Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin (20/4/2020)
caoimhghin@yahoo.com www.gaelart.net
"Some Eighteenth century people believed
that reason and science are good and therefore things would
just go on improving forever. This optimism characterized a
period that came to be known as the Age of Enlightenment. At
the end of this period, mass movements in America and
France, and the Industrial Revolution in England, changed
the world forever, making people realize that society in the
19th Century was the first that could conceive itself to be
radically different from the past.
This led to a sense of
disillusionment and alienation began to spread, and the
Romanticist movement rose up as a backlash. Romanticists
believed that the advances made by The Enlightenment were
creating an oppressive, and conformist society - and that
science and rationality could never hope to truly understand
the world and the human personality and that the modern
world's progress came at the price of cherished values from
the distant past which was slowly dying out.
The ideologies that sprang forth from the
Enlightenment and Romanticism are essentially the most
drastically important ideologies that have been created in
modern history. From them has developed just about every
political, social, economic, industrial, and cultural
movement that exists today. The results from them are every
struggle we view today as commonplace. Capitalism vs.
Socialism, bourgeoisie vs. middle class, white collar vs.
Blue collar, city life vs. Country life, etc. Both of these
movements have and will continue to impact the way we
perceive society, nature, and God for the rest of time.
Once the renaissance era, which produced a plethora of
marvelous (and often religiously motivated) structures,
paintings, and contraptions, had ended, the next movement to
spring up in Western civilization was the Enlightenment or
the Age of Reason. The leaders of the Enlightenment, which
consisted of intellectuals and artists, sought to use logic
and rationality to solve human problems. They viewed
religion and its representatives as nothing more than snake
oil salesman who were attempting to seize wealth and power
by spreading ignorance and superstition throughout the
world, and they made an effort to combat these so-called
forces of ignorance with the mind and with reason. It was
highly critical of monarchies and empire, and it helped
develop the founding ideas of democracy. The enlightenment
and its workers would plant the seeds of political
revolution throughout the world, particularly in colonial
America. The enlightenment planted the ideas of
independence, order, and accountability in the minds of many
civilians.
One of the fathers of the Enlightenment, Francis Bacon,
developed the idea of implementing rationality in science.
He practically invented the modern scientific method. From
his teachings and ideas would come Isaac Newton, Galileo
Galilei, and many other brilliant scientists and thinkers.
The Enlightenment would ring in the founding principles of
secularism and suggested the very new and controversial idea
the man didn’t need God, that God was not interventional, or
even that there was no God. The Enlightenment sought to
bring about order, which had become a foreign concept in the
reigns of monarchs. Philosophers and political thinkers like
John Locke attacked monarchy and suggested that a government
should be ruled by its people.
Romanticism started up around the mid-1700s and “ended”
around 100 years later. Romanticism was a focus on the
hearts and minds of humans, and appealed to their human
nature, their passions, love, and other emotional areas. It
did not believe in a God, nor did it believe that God
believed in man, but it sought to bring unity to people and
nature. Romanticism changed the way the things such as love,
nature, children, innocence, sex, and government are viewed.
It attempted to bring about an independence from government,
and separate people from the love of money and rather focus
on matters of the heart. It encouraged people to go on
adventures, to fall in love, and to pursue dreams and goals.
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/enlightenment-romanticism
Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
By (author) Michael Lowy , By (author) Robert Sayre ,
Translated by Catherine Porter (Duke University Press,North
Carolina, United States 2002]
The Age of Enlightenment: The 18th Century Philosophers,
selected, with Introduction and Commentary
(The Mentor Philosophers)
by Isaiah Berlin
A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the
Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
by Jonathan Israel (Author)
Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity 1650-1750
by Jonathan I. Israel (Author)
Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human
Rights 1750-1790
by Jonathan Israel (Author)
Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the
Emancipation of Man 1670-1752
by Jonathan I. Israel (Author)
The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters
by Anthony Pagden
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism,
and Progress
by Steven Pinker
The Enlightenment: An evaluation of its assumptions,
attitudes and values
by Norman Hampson
Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Towards a Politics of Radical
Engagement
by Stephen Eric Bronner
The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral
Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today
by Michael L Frazer
A Passion for Justice: Emotions and the Origins of the
Social Contract
by Robert C Solomon
Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab
Conquest to Tamerlane
by S Frederick Starr
The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
by John Hale
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered
the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes (Author) Publisher: HarperPress; first
edition (2009)
The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots' Invention of the
Modern World
by Arthur Herman (Author) Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd; New
Ed edition (2003)
Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
by Roy Porter (Author) Publisher: Penguin; New Ed edition
(2001)(Allen Lane History)
The Great Debate
By Yuval Levin
------------------------------------------------
ANALYSIS OF ROMANTICISM
Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
By (author) Michael Lowy , By (author) Robert Sayre ,
Translated by Catherine Porter (Duke University Press,North
Carolina, United States 2002]
The Romantic Agony (Oxford Paperbacks)
by Mario Praz, Frank Kermode, et al.
Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology
by Max Blechman
Romanticism: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies)
by Duncan Wu
The Roots Of Romanticism
by Isaiah Berlin
The Romantic Revolution
by Tim Blanning
The Romantic School and Other Essays (German Library S.)
by Heinrich Heine
Romanticism
by Lilian R Furst
Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and
its Background 1760-1830
by Marilyn Butler
-------------------------------------------
ART
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (Penguin Classics)
by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume II
by G. W. F. Hegel (Author)
The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic Versus Classic Art
by Sir Kenneth Clark, Illustrated, 1973
Neo-Classicism
by Hugh Honour
Early Renaissance
by Michael Levey
Realism
by Linda Nochlin
Transformations in Late Eighteenthe Century Art
by Robert Rosenblum
Naturalism
by Lilian R Furst and Perter N Skrine
Realism
by Damian Grant
Realism in 20th Century Painting
by Brendan Prendeville
Twenty-first century depictions of love and marriage are
shaped by a set of Romantic myths and misconceptions and
with his trademark warmth and wit, Alain de Botton explores
the complex landscape of a modern relationship, presenting a
realistic case study for marriage and examining what it
might mean to love, to be loved - and to stay in love.
Alain de Botton is an internationally renowned philosopher,
television presenter and author of international best
sellers Essays in Love, How Proust Can Change Your Life and
Status Anxiety. In this talk, he discusses his stunning new
novel The Course of Love, a philosophical novel about modern
relationships.
QUOTES:
When Classicism met Romanticism:
the Salon of 1824.
The Vow of Louis XIII by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres hung
in same room as The Massacre at Chios by Delacroix.
Ingres The Vow of Louis XIII is an 1824 painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres, now in Montauban Cathedral. It shows a vow to the
Virgin Mary by Louis XIII of France. It is an oil painting
on canvas measuring 421 x 262 cm.
It was commissioned by France's Ministry of Interior in
August 1820 for the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Montauban.
The subject of the painting was to be Louis XIII's vow in
1638 to consecrate his kingdom to the Virgin in Her
Assumption. When Ingres accepted the commission, he was
living in Florence. Although he had experienced success as a
portrait painter, his ambition was to establish a reputation
in the more prestigious genre of history painting. He went
to work with his usual diligence, and spent four years
bringing the large canvas to completion.
He travelled to Paris with it in October 1824. It was a
critical success at that year's Salon and later established
Ingres' reputation as the main representative of classicism,
in opposition to the romanticism represented at the same
Salon by The Massacre at Chios by Delacroix.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vow_of_Louis_XIII
When Classicism met Romanticism: the Salon of 1824.
The Vow of Louis XIII by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres hung
in same room as The Massacre at Chios by Delacroix.
Delacroix On 15 September 1821, Delacroix wrote to his friend
Raymond Soulier that he wanted to make a reputation for
himself by painting a scene from the war between the
Ottomans and the Greeks, and have this painting displayed at
the Salon. At this time Delacroix was not famous, and had
yet to paint a canvas that was to be hung for public
display. In the event, he decided to paint his Dante and
Virgil in Hell, but even as this painting was revealed to
the public in April 1822, the atrocities at Chios were being
meted out in full force. In May 1823, Delacroix committed to
paint a picture about the massacre.
When the Salon of 1824 opened on 25 August—an unusually late
date for this institution—Delacroix's picture was shown
there as exhibit no. 450 and entitled Scènes des massacres
de Scio; familles grecques attendent la mort ou l'esclavage,
etc. (English:Scenes of massacres at Chios; Greek families
awaiting death or slavery, etc..) The painting was hung in
the same room that housed Ingres’ The Vow of Louis XIII.
This display of two works exemplifying such different
approaches to the expression of form marked the beginning of
the public rivalry between the two artists. Delacroix
thought this was the moment the academy began to regard him
as an "object of antipathy".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Massacre_at_Chios
Borrell
the Romanticism genre of art, was not the way art should be
taught...
"Borrell was a great
believer in realism in art and felt that the Romanticism
genre of art, which was the cornerstone of art education at
the Llotja in Barcelona, was not the way art should be
taught. He set up his own academy of drawing and painting,
the Sociedad de Bellas Artes, in which he sort to introduce
his students to the world of realism in art and sought to
influence his students with the works of the contemporary
Catalan painters such as Romà Ribera, Ricard Canals and the
muralist, Josep Maria Sert. He encouraged his students to
leave the confines of the school and paint en plein air.
Many believe that Borrell’s
depiction mirrored his own desperate attempt to free
himself from the confines of official academic training
methods of art and the art critics of his day who championed
the Romantic art of the time, with all its heroic figures
and who were highly critical of art which depicted the not
so pleasant “real” world. The title of the work is
Escape from Criticism and this probably indicative of the
struggle young artists had to go through with the constant
bombardment of criticism from so-called knowledgeable art
critics."
the tritone - an interval so dissonant that it’s earned the
nickname ‘The Devil’s Interval’ and was avoided for
centuries by composers and the pupils they taught.
What is a tritone?
A tritone is an interval made up of three tones, or six
semitones. In each diatonic scale there is only one tritone,
and it occurs between the fourth and seventh degrees of the
scale, so in a C major scale this would be between F and B.
Or in G major it would be between C and F sharp:
Did you know that not all accidentals were created at the
same time? F sharp and B flat were the first ones, and they
were invented to try and solve the problem of the tritone in
music.
The system of modes worked for every note of the scale...
until you got to B. This scale was called the Locrian mode,
and it was the only one where the fifth degree of the scale
is not a perfect fifth - it’s an augmented fourth – a
forbidden tritone!
This went against everything music appeared to stand for,
and was christened diabolus in musica – the Devil in music.
The Locrian mode was very rarely used.
John Sloboda, a professor of music psychology at the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama, explained that the tritone is particularly unnerving because the human brain is
hardwired to find harmony and symmetry in music:
“When we hear something dissonant, it gives you a little bit
of an emotional frisson, because it's strange and
unexpected. The emotional result of hearing a tritone, might
not be too different from the one experienced at the bottom
of a staircase that failed to mention it’s missing its last
step.”
The name diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") has been
applied to the interval from at least the early 18th
century, though its use is not restricted to the tritone.
That original symbolic association with the devil and its
avoidance led to Western cultural convention seeing the tritone as suggesting "evil" in music. However, stories that
singers were excommunicated or otherwise punished by the
Church for invoking this interval are likely fanciful.
Later, with the rise of the Baroque and Classical music era,
composers accepted the tritone, but used it in a specific,
controlled way—notably through the principle of the
tension-release mechanism of the tonal system.
It is only with the Romantic music and modern classical
music that composers started to use it totally freely,
without functional limitations notably in an expressive way
to exploit the "evil" connotations culturally associated
with it (e.g., Franz Liszt's use of the tritone to suggest
Hell in his Dante Sonata:
Liszt, "Après une lecture du Dante" from Années de
Pèlerinage. Listen
—or Wagner's use of timpani tuned to C and F? to convey a
brooding atmosphere at the start of the second act of the
opera Siegfried.
