and pain. In this the poet
follows the rules of nature itself since he portrays ‘the whole comedy and
tragedy of life.’ In every great Poem—in Shakespeare’s plays, in Dante’s Comedia, in Goethe’s Faust—we must indeed pass through the
whole gamut of human emotions.”[49]
“We may speak of the individual temperament of the artist, but the work
of art as such has no special temperarment. ... To speak of Mozart’s music as
cheerful or serene, of Beethoven’s as grave, somber or sublime would betray an
unpenetrating taste. Here too the
distinction between tragedy and comedy becomes irrelevant. The question whether
Mozart’s Don Giovanni is a tragedy or
an opera buffa is scarcely worth answering.
Beethoven’s composition based on Schiller’s ‘Hymn to Joy’ express the
highest degree of exultation. But when
listening to it we do riot for a moment forget the tragic accents of the Nineth
Symphony. All these contrasts must be
present and they must be felt in their full strength. In our esthetic experience they coalesce into
one indivisible whole. What we hear is
the whole scale of human emotions from the lowest to the highest note; it is
the motion and vibration of our whole being.
The greatest comedians themselves can by means give us an easy
beauty. Their work is often filled with
great bitterness. ...”
“Comic
art possesses in the highest degree that faculty shared by all art, sympathetic
vision.”[50]
(5) Katharsis as the Relief of Material Burden--According to the
Teddy Brunius, a Swedish scholar, “Aristotle’s poetics, 1949b 26 (,i.e., on Katharsis) inspired one thousand and
four hundred and twenty-five different interpretations before 1931.”[51]
Obviously, this figure does not include Cassirer’s new interpretation; for An Essay on Man appeared in 1944. His interpretation
is to be understood in light of his treatment (i) of form and matter, and (ii)
of tragedy and comedy. In Aristotle,
Katharsis is said to be the effect of tragedy.
For Cassirer, there is no such a sharp distinction of tragedy and
comedy, their boundary being blured; it can hardly be the that the Kathartic
process is confined to the tragic experience alone. It can be said of all arts,
as the consummatory phase of state of our esthetic experience, the highest
effect produced by the works of art. he
interprets such an effect in terms of the relief of the material burden (of our
passions). Indeed, it needs some
clarification. While speaking of this
Aristotelian theory of Katharsis, he says:
“What seems to be
clear and what is now generally admittted is that the Cathartic process
described by Aristotle does not mean a purification or a change in the
character and quality of the passions themselves, but a change in the human
soul. By tragic poetry the soul acquires a new attitude towards its emotions. The soul experiences the emotions of pity and
fear, but instead of beng disturbed amd disquieted by them, itis brought to a
state of rest and peace. At first sight
this would seem to be contradiction.
For what
Aristotle looks upon as the effect of tragedy is a synthesis of two moments
which in real life, in our practical existence, exclude each other. The highest intensification of our emotional
life is thought of at the same time as
giving us a sense of repose. We live
through all our passions feeling their full range and highest tension. But what we leave behind when passing the
threshold of art is the hard pressure, the compulsion of our emotions. ...
Esthetic freedom is not the absence of passions, not Stoic apathy, but just
the contrary. It means that our emotional life acquires its greatest strength,
and that in this very strength it changes its form. For here we are no longer living in the immediate
reality of things, but in a world of’ pure sensuous forms. In this world all our feelings undergo a sort
of trans-substantiation with respect to their essence and their character. The
passions themselves are relieved of their material burden.
We feel their
form and their life but not their encumbrance.
The calmness of the work of art is, paradoxically, a dynamic, not a
static calmness. Art gives us the
motions of the human soul in all their depth and variety. But the form, the
measure and rhythm, of these motions is not comparable to any single state of
emotion. What we feel in art is not a
simple emotional quality. It is the
dynamic process of life itself—the continuous oscillation between poles,
between joy and grief, hope and fear, exultation and despair. To give esthetic form to our passions is to
transform them into a free and active state.”[52]
Now, it becomes clear that katharsis is interpreted in terms of the
relief of material burden, or simply,
katharsis means freedom--liberation. This is no less true of tragedy than of
comedy. Cassirer even coined a term “comic
katharsisi”:
“The greatest comedians themselves can by no means give us
an easy beauty. Their work is often
filled with great bitterness.
Aristophanese is one of the sharpest critics of human nature; Molière is
nowhere greater than in his Misanthrope
or Tartuffe. Nevertheless the
bitterness of the great comic writers is not the acerbity of the satirist or
the severity of the moralist. ...”
“Comic art possesses in the highest degree that
faculty shared by all art, sympathetic vision.
By virtue of this faculty it can accept human life with all its defects
and foibles, its follies and vices.
Great comic art has always been a sort of encomium moriae, a praise of folly. In comic perspective, all
things begin to take on a new
face. We are perhaps never nearer to our
human world than in the works of a great comic writer, ... We become observant
of the minutest details; we see this world in all its narrowness, its
pettiness, and silliness. We live in
this restricted world, but we are no longer imprisoned by it. Such is the peculiar character of the comic
catharsis.”
“Things and events begin to lose their material weight; scorn is
dissolved into laughter and laughter
is liberation.”[53]
(6)
Creation, Appreciation, and Communicability—What has been said about
creation applies not only to the artist, but to us, the spectators, the
auditors, the beholders. “Like the
process of speech the artistic process is a dialogical and dialectic one. Not even the spectator is left to a merely
passive role. We cannot understand a
work of art without, to a certain degree, repeating and reconstructing the
creative process by which it has come into being. By the nature of this creative procoss the
passions themselves are turned into actions.”[54]
Here Cassirer expresses the same Crocean view that appreciation itself is a
sort of creation. And creation as such
implies freedom:
“If in real life we had to endure all those emotions through which we
live in Sophocles’Oedipus or in
Shakespeare’s King Lear we should
scarcely survive the shock and strain.
But art turns all these pains and outrages, these cruelties and
atrocities, into a means of self-liberation, thus giving us an inner freedom
which cannot be attained in any other way.”[55]
(7)
Natural Beauty and Esthetic Beauty—Cassirer’s observation of the polarity
between the beauty of art and the so-called beauty of nature reminds one of
Oscar Wilde’s paradox that nature imitates art.
Let us take Cassirer’s view
first:
“According to
Albrecht Dürer, the real gift of the artist is to ‘elicit’ beauty form nature.
On the other hand we find spiritualistic theories which deny any
connection between the beauty of art and the so co-called beauty of
nature. The beauty of nature is
understood merely as a metaphor. Croce
thinks it sheer rhetoric to speak of a beautiful river or tree. Nature to him
is it sneer rhetoric to speak of a beautiful river or tree. Nature to him is stupid when compared with
art; she is mute save when man makes her speak.”
“The
contradiction between these conceptions may perhaps be resolved by
distinguishing sharply between organic beauty and natural beauty. Ther are many natural beauties with no
specific esthetic character. The organic beauty of a 1andscape is not the same
as that esthetic beauty which we feel
in the works of
great landscape paintings. Even we, the spectators, are fully aware of this
difference.”
“I may walk
through the landscape and feel it charms.
I may enjoy the mildness of the air, the freshness of the meadows, the
variety and cheefulness of the coloring, and the fragrant odor of the
flowers. But I may then experience a
sudden change in my frame of mind.
Thereupon I see the landscape with an artist’s eye—I begin to form a
picture of it. I have now entered a new
reality—the realm not of living things but of ‘living forms.’ No longer in the
immediate reality of things, I live now in the rhythm of spatial forms, in the
harmony and contrast of colors, in the balance of light and shadow. In such absorption in the dynamic aspect of
form consists the esthetic experience.”[56]
It would be
interesting to compare and contrast Cassirer with Oscar Wilde on the beauty of
art and the beauty of nature. Wilde
speaks favorably of the impressionists:
“Paradox though it may seem—and paradox are
always dangerous—it is nonetheless true
that Life imitate Art far more than Art imitate Life. ...
A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to
copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
...Life is Art’s best, Art’s only pupil. ...
Nature, no less than Life,
is an imitation of Art. Nature follows the landscape painter then, and takes
her effects from him?
Certainly. Where, if not from the
impressionists, do we get those wonderful fogs that come creeping down our
street, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous
shadows? To whom, if not to them and
their masters, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and
turn to faint forms of fading grace, carved bridge and swaging barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place
in the climate of London during the lat ten years is entirely due to this
particular school of art.
For what is nature? Nature is no
great mother who has borne us. She is
our creation. It is in our brain that she
quickens to life. things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we
see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from
seeing a thing. One does not anything
until one sees its beauty. Then and then
only, does it come into existence. At
present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and
painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries
in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know
anything about them. they did not exist
till Art invented them.”[57]
Of course, Wilde’s remark is not to be taken literally. His emphasis is on the effect of art on the “sudden change” of our frame of
mind. It is due to such a change that
things begin to take on new forms as never seen before. The sudden change in one’s frame of mind, as interpreted by
Cassirer, may be said to have resulted from one’s experience of the organic
beauty, i.e., the beauty of nature; while for Wilde, just on the contrary, the
sudden change of one’s frame of mind is said to have resulted from one’s
experience of the esthetic beauty, i.e., the beauty of Art is said to have resulted from one's
experience of the esthetic beauty, i.e., the beauty of Art. But nevertheless neither of these two
interpretations can be taken too literally, they can only be treated relationally, and resolved in a functional unity,
that is: One’s esthetic experience is conditioned by the previous ones, whether
of organic (natural) or esthetic beauty.
