Minor æstheticians in the metaphysical school. Krause, XIII MINOR GERMAN ESTHETICIANS WHEN we turn from the pages of methodical and serious thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Humboldt and Steinthal, we are filled with distaste by the books written in enormous quantities during the first half of the nineteenth century by disciples of Schelling and Hegel. We are fatigued and almost disgusted as we pass from this illuminating and scientific study to something which oscillates between vapid fancies and charlatanism; between the vanity of empty formulæ and the attempt, not always free from dishonesty, to employ them in order to amaze and overwhelm the reader or student. Why should we encumber a general History of Esthetic (which ought, certainly, to take account of aberrations from the truth, but only in so far as they indicate the general trend of contemporary thought) with the theories of such men as Krause, Trahndorff, Weisse, Deutinger, Oersted, Zeising, Eckardt and the crowd of manipulators of manuals and systems? The only one who obtained a hearing outside his native Germany was Krause, who was imported into Spain; we are justified, therefore, in leaving them to the memory or forgetfulness of their compatriots. For Krause,1 the humanitarian, the freethinker, the theosophist, everything is organism, everything is beauty; beauty is organism, and organism is beauty Essence, that is to say God, is one, free and entire; one, free and entire is Beauty. There is but 1 Abriss der Ästhetik, post. 1837; Vorlesung üb. Ästh. (1828–1829), post. 1882. one artist, God; but one art, the divine. The beauty of finite things is the Divinity, or rather the likeness of Divinity manifested in the finite. Beauty brings into play reason, intellect and imagination in a mode conforming to their laws, and awakens disinterested pleasure and inclination in the soul. Trahndorff,1 describing the various degrees by which the individual seeks to grasp the essence or form of the universe (the degrees of feeling, intuition, reflexion and presentiment), and noting the insufficiency of simple theoretical knowledge till supplemented by the Will, the Will which is power (Können), in its three degrees of Aspiration, Faith and Love, places the Beautiful in the highest grade, in Love: it would seem, therefore, that Beauty is Love which comprehends itself. Christian Weisse 2 attempted, like Trahndorff, to reconcile the God of Christianity with the Hegelian philosophy in his estimation the aesthetic Idea is superior to the logical, and leads to religion, to God; the idea of beauty, existing outside the sensible universe, is the reality of the concept of beauty, and, as the idea of divinity is absolute Love, so must that of Beauty be found truly in Love. The same reconciliation was attempted by the Catholic theologian Deutinger; 3 beauty, for him, is born of power (Können), an activity parallel with those of the knowledge of truth and the doing of good but (differing in this from knowledge, which is receptive) realizing itself in an outward movement from within, mastering the world of matter and imprinting upon it the seal of personality. An internal ideal intuition, the Idea: an external shapable matter : the power of interpenetrating internal with external, invisible with visible, ideal with real: such is Beauty. Oersted (the celebrated Danish naturalist whose works 1 Ästhetik, Berlin, 1827. 2 Asthetik, Leipzig, 1830; System di Ästh., lectures, post. Leipzig, 1872. • Kunstlehre, Ratisbon, 1845-1846 (Grundlinien einer positiven Philosophie, vols. iv. v.). Der Geist in der Natur, 1850-1851; Neue Beiträge z. d. Geist i. d. Natur, post. 1855. were translated into German and gained him a considerable reputation in Germany) defines beauty as the objective Idea in the moment of subjective contemplation the Idea expressed in things in so far as it reveals itself to intuition. Zeising1 turned his attention partly to exploration of the mysteries of the golden section, and partly to speculations on Beauty, which he considered as one of the three forms of the Idea ; first, the Idea which expresses itself in object and subject; secondly, the Idea as intuition; and thirdly, the Absolute which appears in the world and is conceived intuitively by the spirit. Eckardt,2 intent on creating a theistic Esthetic which should avoid the one-sided transcendence of deism on the one hand and the one-sided immanence of pantheism on the other, maintained that its principles must be sought not in the feelings of the contemplator, not in works of art, not in the idea of the beautiful, not in the concept of art, but in the creative spirit of the artist, the original fount of beauty; and since a creative artist cannot be conceived except as derived from the highest creative genius which is God, Eckardt invokes aid from a psychology of God (eine Psychologie des Weltkünstlers). If quantity is as important as quality, we must devote Theodor some space to Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the bulkiest of all German æstheticians, indeed the German æsthetician par excellence: after publishing a book on The Sublime and the Comic, a contribution to the Philosophy of the Beautiful, in 1837, he produced four huge tomes on Esthetic as Science of the Beautiful between 1846 and 1857, where, in hundreds of paragraphs and long observations and sub-observations, is massed a stupendous amount of æsthetic material, of matter foreign to Esthetic, and of subjects taken haphazard from the whole thinkable Fried. Vischer. 