The term "classical music" has two meanings; the broader
meaning includes all Western art music from the Medieval era
to the 2000s, and the specific meaning refers to the art
music from the 1750s to the early 1820s—the period of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van
Beethoven. This section is about the specific meaning.
The Classical era, from about 1750 to 1820, established many
of the norms of composition, presentation, and style, and
was also when the piano became the predominant keyboard
instrument. The basic forces required for an orchestra
became somewhat standardized (although they would grow as
the potential of a wider array of instruments was developed
in the following centuries). Chamber music grew to include
ensembles with as many as 8 to 10 performers for serenades.
Opera continued to develop, with regional styles in Italy,
France, and German-speaking lands. The opera buffa, a form
of comic opera, rose in popularity. The symphony came into
its own as a musical form, and the concerto was developed as
a vehicle for displays of virtuoso playing skill. Orchestras
no longer required a harpsichord (which had been part of the
traditional continuo in the Baroque style), and were often
led by the lead violinist (now called the
concertmaster).[41]
Classical era musicians continued to use many of instruments
from the Baroque era, such as the cello, contrabass,
recorder, trombone, timpani, fortepiano (the precursor to
the modern piano) and organ. While some Baroque instruments
fell into disuse (e.g., the theorbo and rackett), many
Baroque instruments were changed into the versions that are
still in use today, such as the Baroque violin (which became
the violin), the Baroque oboe (which became the oboe) and
the Baroque trumpet, which transitioned to the regular
valved trumpet. During the Classical era, the stringed
instruments used in orchestra and chamber music such as
string quartets were standardized as the four instruments
which form the string section of the orchestra: the violin,
viola, cello, and double bass. Baroque-era stringed
instruments such as fretted, bowed viols were phased out.
Woodwinds included the basset clarinet, basset horn,
clarinette d'amour, the Classical clarinet, the chalumeau,
the flute, oboe and bassoon. Keyboard instruments included
the clavichord and the fortepiano. While the harpsichord was
still used in basso continuo accompaniment in the 1750s and
1760s, it fell out of use at the end of the century. Brass
instruments included the buccin, the ophicleide (a
replacement for the bass serpent, which was the precursor of
the tuba) and the natural horn.
Wind instruments became more refined in the Classical era.
While double-reed instruments like the oboe and bassoon
became somewhat standardized in the Baroque, the clarinet
family of single reeds was not widely used until Mozart
expanded its role in orchestral, chamber, and concerto
settings.[42]
Major composers of this period include Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Christoph
Willibald Gluck, Johann Christian Bach, Luigi Boccherini,
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Muzio Clementi, Antonio Salieri,
and Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
Romantic era
The music of the Romantic era, from roughly the first
decade of the 19th century to the early 20th century, was
characterized by increased attention to an extended melodic
line, as well as expressive and emotional elements,
paralleling romanticism in other art forms. Musical
forms began to break from the Classical era forms (even as
those were being codified), with free-form pieces like
nocturnes, fantasias, and preludes being written where
accepted ideas about the exposition and development of
themes were ignored or minimized.[43] The music became more
chromatic, dissonant, and tonally colorful, with tensions
(with respect to accepted norms of the older forms) about
key signatures increasing.[44] The art song (or Lied) came
to maturity in this era, as did the epic scales of grand
opera, ultimately transcended by Richard Wagner's Ring
cycle.[45]
In the 19th century, musical institutions emerged from the
control of wealthy patrons, as composers and musicians could
construct lives independent of the nobility. Increasing
interest in music by the growing middle classes throughout
western Europe spurred the creation of organizations for the
teaching, performance, and preservation of music. The piano,
which achieved its modern construction in this era (in part
due to industrial advances in metallurgy) became widely
popular with the middle class, whose demands for the
instrument spurred a large number of piano builders. Many
symphony orchestras date their founding to this era.[44]
Some musicians and composers were the stars of the day;
some, like Franz Liszt and Niccolò Paganini, fulfilled both
roles.[46]
European cultural ideas and institutions began to follow
colonial expansion into other parts of the world. There was
also a rise, especially toward the end of the era, of
nationalism in music (echoing, in some cases, political
sentiments of the time), as composers such as Edvard Grieg,
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Antonín Dvořák echoed
traditional music of their homelands in their
compositions.[47]
In the Romantic era, the modern piano, with a more powerful,
sustained tone and a wider range took over from the more
delicate-sounding fortepiano. In the orchestra, the existing
Classical instruments and sections were retained (string
section, woodwinds, brass, and percussion), but these
sections were typically expanded to make a fuller, bigger
sound. For example, while a Baroque orchestra may have had
two double bass players, a Romantic orchestra could have as
many as ten. "As music grew more expressive, the standard
orchestral palette just wasn't rich enough for many Romantic
composers." [48] The family of instruments used, especially
in orchestras, grew. A wider array of percussion instruments
began to appear. Brass instruments took on larger roles, as
the introduction of rotary valves made it possible for them
to play a wider range of notes. The size of the orchestra
(typically around 40 in the Classical era) grew to be over
100.[44] Gustav Mahler's 1906 Symphony No. 8, for example,
has been performed with over 150 instrumentalists and choirs
of over 400.[49] New woodwind instruments were added, such
as the contrabassoon, bass clarinet and piccolo and new
percussion instruments were added, including xylophones,
snare drums, celestas (a bell-like keyboard instrument),
bells, and triangles,[48] large orchestral harps, and even
wind machines for sound effects. Saxophones appear in some
scores from the late 19th century onwards. While appearing
only as featured solo instruments in some works, for example
Maurice Ravel's orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's
Pictures at an Exhibition and Sergei Rachmaninoff's
Symphonic Dances, the saxophone is included in other works
such as Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet Suites 1 and 2
and many other works as a member of the orchestral ensemble.
In some compositions such as Ravel's Boléro, two or more
saxophones of different sizes are used to create an entire
section like the other sections of the orchestra. The
euphonium is featured in a few late Romantic and
20th-century works, usually playing parts marked "tenor
tuba", including Gustav Holst's The Planets, and Richard
Strauss's Ein Heldenleben.
The Wagner tuba, a modified member of the horn family,
appears in Richard Wagner's cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen
and several other works by Strauss, Béla Bartók, and others;
it has a prominent role in Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7
in E Major.[50] Cornets appear in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's
ballet Swan Lake, Claude Debussy's La mer, and several
orchestral works by Hector Berlioz.[clarification needed]
Unless these instruments are played by members doubling on
another instrument (for example, a trombone player changing
to euphonium for a certain passage), orchestras will use
freelance musicians to augment their regular
rosters.[citation needed]
The Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra performs Tchaikovsky's
Fourth Symphony
Prominent composers of this era include Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky, Frédéric Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Franz
Schubert, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt,
Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, and Johann
Strauss II.
Prominent composers of the early 20th century include Igor
Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei
Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton
Webern, Alban Berg, Aram Khachaturian, George Gershwin,
Edvard Grieg, and Béla Bartók.}
In the middle of the 18th century, Europe began to move
toward a new style in architecture, literature, and the
arts, generally known as Classicism. This style sought to
emulate the ideals of Classical antiquity, especially those
of Classical Greece.[3] Classical music used formality and
emphasis on order and hierarchy, and a "clearer", "cleaner"
style that used clearer divisions between parts (notably a
clear, single melody accompanied by chords), brighter
contrasts and "tone colors" (achieved by the use of dynamic
changes and modulations to more keys). In contrast with the
richly layered music of the Baroque era, Classical music
moved towards simplicity rather than complexity. In
addition, the typical size of orchestras began to
increase,[3] giving orchestras a more powerful sound.
The remarkable development of ideas in "natural philosophy"
had already established itself in the public consciousness.
In particular, Newton's physics was taken as a paradigm:
structures should be well-founded in axioms and be both
well-articulated and orderly. This taste for structural
clarity began to affect music, which moved away from the
layered polyphony of the Baroque period toward a style known
as homophony, in which the melody is played over a
subordinate harmony.[3] This move meant that chords became a
much more prevalent feature of music, even if they
interrupted the melodic smoothness of a single part. As a
result, the tonal structure of a piece of music became more
audible.
The new style was also encouraged by changes in the economic
order and social structure. As the 18th century progressed,
the nobility became the primary patrons of instrumental
music, while public taste increasingly preferred lighter,
funny comic operas. This led to changes in the way music was
performed, the most crucial of which was the move to
standard instrumental groups and the reduction in the
importance of the continuo—the rhythmic and harmonic
groundwork of a piece of music, typically played by a
keyboard (harpsichord or organ) and usually accompanied by a
varied group of bass instruments, including cello, double
bass, bass viol, and theorbo. One way to trace the decline
of the continuo and its figured chords is to examine the
disappearance of the term obbligato, meaning a mandatory
instrumental part in a work of chamber music. In Baroque
compositions, additional instruments could be added to the
continuo group according to the group or leader's
preference; in Classical compositions, all parts were
specifically noted, though not always notated, so the term
"obbligato" became redundant. By 1800, basso continuo was
practically extinct, except for the occasional use of a pipe
organ continuo part in a religious Mass in the early 1800s.
Economic changes also had the effect of altering the balance
of availability and quality of musicians. While in the late
Baroque, a major composer would have the entire musical
resources of a town to draw on, the musical forces available
at an aristocratic hunting lodge or small court were smaller
and more fixed in their level of ability. This was a spur to
having simpler parts for ensemble musicians to play, and in
the case of a resident virtuoso group, a spur to writing
spectacular, idiomatic parts for certain instruments, as in
the case of the Mannheim orchestra, or virtuoso solo parts
for particularly skilled violinists or flautists. In
addition, the appetite by audiences for a continual supply
of new music carried over from the Baroque. This meant that
works had to be performable with, at best, one or two
rehearsals. Even after 1790 Mozart writes about "the
rehearsal", with the implication that his concerts would
have only one rehearsal.
Since there was a greater emphasis on a single melodic line,
there was greater emphasis on notating that line for
dynamics and phrasing. This contrasts with the Baroque era,
when melodies were typically written with no dynamics,
phrasing marks or ornaments, as it was assumed that the
performer would improvise these elements on the spot. In the
Classical era, it became more common for composers to
indicate where they wanted performers to play ornaments such
as trills or turns. The simplification of texture made such
instrumental detail more important, and also made the use of
characteristic rhythms, such as attention-getting opening
fanfares, the funeral march rhythm, or the minuet genre,
more important in establishing and unifying the tone of a
single movement.
The Classical period also saw the gradual development of
sonata form, a set of structural principles for music that
reconciled the Classical preference for melodic material
with harmonic development, which could be applied across
musical genres. The sonata itself continued to be the
principal form for solo and chamber music, while later in
the Classical period the string quartet became a prominent
genre. The symphony form for orchestra was created in this
period (this is popularly attributed to Joseph Haydn). The
concerto grosso (a concerto for more than one musician), a
very popular form in the Baroque era, began to be replaced
by the solo concerto, featuring only one soloist. Composers
began to place more importance on the particular soloist's
ability to show off virtuoso skills, with challenging, fast
scale and arpeggio runs. Nonetheless, some concerti grossi
remained, the most famous of which being Mozart's Sinfonia
Concertante for Violin and Viola in E flat Major.
1750–1775
By the late 1750s there were flourishing centers of the new
style in Italy, Vienna, Mannheim, and Paris; dozens of
symphonies were composed and there were bands of players
associated with musical theatres. Opera or other vocal music
accompanied by orchestra was the feature of most musical
events, with concertos and symphonies (arising from the
overture) serving as instrumental interludes and
introductions for operas and church services. Over the
course of the Classical period, symphonies and concertos
developed and were presented independently of vocal music.
The "normal" orchestra ensemble—a body of strings
supplemented by winds—and movements of particular rhythmic
character were established by the late 1750s in Vienna.
However, the length and weight of pieces was still set with
some Baroque characteristics: individual movements still
focused on one "affect" (musical mood) or had only one
sharply contrasting middle section, and their length was not
significantly greater than Baroque movements. There was not
yet a clearly enunciated theory of how to compose in the new
style. It was a moment ripe for a breakthrough.