Our experience of the one will influence our experience of the other.
II. Imagination: Romanticism and Classicism
In the second
section of his chapter on art, Cassirer poses a polarity with respect to Imagination,
i.e., the polarity between romanticism and classicism (including
neo-classicism); under the headings of Imagination also can be subsumed some
other polarities, such as transcendentalism and realism (idealism and
naturalism), metaphysical and psychological theories of art, etc. The last one is preserved for the third
section. His view of the role of
Imagination is best reflected in the following anecdote, as related by Dimitry
Gawronsky:
“Cassirer liked to tell the following story: Once he
met the great mathematician Hilbert, the Euclid of our time, and asked him
about one of the latter’s disciples.
Hilbert answered: ‘He is all
right. You know, for a mathematician he
did not have enough imagination. But he
has become a poet and now he is doing fine.’
Cassirer always heartily laughed, when he told this story, and he had
good reason for doing so, ...”[58]
Perhaps his
strongest reason may be found in this very chapter on art in An Essay on Man. His method of presentation as of investigation,
as pointed at the beginning, is a dialectic one; his approach to the
dissolution of any polarity is a critical one, i.e., by laying bare the nature
(through analysis) of, and thus doing justice tom either of these two poles in
extremity; and the clue to his wayout, and the sharpest, most powerful weapon
whereby he criticizes several leading figures in the field of aesthetics, say,
from Croce , Santayana, Bergson, Nietzsche to Schiller, lies precisely in his
new conception of Forms. Take for example
hies tratment of the polalrity between romanticism and classicism.
Romanticism encourages the free play of the imagination while classicism
(including neo-classicism), thoug not at all denying the specific power of
theimagination as an indispensable gift to every great poet and artist, will
subject it to the control by the laws of reason, in the name of measure, so to
seapk, simply because no perfection can be achieved by indulgence in the mere
play of this natural impulse and instinctive power; these laws of reason will
restrict the poet or artist to the field of the the probable. While, on the other hand, the romantic art will have as
its only subject the marvelous,
miraculous and mysterious, in short, the wonderful. “The source of imaginative creation never
dries up, for it is indestructibe and
inexhaustible. In every age and in every great artist the operation of the
imagination reappears in new forms and new force.”[59]
This sounds highly convincing and seems to be a sound theory of art; but what,
after all, is wrong with it?
Indeed, “in romantic thought, the theory of poetic imagination has
reach-ed its climax. Imagination is no
longer that special human activity which builds up the human world oaf
art. It now has universal metaphysical
value. Poetic imagination is the only
clue to reality,” thus remarks Cassirer,
“Fichte’s
idealism is bsed upon his conception of ‘productive imagination’ (Kantian in
origin). Schelling declared in his System
of Transcendental that art is the consummation of philosophy. ...The
distinction between poetry and philosophy is felt to be shallow and
superficial. ... To poetize philosophy and to philosophize poetry -- such was
the highest aim of all the romantic thinkers.
The true poem is not the work of the individual artist; it is the
universe itself, the one work of art which is forever perfecting itself. hence all the deepest mysteries of all the
arts and sciences appertain to poetry.
‘Poetry,’ said Novalis, ‘is what is absolutely and genuinely real. That is the kernel of my philosophy. The more poetic, the more true.’
By this
conception, poetry and art seemed to be elevated to a rank and dignity they had
never before possessed. ... Nevertheless, this exuberant and ecstatic praise of
poetic imagination had its strict limitation.”[60]
What is the
Achilles’ heel of the romantic theory of art?
In brief, the serious drawback consists in (1) its choice of themes,
i.e., the wonderful or rather, the
infinite, and its resulting dualism of prosaic/poetic, and (2) its unduly
emphasis on “free play of imagination,” with the important role of
externalization completely ignored.
On the
problem of theme, Cassirer comments
thus: “In order to achieve their metaphysical aim the romanticist had to make a
serious sacrifice. The infinite had been
declared to be the true, indeed the only, subject of art. The beautiful was conceived as a symbolic
representation of the infinite. He only can be an artist, according to
Friedrich Schlegel, who has a religion of his own, an original conception of
the infinite. But in this event what
becomes of our finite world, the world of sense experience?” --
Clearly this
world as such has no claim to beauty.
Over against the true universe, the universe of the poet and the artist,
we find our common and prosaic world deficient in all poetic beauty. A dualism of this kind is an essential
feature in all romantic theories of art. ...
This conception
of poetry is, however, rather a qualification and limitation than a genuine
account of the creative process of art.”[61]
In this respect,
the realists of the19th century had a keener insight into the art process; they
maintained a radical , and uncompromising naturalism which led them to a more
profound conception of artistic form where romanticism failed most conspicuously,
as form is also a matter of externalization:
“With the power of invention and of
universal animation (i.e., imagination) we are only in the anteroom of
art. The artist must not only feel the
‘inward meaning’ of things and their moral life, he must externalize his
feelings. The highest and most characteristic power of artistic imagination
appears in this latter act.
Externalization means visible or tangible embodiment not simply in a
particular material medium--in clay, bronze or marble--but in sensuous form, in
rhythm, in color pattern, in lines and design, in plastic shapes. It is the structure, the balance and order,
of these forms which affect us in the work of art. ...”[62]
Cassirer makes
his formalistic tendency keenly felt almost on every page of his writings. He
is a formalist, indeed. But in a different
sense; not even in the Kantian sense.
For him, the form is not merely pure, but sensuous, it is another name
for Kant’s Schema; it is not static as conditions (like the Kantian forms and
categories), it is dynamic, formative, directive, spontaneous, concretizing and
transforming. The problem of form, he
would agree with Adolf Hilderbrand and even Croce, is the true problem of art,
with “form” used in the its enlarged and enriched, revised sense, of
course. To support his emphasis on the character and role of the
moment of Form, he substantiates his thesis by attacking Aristotle’s view on
the tragic plot:
“In his theory of
tragedy Aristotle stressed the invention of the tragic plot. Of all the necessary ingredients of
tragedy--spectacle, character, fable, diction, melody and thought-- he thought
the combination of the incidents of the story the most important, ...
To enjoy the
plots of Shakespeare--to follow with the keenest interest, ‘the combination of
the incidents fo the story’ in Othello,
Macbeth, or Lear---does not necessarily mean that one understands and feels
the tragic art of Shakespeare. Without
Shakespeare’s language, without the power of his dramatic diction, all this
would remain unimpressive. The context
of a poem cannot be separated from its form--from the verse, the melody, the
rhythm. These elements are not merely
external or technical means to reproduce a given intuition; they are part and
parcel of the artistic intuition itself.”[63]
To borrow from
Cassirer’s pet polarity: Freedom and Form-- which is reminiscent of Goethe’s
Life and Form, even Dichtung und
Warheit--romanticism and classicism may be contrasted in their emphasis,
each stressing on the one at the sacrifice of the other. What has been said about romanticism also
applies to classicism, just by switching the pople on the scale, interchangeably. As romanticism has laid too much stress on
Freedom while completely ignoring the moment of Form, classicism has shifted to
the opposite pole: the power of imagination be subjected to the control by the
laws of reason, in the name of measure.
Thus it has committed an error not in its emphasis on the opposite pole
(Form), but in its adhering to an erroneous conception of this pole, taking
Form as static and rigid as a rule, “measurable by a linear standard or by a
clock” (e.g., the dramatic unities of space and time), and expressible in
purely objective (arithmetic) terms.
Just as romanticism can be opposed to
classicism with respect both to the power of the imagination and to the moment
of form, i.e., both to the subject-matter and to form, so similarly
transcendentalism (idealism) can be opposed to naturalism (realism). As
mentioned above, the romantic conception of poetry, taking the marvelous,
miraculous, and mysterious, the wonderful, the infinite, as the only subject,
is rather a qualification and limitation than a genuine account of the creative
process of art, the realists have taken the opposite road. They maintained a radical uncompromising
naturalism, by denying the “pure form” of the idealistic schools, and
concentrating on the material aspects of things. By virtue of this sheer concentration, they
were enabled to overcome the conventional dualism between the poetic and
prosaic spheres, resulting from the romantic conception of poetry and art. The nature of a work of art, according to the
realists, does not depend on the greatness or smallness of its
subject-matter. No subject whatever is
impermeable to the formative energy of art.
One of the greatest triumphs of art is to make us see commonplace things
in their real shape and in their true light, such as as we find in Balzac,
Zola, etc. The naturalism of the
realists leads to a more profound conception of artistic forms (by denying the
‘pure forms” of the idealistic schools; but its serious drawback lies in its
attitude towards the imaginative power:
“Nevertheless, running through the works of all these
realists great imaginative power is observable, which is by no means inferior
to that of the romantic writers. The
fact that this power could be not openly acknowledged was a serious drawback to
the naturalistic theories of art. In
their attempts to refute the romantic conceptions of transcendental poetry they
reverted to the old definition art as an imitation of nature.”[64]
“In so doing,”
comments Cassirer, ‘They missed the principal point, since they failed to
recognize the symbolic character of art.”
