probation ("es gefällt!"). And while the pleasant and the unpleasant "in the progress of culture gradually become transient and unimportant, Beauty stands out more and more as something permanent and possessed of undeniable value."1 The judgment of taste is universal, eternal, immutable: "the complete representation (vollendete Vorstellung) of the same relations is always followed by the same judgment; just as the same cause always produces the same effect. This happens at all times and in all circumstances, conditions and complications, which gives to the particularity of certain cases the appearance of a universal rule. Granted that the elements of a relation are universal concepts, it is plain that although in judging we think only of the content of these concepts, the judgment must have a sphere as large as that common to the two concepts. Herbart considers æsthetic judgements as a general class comprising ethical judgements as a subdivision: “amongst other beauties is to be distinguished morality, as a thing not only of value in itself but as actually determining the unconditioned value of persons"; within morality in the narrowest sense is distinguished in turn justice.3 The five ethical ideas guiding moral life (internal liberty, perfection, benevolence, equity and justice) are five æsthetic ideas or rather æsthetic concepts applied to relations of will. content and Herbart looks on art as a complex fact, the combina- Art as sum of tion of an extra-æsthetic element, content, which may form. have logical or psychological or any other kind of value, and a purely æsthetic element, form, which is an application of the fundamental æsthetic concepts. Man looks for that which is diverting, instructive, moving, majestic, ridiculous; and “all these are mingled with the beautiful in order to procure favour and interest for the work. The beautiful thus assumes various complexions, and becomes graceful, magnificent, tragic, or comic; it can 1 Einleitung in die Philosophie, pp. 125-128. 2 Allgemeine praktische Philosophie, in Werke, viii. p. 25. Herbart and Kantian thought. become all these because the æsthetic judgement, in itself calmly serene, tolerates the company of the most diverse excitations of the soul which are no part of itself." 1 But all these things have nothing to do with beauty. In order to discover the objectively beautiful or ugly, one must make abstraction from every predicate concerning the content. "In order to recognize the objectively beautiful or ugly in poetry, one must show the difference between this and that thought, and the discussion will concern itself with thoughts; to recognize it in sculpture, one must show the difference between this and that outline, and the discussion will turn upon outlines; to recognize it in music, one should show the difference between this and that tone, and the discussion will turn upon tones. Now, such predicates as ‘magnificent, charming, graceful' and so forth contain nothing whatever about tones, outlines or thoughts, and therefore tell us nothing about the objectively beautiful in poetry, sculpture, or music; indeed they rather lead us to believe in the existence of an objective beauty to which thought, outline, or tone are equally accidental, which may be approached by receiving impressions from poetry, sculpture, music and so forth, obliterating the object and giving oneself up to the pure emotion of mind." 2 Very different is the aesthetic judgement, the "cold judgement of the connoisseur" who considers exclusively form, i.e. objectively pleasant formal relations. This abstraction from the content in order to contemplate pure form is the catharsis produced by art. Content is transitory, relative, subject to moral law and liable to moral judgement : form is permanent, absolute, free.3 Concrete art may be the sum of two or more values; but the æsthetic fact is form alone. The reader who goes behind appearances and discounts diversities of terminology will not fail to observe the close similarity of the aesthetic doctrine of Herbart to that of Kant. In Herbart we again find the distinction between free and adherent beauty, and between form and the 1 Einleitung, p. 162. 2 Op. cit. pp. 129-130. 3 Op. cit. p. 163. sensuous stimulus (Reiz) attached to form: we find an affirmation of the existence of pure beauty, the object of necessary and universal, but not discursive, judgements; lastly, we find a certain connexion between beauty and morality, between Esthetic and Ethics. In these matters Herbart is perhaps the most faithful follower and propagator of the thought of Kant, whose doctrine contains the germ of his own. In one passage he describes himself as “a Kantian, but of the year 1828"; and he is quite right, even in pointing out the exact difference in date. Amidst the errors and uncertainties of his æsthetic thought, Kant is rich in suggestion and scatters fertile seed; he belongs to a period when philosophy was still young and impressionable. Herbart, coming later, is dry and one-sided; he takes whatever is false in Kant's doctrine and hardens it into a system. If they had done little else, the Romanticists and idealists had at least united the theory of beauty to that of art, and destroyed the rhetorical and mechanical view; and they had brought into relief (frequently exaggerating, doubtless) various important characteristics of artistic activity. Herbart restates the mechanical view, restores the duality, and presents a capricious, narrow, barren mysticism, devoid of all breath of artistic feeling. Esthetic of content and Esthetic of form: meaning of the contrast. XI FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER We have now reached a point when we are able to give ourselves an exact account of the signification and importance of the celebrated war waged for over a century in Germany between the Esthetic of content (Gehaltsästhetik) and the Esthetic of form (Formästhetik); a war which gave birth to vast works on the history of Esthetic undertaken from one or other point of view, and sprang from Herbart's opposition to the idealism of Schelling, Hegel, and their contemporaries and followers. "Form" and "Content" are among the most equivocal words in the whole philosophical vocabulary, particularly in Esthetic; sometimes, indeed, what one calls form, others call content. The Herbartians were specially given to quoting in their own defence Schiller's dictum, that the secret of art consists in "cancelling content by form." But what is there in common between Schiller's concept of "form," which placed the æsthetic activity side by side with the moral and intellectual, and Herbart's form," which does not penetrate or enliven, but clothes and adorns a content? Hegel, on the other hand, often gives the name "form" to what Schiller would call matter" (Stoff), that is, the sensible matter which it is the business of spiritual energy to dominate. Hegel's "content" is the idea, the metaphysical truth, the constituent element of beauty: Herbart's "content" is the emotional and intellectual element which falls outside beauty. The Esthetic of "form" in Italy is an æsthetic of expressive activity; the form is neither a clothing nor a metaphysical idea nor sensible matter, but a representative or imaginative faculty with the power of framing impressions; yet there have been attempts to confute this Italian æsthetic formalism with the same arguments that are used against German æsthetic formalism, a totally different thing in every respect. And so forth. Having given a plain account of the thoughts of the post-Kantian æstheticians, we shall be able to appreciate their opponents without seeking light from their obscure terminology or allowing ourselves to be misled by the banners they wave. The antithesis between the Esthetic of content and that of form, the Esthetic of idealism and that of realism, the Esthetic of Schelling, Solger, Hegel and Schopenhauer and that of Herbart, will appear in its true light, as the family quarrel between two conceptions of art united by a common mysticism, although one is destined almost to meet with truth during its long journey, while the other wanders ever further away. The first half of the nineteenth century was for Germany a period of many fine-sounding philosophical formulæ subjectivism, objectivism, subjective - objectivism; abstract, concrete, abstract-concrete; idealism, realism, idealism - realism; between pantheism and theism Krause inserted his pan-en-theism. In the midst of this uproar, in which the second-rate men shouted down the first-rate and made good their claim to their only true property, namely words, it is not surprising that a few modest clear thinkers, philosophers who preferred to think about realities, should have the worst of it and remain unheard and unnoticed, lost among the roaring crowd or labelled with a false ticket. This, at least, seems to have been the lot of Friedrich Schleier- Friedrich macher, whose æsthetic doctrine is amongst the least macher. known although it is perhaps the most noteworthy of the day. Schleier Schleiermacher delivered his first lectures on Esthetic Wrong judgeat Berlin University in 1819, and from that date he ments concern began to study the subject seriously with a view to writing ing him. |