Many consider this breakthrough to have been made by C. P.
E. Bach, Gluck, and several others. Indeed, C. P. E. Bach
and Gluck are often considered founders of the Classical
style. The first great master of the style was the composer
Joseph Haydn. In the late 1750s he began composing
symphonies, and by 1761 he had composed a triptych (Morning,
Noon, and Evening) solidly in the contemporary mode. As a
vice-Kapellmeister and later Kapellmeister, his output
expanded: he composed over forty symphonies in the 1760s
alone. And while his fame grew, as his orchestra was
expanded and his compositions were copied and disseminated,
his voice was only one among many.
While some scholars suggest that Haydn was overshadowed
by Mozart and Beethoven, it would be difficult to overstate
Haydn's centrality to the new style, and therefore to the
future of Western art music as a whole. At the time,
before the pre-eminence of Mozart or Beethoven, and with
Johann Sebastian Bach known primarily to connoisseurs of
keyboard music, Haydn reached a place in music that set him
above all other composers except perhaps the Baroque era's
George Frideric Handel. Haydn took existing ideas, and
radically altered how they functioned—earning him the titles
"father of the symphony" and "father of the string quartet".
One of the forces that worked as an impetus for his pressing
forward was the first stirring of what would later be called
Romanticism—the Sturm und Drang, or "storm and stress" phase
in the arts, a short period where obvious and dramatic
emotionalism was a stylistic preference. Haydn accordingly
wanted more dramatic contrast and more emotionally appealing
melodies, with sharpened character and individuality in his
pieces. This period faded away in music and literature:
however, it influenced what came afterward and would
eventually be a component of aesthetic taste in later
decades.
The Farewell Symphony, No. 45 in F♯ Minor, exemplifies
Haydn's integration of the differing demands of the new
style, with surprising sharp turns and a long slow adagio to
end the work. In 1772, Haydn completed his Opus 20 set of
six string quartets, in which he deployed the polyphonic
techniques he had gathered from the previous Baroque era to
provide structural coherence capable of holding together his
melodic ideas. For some, this marks the beginning of the
"mature" Classical style, in which the period of reaction
against late Baroque complexity yielded to a period of
integration Baroque and Classical elements.
1775–1790
Haydn, having worked for over a decade as the music director
for a prince, had far more resources and scope for composing
than most other composers. His position also gave him the
ability to shape the forces that would play his music, as he
could select skilled musicians. This opportunity was not
wasted, as Haydn, beginning quite early on his career,
sought to press forward the technique of building and
developing ideas in his music. His next important
breakthrough was in the Opus 33 string quartets (1781), in
which the melodic and the harmonic roles segue among the
instruments: it is often momentarily unclear what is melody
and what is harmony. This changes the way the ensemble works
its way between dramatic moments of transition and climactic
sections: the music flows smoothly and without obvious
interruption. He then took this integrated style and began
applying it to orchestral and vocal music.
The opening bars of the Commendatore's aria in Mozart's
opera Don Giovanni. The orchestra starts with a dissonant
diminished seventh chord (G# dim7 with a B in the bass)
moving to a dominant seventh chord (A7 with a C# in the
bass) before resolving to the tonic chord (D minor) at the
singer's entrance.
Haydn's gift to music was a way of composing, a way of
structuring works, which was at the same time in accord with
the governing aesthetic of the new style. However, a younger
contemporary, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, brought his genius to
Haydn's ideas and applied them to two of the major genres of
the day: opera, and the virtuoso concerto. Whereas Haydn
spent much of his working life as a court composer, Mozart
wanted public success in the concert life of cities, playing
for the general public. This meant he needed to write operas
and write and perform virtuoso pieces. Haydn was not a
virtuoso at the international touring level; nor was he
seeking to create operatic works that could play for many
nights in front of a large audience. Mozart wanted to
achieve both. Moreover, Mozart also had a taste for more
chromatic chords (and greater contrasts in harmonic language
generally), a greater love for creating a welter of melodies
in a single work, and a more Italianate sensibility in music
as a whole. He found, in Haydn's music and later in his
study of the polyphony of J.S. Bach, the means to discipline
and enrich his artistic gifts.
The Mozart family c. 1780. The portrait on the wall is of
Mozart's mother.
Mozart rapidly came to the attention of Haydn, who hailed
the new composer, studied his works, and considered the
younger man his only true peer in music. In Mozart, Haydn
found a greater range of instrumentation, dramatic effect
and melodic resource. The learning relationship moved in
both directions. Mozart also had a great respect for the
older, more experienced composer, and sought to learn from
him.
Mozart's arrival in Vienna in 1780 brought an acceleration
in the development of the Classical style. There, Mozart
absorbed the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic
cohesiveness that had been brewing for the previous 20
years. His own taste for flashy brilliances, rhythmically
complex melodies and figures, long cantilena melodies, and
virtuoso flourishes was merged with an appreciation for
formal coherence and internal connectedness. It is at this
point that war and economic inflation halted a trend to
larger orchestras and forced the disbanding or reduction of
many theater orchestras. This pressed the Classical style
inwards: toward seeking greater ensemble and technical
challenges—for example, scattering the melody across
woodwinds, or using a melody harmonized in thirds. This
process placed a premium on small ensemble music, called
chamber music. It also led to a trend for more public
performance, giving a further boost to the string quartet
and other small ensemble groupings.
It was during this decade that public taste began,
increasingly, to recognize that Haydn and Mozart had reached
a high standard of composition. By the time Mozart arrived
at age 25, in 1781, the dominant styles of Vienna were
recognizably connected to the emergence in the 1750s of the
early Classical style. By the end of the 1780s, changes in
performance practice, the relative standing of instrumental
and vocal music, technical demands on musicians, and
stylistic unity had become established in the composers who
imitated Mozart and Haydn. During this decade Mozart
composed his most famous operas, his six late symphonies
that helped to redefine the genre, and a string of piano
concerti that still stand at the pinnacle of these forms.
One composer who was influential in spreading the more
serious style that Mozart and Haydn had formed is Muzio
Clementi, a gifted virtuoso pianist who tied with Mozart in
a musical "duel" before the emperor in which they each
improvised on the piano and performed their compositions.
Clementi's sonatas for the piano circulated widely, and he
became the most successful composer in London during the
1780s. Also in London at this time was Jan Ladislav Dussek,
who, like Clementi, encouraged piano makers to extend the
range and other features of their instruments, and then
fully exploited the newly opened up possibilities. The
importance of London in the Classical period is often
overlooked, but it served as the home to the Broadwood's
factory for piano manufacturing and as the base for
composers who, while less notable than the "Vienna School",
had a decisive influence on what came later. They were
composers of many fine works, notable in their own right.
London's taste for virtuosity may well have encouraged the
complex passage work and extended statements on tonic and
dominant.
Around 1790–1820
When Haydn and Mozart began composing, symphonies were
played as single movements—before, between, or as interludes
within other works—and many of them lasted only ten or
twelve minutes; instrumental groups had varying standards of
playing, and the continuo was a central part of
music-making.
In the intervening years, the social world of music had seen
dramatic changes. International publication and touring had
grown explosively, and concert societies formed. Notation
became more specific, more descriptive—and schematics for
works had been simplified (yet became more varied in their
exact working out). In 1790, just before Mozart's death,
with his reputation spreading rapidly, Haydn was poised for
a series of successes, notably his late oratorios and
"London" symphonies. Composers in Paris, Rome, and all over
Germany turned to Haydn and Mozart for their ideas on form.
The time was again ripe for a dramatic shift. In the 1790s,
a new generation of composers, born around 1770, emerged.
While they had grown up with the earlier styles, they heard
in the recent works of Haydn and Mozart a vehicle for
greater expression. In 1788 Luigi Cherubini settled in Paris
and in 1791 composed Lodoiska, an opera that raised him to
fame. Its style is clearly reflective of the mature Haydn
and Mozart, and its instrumentation gave it a weight that
had not yet been felt in the grand opera. His contemporary
Étienne Méhul extended instrumental effects with his 1790
opera Euphrosine et Coradin, from which followed a series of
successes. The final push towards change came from Gaspare
Spontini, who was deeply admired by future romantic
composers such as Weber, Berlioz and Wagner. The innovative
harmonic language of his operas, their refined
instrumentation and their "enchained" closed numbers (a
structural pattern which was later adopted by Weber in
Euryanthe and from him handed down, through Marschner, to
Wagner), formed the basis from which French and German
romantic opera had its beginnings.
The most fateful of the new generation was Ludwig van
Beethoven, who launched his numbered works in 1794 with a
set of three piano trios, which remain in the repertoire.
Somewhat younger than the others, though equally
accomplished because of his youthful study under Mozart and
his native virtuosity, was Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Hummel
studied under Haydn as well; he was a friend to Beethoven
and Franz Schubert. He concentrated more on the piano than
any other instrument, and his time in London in 1791 and
1792 generated the composition and publication in 1793 of
three piano sonatas, opus 2, which idiomatically used
Mozart's techniques of avoiding the expected cadence, and
Clementi's sometimes modally uncertain virtuoso figuration.
Taken together, these composers can be seen as the vanguard
of a broad change in style and the center of music. They
studied one another's works, copied one another's gestures
in music, and on occasion behaved like quarrelsome rivals.
The crucial differences with the previous wave can be seen
in the downward shift in melodies, increasing durations of
movements, the acceptance of Mozart and Haydn as
paradigmatic, the greater use of keyboard resources, the
shift from "vocal" writing to "pianistic" writing, the
growing pull of the minor and of modal ambiguity, and the
increasing importance of varying accompanying figures to
bring "texture" forward as an element in music. In short,
the late Classical was seeking music that was internally
more complex. The growth of concert societies and amateur
orchestras, marking the importance of music as part of
middle-class life, contributed to a booming market for
pianos, piano music, and virtuosi to serve as exemplars.
Hummel, Beethoven, and Clementi were all renowned for their
improvising.
The direct influence of the Baroque continued to fade: the
figured bass grew less prominent as a means of holding
performance together, the performance practices of the
mid-18th century continued to die out. However, at the same
time, complete editions of Baroque masters began to become
available, and the influence of Baroque style continued to
grow, particularly in the ever more expansive use of brass.
Another feature of the period is the growing number of
performances where the composer was not present. This led to
increased detail and specificity in notation; for example,
there were fewer "optional" parts that stood separately from
the main score.
The force of these shifts became apparent with Beethoven's
3rd Symphony, given the name Eroica, which is Italian for
"heroic", by the composer. As with Stravinsky's The Rite of
Spring, it may not have been the first in all of its
innovations, but its aggressive use of every part of the
Classical style set it apart from its contemporary works: in
length, ambition, and harmonic resources as well.
Romantic music is a period of Western classical music
that began in the late 18th or early 19th century. It is
related to Romanticism, the Western artistic and literary
movement that arose in the second half of the 18th century,
and Romantic music in particular dominated the Romantic
movement in Germany.
In the Romantic period, music became more explicitly
expressive and programmatic, dealing with the literary,
artistic, and philosophical themes of the time. Famous early
Romantic composers include Beethoven (whose works span both
this period and the preceding Classical period along with
Schubert), Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and
Berlioz. The late 19th century saw a dramatic expansion in
the size of the orchestra and in the dynamic range and
diversity of instruments used in this ensemble. Also, public
concerts became a key part of urban middle class society, in
contrast to earlier periods, when concerts were mainly paid
for by and performed for aristocrats. Famous composers from
the second half of the century include Bruckner, Johann
Strauss II, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Verdi, and
Wagner. Between 1890 and 1910, a third wave of composers
including Mahler, Richard Strauss, Puccini, and Sibelius
built on the work of middle Romantic composers to create
even more complex – and often much longer – musical works. A
prominent mark of late-19th-century music is its
nationalistic fervor, as exemplified by such figures as
Dvořák, Sibelius, Elgar and Grieg. Other prominent
late-century figures include Saint-Saëns, Fauré,
Rachmaninoff and Franck.
