and empiricism.

XVIII

ÆSTHETIC PSYCHOLOGISM AND OTHER

RECENT TENDENCIES

Neo-criticism THE neo-critical or neo-Kantian movement was powerless to make headway against hedonistic, psychological and moralistic views of the æsthetic fact, although it made every effort to save the concept of spirit from the invading rush of naturalism and materialism.1 Kant bequeathed to neo-criticism his own failure to understand creative imagination, and the neo-Kantians do not seem to have had the faintest notion of any form of cognition other than the intellectual.

Kirchmann.

Amongst German philosophers of any renown who clung to æsthetic sensationalism and psychologism was Kirchmann, promoter of a so-called realism, and author of Esthetic on a Realistic Basis (1868).2 In his doctrine the æsthetic fact is an image (Bild) of a real; an animated (seelenvolles) image, purified and strengthened, that is, idealized, and divided into the image of pleasure, which is the beautiful, and that of pain, which is the ugly. Beauty admits of a threefold series of varieties or modifications, being determined according to the content as sublime, comic, tragic, etc.; according to the image, as beauty of nature or of art; and according to the idealization as idealistic or naturalistic, formal or spiritual,

1 A. F. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, u. Kritik seiner Bedeutung i. d. Gegenwart, 1866.

2

1868.

J. F. v. Kirchmann, Asthetik auf realistischer Grundlage, Berlin,

symbolical or classical. Not having grasped the nature of æsthetic objectification, Kirchmann takes the trouble to draw up a new psychological category of ideal or apparent feelings, arising from artistic images and being attenuations of the feelings of real life.1

To the evolution or involution of the Herbartians into Metaphysic physiologists of aesthetic pleasure corresponds a similar translated into Psychology. evolution or involution of the idealists into adherents of Vischer. psychologism. The first place must be given to the veteran Theodor Vischer, who in a criticism of his own work pronounced Esthetic to be "the union of mimics and harmonics" (vereinte Mimik und Harmonik), and Beauty the "harmony of the universe," never actually realized because realized only at infinity, so that when we think to seize it in the Beautiful, we are under an illusion a transcendent illusion, which is the very essence of the æsthetic fact.2 His son Robert Vischer coined the word Einfühlung to express the life with which man endows natural objects by means of the æsthetic process. Volkelt, when treating of the Symbol and joining symbolism to pantheism, opposed associationism and favoured a natural teleology immanent in Beauty. The Herbartian Siebeck (1875) abandoned the formalistic theory and tried Siebeck. to explain the fact of beauty by the concept of the appearance of personality. He distinguishes between objects which please by their content alone (sensuous pleasures), those which please by form alone (moral facts), and those which please by the connexion of content with form (organic and æsthetic facts). In organic facts the form is not outside the content, but is the expression of the reciprocal action and conjunction of the constitutive elements whereas in æsthetic facts the form is outside the content, and as it were its mere surface; not a means to the end, but an end in itself. Esthetic intuition is a 1 Asth. auf real. Grund. vol. i. pp. 54-57; see above, pp. 80-81.

2 Kritische Gänge, vol. v. pp. 25-26, 131.

3 R. Vischer, Über das optische Formgefühl, Leipzig, 1873. Der Symbol-Begriff in der neuesten Asth., Jena, 1876.

Das Wesen d. ästh. Anschauung, Psychologische Untersuchungen z. Theorie d. Schönen u. d. Kunst, Berlin, 1875.

M. Diez.

relation between the sensible and the spiritual, matter and spirit, and is thus form regarded as the appearance of personality. Esthetic pleasure arises from the spirit's consciousness of discovering itself in the sensible. Siebeck borrows the theory of modifications of the beautiful from the metaphysical idealists, who held that only in such modifications can beauty be found in the concrete, just as humanity can only exist as a man of determinate race and nationality. The sublime is that species of beauty wherein the formal moment of circumscription is lost, and is therefore the unlimited, which is a kind of extensive or intensive infinity; the tragic arises when the harmony is not given but is the result of conflict and development; the comic is a relation of the small to the great; and so

These traces of idealism, together with his firm hold on the Kantian and Herbartian absoluteness of the judgement of taste, make it impossible to regard Siebeck's Esthetic as purely psychological and empirical and wholly devoid of philosophical elements. It is the same with Diez, who, in his Theory of Feeling as Foundation of Esthetic (1892),1 tries to explain the artistic activity as a return to the ideal of feeling (Ideal des fühlenden Geistes), parallel with science (ideal of thought), morality (ideal of will) and religion (ideal of personality). But whatever is this so-called feeling? is it the empirical feeling of the psychologists, irreducible to an ideal, or the mystic faculty of communication and conjunction with the Infinite and the Absolute? the absurd "pleasure-value" of Fechner, or the "judgement" of Kant? One is inclined to say that these writers, and others like them, still under the influence of metaphysical views, lack the courage of their opinions they feel themselves to be in an atmosphere of hostility and speak under reservations or compromises. The psychologist Jodl asserts the existence of elementary æsthetic feelings, as discovered by Herbart, and defines them as "immediate excitations not resting upon associative or reproductive activity or on the fancy," although