1 Asthetische Forschungen, Frankfurt a. M. 1855. Die theistische Begründung d. Asthetik im Gegensatz z. d. pantheistichen, Jena, 1857; same author, Vorschule d. Asth., Karlsruhe, 1864-1865. Ub. d. Erhabene u. Komische, Stuttgart, 1837. 4 Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft d. Schönen, Reutlingen, Leipzig and Stuttgart, 1846-1857, 3 parts in 4 vols. universe. Vischer's work is divided into three parts: a Metaphysic of the Beautiful, which investigates the concept of Beauty in itself, no matter where and how it is realized a treatise on concrete Beauty, which inquires into the two one-sided modes of realization, Beauty of nature and Beauty of imagination, one lacking subjective, the other lacking objective, existence lastly, a theory of the arts, which studies the synthesis in art of the two artistic moments, the physical and psychical, the objective and subjective. It is easy to sum up Vischer's concept of æsthetic activity; it is Hegel's concept, debased. For Vischer, Beauty belongs neither to the theoretical nor to the practical activity, but is placed in a serene sphere, superior to these antitheses; that is to say in the sphere of absolute Spirit, in company with Religion and Philosophy; but, in contradistinction to Hegel, Vischer assigns the first place in this sphere to Religion, the second to Art, and the third to Philosophy. Much ingenuity was devoted in those days to moving these words about like pieces on a chess-board; it has been observed that of the six possible combinations of the three terms Art, Religion and Philosophy, four were actually adopted: by Schelling, P.R.A.; by Hegel, A.R.P.; by Weisse, P.A.R.; and by Vischer, R.A.P.2 But Vischer himself 3 states that Wirth, author of a System of Ethics, opted for the fifth combination, R.P.A., which leaves us but the sixth, A.P.R., unclaimed, unless (as is not improbable) some unrecognized genius seized upon it and made it the text of his system. Beauty, therefore, as the second form of the absolute Spirit, is the realization of the Idea, not as abstract concept but as union of concept and reality; and the Idea determines itself as species (Gattung), and every idea of a species, even on the lowest degree, is beautiful as being an integral part in the totality of Ideas; although the higher the degree of the idea the 1 Asth. introd. §§ 2-5. 2 Hartmann, Dtsch. Asth. s. Kant, p. 217, note. 3 Asth. introd. § 5. System der spekulativen Ethik, Heilbronn, 1841-1842. Ꮓ Other greater is its beauty.1 Highest of all degrees is that of human personality: "in this spiritual world the Idea attains its true significance; the name of idea is given to the great moral motive powers to which the concept of species may also be applied in the sense that they stand to their restricted spheres in the same relation in which the genus stands to its species and individuals." At the head of all is the Idea of morality: "the world of moral and autonomous ends is destined to furnish the most important, the most worthy content of the Beautiful"; with the warning, however, that Beauty, in actualizing this world through intuition, excludes art having a moral tendency. So Vischer proceeds now to degrade Hegel's Idea to the simple class-concept, now to couple it with the idea of the Good; now, in accord with the teaching of his master, to make it different from, yet superior to, intellect and morality. From the first, the Herbartian formalism was little tendencies. studied and less followed: two writers, Griepenkerl in 1827 and Bobrik in 1834, made some attempt to develop and apply the cursory notes with which Herbart contented himself.3 Schleiermacher's lectures, even before their appearance in book form, had served as basis for a series of elegant dissertations by Erich Ritter (1840) * (better known as a historian of philosophy); his work is of little value, for instead of dwelling on the important points of the master's doctrine Ritter brings into prominence secondary matters relating to sociability and the æsthetic life. A penetrating critic of German Esthetic from Baumgarten to the post-Kantian school was Wilhelm Theodor Danzel, who lived about this time and very properly rebelled against the claim to find "thought" in works of art: "Artistic thought : "Artistic thought: " he writes; unhappy phrase, which helped to condemn an entire epoch to the Sisyphean labour of trying to reduce art to intel 1 Asth. §§ 15-17. 2 Op. cit. §§ 19-24. 3 Griepenkerl, Lehrb. d. Asth., Brunswick, 1827. Verträge üb. Asth., Zürich, 1834. Bobrik, Freie Ub. d. Principien d. Asth., Kiel, 1840. |