Background
The Romantic movement was an artistic, literary, and
intellectual movement that originated in the second half of
the 18th century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to
the Industrial Revolution (Encyclopædia Britannica n.d.).
In part, it was a revolt against social and political norms
of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the
scientific rationalization of nature (Casey 2008). It
was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and
literature, but had a major impact on historiography (Levin
1959,[page needed]) and education (Gutek 1995, 220–54), and
was in turn influenced by developments in natural history
(Nichols 2005, 308–309).
One of the first significant applications of the term to
music was in 1789, in the Mémoires by the Frenchman André
Grétry, but it was E.T.A. Hoffmann who really established
the principles of musical romanticism, in a lengthy review
of Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony published in 1810,
and in an 1813 article on Beethoven's instrumental music. In
the first of these essays Hoffmann traced the beginnings of
musical Romanticism to the later works of Haydn and Mozart.
It was Hoffmann's fusion of ideas already associated with
the term "Romantic", used in opposition to the restraint and
formality of Classical models, that elevated music, and
especially instrumental music, to a position of pre-eminence
in Romanticism as the art most suited to the expression of
emotions. It was also through the writings of Hoffmann
and other German authors that German music was brought to
the centre of musical Romanticism (Samson 2001).
Traits
Characteristics often attributed to Romanticism:
a new preoccupation with and surrender to Nature;
a fascination with the past, particularly the Middle Ages
and legends of medieval chivalry;
a turn towards the mystic and supernatural, both religious
and merely spooky;
a longing for the infinite;
mysterious connotations of remoteness, the unusual and
fabulous, the strange and surprising;
a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly, the frightful, and
terrifying;
fantastic seeing and spiritual experiences;
a new attention given to national identity;
emphasis on extreme subjectivism;
interest in the autobiographical;
discontent with musical formulas and conventions.
Such lists, however, proliferated over time, resulting in a
"chaos of antithetical phenomena", criticized for their
superficiality and for signifying so many different things
that there came to be no central meaning. The attributes
have also been criticized for being too vague. For example,
features of the "ghostly and supernatural" could apply
equally to Mozart's Don Giovanni from 1787 and Stravinsky's
The Rake's Progress from 1951 (Kravitt 1992, 93–95).
In music there is a relatively clear dividing line in
musical structure and form following the death of Beethoven.
Whether one counts Beethoven as a 'romantic' composer or
not, the breadth and power of his work gave rise to a
feeling that the classical sonata form and, indeed, the
structure of the symphony, sonata and string quartet had
been exhausted. Schumann, Schubert, Berlioz and other
early-Romantic composers tended to look in alternative
directions.
Some characteristics of Romantic
music include:
The use of new or previously not so common musical
structures like the song cycle, nocturne, concert etude,
arabesque and rhapsody, alongside the traditional classical
genres. Programme music became somewhat more common;
A harmonic structure based on movement from tonic to
subdominant or alternative keys rather than the traditional
dominant, and use of more elaborate harmonic progressions
(Wagner and Liszt are known for their experimental
progressions);
A greater emphasis on melody to sustain musical interest.
The classical period often used short, even fragmentary,
thematic material while the Romantic period tended to make
greater use of longer, more fully defined and more
satisfying themes;
The use of a wider range of dynamics, for example from ppp
to fff, supported by large orchestration;
Using a larger tonal range (exp. using the lowest and
highest notes of the piano);
Trends of the 19th century
Non-musical influences
Events and changes in society such as ideas, attitudes,
discoveries, inventions, and historical events often affect
music. For example, the Industrial Revolution was in full
effect by the late 18th century and early 19th century. This
event had a profound effect on music: there were major
improvements in the mechanical valves and keys that most
woodwinds and brass instruments depend on. The new and
innovative instruments could be played with greater ease and
they were more reliable (Schmidt-Jones and Jones 2004, 3).
Another development that had an effect on music was the rise
of the middle class. Composers before this period lived on
the patronage of the aristocracy. Many times their audience
was small, composed mostly of the upper class and
individuals who were knowledgeable about music
(Schmidt-Jones and Jones 2004, 3). The Romantic
composers, on the other hand, often wrote for public
concerts and festivals, with large audiences of paying
customers, who had not necessarily had any music lessons
(Schmidt-Jones and Jones 2004, 3). Composers of the Romantic
Era, like Elgar, showed the world that there should be "no
segregation of musical tastes" (Young 1967, 525) and that
the "purpose was to write music that was to be heard" (Young
1967, 527).
Nationalism
During the Romantic period, music often took on a much more
nationalistic purpose. For example, Jean Sibelius' Finlandia
has been interpreted to represent the rising nation of
Finland, which would someday gain independence from Russian
control (Child 2006). Frédéric Chopin was one of the first
composers to incorporate nationalistic elements into his
compositions. Joseph Machlis states, "Poland's struggle for
freedom from tsarist rule aroused the national poet in
Poland. … Examples of musical nationalism abound in the
output of the romantic era.
The folk idiom is prominent in the Mazurkas of Chopin" (Machlis
1963, 149–50). His mazurkas and polonaises are particularly
notable for their use of nationalistic rhythms. Moreover,
"During World War II the Nazis forbade the playing of …
Chopin's Polonaises in Warsaw because of the powerful
symbolism residing in these works" (Machlis 1963, 150).
Other composers, such as Bedřich Smetana, wrote pieces that
musically described their homelands; in particular,
Smetana's Vltava is a symphonic poem about the Moldau River
in the modern-day Czech Republic and the second in a cycle
of six nationalistic symphonic poems collectively titled Má
vlast (My Homeland) (Grunfeld 1974, 112–13). Smetana also
composed eight nationalist operas, all of which remain in
the repertory. They established him as the first Czech
nationalist composer as well as the most important Czech
opera composer of the generation who came to prominence in
the 1860s (Ottlová, Tyrrell, and Pospíšil 2001).
In this connection, as we saw
already in the general division of the subject [on pp.
76-81], we have three chief art-forms to consider:
(i) The Symbolic. In this the Idea still seeks its genuine
expression in art, because in itself it is still abstract
and indeterminate and therefore does not have its adequate
manifestation on and in itself, but finds itself confronted
by what is external to itself, external things in nature and
human affairs. Now since it has only an immediate inkling of
its own abstractions in this objective world or drives
itself with its undetermined universals into a concrete
existence, it corrupts and falsifies the shapes that it
finds confronting it. This is because it can grasp them only
arbitrarily, and therefore, instead of coming to a complete
identification, it comes only to an accord, and even to a
still abstract harmony, between meaning and shape; in this
neither completed nor to be completed mutual formation,
meaning and shape present, equally with their affinity,
their mutual externality, foreignness, and incompatibility.
(ii) But, secondly, the Idea, in accordance with its
essential nature, does not stop at the abstraction and
indeterminacy of universal thoughts but is in itself free
infinite subjectivity and apprehends this in its actuality
as spirit. Now spirit, as free subject, is determined
through and by itself, and in this self-determination, and
also in its own nature, has that external shape, adequate to
itself, with which it can close as with its absolutely due
reality. On this entirely harmonious unity of content and
form, the second art-form, the classical, is based. Yet
if the consummation of this unity is to become actual,
spirit, in so far as it is made a topic for art, must not
yet be the purely absolute spirit which finds its adequate
existence only in spirituality and inwardness, but the
spirit which is still particular and therefore burdened with
an abstraction. That is to say, the free subject, which
classical art configurates outwardly, appears indeed as
essentially universal and therefore freed from all the
accident and mere particularity of the inner life and the
outer world, but at the same time as filled solely with a
universality particularized within itself. This is because
the external shape is, as such, an external determinate
particular shape, and for complete fusion [with a content]
it can only present again in itself a specific and therefore
restricted content, while too it is only the inwardly
particular spirit which can appear perfectly in an external
manifestation and be bound up with that in an o, inseparable
unity.
Here art has reached its own essential nature by bringing
the Idea, as spiritual individuality, directly into harmony
with its bodily reality in such a perfect way that external
existence now for the first time no longer preserves any
independence in contrast with the meaning which it is to
express, while conversely the inner [meaning], in its shape
worked out for our vision, shows there only itself and in it
is related to itself affirmatively.[1]
(iii) But, thirdly, when the Idea of the beautiful is
comprehended as absolute spirit, and therefore as the spirit
which is free in its own eyes, it is no longer completely
realized in the external world, since its true determinate
being it has only in itself as spirit. It therefore
dissolves that classical unification of inwardness and
external manifestation and takes flight out of externality
back into itself. This provides the fundamental typification
of the romantic art-form; the content of this form, on
account of its free spirituality, demands more than what
representation in the external world and the bodily can
supply; in romantic art the shape is externally more or less
indifferent, and thus that art reintroduces, in an opposite
way from the symbolic, the separation of content and form.
In this way, symbolic art seeks that perfect unity of inner
meaning and external shape which classical art finds in the
presentation of substantial individuality to sensuous
contemplation, and which romantic art transcends in its
superior spirituality.
Still, of what nature are the creations which Classic Art
produces in following such a method? What are the
characteristics of the new gods of Greek art?
a. The most general idea that we should form of them is
that of a concentrated individuality, which, freed from the
multiplicity of accidents, actions, and particular
circumstances of human life, is collected upon itself at the
focus of its simple unity. Indeed, what we must first remark
is their spiritual and, at the same time, immutable and
substantial individuality. Far removed from the world of
change and illusion, where want and misery reign, far from
the agitation and trouble which attach to the pursuit of
human interests, retired within themselves they rest upon
their own universality as upon an everlasting foundation
where they find their repose and felicity. By this alone
the gods appear as imperishable powers, of which the
changeless majesty rises above particular existence.
Disengaged from all contact with whatever is foreign or
external, they manifest themselves uniquely in their
immutable and absolute independence.
Yet, above all, these are not simple abstraction — mere
spiritual generalities — they are genuine individuals. With
this claim each appears as an ideal which possesses in
itself reality, life; it has, like spirit, a clearly defined
nature, a character. Without character there can be no true
individuality. In this respect as we have seen above, the
spiritual gods contain, as integrant part of themselves, a
definite physical power, with which is established an
equally definite moral principle, which assigns to each
divinity a limited circle in which his outward activity must
be displayed. The attributes, the specific qualities which
result therefrom, constitute the distinctive character of
each divinity.
Still, in the ideal proper, this definite character must not
be limited to the point of exclusive being; it must maintain
itself in a just medium, and must return to universality,
which is the essence Of the divine nature. Thus each god, in
so far as he is at once a particular individuality and a
general existence, is also, at the same time, both part and
whole. He floats in a just medium between pure generality
and simple particularity. This is what gives to the true
ideal of classic Art its security and infinite calm,
together with a freedom relieved from every obstacle.
b. But, as constituting beauty in Classic Art, the special
character of the gods is not purely spiritual; it is
disclosed so much the more under an external and corporeal
form which addresses itself to the eyes as well as to the
spirit. This, we have seen, no longer admits the symbolic
element, and should not even pretend to affect the Sublime.
Classic beauty causes spiritual individuality to enter into
the bosom of sensuous reality. It is born of a harmonious
fusion of the outward form with the inward principle which
animates. Whence, for this very reason, the physical form,
as well as the spiritual principle, must appear enfranchised
from all the accidents which belong to outer existence, from
all dependence upon nature, from the miseries inseparable
from the finite and transitory world. It must be so purified
and ennobled that, between the qualities appropriate to the
particular character of the god and the general forms of the
human body, there shall be manifest a free accord, a perfect
harmony. Every mark of weakness and of dependence has
disappeared; all arbitrary particularity which could mar it
is cancelled or effaced. In its unblemished purity it
corresponds to the spiritual principle of which it should be
the incarnation.
c. Notwithstanding their particular character the gods
preserve also their universal and absolute character.
Independence must be revealed, in their representation,
under the appearance of calmness and of a changeless
serenity. Thus we see, in the figures of the gods that
nobility and that elevation which announces in them that,
though clothed in a natural and sensuous form, they have
nothing in common with the necessities of finite existence.