“Art is, indeed, symbolism, but the
symbolism of art must be understood in an immanent, not in a transcendental
sense. Beauty is “The Infinite finitely
presented” according to Schelling. The
real subject of art is not, however, the metaphysical Infinite of Schelling,
nor is it the Absolute of Hegel. It is
to be sought in certain fundamental structural elements of our sense experience
itself--in lines design, in architectural, musical forms. These elements are, so to speak,
omnipresent. Free from all mysteries,
they are patent and unconcealed; they are visible, audible, tangible, ... art
can embrace and pervade the whole sphere of human experience.”[65]
From the symbolic point of view there is indeed no limitation whatever
on the subject-matter of art. Thus
Cassirer winds up his discussions on romanticism and classicism, on idealism
and ralism (naturalism). All these
schools, through his analysis, turn out to be defective, as contrasted with his
own position of symbolism. To conclude,
we may safely assert that romaqnticism (idealism) is Freedom without form;
classicism is Form without Freedom, realism (naturalism) is neither Freedom nor
Form; only symbolism is both. It is to
be noted, however, that there is a shift in the meaning of ‘form’ in these
three cases. For both classicism and
romanticism ‘form’ is used in the sense of “rule.” or “law” as measure to be be
observed in the course of the creative process
of art; for realism or naturalism, ‘form’ means the ‘pure form’ in the
idealistic or transcendent sense, as opposed to ‘the ‘material’; for symbolism
‘form’ means ‘both pure and concrete,’ structural, constitutive, constructive,
dynamic, etc.; it is that by which one’s
creative imaginative power becomes concretized, it is always charged with the
material import, it is, in sum, the ‘sensuous form’ without losing its ‘pure’
character. (Here by ‘pure’ we mean
‘without empirical content,’ or ‘free from material burden). In cassirer’s
symbolism, he is not merely concerned with Freedom and Form; rather, he is
much more concerned with the Freedom of
Form and the Form of Freedom. In Goethe’s language, the higher the Form, the
greater the Life; the quality of Life is thus heightened and enhanced by higher
forms. In other words, these two correlative concepts can only be treated relationally
and functionally. Not only his theory of
art as symbolism, but also his whole philosophy of symbolic forms, can be
viewed as a duet of Freedom and From by dialectic interplay of these two
moments as intercomplementary by mutal enrichement.
III. Pleasure, Art, and Life
In the third, concluding section of his
chapter on art, Cassirer examines two seemingly opposing schools of thought in
esthetics. i.e., psychological and metaphysical theories of art, represented
respectively by the esthetic hedonism of George Santayana and the esthetic
intuitionism of Henri Bergson. as is typical of his method as the functional
approach. His discussion covers the play-theory of Schiller (as contrasted in
the conception of play with Darwin’s and Spencer’s), Nietzsche’s view of the
Greek art, Croce’s identification of art with language of aesthetics and
linguistics, and finally the relation of art to life, in terms of its human
import, its role, function and meaning for the whole sphere of human
experience. Since both his way of
presentation and those of Santayana, Nietzsche , Bergson, Croce, and Schiller
are quite familiar to modern readers, we shall only focus on some of his
comments on these themes under the following headings:
(1) Psychologicalism and
Metaphysicalism--The polarity between these two schools in aesthetics may be seen in
that the former is concerned not with any theories of beauty, but with the fact
of beauty and a descriptive analysis of this fact, while the latter has to
assume some fundamental principles and is concerned with the theories, rather
than merely with some facts, of beauty.
But they meet on the same ground in that both are reactionary in
character to the intellectualism or rationalism in aesthetics.
The psychological theory
of art, or esthetic hedonism, has as its starting point a solid, simple,
obvious and undeniable fact: pleasure.
No one could deny that the work of art gives us the highest pleasure,
perhaps the most endurable and intense pleasure. This is an undeniable fact, indeed. But a fact is merely a fact. If taken as a principle, whether
psychological or aesthetic or what the like, its meaning becomes vague and
ambiguous in the extreme, and broad enough to include the most diverse and
heterogeneous phenomena and the most disparate differences. As Kant warns in his Critique of Practical Reason by the metaphor of money:
“Just
as to the man who wants money to spend, it is all the same whether the gold is
dug out of the mountain or washed out of the sand, provided it is everywhere
accepted at the same value; so the man who cares only for the enjoyment of life
dos not ask whether the ideas are of the understanding or of the senses, but
only how much and how great pleasure they will give us for the longest time.”[66]
This holds in ethics as well as in aesthetics. In modern times, the esthetic hedonism has
found its clearest expression in the philosophy of George Santayana, who defined
beauty as “pleasure objectified” and maintained that as science is the response
to the demand for information, so art is the response to the demand for
entertainment. On both claims Cassirer
comments: In the first place, to say that beauty is pleasure objectified is
begging the question, for how can pleasure--the most subjective state of our
mind--ever be objectified?[67]
In the second place, if it si really the case that art is the response to the
demand for entertainment, such a demand can be satisfied by much “better” and
“cheaper” means. he says emphatically:
“To think that the great artist worked for this purpose, that
Michaelangelo constructed Saint Peter’s
Cathedral, that Dante or Milton wrote their poems, for the sake of
entertainment, is impossible. They would
undoubtedly have subscribed to Aristotle’s dictum that ‘to exert oneself and
work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish.”[68]
“If art is enjoyment it is not the enjoyment of
things but the enjoyment of forms. Delight
in forms is quite different from delight in things or sense impressions.” And
in line with the Kantian tradition, Cassirer charges all kinds of esthetic hedonism,
ancient and modern, for their failure to account for the fundamental moment of
activity, spontaneity or, more precisely, esthetic creativeness:
Forms cannot simply be impressed on our minds;
we must produce them in order to feel their beauty. ... In esthetic life we
experience a radical transformation.
Pleasure itself is no longer a mere affection; it becomes a
function. For the artist’s eye is not
simply an eye that reacts to or reproduces sense impressions. Its activity is not confined to receiving or
registering the impressions of outward things or to combining these impressions
in new and arbitrary ways. A great
painter or musician is not characterized by his sensitiveness to color or
sounds but by his power to elicit from the static material a dynamic life of
forms. Only in this sense, then, can the
pleasure we find in art be objectified.
To define beauty as ‘pleasure objectified’ contains, therefore, the
whole problem in a nutshell.
Objectification is always a constructive process. The physical world ... is no mere bundle of
sense data, nor is the world of art a bundle of feeling and emotions.”[69]
Now let us turn to his
comments on Bergson’s metaphysical theory of art. The metaphysical school of
esthetics, like the psychological, is a reaction against the rationalistic and
intellectualistic theories. “Intellect
does us no good.” “We cannot understand
the work of art by subjecting it to logical rules. For art arises from other and deeper
sources. In order to discover these
sources we must forget our common standards, we must plunge into the mysteries
of our unconsciousness life. The artist
is a sort of somnambulist who must pursue his way without the interference or
control of any conscious activity. To
wake him would be to destroy his power.”[70] This anti-intellectual attitude towards art
and its commitment to our unconscious life, or intuition, has found its most
eloquent champion in Bergson, who gave a theory of beauty which was intended as
the last and most conclusive proof of his general metaphysical principles.
According to Bergson,
“There is no better illustration of the fundamental
dualism, of the incompatibility, of intuition with reason than the work of art.
What we call rational or scientific truth is superficial and
conventional. Art is the escape from this shallow and narrow conventional
world. it leads us to the very sources
of reality. If reality is ‘creative evolution’ it is in
the creativeness of art that we must seek the evidence for the fundamental
manifestation of the creativeness of life.”[71]
“But the intention of Bergson,” Cassirer points out, “is not a really active
principle. It is a mode of receptivity,
not of spontaneity. Esthetic intuition, too, is everywhere described by Bergson
as a passive capability, not as an active form.
For he writes:
“The object of art is to put to sleep the active or rather resistant
powers of our personality, and thus
to bring us into a state of perfect responsive-ness, in which we realize the
idea that is suggested to us and symbolizes with the feeling that is expressed. In the process of art we shall find, in a
weakened form, a refined and in some measure spiritualized version of the
processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis. ...”
Here lies the
greatest flaw in Bergson’s theory of art, Cassirer argues,
“Our experience of beauty is not, however, of such a hypnotic character. Beauty, in its genuine and special sense, cannot be impressed upon our minds in this way. In order to feel it one must co-operate with the artist. One must not only sympathize with the artist’s feeling but also enter into his creative activity.”
In sum, to put to
sleep the active powers of our personality would be to paralyze our very sense
of beauty.
“The apprehension of beauty, the awareness of the dynamism of forms,
cannot be communicated in this way. For beauty
depends both on feelings of a special kind and on an act of judgement and
contemplation. ... One of the greatest contributions of Shaftsbury to the
theory of art was his insistence on this point.” [72]
What has just
been raised against Bergson’s metaphysical theory of art also holds for the
psychological theory of Nietzsche, his volitionalistic or voluntarianistic
thesis of the will to power.