1 Max Diez, Theorie des Gefühls z. Begründung d. Ästhetik, Stuttgart,

"in ultimate analysis they must be reduced to the same principles.'

"1

The purely psychological and associationistic tendency Psychological becomes clearly defined in Professor Teodor Lipps and tendency. Teodor Lipps. his school. Lipps criticizes and rejects a whole series of æsthetic theories: (a) of play; (b) of pleasure; (c) of art as recognition of real life, even if displeasing; (d) of emotion and passional excitation; (e) syncretism, attributing to art beside the primary purpose of play and pleasure the further ends of recognition of life, in its reality, revelation of individuality, commotion, freedom from a weight, or free play of the imagination. His theory differs little at bottom from that of Jouffroy, for in his thesis he assumes artistic beauty to be the sympathetic. "The object of sympathy is our objectified ego, transposed into others and therefore discovered in them. We feel ourselves in others and we feel others in ourselves. In others, or by means of them, we feel ourselves happy, free, enlarged, elevated, or the contrary of all these. The aesthetic feeling of sympathy is not a mere mode of æsthetic enjoyment, it is that enjoyment itself. All æsthetic enjoyment is founded, in the last analysis, singly and wholly upon sympathy; even that caused by geometrical, architectonic, tectonic, ceramic, etc., lines and forms." Whenever in a work of art we find a personality (not a defect of the man, but something positively human) which harmonizes with and awakes an echo in the possibilities and tendencies of our own life and vital activities: whenever we find positive, objective humanity, pure and free from all real interests lying outside the work of art, as art only can reproduce it and æsthetic contemplation alone can demand; the harmony, the resonance, fills us with joy. The value of personality is ethical value outside it there is no possibility or determination of ethical character. All artistic and in general æsthetic enjoyment is, therefore, the enjoyment of something which has ethical value (eines ethische

1 Friedr. Jodl, Lehrb. der Psychologie, Stuttgart, 1896, § 53, PP. 404414.

K. Groos.

Werthvollen); not as element of a complex, but as object of æsthetic intuition.1

3

The æsthetic fact is thus deprived of all its own value and allowed merely a reflexion from the value of morality. Without lingering over Lipps's pupils (such as Stern and others 2) and writers of similar tendency (such as Biese, with his theory of anthropomorphism and universal metaphor; or Konrad Lange, who propounds a thesis that art is conscious self-deception), we will call attention to Professor Karl Groos (1892), who comes within measurable distance of the concept of æsthetic activity as a theoretic value.5 Between the two poles of consciousness, sensibility and intellect, are several intermediate grades, amongst which lies intuition or fancy, whose product, the image or appearance (Schein), is midway between sensation and concept. The image is full like sensation, but regulated like the concept; it has neither the inexhaustible richness of the former, or the barren nudity of the latter. Of the nature of image or appearance is the aesthetic fact; which is distinguished from the simple, ordinary image not by its quality, but by its intensity alone the æsthetic image is merely a simple image occupying the summit of consciousness. Representations pass through consciousness like a crowd of people hurrying over a bridge, each bent on his own business; but when a passer-by halts on the bridge and looks at the scene, then is it holiday, then arises the æsthetic fact. This is therefore not passivity but activity; according to the formula adopted by Groos it is internal imitation (innere Nachahnung). It may be objected against the theory

1 Komik und Humor, eine psychol. ästhet. Untersuch., HamburgLeipzig, pp. 223-227.

2 Paul Stern, Einfühling u. Association i. d. neueren Asth., 1898, in Beiträge z. Asth., ed. Lipps and R. M. Werner (Hamburg-Leipzig). 3 Alfr. Biese, Das Associationsprincip u. d. Anthropomorphismus i. d. Asth., 1890; Die Philosophie des Metaphorischen, Hamburg-Leipzig, 1893.

Konrad Lange, Die bewusste Selbsttäuschung als Kern des künstlerischen Genusses, Leipzig, 1895.

Karl Groos, Einleitung i. d. Ästhetik, Giessen, 1892.

• Op. cit. pp. 6-46, 83-100.