Absolute existence, if it were pure, freed all
particularity, would conduct to the sublime but, in the
Classic ideal, spirit realises and manifests itself under a
sensuous form which is its perfect image, and whatever of
sublimnity it has shown to be grounded in its beauty, and as
having passed wholly into itself. This is what renders
necessary, for the representation of the gods, the classic
expression of grandeur and beautiful sublimnity.
In their beauty they appear, then, elevated above their own
corporeal existence; but there is manifest a disagreement
between the happy grandeur which resides in their
spirituality and their beauty, which is external and
corporeal. Spirit appears to be entirely absorbed in the
sensuous and yet at the same time, aside form this, to be
merged in itself alone; it is, as it were, the moving
presence of a deathless god in the midst of mortal men.
Thus, although this contradiction does not appear as a
manifest opposition, the harmonious totality conceals in its
individual unity a principle of destruction which is found
there already expressed. This is that sigh of sadness in the
midst of grandeur which men full of sagacity have felt in
the presence of the images of the ancient gods,
notwithstanding their perfect beauty and the charm shed
around them. In their calmness and their serenity they
cannot permit themselves to indulge in pleasure, in
enjoyment nor in what we especially term satisfaction. The
eternal calm must not even extend so far as to admit of a
smile nor the pleasing contentment with itself.
Satisfaction, properly speaking, is the sentiment which is
born of the perfect accord of our soul with its present
situation. Napoleon, for example, never expressed his
satisfaction more profoundly than when he had attained to
something with which all the world was dissatisfied; for
true satisfaction is nothing else than the inner approbation
which the individual gives himself because of his own acts
and personal effort. Its last degree is that commonplace
feeling (bourgeois sentiment, Philisterempfindung) of
contentment which every man can experience. Now, this
sentiment and this expression cannot be granted to the
immortal gods of Classic Art.
It is this character of universality in the Greek gods
which people have intended to indicate by characterising
them as cold. Nevertheless, these figures are cold only in
relation to the vivacity of modern sentiment; in themselves
they have warmth and life. The divine peace which is
reflected in the corporeal form comes from the fact that
they are separated from the finite; it is born of their
indifference to all that is mortal and transitory. It is
an adieu without sadness and without effort, but an adieu to
the earth and to this perishable world. In these divine
existences the greater the degree in which seriousness and
freedom are outwardly manifested, the more distinctly are we
made to feel the contrast between their grandeur and their
corporeal form. These happy divinities deprecate at once
both their felicity and their physical existence. We read
their lineaments the destiny which weighs upon their heads,
and which, in the measure that its power increases (causing
this contradiction between moral grandeur and sensuous
reality to become more and more pronounced), draws Classic
Art onto its ruin.
(a) the subject-matter of romantic art, at least in
relation to the Divine, is very circumscribed. For, first,
as we have already indicated above [on pp. 507, 520],
nature is emptied of gods; the sea, mountains, valleys,
rivers, springs, time and night, as well as the universal
processes of nature, have lost their value so far as
concerns the presentation and content of the Absolute.
Natural formations are no longer augmented symbolically;
they have been robbed of their characteristic of having
forms and activities capable of being traits of a divinity.
For all the great questions about the origin of the world,
about the whence, wherefore, and whither of created nature
and humanity, and all the symbolic and plastic attempts to
solve and represent these problems, have disappeared owing
to the revelation of God in the spirit; and even in the
spiritual realm the variegated coloured world with its
classically shaped characters, actions, and events is
gathered up into one ray of the Absolute and its eternal
history of redemption.
The entire content [of romantic
art] is therefore concentrated on the inner life of the
spirit, on feeling, ideas, and the mind which strives after
union with the truth, seeks and struggles to generate and
preserve the Divine in the subject’s consciousness, and now
may not carry through aims and undertakings in the world for
the sake of the world but rather has for its sole essential
undertaking the inner battle of man in himself and his
reconciliation with God; and it brings into
representation only the personality and its preservation
along with contrivances towards this end. The heroism which
may enter here accordingly is no heroism which from its own
resources gives laws, establishes organizations, creates and
develops situations, but a heroism of submission. It submits
to a determinate and cut and dried [system of divine truth]
and no task is left to it but to regulate the temporal order
by that, to apply what is higher and absolutely valid to the
world confronting it, and to make it prevail in the
temporal. But since this absolute content appears compressed
into one point, i.e. into the subjective heart, so that all
process is transported into the inner life of man, the scope
of the subject matter is therefore also infinitely extended
again. It opens out into a multiplicity without bounds. For
although that objective history constitutes the substantial
basis of the heart, the artist yet runs through it in every
direction, presents single points drawn from it or presents
himself in steadily added new human traits; over and above
this, he can draw into himself the whole breadth of nature
as the surroundings and locality of spirit and devote it to
the one great end.
Even so, there are doubtless examples
of completely deceptive copying. The grapes painted by
Zeuxis have from antiquity onward been styled a triumph of
art and also of the principle of the imitation of nature,
because living doves are supposed to have pecked at them. To
this ancient example we could add the modern one of Banner’s
monkey[30] which ate away a painting of a cock- chafer in
Rösel’s Insektbelustigungen [Amusements of Insects] and was
pardoned by his master because it had proved the excellence
of the pictures in this book, although it had thus destroyed
the most beautiful copy of this expensive work. But in
such examples and others it must at least occur to us at
once that, instead of praising works of art because they
have deceived even doves and monkeys, we should just
precisely censure those who think of exalting a work of art
by predicating so miserable an effect as this as its highest
and supreme quality. In sum, however, it must be said that,
by mere imitation, art cannot stand in competition with
nature, and, if it tries, it looks like worm trying to crawl
after an elephant.
Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics.
Volume 1. p51/52 Therefore the further question arises: what, then, is
the content of art, and why is this content to be portrayed
? In this matter our consciousness confronts us with the
common opinion that the task and aim of art is to bring home
to our sense, our feeling, and our inspiration everything
which has a place in the human spirit. That familiar saying
‘nihil humani a me alienum puto' art is supposed to make
real in us.
Its aim therefore is supposed to consist in awakening and
vivifying our slumbering feelings, inclinations, and
passions of every kind, in filling the heart, in forcing the
human being, educated or not, to go through the whole gamut
of feelings which the human heart in its inmost and secret
recesses can bear, experience, and produce, through what can
move and stir the human breast in its depths and manifold
possibilities and aspects, and to deliver to feeling and
contemplation for its enjoyment whatever the spirit
possesses of the essential and lofty in its thinking and in
the Idea – the splendour of the noble, eternal, and true:
moreover to make misfortune and misery, evil and guilt
intelligible, to make men intimately acquainted with all
that is horrible and shocking, as well as with all that is
pleasurable and felicitous; and, finally, to let fancy loose
in the idle plays of imagination and plunge it into the
seductive magic of sensuously bewitching visions and
feelings.
According to this view this universal
wealth of subject-matter art is, on the one hand, to embrace
in order to complete the natural experience of our external
existence, and, on the other hand, to arouse those passions
in general so that the experiences of the life do not leave
us unmoved and so that we might now acquired a receptivity
for all phenomena. But [on this view] such a stimulus is
not given in this field by actual experience itself, but
only through pure appearance of it, since art deceptively
substitutes its productions for reality. The possibility of
this deception through the pure appearance of art rests on
the fact that, for man, all reality must come through the
medium of perception and ideas, and only through this medium
does it penetrate the heart and the will. Now here it is a
matter of indifference whether a man’s attention is claimed
by immediate external reality or whether this happens in
another way, namely through pictures, symbols, and ideas
containing in themselves and portraying the material of
reality. We can envisage things which are not real as if
they were real. Therefore it remains all the same for our
feelings whether it is external reality, or only the
appearance of it, whereby a situation, a relation, or, in
general, a circumstance of life, is brought home to us, in
order to make us respond appropriately to the essence of
such a matter, whether by grief or rejoicing, whether by
being touched or agitated, or whether by making us go
through the gamut of the feelings and passions of wrath,
hatred, pity, anxiety, fear, love, reverence and admiration,
honour and fame.
This arousing of all feelings in us, this drawing of the
heart ‘through all the circumstances of life, this
actualizing of all these inner movements by means of a
purely deceptive externally presented object is above all
what is regarded, on the view we have been considering, as
the proper and supreme power of art. But now since, on
this view, art is supposed to have the vocation of imposing
on the heart and the imagination good and bad alike,
strengthening man to the noblest ideals and yet enervating
him to the most sensuous and selfish feelings of pleasure,
art is given a purely formal task; and without any
explicitly fixed aim would thus provide only the empty form
for every possible kind of content and worth.
6.2.3 Romantic Art Romantic art, like classical art, is the sensuous
expression or manifestation of the freedom of spirit. It is
thus capable of genuine beauty. The freedom it manifests,
however, is a profoundly inward freedom that finds its
highest expression and articulation not in art itself but in
religious faith and philosophy. Unlike classical art,
therefore, romantic art gives expression to a freedom of the
spirit whose true home lies beyond art. If classical art can
be compared to the human body which is thoroughly suffused
with spirit and life, romantic art can be compared to the
human face which discloses the spirit and personality
within. Since romantic art actually discloses the inner
spirit, however, rather than merely pointing to it, it
differs from symbolic art which it otherwise resembles.
Romantic art, for Hegel, takes threebasic forms.
The first is that of explicitly religious art. It is
in Christianity, Hegel contends, that the true nature of
spirit is revealed. What is represented in the story of
Christ's life, death and resurrection is the idea that a
truly divine life of freedom and love is at the same time a
fully human life in which we are willing to “die” to
ourselves and let go of what is most precious to us. Much
religious romantic art, therefore, focuses on the suffering
and death of Christ.
Hegel notes that it is not appropriate in romantic art to
depict Christ with the idealized body of a Greek god or
hero, because what is central to Christ is his irreducible
humanity and mortality. Romantic art, therefore, breaks with
the classical ideal of beauty and incorporates real human
frailty, pain and suffering into its images of Christ (and
also of religious martyrs). Indeed, such art can even go to
the point of being “ugly” (unschön) in its depiction of
suffering (PKÄ, 136).
If, however, romantic art is to fulfill the purpose of art
and present true freedom of spirit in the form of beauty, it
must show the suffering Christ or suffering martyrs to be
imbued with a profound inwardness (Innigkeit) of feeling and
a genuine sense of reconciliation (Versöhnung) (PKÄ, 136–7):
for such an inward sense of reconciliation, in Hegel's view,
is the deepest spiritual freedom. The sensuous expression
(in color or words) of this inner sense of reconciliation
constitutes what Hegel calls the “beauty of inwardness” or
“spiritual beauty” (geistige Schönheit) (PKÄ, 137). Strictly
speaking, such spiritual beauty is not as consummately
beautiful as classical beauty, in which the spirit and the
body are perfectly fused with one another. Spiritual beauty,
however, is the product of, and reveals, a much more
profound inner freedom of spirit than classical beauty and
so moves and engages us much more readily than do the
relatively cold statues of Greek gods.
The most profound spiritual beauty in the visual arts is
found, in Hegel's view, in painted images of the Madonna and
Child, for in these what is expressed is the feeling of
boundless love. Hegel had a special affection for the
paintings of the Flemish Primitives, Jan van Eyck and Hans
Memling, whose work he saw on his visits to Ghent and Bruges
in 1827 (Hegel: The Letters, 661–2), but he also held
Raphael in high regard and was particularly moved by the
expression of “pious, modest mother-love” in Raphael's
Sistine Madonna which he saw in Dresden in 1820 (PKÄ, 39;
Pöggeler et al 1981, 142). Greek sculptors portrayed Niobe
as simply “petrified in her pain” at the loss of her
children. By contrast, the painted images of the Virgin Mary
are imbued by van Eyck and Raphael with an “eternal love”
and a “soulfulness” that Greek statues can never match (PKÄ,
142, 184).