“It is not” he
argues, “the ideal of Wicklemann that we find in Greek art. In Aeschylus, in Sophocles or Euripides we
seek in vain for ‘noble simplicity and serene grandeur.’
The greateness of Greek art consists in the depth and extreme tension
of violent emotions. The essence of every great work of art lies in this very
tension, i.e., the fundamental polarity between the Dionysian and Apollonian
spirits. “... Greek tragedy was the
offspring of the Dionysian cult: its power was a orgiastic power. But orgy alone could produce Greek drama. The
force of Dionysius was counterbalanced by the force of Apollo. ... Great art of
all times has arisen from the interpenetration of two opposing forces--from an
orgiastic impulse and a visionary state.
It is the same contrast as exists between the dream state and the state
of intoxication. Dream gives us the power of vision, of association, of poetry;
intoxication gives us the power of grand attitude, of passion, of song and
dance.”
Cassirer objects to this interpretation of artistic inspiration in such
terms. He argues,
“In this theory
of its psychological origin one of the essential features of art has
disappeared. For artistic inspiration is
not intoxication, artistic imagination is not dream or hallucination. Every
great work of art is characterized by a deep structural unity. We cannot account for this unity by reducing
it to two different states which, like the dream state and the state of intoxication,
are entirely different and disorganized. We cannot integrate a structural whole
out of amorphous element.”[73]
In the above criticisms on
Santayana, Bergson, and Nietzsche, Cassirer has resorted to his own scale: the
moment of Form, characterized by its structural, constitutive, constructive
function and its dynamic mode of life, and the moment of freedom in terms of
spontaneity, activity, and creativeness.
The moment of Form, in Cassirer’s treatment of others, appears somewhat
like his deus ex machina.
(2)
Art and Play--Another influential school of esthetic thought is the so- called
play-theory of art, cherished by Schiller, Darwin, Spencer and others. But the
very term ‘play’ is differently conceived by them. Schiller’s play-theory is a
transcendental and idealistic theory; Darwin’s, and Spencer’s theories are
both biological and naturalistic. This type of art-theory seems at the first
sight to be superior to esthetic hedonism, intuitionism or volitionalism in the
sense that it has enjoyed two the advantage of possessing two fundamental
features of art: activity and
disinterestedness (both are due to the old master Immanuel Kant). But still it fails to stand the scrutiny by
Cassirer’s symbolistic criterion in terms of the constructive character of
Forms.
First, he points out that there are to
be distinguished three different kinds of imagination: (i) the power of
invention, (ii) the power of personification and (iii) the power to constructive and sensuous
forms. “In the play of a child we find
the two former powers, but not the third. ... The child plays with things, the
artist plays with forms. Play gives us
illusive images; art gives us a new kind of truth—a truth not of empirical
things but of pure forms.”[74] He further emphasizes:
“To be sure, it is not the same thing to live in the realm of forms as
to live in the realm of things, of the empirical objects of our
surroundings. The forms of art, on the
other hand, are not empty forms. They
perform a definite task in the construction and organization of human
experience.”[75]
From the moment
of disinterestedness implied in the pay-theory, we will be led to one of its
stumbling blocks: “Removal to a distance.” this will lead us to the problem, perhaps the
greatest problem of all: Art and Life.
(3)
Art and Life--Here on this major issue, the human import of art and its
meaning and significance to life, I think, Cassirer’s discussion comes to its
climax, his argument becomes superbly eloquent, forcible, and powerfully
convincing:
To live in the realm of forms does not signify an evasion of the issues
of life; it represents, on the contrary, the realization of one of the highest
energies of life itself. We cannot speak
of art as ‘extra-human’ or ‘super-human’ without overlooking one of its
fundamental features, its constructive power in the framing of our human
universe. ...”[76]
Behind the existence, the nature, the empirical properties of things,
we suddenly discover their forms. These
forms are no static elements. What they
show is a mobile order, which reveals to us a new horizon of nature. Even the greatest admirer of art have often
spoken of it as if it were a mere accessory, an embellishment or ornament, of
life. But this is to underrate its real
significance and its real role for human culture. ... Only by conceiving art as a special
direction, a new orientation, of our thoughts, our imagination, and our
feelings, can we comprehend its true meaning and function. The plastic arts make us see the sensible
world in all its richness and multifariousness.
What would we know of the innumerable nuances in the aspects of things
were it not for the works of the great painters and sculptors? Poetry is, similarly, the revelation of our
personal life. The infinite potentialities of which we had but a dim and
obscure presentiment are brought to light by the lyric poet, by the novelists,
and by the dramatists. Such art is in no
sense mere counterfeit of facsimile, but a genuine manifestation of our inner
life.”[77]
PART III
Conclusion and Comments
Now it is time to make an evaluation,
by summing up our observations on Cassirer as a philosopher of art. The chapter on art in An Essay on Man is the sole systematic presentation of his views on
art and art-theories as available; it is not intended to be an independent and
complete theory in aesthetics for, as the main contention of his philosophy of
culture implies, art as one of the symbolic forms cannot be treated in
isolation from the whole sphere of human work.
In the short span of about forty pages Cassirer had made a masterful
exposition of his thesis that art is symbolic form by way of a critical examination
of almost all the major schools and major figures in the development of Western
aesthetic thought. His general outlook
is critical, his approach and contention reconstructive. Any reader will be impressed with the
characteristic features of comprehensivity, coherence, or consistency of his
treatment. As Slochower has rightly
observed, “Cassirer’s philosophy itself reaches its own most eloquent expression
in his discussion on art and literature.”
In his philosophy of art we find the core of his philosophy of culture,
as he has expressly stated: “Art can embrace and pervade the whole sphere
of human experience.” How to epitomize his position in aesthetics?--a
symbolist or symbolic formist. As such,
he exemplifies the saying: To see the cultural phenomena with an artist’s eye.
It is unnecessary to repeat all the
virtues of his functional approach in general as outlined in the earlier part
of this study; in this concluding part we shall content ourselves with being
able to highlight some aspects of his aesthetic viewpoints with respect, of
course, to both his merits and his limitations.
A clue to his limitations as critic of art-theories lies in what I have
taken the liberty to describe as his deus
ex machina--which is his new conception of form and which accounts for the
consistency of his position as a whole.
And here lies his true merits and limitations as well.
As is
said of the virtues of Kant as a critical philosopher, “he is unwilling to sacrifice insight to consistency.”[78]
This should be laid down as motto
for any critical and constructive mind. But one should also realize that it can
be more easily said than done for any one.
Great as he is both as thinker and scholar, even Cassirer himself fails
to live up such a high ideal as guideline. Indeed, “bonus dormitat
Homerus.” For the sake of consistency of
his own system he is tempted at times to sacrifice insights, usually of those
who are not immune from his critical scanning.
I shall be brief in mentioning about his merits for they abound almost
in every page of his writings we read, too ample to be enumerated here. Instead, I shall confine my laudatory
comments only to two main points--firstly, his expansion of the Aristotelian
concept of katharsis to cover both tragedy and comedy, indeed, the entire realm
of artistic creative activities; secondly, his criticism of the Crocean
position in aesthetics. On the other
hand, I have some reservations
concerning his treatment of other figures, such as Aristotle, Tolstoy,
Santayana, Bergson, and Nietzsche, to mention a few. His criticism of all these figures is, at
least in part, “bad shot,” motivated as a rule, of course, by his love of
consistency above insights. let us take
a closer look at these two aspects--his merits and his limitations.
(1)
Merits--The most striking feature of Cassirer’s thought is his
methodological monism or trans-dualism.
In the campaign against dualism of any sort he is not alone, of
course. For instance, John Dewey is no
less wholeheartedly devoted to the same cause, springing from the same source of
the Hegelian insight into the unity of culture.
But Dewey is primarily a naturalist and, with his naturalistic tendency
and pragmatic outlook, the concept of certainty is dissolved always with that
of substance. Not so, however, with Cassirer, for whom reality or substance is
not to be denied altogether, nor explained away, but transformed into the
concept of function; or is certainty to be simply dropped on looked upon as a
taboo, but reinterpreted in terms of form.
By such a tour de force
Cassirer has succeeded not merely in solving the moot problem of substance and
function, process and reality, freedom and lawfulness in traditional
philosophy, at one stroke, as it were; but he has thus laid down, once for all,
the foundation-stone for the edifice of his Neo-Kantianism characterized by the
functional view of substance and the functional unity of freedom and form. Any other pair of contrariety will be
automatically dissolved in the same way, including, for instances, the distinction
of tragedy and comedy. With the boundary
between tragedy and comedy thus broken down, it follows naturally that
katharsis is not confined to tragedy alone.