The second fundamental form of romantic art
identified by Hegel depicts what he calls the secular
“virtues” of the free spirit (Aesthetics, 1: 553; PKÄ,
135). These are not the ethical virtues displayed by the
heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy: they do not involve a
commitment to the necessary institutions of freedom, such as
the family or the state. Rather, they are the formal virtues
of the romantic hero: that is to say, they involve a
commitment by the free individual to an object or person
determined by the individual's contingent choice or passion.
Such virtues include that of romantic love (which
concentrates on a particular, contingent person), loyalty
towards an individual (that can change if it is to one's
advantage), and courage (which is often displayed in the
pursuit of personal ends, such as rescuing a damsel in
distress, but can also be displayed in the pursuit of
quasi-religious ends, such as the hunt for the Holy Grail) (PKÄ,
143–4).
Such virtues are found primarily in the world of mediaeval
chivalry (and are subjected to ridicule, Hegel points out,
in Cervantes' Don Quixote) (Aesthetics, 1: 591–2; PKÄ, 150).
They can, however, also crop up in more modern works and,
indeed, are precisely the virtues displayed in an art-form
of which Hegel could know nothing, namely the American
Western.
The third fundamental form of romantic art depicts
the formal freedom and independence of character.
Such freedom is not associated with any ethical principles
or, indeed, with any of the formal virtues just mentioned,
but consists simply in the “firmness” (Festigkeit) of
character (Aesthetics, 1: 577; PKÄ, 145–6). This is freedom
in its modern, secular form. It is displayed most
magnificently, Hegel believes, by characters, such as
Richard III, Othello and Macbeth, in the plays of
Shakespeare. Note that what interests us about such
individuals is not any moral purpose that they may have, but
simply the energy and self-determination (and often
ruthlessness) that they exhibit. Such characters must have
an internal richness (revealed through imagination and
language) and not just be one-dimensional, but their main
appeal is their formal freedom to commit themselves to a
course of action, even at the cost of their own lives. These
characters do not constitute moral or political ideals, but
they are the appropriate objects of modern, romantic art
whose task is to depict freedom even in its most secular and
amoral forms.
Hegel also sees romantic beauty in more inwardly sensitive
characters, such as Shakespeare's Juliet. After meeting
Romeo, Hegel remarks, Juliet suddenly opens up with love
like a rosebud, full of childlike naivety. Her beauty thus
lies in being the embodiment of love. Hamlet is a somewhat
similar character: far from being simply weak (as Goethe
thought), Hamlet, in Hegel's view, displays the inner beauty
of a profoundly noble soul (Aesthetics, 1: 583; PKÄ, 147–8).
In Hegel's view, much painting and poetry after the
Reformation focuses its attention on the prosaic details
of ordinary daily life, rather than on the intimacy of
religious love or the magnificent resolve and energy of
tragic heroes. To the extent that such works of art no
longer aim to give expression to divine or human freedom but
seek (apparently at least) to do no more than “imitate
nature,” they prompt Hegel to consider whether they still
count as “art works” in the strictly philosophical (as
opposed to the more generally accepted) sense of the term.
In the twentieth century it is the abstract creations of,
for example, Jackson Pollock or Carl André that usually
provoke the question: “is this art?”. In Hegel's mind,
however, it is works that appear to be purely naturalistic
and “representational” that raise this question. His view is
that such works count as genuine works of art only when
they do more than merely imitate nature. The
naturalistic and prosaic works that best meet this
criterion, he maintains, are the paintings of the sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Dutch masters.
In such works, Hegel claims, the painter does not aim simply
to show us what grapes, flowers or trees look like: we know
that already from nature. The painter aims, rather, to
capture the—often fleeting—“life” (Lebendigkeit) of things:
“the lustre of metal, the shimmer of a bunch of grapes by
candlelight, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or the sun, a
smile, the expression of a swiftly passing emotion”
(Aesthetics, 1: 599). Often, indeed, the painter seeks to
delight us specifically with the animated play of the colors
of gold, silver, velvet or fur. In such works, Hegel notes,
we encounter not just the depiction of things, but “as it
were, an objective music, a peal in colour [ein Tönen in
Farben]” (Aesthetics, 1: 598–600).
A genuine work of art is the sensuous expression of divine
or human freedom and life. Paintings that are no more
than prosaic, naturalistic depictions of everyday objects or
human activity would thus appear to fall short of genuine
art. Dutch artists, however, turn such depictions into
true works of art precisely by imbuing objects with “the
fullness of life.” In so doing, Hegel claims, they give
expression to their own sense of freedom, “comfort” and
“contentment” and their own exuberant subjective skill
(Aesthetics, 1: 599; PKÄ, 152). The paintings of such
artists may lack the classical beauty of Greek art, but they
exhibit magnificently the subtle beauties and delights of
everyday modern life.
notes
[To the extent that such works of art no longer aim to give
expression to divine or human freedom but seek (apparently
at least) to do no more than “imitate nature - See the
pearse school of heroes and the problem of Naturalism in
art]
7. Conclusion
Hegel's aesthetics has been the focus of—often highly
critical—attention since his death from philosophers such as
Heidegger, Adorno and Gadamer. Much of this attention has
been devoted to his supposed theory of the “end” of art.
Perhaps Hegel's most important legacy, however, lies in the
claims that art's task is the presentation of beauty and
that beauty is a matter of content as well as form. Beauty,
for Hegel, is not just a matter of formal harmony or
elegance; it is the sensuous manifestation in stone, color,
sound or words of spiritual freedom and life. Such beauty
takes a subtly different form in the classical and romantic
periods and also in the different individual arts. In one
form or another, however, it remains the purpose of art,
even in modernity.
These claims by Hegel are normative, not just descriptive,
and impose certain restrictions on what can count as genuine
art in the modern age. They are not, however, claims made
out of simple conservatism. Hegel is well aware that art can
be decorative, can promote moral and political goals, can
explore the depths of human alienation or simply record the
prosaic details of everyday life, and that it can do so with
considerable artistry. His concern, however, is that art
that does these things without giving us beauty fails to
afford us the aesthetic experience of freedom. In so doing,
it deprives us of a central dimension of a truly human life.
To further this aim he published De l'Allemagne ("On
Germany") in French (begun 1833). In its later German
version, the book is divided into two: Zur Geschichte der
Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland ("On the History of
Religion and Philosophy in Germany") and Die romantische
Schule ("The Romantic School").
Heine was deliberately attacking Madame de Staël's book De
l'Allemagne (1813) which he viewed as reactionary,
Romantic and obscurantist. He felt de Staël had
portrayed a Germany of "poets and thinkers", dreamy,
religious, introverted and cut off from the revolutionary
currents of the modern world. Heine thought that such an
image suited the oppressive German authorities.
He also had an Enlightenment view of the past, seeing it
as mired in superstition and atrocities. "Religion and
Philosophy in Germany" describes the replacement of
traditional "spiritualist" religion by a pantheism that pays
attention to human material needs.
According to Heine, pantheism had been repressed by
Christianity and had survived in German folklore. He
predicted that German thought would prove a more explosive
force than the French Revolution.
Starting from the mid-1820s Heine distanced himself from
Romanticism by adding irony, sarcasm and satire into his
poetry and making fun of the sentimental-romantic awe of
nature and of figures of speech in contemporary poetry and
literature. An example are these lines:
Das Fräulein stand am Meere
Und seufzte lang und bang.
Es rührte sie so sehre
der Sonnenuntergang.
Mein Fräulein! Sein sie munter,
Das ist ein altes Stück;
Hier vorne geht sie unter
Und kehrt von hinten zurück.
A mistress stood by the sea
sighing long and anxiously.
She was so deeply stirred
By the setting sun
My Fräulein!, be gay,
This is an old play;
ahead of you it sets
And from behind it returns.
Heine shared liberal enthusiasm for the revolution, which he
felt had the potential to overturn the conservative
political order in Europe. Heine was also attracted by the
prospect of freedom from German censorship and was
interested in the new French utopian political doctrine
of Saint-Simonianism. Saint-Simonianism preached a
new social order in which meritocracy would replace
hereditary distinctions in rank and wealth. There would
also be female emancipation and an important role for
artists and scientists. Heine frequented some Saint-Simonian
meetings after his arrival in Paris but within a few years
his enthusiasm for the ideology – and other forms of
utopianism- had waned.
In October 1843, Heine's distant relative and German
revolutionary, Karl Marx, and his wife Jenny von Westphalen
arrived in Paris after the Prussian government had
suppressed Marx's radical newspaper. The Marx family settled
in Rue Vaneau. Marx was an admirer of Heine and his early
writings show Heine's influence. In December Heine met the
Marxes and got on well with them. He published several
poems, including Die schlesischen Weber, in Marx's new
journal Vorwärts ("Forwards"). Ultimately Heine's ideas of
revolution through sensual emancipation and Marx's
scientific socialism were incompatible, but both writers
shared the same negativity and lack of faith in the
bourgeoisie.
Heinrich Heine The Romantic school
But what was the Romantic School in Germany?
It was nothing else than the reawakening of the poetry of
the middle ages as it manifested itself in the poems,
paintings, and sculptures, in the art and life of those
times. This poetry, however, had been developed out of
Christianity; it was a passion-flower which had blossomed
from the blood of Christ.
In the secular poetry we find, as intimated above, first,
the cycle of legends called the Nibelungenlied, and the Book
of Heroes. In these poems all the ante-Christian modes of
thought and feelings are dominant; brute force is not yet
moderated into chivalry; the sturdy warriors of the North
stand like statues of stone, and the soft light and moral
atmosphere of Christianity have not yet penetrated their
iron armour. But dawn is gradually breaking over the old
German forests, the ancient Druid oaks are being felled, and
in the open arena Christianity and Paganism are battling:
all this is portrayed in the cycle of traditions of
Charlemagne; even the Crusades with their religious
tendencies are mirrored therein.
Classic art had to portray only the finite, and its forms
could be identical with the artist's idea. Romantic art had
to represent, or rather to typify, the infinite and the
spiritual, and therefore was compelled to have recourse to a
system of traditional, or rather parabolic, symbols,
just as Christ himself had endeavoured to explain and make
clear his spiritual meaning through beautiful parables.
Hence the mystic, enigmatical, miraculous, and
transcendental character of the art-productions of the
middle ages. Fancy strives frantically to portray through
concrete images that which is purely spiritual, and in the
vain endeavour invents the most colossal absurdities; it
piles Ossa on Pelion, Parcival on Titurel, to reach heaven.
But even they, the painters, were compelled to disfigure
the patient canvas with the most revolting representations
of physical suffering. In truth, when we view certain
picture galleries, and behold nothing but scenes of blood,
scourgings, and executions, we are fain to believe that the
old masters painted these pictures for the gallery of an
executioner.
It was against this literature that, in the closing years of
the last century, there arose in Germany a new school, which
we have designated the Romantic School. At the head of this
school stand the brothers August William and Frederic
Schlegel. Jena, where these two brothers, together with many
kindred spirits, were wont to come and go, was the central
point from which the new æsthetic dogma radiated. I
advisedly say dogma, for this school began with a criticism
of the art productions of the past, and with recipes for the
art works of the future.
But if the Schlegels could give no definite, reliable theory
for the masterpieces which they bespoke of the poets of
their school, they atoned for these shortcomings by
commending as models the best works of art of the past, and
by making them accessible to their disciples. These were
chiefly the Christian-Catholic productions of the middle
ages.
For the works of Calderon bear most distinctly the impress
of the poetry of the middle ages—particularly of the two
principal epochs of knight-errantry and monasticism. The
pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose poetical
flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical
perfumes, with all their pious grandezza, with all their
sacerdotal splendour, with all their sanctimonious
balderdash, were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed
with fantastically-pious, insanely-profound poems, over
which it was the fashion to work one's self into a mystic
ecstasy of admiration, as in The Devotion to the Cross,
or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in The Constant
Prince.