Katharsis is further reinterpreted as relief of the material burden of
emotions and passions. Cassirer has done
a great service to the age-long Aristotelian insight; his new interpretation of
katharsis is perhaps at least one of the best, so far available. No less remarkable is his criticism of Croce. That Croce is methodologically a dualist can
be easily ascertained by reference to this distinction bwetween two kinds of
knowledge: knowledge by concept and knowledge by intuition. Cassirer’s refutation of the Crocean view
focuses on two points: (1) that Croce has ignored the material moment in the
process of externalization and (2) that Croce has made a serious mistake in
equating art to language and, consequently, aesthehtics to linguistics. As to the first point, Cassirer comments:
“For Croce, the essence of artistic creation lies in
the formation of intuition alone. He is
interested only in the fact of expression, not the mode. The only thing that matters is the intuition
of the artist, not the embodiment of this intuition in a particular material;
when the process (the formation of intuition) is completed the artistic
creation has been achieved; what follows is only an external reproduction which
is necessary for the communication of
intuition but meaningless with respect to its essence, only of technical
importance.”[79]
Yet, Cassirer argues,
the formation of intuition is not enough; artistic creation is far from being
accomplished when the artist has arrived at any intuition (of the forms); he
must not confine his creative activity, his imaginative power, to the formation
of intuition alone, which is his spiritual soliloquy; he must be able to
externalize his intuition.
Externalization means visible, tangible, audible embodiment not singly
in a particular material medium, but in sensuous forms. The term “not simply”
here is highly important, signifying that the material moment, though obviously
not sufficient in itself, is essentially indispensable for the artistic
creation. Not that Cassirer fails to see
the importance of the formation of intuition, but that he is more concerned
with the externalization of this intuition. For Croce, externalization is
merely of secondary importance, as a matter of technical consideration; for
Cassirer, it is essentially and crucially important, it is the consummation of
art-activity. There is no great art
without externalization, and no externalization without the material
moment. Here lies the Achilles’ heel for
the Crocean position. It has a blind
spot as to the gap between intuition and expression, as Joyce Gary points out.
Next, we turn to the second point, on
the inadequacy of Croce’s identification of art with langauge, of esthetics
with linguistics. Indeed, art may be
defined as a symbolic language; but this leaves us only with a common genus,
not the specific difference, thus remarks Cassirer:
“Croce insists
that there is not only a close relation but a complete identity between
language and art. To this way of thinking
it is quite arbitrary to distinguish these two activities. Whoever studies general linguistics,
according to Croce, studies esthetic problems, -- and vice versa.”[80]
But for Cassirer,
“There
is, however, an unmistakable difference between the symbols of art and the
linguistic terms of ordinary speech or writing.
These two activities agree neither in character nor purpose; they do not
employ the same means, nor do they tend toward the same ends. Neither language nor art gives us mere
imitation of things or actions; both are representations. But a representation in the medium of
sensuous forms differs widely from a verbal or conceptual representation. The description of a landscape by a painter
or poet and that by a geographer or geologist have scarcely anything in common. Both the mode and motive are different in the
work of a scientist and in the work of an artist.”[81]
A contrast and comparison of art with
language and science will make clear the requirement for genus et differentiae. But
language and science are characterized by their act or process of
classification towards simplification and, similarly, art implies an act of
condensation and concentration. But on
the other hand, there is to be perceived a difference between and among
them: Language and science, depending on
one and the same process of abstraction or generalization, are abbreviations of
reality while art, described as a process of concretion, is an intensification
of reality.
(2)
Limitations--Even Cassirer himself admits that sympathetic vision is the faculty
shared by all arts. If this applies to
all arts, it applies all the more to the art of criticism, especially of
philosophical criticism. What makes one a great critic is farimindedness that
results from combining sympathetic vision with the Kantian virtue of
unwillingness to sacrifice insights to consistency as mentioned above. In the case of Cassirer, as a critic, he is
undoubtedly one with great vision, but not sympathetic enough; and as a
philosopher, he is highly consistent but at times willing to sacrifice
insights, especially some one else’s. To
substantiate this claim, I would like to provide some samples as follows:
(A)
Aristotle on Plot--While Aristotle in his theory of tragedy says that
of all the necessary ingredient of tragedy the plot is the most important,
Cassirer holds it to be “no necessary element of the artistic process” on the
ground that it is a sort of intellectual activity! He says,
“To enjoy the plot of Shakespeare, ...
does not necessarily mean that one understands and feels the tragic art of Shakespeare.
Without Shakespeare’s language, without the power of his dramatic diction, all
this would remain unimpressive. ... the plot was so complicated that it needed
a special intellectual effort to understand and unravel it. It is clear, however, that this sort of
intellectual activity and intellectual pleasure is no necessary element of the
artistic process.”[82]
It is surprising
to be told by one who has laid so much stress on the moment of form and has so
constantly emphasized on its inseparability from matter that plot is “no
necessary element in artistc process”!
The so-called plot in tragedy is but a special case of the principle of
organization, or organic unity, of all arts; and organic unity is the master
principle of art, be it architecture, or painting, or music, or poetry, or
novel, or play. It is the structural principle
applied to the dramatic art. Even composition
can be said of painting and of architecture as well. In Chinese terminology it
is called “bu-jü,” literally in the sense of marshalling the total vista by
deliberately setting-up all the relevant factors for a situation; Whoever
versed in rhetorics can tell the importance of such an apparently trivial
technique as the arrangement of words-order even in a single sentence. Any
slight changv in the words-order can make a world of difference in effect, even
in content, sometimes of vital importance! “A beautiful thing” is less poetical
than “a thing of beauty.” “The harder we
fought, the more defeated we are!” a true statement as it is, might have caused
demotion for General Tzeng Guo-fan [in putting down the Taiping Riots in the
19th century China]; fortunately it was changed into “The more defeated we
were, the harder we fought!” Why cannot
a well constructed plot heighten the
total character, the total effect, the total quality as a whole of any dramatic
work? is this precisely what the
principle of structure as form meant for?
Why is the plot merely a matter of intellectual activity or a matter of
intellectual activity? Such a purely or
barely intellectualistic view of the plot is far too narrow and one sided and
fails to do full justice to the main contention of Aristotle. Why must the role
and function of form be confined to “the embellishment with each kind of
artistic ornament” alone--verse, melody, diction, etc.? What is meant by the plot for Aristotle? It means “the structure of incidents.” It is design from a totalistic
perspective. Why does Cassirer attach so
much weight to the sensuous form, or material medium, such as rhythm, color
pattern, lines and design, plastic shapes, etc., while disparaging the
Aristotelian plot as neither important nor necessary? For the same story a difference in the plot
would involve differences in content and effect. How can the plot be purely intellectual
without material, even emotional, import?
Whence such a dualism of intellectual vs. emotional? The plot is the structure of the play as a
whole which accounts for its organic unity.
It is the form of forms. Just as
the form is a symbolic form, so is the plot a symbolic plot. It is the backbone of the play itself,
unifying and holding all parts together to make an organic whole. What Aristotle intends to stress on the plot
is its all-importance and indispensability to the play writing, obviously not
to the exclusion of any other ingredients, such as character, diction, thought,
spectacle, melody, as mentioned in his definition of tragedy. It is simply the principle of structure
which sums up all these ingredients and has them wrought into a unified integral
whole. Though Aristotle’s conception of
form does not conform with Cassirer’s--for the Greeks, form is pure (free from
material contents) whereas for the Neo-Kantians, form is both pure and sensuous
(concrete)--this difference by no means constitutes the sufficient ground for
rejecting the Aristotelian plot as “no necessary element of the artistic
process.” For what, after all, is a plot
if not some sort of form? It is form of
the consummate sort, as in one sense form is to be understood as “organized
construction.” Cassirer is typically
dialectical in his treatment of the historical figures: If the person in question is unimpeachable on
the formal ground he will charge him on the material ground, and vice
versa. He has ion hand a double-edged
sword for use. here his charge against
Aristotle’s conception of the plot and its role in tragedy is untenable because
it is unfair. And such a charge, in the
last analysis, would prove to be self-contradictory and back-fired for reasons
stated above, as it is found to be inconsistent with Cassirer’s own organistic
position in general, his adopting of the Gestaltan-Principle in particular and,
above all, his own view of form as “organized
construction.”
(B) On Tolstoy--According to Cassirer, Tolstoy and Croce make
an interesting antipod: One ignores the
moment of form; the other , the moment of matter. His criticism on Tolstoy
focuses on two points: (1) “Tolstoy
suppresses a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form”; (2) “Tolstoy holds
that the degree of infectiousness is the sole measure of excellence in art.”[83]
From Cassirer’s view of art as symbolic forms, form and matter make a
dialectical unity through interplay and interpenetration, hence neither should
be ignored; and further from his view of art as the condensation and
intensification of reality, it follows that “it is not the degree of infection
but the degree of intensification and illumination which is the medasure of
excellence in art.”[84]
First, I shall
say that Tolstoy does not suppress the moment of form. In his What
Is Art? we find, on the contrary, that no less than Cassirer he has taken
into account the moment of form. He has
this to say:
“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means
of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to
transmit the feeling that others experience the same feeling this is the activity
of art.”
Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one
man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings
he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also
experience them. [85]
How can Tolstoy, a great creative artist himself,
suppress the moment of form? Only that
he considers it as a means, indispensable as it is, whereby to transmit one’s
feeling to others. It is the medium of
transmission. The excellence in the work
of art does not, of course, consists in the form alone--which is thus a matter
of How. For Tolstoy, art has a much
higher aim to achieve, a much nobler function to perform, namely, the
improvement of humanity, the value-reorientation of human life and experience
through universal love and genuine feelings of brotherhood, in Tolstoy’s words,
as embodied in the spirit of Christ. This view of art concerns more than any formal
consideration as a matter of How: How to
transmit so as to infect (influence) the frame of their mind, in the forming
and shaping of their characters. True it
is that art aims to transmit feelings, but Tolstoy rasises the question of a
higher, deeper level: What kind of feelings is the most worth
transmitting? He was raging his was
against the prevailing and highly contagious type of art-theories of his day
that proclaims “Art for its own sake” as the standard. His extolling view of the value of the
content is reactionary to the fashion of the later half of the 10th century,
especially during the period of the decadence of “la fin de siecle.”
In the second place, I should like to point out that in so far as their
attitude towards the purpose is concerned, Tolstoy has much in common with
Cassirer than we are usually aware of.
The misleading impression is created by the choice of word, especially
the expressions “infection” or “contagion,” of which neither can be taken in
the literal sense. At most it serves as
a warning as used in the metaphorical way! It signifies the power of
transmission and communication, for good or for evil. Few have keener insight into this power of
art than Tolstoy, except perhaps Plato in the ancient time. Both Plato and Tolstoy are fully aware of how
powerfully corruptive the bad art could be!
With this key term of “infection” thus clarified, we can now proceed to
compare it as a counterpart notion to Cassirer’s “motion.” Whereas Tolstoy maintians “The stronger the
infection the better is the art,” Cassirer argues that the essence of art
consists in motions rather than emotions. Speaking of katharsisi, he remarks:
“The
calmness of the work of art is, paradoxically, a dynamic, not a static
calmness. Art gives us the motions of
the human soul in all their depth and variety.
But the forms, the measure and rhythm, of these motions is not
comparable to any single state of emotion.
What we feel in art is not a simple or single emotional quality. It is the dynamic process of life itself.”[86]
Is there any
better interpretation of Tolstoy’s advocacy of
“stronger infection” than the “motions of the human souls in all their
depth and variety?” Tolstoy is concerned not merely with communication, but
also the effects of this communication.
His “degree of infectiousness” is to be understood not only in terms of
“the intensity of infection,” but in terms of its moral and psychological
effects upon human life as a whole. Even
though we may agree with Cassirer on that “it is not the degree of infection
but the degree of intensification and illumination which is the measure of the
excellence in art, we may still probe more deeply by asking further: What about the effects of this very
phenomenon of intensification and illumination?
Once we are thus “illumined,” what kind of difference has it made upon
us as consequences, upon the whole frame of our mind, upon our general outlook
on life, upon our life styles and life ideals? In Cassirer’s own word: “a new orientation.” Because art is
symbolism. There it is!--The concord of insights for both Cassirer and
Tolstoy. For what constitutes the
symbolic character of art, if not “meaning” or “significance?” though we are
told by Cassirer that “meaning” or “significance” is not something given” as an
easy pleasure or beauty, it is something to be dug out by our active,
constructive efforts; it is our achievement constructed by virtue of the
functions of our creative faculty. And once such meanings or significances were
thus dug out, the effects they exert upon our soul and mind cannot be
obliterated; to underrate such effects and functions of art, as Cassirer puts
it, would be to underate its real significance and its real role in human
culture.’’ Thus concludes emphatically our philosopher of culture: “Only by conceiving art as a special direction,
a new orientation, of our thoughts, our imagination, and our feelings, can we
comprehend its true meaning and function.”[87] Though the choice of words in the expression
“infectiousness” may be unfortunate, Tolstoy has a point: “beware of art--especially the bad
kind.” In so far as the positive
function of art is concerned, there is nothing essentially incompatible between
Cassirer and Tolstoy in their conception of “effectiveness” or “the power of
motion” as the measure of excellence in art--a criterion of judgement, that is
to say. They both fully recognize that
the function of art consists in its power of transformation of the person by
providing him/her a a special direction, a new orientation, for our thoughts,
our imagination, and our feelings, in sum, our whole personality. In this respect their views and insights
converge and can be interpreted in terms of each other. A note of difference, however, is near at
hand: For Cassirer the function of art
is not confined to the realm of moral or religious life alone; it has such a
wider siginificance than the one given by Tolstoy the moralist plus religonist. Man cannot live on bread alone, nor solely on
morality either. Here Cassirer’s view is no doubt superior to Tolstoy’s. But on the other hand, the earnestness as reflected
in the Tolstoyean criterion of art is not to be dismissed either, despite the
unpleasant impression associated with the term “infectiousness.” Moreover, what Tolstoy suggests as to the
sure means whereby to achieve the optimal effect of art--individuality,
clarity, and sincerity--is quite congenial with Cassirer’s general criterion of
excellence in art: “The more conrete,
the better,” with art defined as the intensification and illumination of
reality. In contrast to science what is
always searching for some central common features of a given object, art is
always aiming at the particular aspect or uniqueness of it. Of the three requirements as conditions of
the highest degree of effectiveness in art, Tolstoy stresses sincerity above
all. Sincerity, means the whole
commitment on the part of the artist, the impelling force and drive for him to
express his feelings. But individuality
and clarity correlate to Cassirer’s requirement for intensification and illumination. The more individual the feeling is, the more
strongly does it act upon the recipient, hence the more intensifying. The more clearly it is expressed, the more
illuminating is the work itself, hence the more effective. In the quest for particularity, individuality,
uniqueness are convergent the insights of Tolstoy, Cassirer, Croce and Bergson,
despite their differences in details.
(C) On
Santayana—The definition of beauty given by Santayana as pleasure objectified”
is criticized by Cassirer as “begging the question.” The definition, as it stands, is far from
being an ideal one, simply because “pleasure” is not only ambiguous, but
multiguous, thus vague and misleading.
Nevertheless, Santayana has a point on “objectification,” hence
deserving some credit at least on that
account. Cassirer redefines “pleasure” as “delight in forms” and reinterprets
“objectification” as “eliciting form the static materials a dynamic life of forms.”
In other words, objectification means externalization. After having thus fitted these two terms into
his own framework, Cassirer goes so far as to claim that “only in this sense,
then, can the pleasure we find in art be objectified. To define beauty as “pleasure objectified”
contains, therefore, the whole problem in a nutshell, and “objectification is
always a constructive process.” His
argument on the inadequacy of the psychological theories of art as based solely
on pleasure as a a fact is quite enlightening; but he fails to do full justice
to Santayana’s whole view: It is not
pleasure itself, but the objectification of pleasure, that accounts for the
essence of beauty. One may take issues
with Santayana on his hedonist claim for “pleasure” as a defining ground of
beauty, but not on the requirement of “objectification,” whether taken as
“expression” or “externalization,” or “eliciting,” or what the like. And the ground Cassirer gives for his criticism
on Santayana is not convincing: “According to Santayana beauty is ....
“pleasure objectified.” But this is begging the question. For how can pleasure—the most subjective
state of mind—ever be objectified?”[88] Obviously Cassierer has taken “pleasure” as
one private experience, unsharable, uncommunicable, too personal, etc., hence
“the most subjective state of mind.” This kind of comment is a violation of his
own trans-dualistic, and organic outlook in general. By “pleasure” we mayunderstand a sort of “enjoyable
experience” such as a sunset view, which is highly sharable, hence
objectifiable. It is the main contention of Santayana that pleasures that are
not objectifiable are excluded from the universe of discourse in The Sense of Beauty. Even Kant admits
universality of pleasure as one of the four moments of beauty. Those kinds of experience that are not
universalizable, nor objectifiable, Kant calls “agreeable, delightful” to the
person alone in a given moment, but not beautiful. To say “pleasure is the most subjective state
of mind”--hence unobjectifiable--is to commit the fallacy of arbitrary
definition, or rash conclusion. Besides,
it is un-Kantian at bottom. By thus
twisting “pleasure” into “the most subjective” one can at best present (or
misrepresent) the initial definition as “contradictory in term,” yet not
“begging the question.” state of mind
“unsharable” we can at most say that this (definition) is contradictory in
term,” but not “begging the question”; for there is no question to beg yet. I
am rather inclined to suspect that here, as elsewhere, Cassirer has made one of
his “bad shots” as a critic, unfortunately.
(D) On Bergson—Cassirer becomes
most unsympathetic when he comes to the treatment of Bergson and Nietzsche,
whose backgrounds are entirely and diametrically different from his. As he indicated, the metaphysical theory of
Bergson and the psychological theory of Nietzsche are both reactions against
intellectualism or rationalism; and he himself may be called a most eloquent
champion for rationalism, though in a qualified sense. With his Neo-Kantian
background in critical idealism, he is always lured to the rationality of
forms. For quite a long period of time
Bergson has not been saved from the charge of anti-intellectualism, as
Whitehead points out. This is
unfair. Bergson has only criticized
intellect as insufficient, and even redefines intuition as “intellectual
sympathy.” To call Bergson
anti-intellectual or anti-rational is onesided, unfair. As Alfred Northe Whitehead acknolwledges, “ I
am also great indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue
their type of thought from the charge of anti-intllectualism, which rightly or
wrongly hass been associated with it.”[89]
Cassirer’s harsh criticism of Bergson, I think, is largely due to a misreading
of he context. He says, “The intuition
of Bergson is not a really active principle.
It is a mode of receptivity, not of spontaneity. Aesthetic intuition, too is everywhere described
by Bergson as a passive capability, not as an active form.” To back up such a
verdict he quotes Bergson as saying:
“The
object of art is to put into sleep the active or rather resistant powers of our
personality, and thus to bring us into a state of perfect responsiveness, in
which we realize the idea that is suggested to us and sympathize with, the
feeling that is expressed. ... There are thus distinct phases in the progress
of an aesthetic feeling, as in the state of hypnosis.”[90]
adding further:
“The
artist is a sort of somnambulist who must pursue his way without the interference of control of any conscious activity. To wake him would be to destroy his power.”[91]
Finally, in conclusion, he proclaims: “All aesthetic
theories which attempt to account for art in terms of analogies taken from disordered
and disintegrated spheres of human experience--from hypnosis, dream or
intoxication (Nietzsche) --miss the main point.”[92]
He argues that the fundamental feature of art is the constructive power in the
framing of our human universe. One will
be really surprised to be told that the intuition of Bergson is a passive
principle, so much at odd with the key-note and motif of a philosopher of
creativity, of the élan vital, the great champion of creative evolution! Three questions can be raised thus: (1) Is it
really the case that Bergson’s intuition is a passive capability, not
spontaneity, not an active principle? what is Bergson’s real point? (2) Can the
analogy of “hypnosis” be taken literally? and what is meant by “putting into
sleep”? And (3) How, then, can the
Bergsonian thesis be justified, that rality is creativity as advanced in Creative Evolution and that only by
intuition cvan we grasp reality? Bergson
could be criticized on many other grounds, such as his dualism of intuition vs.
Intellect, absolute vs. Relative knowledge, etc. Decidedly not on any passive view of
intuition. The term “hypnosis” a
misleading, as any analogy can be. By no
means should it be taken literally. The
main contention of Bergson is to emphasize the function of intuition as superior
to concept, as enabling us to see the particular features of an object and its
uniqueness. Any possible screening
factors must be brushed aside before one can have an immediate experience of
reality. The mediate is the screening,
be it logical choppings, conceptual thinkings, verbalizations, or symbolic
conventions. By putting into sleep these
stumbling and screening factors, i.e., getting rid of those intervening symbols
(stereotyped), then, and only then, will we be able to release the power of intuition
laten within us, which is active, spontaneous, creative in character, through
and through. Conventionality, not
intuition, is the arch enemy of
activity!
The most striking difference between
Cassirer and Bergson is to be found in their attitude towards “the
symbol.” For Cassirer, it is the soul,
the center of human creative activity; for Bergson, it is precisely what should
be dispensed with! He even defines
metaphysics as the science which claims to dispense with symbols. “So art,’ he argues,
“whether be it painting, or
sculpture, poetry or music, ha s no other object than to brush aside the
utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalizations, I
short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face
with reality itself, ... Art is
certainly only a more direct vision of reality.” (La Rire)
But how? By intuition!
Concepts, symbols, understandings, are all intervening factors that must
be brushed aside. Only in this sense can
we understand Bergson’s true contnetion and intention when he uses the
metaphorical language such as ‘putting into sleep” and “as in a state of
hypnosis.” All that the intende to mean
(no matter what he has said) is simply to call our attention to what he
believes to be a higher faculty in our mind and personality than the whole set
of intellectual apparatus. Put into
sleep those unfriendly forces in our makeup before our creative potency can
fully release itself. Or, to translate
it into the Kantian language, “Deny knowledge in order to make room for the
really creative”; “put into sleep theintervening, the mediate, in order to make
awaken the immediate--the intutitve, the creative.” In the statement “the object of art is to put
into sleep the active or rather the resistent powers of our personality” the
word “active” is a poor choice, unfortunately.
But fortunately it is auto-corrected, as balanced by the term that
immediately follows it, “or rather resistent powerers, ...” Cassirer seizes upon the former, while overlooking
or letting go of the the latter! The
Bergsonian intuition is entirely different from that in the Kantian sense,
i.e., as a product of sensibility which is passive, receptive, etc., classed as
on the lowest level in the mode of perception.
To label indiscriminately Bergson’s intuition as passive, receptive,
unspontaneous is unfair. What Bergson
attempts to accomplish is to awaken us from our dogmatic slumber in
intellectualism! He thus refers our
attention to intuition as a better substitute for the conventional mode of
knowledge and experience. Intuition for
Bergson is by no means passive; it has spontaneity of its own, more powerful,
more direct (immediate), more responsive than mere intellect. Otherwise, how is it possible that we are
brought into “a state of perfect responsivenss?” Bergson’s love of the dynamic and active, the
creative and spontaneous, is no less than Cassirer’s. But how is it that the Bergsonian position is
treated as almost incompatible with his won?
Is there any possibility to the synthesis of both philosophies? How shall one account for the apparent
incompatibility between them? An
enormous amount of clarification and profound sympathetic understanding are
required for such highly feasible task; fortunately several important clues are
available, and the basic guideline is “put the spirit before the
statement.” Their difference is primarily
a terminological and methodological one.
Bergson is a dualist while Cassirer is a trans-dualist as far as the
methodological orientation is concerned. Besides, terms like “symbol” and “the
symbolic” are taken in quite different senses for these two philosophic
minds. For Bergson, the symbolic is
opposed to the intuitive, as the mediate vs. The immediate, the conventional
vs. the creative, intellect vs. intuition, rationality vs. the irrational (even
supra-rational), etc. For Cassirer, the
symbolic stems form the primary fusion of the sensuous and the intelligible,
substance and fucntion, material and meaning.
“Primary fusion in he symbolic, this primacy of the symbolic functions,
is thesecret of all symbolic forms and all spiritual activity.” It is ‘the
mystery of creative activity par excellence,”
thus Robert S. Hartman has rightly observed.[93]
“There is no Outside or Inside here, no Before or After, nothing active or
passive. Here we have a union of
element.” Such a monist or fusionist
view of the symbolic, of course, is superior to Bergson’s dualistic conception
of the symbolic vs. The intuitive, because it is all-inclusive rather than bifurcational. But this does not blur our insight into the
tenor of creativity as the common denominator for their respective systems of
thought. A. W. Levi has looked upon the
Bergsonian philosophy as less a metaphysics than a philosophy of culture:
“What can we say with
assurance of the place of mind, imagination and creativity in the
universe? What is the ultimate meaning
of man’s science, his philosophy, his religion, and his art? Stripped of all non-essentials, this, I
think, is the root-problem of the Bergsonian philosophy. It is less a metaphysics than a
philosophy of culture.”[94]
On the other hand, no less paradoxically, we have
Carl Hamburg’s characterization of Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms as “both
a philosophy of culture and a metaphysics of experience.” Again, we may quote as witness Robert S.
Hatman’s interpretation of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as “a
philosohy of creation,”
The category of creativity is the one we shall apply to the
deduce from his system. In order to do
so we must first clear the way and determine his philosophy negatively against
its two poles, the raw-materials of creation and the source of the creating
act. The symbolic form is neither the
one nor the other, but represents the process of the creative act itself. ...
Cassirer’s philosophy is neither concerned with pure Being nor with pure consciousness, but with the context and
interaction of both.”[95]
Even Susanne K. Langer
argues for “the deep and close”
relationship between Cassirer’s epistemology (phenomenology of knowledge) and
Freud’s new psychoanalysis. For it is
the recognition of the “non-discursive, or mystic mode of thought) rather than
his clinical hypothesis of an all-pervading disguised sexuality, that makes
Freud’s psychology important for philosophy.” “The broadening of the
philosophical outlook achieved by Cassirer’s theory of language and myth
affects not only the Geistwissenschaften, but also the most crucial present difficulty
in philosophy itself--the even increasing pendulum are between theories of
reason and theories of irrational motivation.”[96]
She credits Cassirer with
being able to have broken down the narrow limits of the rrationalist theory in
a more adequate conceptual frame:
“Der Mythos als Denkform, is the theme that rounds
out the modern philosophical picture of human mentality to embrace psychology
and anthropology and linguistics, which has broken down he narrow limits of
rationalist theory in a more adquate
conceptual frame (i.e., the symbolic forms).”[97]
Cassirer’s approach to the same issue over
irratinality vs. the rational is our modern philosophy, we admit, is no doubt
superior to that adopted either by Freud or Bergson. For both Freud and Bergson are victims to the
pitfalls of dualism, still haunted by the primacy of the irrational over the
rational, whereas Cassirer has adopted a far more balanced, broader, hence more
adeqauate outlook whereby he is enabled to see the problem in the light of the
“primary fusion in the symbolic” function of the mind. Bergsoin is attempting to launch upon the
same campaign, to fight the same battle, to break down the same “narrow limits
of the rationalistic theory,” but less successfully because he fails to free
himself from the dualistic trap, such as intuition vs. intellect, the immediate
vs. the symbolic. In Stephen C. Pepper’s
later work Concept and Quality the
opposition of intuition vs. Intellect is dissolved into a a dialectical unity
by the very principle of fusion.