[On Nationalism]
We would have submitted to Napoleon quietly enough, but
our princes, while they hoped for deliverance through
Heaven, were at the same time not unfriendly to the thought,
that the united strength of their subjects might be very
useful in effecting their purpose. Hence they sought to
awaken in the German people a sense of homogeneity, and even
the most exalted personages now spoke of a German
nationality, of a common German fatherland, of a union of
the Christian-Germanic races, of the unity of Germany.
We were commanded to be patriotic, and straightway we became
patriots,—for we always obey when our princes command.
But it must not be supposed that the word "patriotism" means
the same in Germany as in France. The patriotism of the
French consists in this: the heart warms; through this
warmth it expands; it enlarges so as to encompass, with its
all-embracing love, not only the nearest and dearest, but
all France, all civilisation. The patriotism of the Germans,
on the contrary, consists in narrowing and contracting the
heart, just as leather contracts in the cold; in hating
foreigners; in ceasing to be European and cosmopolitan, and
in adopting a narrow-minded and exclusive Germanism. We
beheld this ideal empire of churlishness organised into a
system by Herr Jahn; with it began the crusade of the
vulgar, the coarse, the great unwashed—against the grandest
and holiest idea ever brought forth in Germany, the idea of
humanitarianism; the idea of the universal brotherhood of
mankind, of cosmopolitanism—an idea to which our great
minds, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul, and all
people of culture in Germany, have ever paid homage.
The Romantic School at that time went hand in hand with the
machinations of the government and the secret societies, and
A. W. Schlegel conspired against Racine with the same aim
that Minister Stein plotted against Napoleon. This school of
literature floated with the stream of the times; that is to
say, with the stream that flowed backwards to its source.
When finally German patriotism and nationality were
victorious, the popular Teutonic-Christian-romantic school,
"the new-German-religious-patriotic art-school," triumphed
also. Napoleon, the great classic, who was as classic as
Alexander or Cæsar, was overthrown, and August William and
Frederic Schlegel, the petty romanticists, who were as
romantic as Tom Thumb and Puss in Boots, strutted about as
victors.
When it was seen how these young people made obeisance,
as it were, to the Roman Catholic Church, and pressed their
way into ancient prisons of the mind, from which their
fathers had so valiantly liberated themselves, much
misgiving was felt in Germany. But when it was discovered
that this propaganda was the work of priests and
aristocrats, who had conspired against the religious and
political liberties of Europe; when it was seen that it was
Jesuitism itself which was seeking, with the dulcet tones of
Romanticism, to lure the youth of Germany to their ruin,
after the manner of the mythical rat-catcher of Hamelin;
when all this became known, there was great excitement and
indignation in Germany among the friends of Protestantism
and intellectual freedom.
Even if the Protestant Church may be charged with a certain
odious narrow-mindedness, yet to its immortal honour be it
said, that by allowing the right of free investigation in
the Christian religion, and by liberating the minds of men
from the yoke of authority, it made it possible for
free-thought to strike root in Germany, and for science to
develop an independent existence.
All the friends of intellectual freedom and the Protestant
Church, sceptics as well as orthodox, simultaneously arose
against the restoration of Catholicism, and, as a matter of
course, the Liberals, who were not specially concerned
either for the welfare of the Protestant Church or of
philosophy, but for the interests of civil liberty, also
joined the ranks of this opposition.
Johann Heinrich Voss, the venerable man of three-score and
ten, publicly entered the lists against the friend of his
youth, and wrote the little book, Wie Ward Fritz Stolberg
ein Unfreier? In it he analysed Stolberg's whole life, and
showed how the aristocratic tendency in the nature of his
old comrade had always existed, and that after the events of
the French Revolution that tendency had steadily become more
pronounced; that Stolberg had secretly joined an association
of the nobility, which had for its purpose to counteract the
French ideas of liberty; that these nobles entered into a
league with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the
re-establishment of Catholicism, to advance also the
interests of the nobility: he exposed in general the ways
and means by which the reactionists were seeking to bring
about the restoration of the Christian-Catholic-feudal
middle ages, and the destruction of Protestant intellectual
freedom and the political rights of the commonalty.
"Undine."
I know not if this novel has been translated into French. It
is the story of a lovely water-fairy who has no soul, and
who only acquires one by falling in love with an earthly
knight. But, alas! with this soul she also learns human
sorrows. Her knightly spouse becomes faithless, and she
kisses him dead. For in this book death also is only a kiss.
This "Undine" may be regarded as the muse of Fouqué's
poetry. Although she is indescribably beautiful, although
she suffers as we do, and earthly sorrows weigh full heavily
upon her, she is yet no real human being. But our age turns
away from all fairy-pictures, no matter how beautiful. It
demands the figures of actual life; and least of all will it
tolerate water-fays who fall in love with noble knights.
This reactionary tendency, this continual praise of the
nobility, this incessant glorification ofthe feudal system,
this everlasting knight-errantry balderdash, became at
length distasteful to the educated portion of the German
middle classes, and they turned their backs on the minstrel
who sang so out of time. In fact, this everlasting sing-song
of armours, battle-steeds, high-born maidens, honest
guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, castles, chapels,
minnesingers, faith, and whatever else that rubbish of the
middle ages may be called, wearied us; and as the ingenuous
hidalgo Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué became more and more
immersed in his books of chivalry, and, wrapped up in the
reveries of the past, he ceased to understand the present,
and then even his best friends were compelled to turn away
from him with dubious head-shakings.
What then seemed to me so grand: all that chivalry and
Catholicism; those cavaliers that hack and hew at each other
in knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and virtuous
dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers;
the monks and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic
powers; colourless passion, dignified by the high-sounding
title of renunciation, and set to the accompaniment of
tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the Miserere; how
distasteful all that has become to me since then!
Lord Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley
Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury]
As Shaftesbury saw it, Hobbes had set
the agenda of British moral philosophy (a search for the
grounding of universal moral principles), and Locke had
established its method (empiricism). Shaftesbury’s important
contribution was to focus that agenda by showing what a
satisfactory response to Hobbes might look like but without
giving up too much of Locke’s method. Shaftesbury showed
the British moralists that if we think of moral goodness as
analogous to beauty, then (even within a broadly empiricist
framework) it is still possible for moral goodness to be
non-arbitrarily grounded in objective features of the world
and for the moral agent to be attracted to virtue for its
own sake, not merely out of self-interest.
c. Moral Sense
In his essay Sensus Communis, Shaftesbury argues for an
understanding of “common sense” as a sense of the common
good (Sensus Communis III.1-2, 48-53). Shaftesbury finds a
predecessor in the Roman tradition which followed Marcus
Aurelius’s coining of the term koinonoemosune to describe
the same sort of sense of the common good (Sensus Communis
III.1, 48n19). This notion of the common good recalls the
distinction between one’s “private good” and one’s “real
good” which Shaftesbury draws in his essay An Inquiry
Concerning Virtue or Merit. The private good or
“self-interest” is the “end” or “interest” which is “right”
for an individual of one’s species and toward which the
natural affections point when they are not “ill.” And the
real good or “virtue” is the end in which one’s private good
harmonizes with the common good of one’s species as a whole
(Inquiry I.II.1, p. 167). Note that pursuing one’s private
good is not necessarily selfish. In fact, for Shaftesbury,
pursuing one’s private good is necessary, natural, and
therefore good (insofar as it does not conflict with the
public good). “Selfishness” is not just any regard for one’s
private good, but an “immoderate” one which is “inconsistent
with the interest of the species or public” (Inquiry I.II.2,
p. 170).
Shaftesbury emphasizes the importance of one’s relation to
society when he says that a creature is “nowise” good (that
is, neither “privately” nor “really” good) if it is
naturally part of a “system” but is either detached from the
system or harms that system (Inquiry I.II.1, p. 168).
Recall, as discussed above, that a human’s most immediate
“system” is society. In this way the sensus communis becomes
a necessary component in Shaftesbury’s ethics. On
Shaftesbury’s view, for any action to be considered good,
the agent must be moved to action by an affection for the
good of the system: one can only be “supposed good when the
good or ill of the system to which he has relation is the
immediate object of some passion or affection moving him”
(Inquiry I.II.1, p. 169). According to Shaftesbury, then, we
could not have an affection toward the common good if we
didn’t somehow represent the common good to ourselves. And
it is the sensus communis which allows us to do that.
Shaftesbury is clear that it is not enough that our actions
be in fact aimed at the common good though still inwardly
motivated by self-interest: “as soon as he has come to have
any affection towards what is morally good and can like or
affect such good for its own sake, as good and amiable in
itself, then is he in some degree good and virtuous, and not
till then” (Inquiry I.iii.3, p. 188). To be virtuous, an
action must be aimed at the common good because we recognize
that it is the common good and have an affection toward it
as such. Thus a truly virtuous and good creature is “one as
by the natural temper or bent of his affections is carried
primarily and immediately, and not secondarily and
accidentally, to good and against ill” (Inquiry I.ii.2,
171). Shaftesbury thinks this affection toward the good of
one’s species is natural and common to every member of the
species. Thus a virtuous action “ought by right” to have as
its “real motive” the natural affection for one’s species.
Being motivated by an affection toward the common good
is, however, only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition
for being virtuous. While anything can be good under
Shaftesbury’s definition, only a human being can be
virtuous. This is because virtue requires a “reflected
sense” (that is, the ability to reflect on what is good and
right) which requires a high degree of reason. Shaftesbury
says:
But to proceed from what is esteemed mere goodness and
lies within the reach and capacity of all sensible
creatures, to that which is called virtue or merit and is
allowed to man only: In a creature capable of forming
general notions of things, not only the outward beings which
offer themselves to the sense are the objects of affection,
but the very actions themselves and the affections of pity,
kindness, gratitude and their contraries, being brought into
the mind by reflection, become objects. So that, by means of
this reflected sense, there arises another kind of affection
towards those very affections themselves, which have been
already felt and have now become the subject of a new liking
or dislike. (Inquiry I.ii.3, p. 172)
The view seems to be that the sensus communis shows us what
is good for our species and we naturally “approve” of that
good and have an “affection” towards it, thereby motivating
us to act. Those actions are individually good which are
motivated by an affection toward the good of the whole. Then
our “reflected sense” gives us a “new affection” towards the
motives which result in good actions. On the next page
Shaftesbury refers to this “reflected sense” as a “sense of
right and wrong” which he defines as “a sentiment or
judgment of what is done through just, equal and good
affection or the contrary” (Inquiry I.ii.3, p. 173). The
notion of the moral sentiments, as Shaftesbury employs it,
presupposes the existence of the sensus communis. A properly
functioning person is already motivated by the right
affections as represented by the sensus communis, and then
our moral sentiment (our “sense of right and wrong”)
confirms that those are in fact the right motivations by
giving us a higher-order “feeling,” “affection,” or
“sentiment” of which actions are done by the right
affections. In other words, moral sentiment is a
second-order affection toward the “right” first-order
affections. Note that, while Shaftesbury also talks as if
not only first-order affections but also actions, tempers,
etc., can be the objects of the moral affection, it must be
remembered that for Shaftesbury no action or temper is truly
good or virtuous unless it is motivated by affection for the
common good. In sum, after the sensus communis determines
the moral action and motivates us to pursue it as good, then
moral sentiment approves of what the common sense tells us
via a feeling of affection and thereby motivates us to
pursue it as virtuous.
It is important to notice here that, while Shaftesbury
refers to our moral sentiments as our “conscience” and even
as our “sense of right and wrong,” he is not trying to
establish a “moral sense” as a distinct mental “faculty” for
receiving moral ideas. As D.D. Raphael notes, “the casual
application of the word ‘sense’ to the moral faculty is
hardly more significant in Shaftesbury than it is in Samuel
Clarke, who was a severe rationalist” (The Moral Sense, p.
16). We talk of a “sense of purpose,” a “sense of urgency,”
a “sense of adventure,” a “sense of humor,” etc. Sometimes
we even speak of morally relevant “senses” such as a “sense
of decency,” a “sense of shame,” a “sense of duty,” etc. But
we don’t mean to suggest that any of these “senses” ought to
be thought of as analogous to the physical senses or that
they are special mental faculties metaphysically distinct
from our ordinary mental faculties. Likewise, Shaftesbury’s
use of the phrase “sense of right and wrong” is simply a
figure of speech. He thought we used our ordinary faculties
of thinking, feeling, and desiring to make moral judgments.