Intuition is reinterpreted in terms of “pre-rational,” and
“post-rational”--culminating in the “trans-rational.” It is simply the unifying principle of our
ways of knowing. And it is in this
revised and broadened sense that intuition is declared by Pepper to be the
“alpha and omega” of all knowledge and experience. Cassirer’s insight in this
regard merges with Dewey’s and Pepper’s.
Bergson’s dualistic view of intuition as opposed to intellect should be
revised, broadened, but not amistaken as “non-active, or non-spontaneous”; for
this is unfair to the spirit of of Bergsonian philosophy as a whole. Like Cassirer’s, the Bergsonian metaphysics
of experience is a philosophy of culture; like Bergson’s, the Cassirerian
philosophy of culture is a metaphysics of experience. The uniting bond between them, and the common
denominantor for both, is a philosophy of creation, with creativity as the
ultimate category. A call for the
synthesis of both is made by Robert S. Hartman:
“Bergson’s philosophy is based on the form of our inner
experience, time; Cassirer’s is based on that of our experience, space. Therefore the latter is led to the central
notion of the symbol, which the former rejects; the former to that of metaphysics
intuition which the latter rejects.
Cassirer’s philosophy can be understood in terms of the plastic arts;
Bergson’s in terms of music. A synthesis
of both philosophies would be the true philosophy of symbolism.”[98]
And we may add, “Creative Symbolism” or “Symbolic
Creativism.” The notion of “the
creative” is expressed for Cassirer by the term “the symbolic”; for Bergson by
the term “the intuitive.” Such a
discrepency, terminological as is it is, can be easily rounded out, and what
remains is the common ground o f creativity for both systems. It is the spirit, not the statement (or letters),
that counts, especially in the case of a philosophy like Bergson’s. To call his intuition “not a mode of
spontaneity” or “as in a state of hypnosis” is to miss the spirit for the sake
of the statement. It is the fallacy of “taking the finger for the moon,” as the
Zen Buddhist calls it.
(E) On Nietzsche--Just as Cassirer has
little sympathy for Bergson, it can hardly be expected that he might have any
more for Nietzsche, another arch enemy of intellectualism, but far more
radical, powerful, and impulsive, and threatening. Cassirer’s criticism of Nietzsche, again,
betrays his love of consistency above insight and his lack of sympathy. He
attacks upon the Nietzschean view of art can be boiled down to one point: “We cannot integrate a structural whole
(unity) our of amorphous elements.” By
this he means “the Dionysian and the Apollonian spirits.” The whole argumentative power hinges upon
whether these two elements are really amorphous. Let us grant Nietzsche a hearing:
In his early work The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche has
maintained that the true spirit of Greek tragic art can be described as a aduet
of two forces, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The force of Dionysus is counterbalnced by
that of Apollo.
“It is the same contrast as exists between
the dream state and the state of intoxication.
Both these states release all manner of artistic powers from within us,
but each unfetters powers of a different kind.
Dream gives us the power of vision, of association, of poetry;
intoxication gives us the power of grand attitude, of passion, of song and
dance. ...
The further development of art is just as
necessarily bound up with the antagoism of those two natural art-forces, as the
further development of mankind is bound up with the antagonism of the sex.”[99]
On such a thesis
of unity of duality in art-theory Cassirer comments:
Even in this theory of its psychological
origin one of the essential feature of art has disappeared. For artistic inspiration is not intoxication,
artistic imagination is not dream or hallucination. Every great work of art is characterized by a
deep structural unity. We cannot
account for this unity by reducing it to the two different states which, like
the dream stte and the state of intoxication, are entirely diffused and
disorganized. We cannot integrate a
structural whole out of amorphous elements.”[100]
Readers must be
taken by surprise! It is simply
incredible that such a great philosopher of symbolic forms, such a great champion
of symbolism in aesthetics and in culture, as Cassirer, should have failed to
see that that terms like “Dionysian” and “Apollonian,” “dream state” and “state
of intoxication” as used in the above context must be taken symbolically par excellence, never literally! How can the dream state or the state of
intoxication be treated as hallucination?
The most creative moment in the artistic persons can be legitimately
likened to the state of intoxication. Lives
of great artists abound in witnesses in this regard. Not only artistic inspiration is an
intoxication, but intoxication of the highest order. In Plato’s Ion (536 4) it is spoken of as a sort of being possessed or held,
by the Muses, so to speak. It is moment
of seizure or ecstacy, or peak experience, as our modern psychologist calls
it. Nietzsche only uses such expressions
as the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the dream state and the state of
intoxication, etc. As metaphors to illustrate the artistically creative state
of mind; it is a symbolic illustration.
The most obvious mistake, “bad shot,” that Cassirer has committed is his
misjudgement that in Nietzsche’s theory one of
the essential features of art disappeared, namely, the deepest structural
unity, hence his lamentation over its
disappearance! We may well console
Cassirer with the remark: It never disappears so long as the Apollonian spirit
is stll alive and at work. For what odes
the Apollonian spirit symblize or stand for?-- if not the principle of
restraint, of the rational, which is essential to any organized construction
and which accounts for the “noble simkplicty and serene grandeur” of Greek art,
as Lessing calls it. Without this very
moment of the Apollonian spirit, how could the Greek art of scupture,
architecture, poetry, and the drama be possible? “Dream” means “ideal” for the Greeks. As Goethe observes, “Of all peoples the Greek
have dreamt the dream of life best.”[101]And
“ideal” is derived from “idoV” or “ideia” meaning thereby “form” or ‘shaping
pattern.” It represents the formative
tendency in all arts, andit is just virtue of such a tendency that the states
of intoxication, “diffused and disorganized” (apparently so), are integrated
into a structural whole. Interpretations
of the greatness of Greek art hitherto made, from Lessing to Wincklemann and
Goethe, are all onesided until Nietzsche, who has suggested for the first time
a far more balanced view by calling our attention to the Dionysian aspect as
the motivating force for artistic creation.
The Greeks are passionate, active, adventurous, “to do their business is
their only holiday.” They were “parents
of rationalism and of emotional worship.”
In this sense, they are “the epitome of human nature.”[102]
The Apollonian and the Dionysian spirits
are just symbols for two apparently antagonistic tendencies in human nature;
the rational and the emotional. Nietzsche admits,
“This antagonism of the Dionysian and of
the Apollonian in the Greek soul is one of the great riddles which made me feel
drawn to the essence of Hellenism. At
bottom, I troubled about nothing save the solution of the question, why
precisely Greek Apollonianism should have been forced to grow out of a
Dionysian soil? The Dionysian Greek had
need of being Apollonian: that is to say, in oder to break his will to the
titanic, to the complex, to the uncertain, to the horrible by a will to
measure, to simplicity, and to submission to rule and concept.”
Finally, he
discovers the secret of the greatness of Hellenism lies precisely in the interfusion, interpenetration, and
perfect blending, of these two apparently antagonistic tendencies, upon which
depends the production of great art just as upon the duality of sex depends the
production of humankind.
Cassirer charges this view by labelling the
Apollonian and Dionysian elements as “amorphous”-- incapable of being integrated
into a structural whol;e. Yet he gives
no further explanation as to why they must be so. Such a charge is far from being fair or well
grounded. Has he bypassed the suggestive
and illustrative metaphor of the “duality of sex” as Nietzsche gives? Moreover, we have good reason to believe that
his Freedom and Form parallel Nietzsche’s symbolic expression of the Dionysian
and the Apollonian, which may be regarded as Cassirer’s Freedom and Form
dramatized. “These two different
states,” as he mentions, are not sufficient ground their being
“amorphous>‘ Otherwise, all the so-called dialectical interplay or
synthetic unity would have broken down.
No more can his Freedom and Form be integrated into a structural whole
than Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian !
Where is the use of the principle of functional unity, then?
In fact, Cassirer does not need to have
criticized so much and so many of the other positons; he could have his own
position art as symbolic forms well defended and well presented in a perfectly
coherent and consistent manner without over-criticism. Many of the insights discussed above, I am
convinced, could be incoporated into his own system rather than excluded from
it. For instances, Aristotle on plot as
the principle of organization and construction; Tolstoy on the purpose of art
as improvement and perfection of humankind; Santayana on objectification of the
feature of beauty and the ground of communicability fo aesthetic experience;
Bergson on intuition as creative and spontaneous in character; and Nietzsche on
union of the emotional and the rational (symbolized by the Dionysian and the
Apollonian), etc. Though a jade work
does not lose all its intrinsic value despite some minor flaw, blemish, or tiny
spots, the case study of Cassirer in relation to such figure listed above
serves as a teaching lesson for us all: a lesson on the importance of “Never
sacrifice insights to consistency,” or what amounts to the same, “Never commit
the fallacy of the over-shots.”
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