Shaftesbury sometimes seems to suggest that moral judgment
is instinctive, yet this is not his considered view. For
example, in the dialogue titled The Moralists, A
Philosophical Rhapsody, Shaftesbury seems to advance the
claim that our sense of beauty is innate: “Nothing surely is
more strongly imprinted on our minds or more closely
interwoven with our souls than the idea or sense of order
and proportion” (The Moralists II.4, p. 273-4). In this
context, Shaftesbury is specifically talking about natural
beauty, but, as we have seen above, moral beauty is a
function of one’s relationship to the natural order.
Shaftesbury notes that we can easily tell the difference
between a structure created by an architect and a mere “heap
of sand and stones” and claims that “this difference is
immediately perceived by a plain internal sensation.” The
source of this sensation seems to be the common sense. In
the Sensus Communis essay, Shaftesbury argues that true
beauty in art requires the artist to submit the
“particulars” of the artwork “to the general design” and
make “all things subservient to that which is principal” (Sensus
Communis IV.3, p. 66), adding that “common sense (according
to just philosophy) judges of those works which want the
justness of a whole and show their author, however curious
and exact in particulars, to be in the main a very bungler”
(Sensus Communis IV.3, p. 67). Hence it is the common sense
(or “sense of beauty” as he calls it in The Moralists) which
discerns “order and proportion” so that taste can approve or
disapprove of them.
Now, Shaftesbury seems to think this ability of common sense
to detect beauty is innate. When we perceive an object or
action we immediately (“straight”) distinguish the beautiful
from the ugly (The Moralists III.2, p. 326), Similarly, he
says in the Inquiry that the mind “cannot be without .. nor
can it withhold” judgments of moral taste, and he compares
the functioning of the moral faculty to the functioning of a
bodily organ: “this affection of a creature towards the good
of the species or common nature is as proper and natural to
him as it is to any organ, part or member of an animal body,
or mere vegetable, to work in its known course and regular
way of growth” (Inquiry II.I.1, 192). But these statements
are misleading in isolation.
By this point in The Moralists, Shaftesbury has already
observed that taste requires cultivation: “How long before a
true taste is gained! How many things shocking, how many
offensive at first, which afterwards are known and
acknowledge the highest beauties! For it is not instantly we
acquire the sense by which these beauties are discoverable”
(The Moralists III. 2, p. 320). Shaftesbury also says
(following the Cambridge Platonists) that the affection for
and knowledge of the good can be lost by vice: “contrary
habit and custom (a second nature) is able to displace” even
the most natural instincts (Inquiry I.III.1, 179). Likewise
in the Miscellaneous Reflections, Shaftesbury writes that “a
legitimate and just taste can neither be begotten, made,
conceived or produced without the antecedent labour and
pains of criticism” (Miscellany III.2, p. 408).
If anything about the sensus communis or moral taste is
innate, it is the potential to develop good taste. Everyone
is born with these faculties. But everyone must be educated
in how to use them. Moral taste is a natural faculty but it
is also a cultivated faculty. Elsewhere Shafesbury argues
that though “good rustics who have been bred remote from the
formed societies of men” might have been “so happily formed
by nature herself that, with the greatest simplicity or
rudeness of education, they have still something of a
natural grace and comliness in their action,” it is
nevertheless “undeniable, however, that the perfection of
grace and comliness of action and behavior can be found only
among the people of a liberal education” since such
perfection requires knowledge of “those particular rules of
art which philosophy alone exhibits” (Soliloquy I.3 p.
85-7). So virtue must be cultivated like good taste in art
or wine. Only then can one act “from his nature, in a manner
necessarily and without reflection” (Sensus Communis IV.1,
p. 60).
In summary, our moral sense is a not a special instinctive
faculty, but an innate potential to approve of certain
actions that must be activated by good education in society.
Once we have been trained in the art of sociable
conversation, our moral sense will inevitably approve of
those actions which are motivated by the teleological good
of society as a whole.
Lord Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of
Shaftesbury]
Shaftesbury believed that humans are designed to
appreciate order and harmony, and that proper appreciation
of order and harmony is the basis of correct judgments about
morality, beauty, and religion. He was at the forefront of
developing the idea of a moral sense, of explicating
aesthetic experience, of defending political liberty and
tolerance, and of arguing for religious belief based on
reason and observation rather than revelation or scripture.
Shaftesbury thought the purpose of philosophy was to help
enable people to live better lives. Towards that end, he
aimed to write persuasively and for the educated populace as
a whole, deploying a wide variety of styles and literary
forms.
2. Morality
2.1 Virtue and Goodness
Shaftesbury maintains that virtue is the promotion of the
good of all humankind.
To love the Publick, to study universal Good, and to promote
the Interest of the whole World, as far as lies within our
power, is surely the Height of Goodness. (C 1.37)
The virtuous person strives to develop an “equal, just, and
universal Friendship” with humanity as a whole (C 2.242).
Shaftesbury’s view of virtue is part of his larger view
of goodness. Something is good, according to Shaftesbury, if
it contributes to the “Existence or Well-being” of the
system of which it is a part (C 2.18). Every animal is a
part of its species. So a particular animal, say a tiger, is
a good member of its species—it’s a good tiger—if it
contributes to the well-being of the tiger species as a
whole. There is also “a system of all animals”, which
consists of the “order” or “economy” of all the different
animal species (C 2.19). So a good animal is one that
contributes to the well-being of “animal Affairs” in general
(C 2.19). The system of all animals, moreover, works
with the system “of Vegetables, and all other things in this
inferior World” to constitute “one system of a Globe or
Earth” (C 2.19). So something is a good earthly thing if it
contributes to the existence of earthly things in general.
And the system of this earth is itself part of a “Universal
System” or “a System of all Things” (C 2.20). So to be
“wholly and really” good a thing must contribute to the good
of the universe as a whole (C 2.20). This progression of
ever-larger systems is a bit dazzling, and we might wonder
how we can know (or even make sense of) whether something is
contributing to the well-being of the universe as a whole.
But Shaftesbury avoids this problem by discussing in detail
only that which makes “a sensible Creature” a good member of
its species—by focusing on whether an individual creature is
promoting the well-being of its species (C 2.21). Perhaps
Shaftesbury believes that a creature that contributes to the
well-being of its species will also always contribute to the
well-being of the universe as a whole, in which case being a
good member of one’s species would be coextensive with being
“wholly and really” good.
The goodness or evilness of a sensible creature, according
to Shaftesbury, is based on the creature’s motives, and not
simply on the results of the creature’s actions (C 2.21–22).
This leads to a crucial claim: every motive to action
involves affection or passion (C 2.40–44). Reason alone
cannot motivate (C 2.28–52, 77–81). Shaftesbury strongly
emphasizes the importance of motive, arguing that if
creatures promote the good of the species only because they
are forced to or only because promoting the good is a means
to other ends, then they are not actually good themselves.
Creatures are good only if their motivating affections are
directed “primarily and immediately” at the good of the
species, not if the connection between their affection and
the good of the species is accidental (C 2.26).
Goodness is something that is within the reach of all
sensible creatures, not only humans but also non-human
animals. A creature is good if its affections promote the
well-being of the system of which it is a part, and
non-human animals are just as capable of possessing this
type of affection as humans. “Virtue or Merit”, on the other
hand, is within the reach of “Man only” (C 2.28), and that
is because virtue or merit is tied to a special kind of
affection that only humans possess. This special kind of
affection is a second-order affection, an affection that has
as its object another affection. We humans experience these
second-order affections because we, unlike non-human
animals, are conscious of our own passions. Not only do we
possess passions, but we also reflect on or become aware of
the passions we have. And when we reflect on our own
passions, we develop feelings about them. Imagine you feel
the desire to help a person in distress. In addition to
simply feeling that desire, you may also become aware that
you are feeling that desire. And when you become aware of
that, you may experience a positive feeling (or “liking”)
towards your desire to help. Or imagine you feel the desire
to harm a person who has bested you in a fair competition.
In addition to simply feeling the desire to harm, you may
also become aware that you are feeling that desire. And when
you become aware of that, you may experience a negative
feeling (or “dislike”) towards your desire to harm. These
are the kinds of phenomena Shaftesbury has in mind when he
writes that
the Affections of Pity, Kindness,
Gratitude, and their Contrarys, being brought into the Mind
by Reflection, become Objects. So that, by means of this
reflected Sense, there arises another kind of Affection
towards those very Affections themselves, which have been
already felt, and are now become the Subject of a new Liking
or Dislike. (C 2.28)
2.2 The Moral Sense
Shaftesbury calls this capacity to feel second-order
affections the “Sense of Right and Wrong” or the “Moral
Sense” (C 2.28–36, 2.40–46, 2.51, 2.53, 2.60), although the
term is not one he emphasizes or explains in detail (see
Rivers 2000a: 124). There is little evidence that he thinks
the moral sense is a distinct psychological faculty in the
way that Hutcheson did. Nevertheless, Shaftesbury does think
that the moral sense (whether one faculty or a general
disposition) is that which produces in us feelings of “like”
or “dislike” for our own (first-order) affections. When the
moral sense is operating properly, it produces positive
feelings towards affections that promote the well-being of
humanity and negative feelings towards affections that
detract from the well-being of humanity. The second-order
feelings that the moral sense produces can themselves
motivate one to action, and people are virtuous if they act
from those second-order feelings. In contrast, non-human
animals, because they lack the powers of reflection
necessary for consciousness of their own affections, do not
possess a moral sense. So non-human animals are incapable of
achieving virtue (C 2.28–31).
Shaftesbury argues that because our sense of morality is a
sentiment, it can be opposed only by another sentiment, and
not by reason or belief.
Sense of Right and Wrong therefore being as natural to us as
natural Affection itself, and being a first Principle in our
Constitution and Make; there is no speculative Opinion,
Persuasion or Belief, which is capable immediately or
directly to exclude or destroy it… And this Affection being
an original one of earliest rise in the Soul or affectionate
Part; nothing beside contrary Affection, by frequent check
and controul, can operate upon it, so as either to diminish
it in part, or destroy it in the whole. (C 2.44).
How to interpret the moral sense is one of the most
intensely debated issues in Shaftesbury scholarship. The two
main camps can be called the constitutive interpretation and
the representative interpretation.
The constitute interpretation holds that morality is
constituted by the subjective affective responses of each
human. Sidgwick is often cited as a proponent of this
interpretation. Sidgwick claims that “Shaftesbury is the
first moralist who distinctly takes psychological experience
as the basis of ethics” (Sidgwick 1902: 187) and that
Shaftesbury thinks morality is based on a “sense [that] may
naturally vary from man to man as the palate does” (Sidgwick
1902: 212–13). Sidgwick thought that this subjectivist
aspect of Shaftesbury’s view did damage to morality because
it undermined the reasons that might be given for being
moral. Price thought something similar, contending that
Shaftesbury’s focus on “affection” led to his “overlooking
entirely … the authority belonging to virtue” (Price 1769:
317). Tuveson is in the same camp, contending that
Shaftesbury’s view differed from prior versions of a moral
sense (such as Henry More’s) by eliminating the role of
reason altogether.
It is the feeling, not reason, which is the right moral
judge; it is the emotions, according to the Inquiry, which
are the right moral guide. (Tuveson 1948: 258)
In saying this, Tuveson claims that Shaftesburean moral
judgments are based on an immediate reaction—an inclining to
or recoiling from—and not on a discursively-arrived upon
“opinion or formal judgment” (Tuveson 1960: 53; see
Filonowiz 1989: 192). Tuveson also claims that Shaftesburean
moral judgments do not represent anything in
mind-independent reality. According to Tuveson, Shaftesbury
thought that “that the value area of the mind must
constitute a world to itself, outside the process of
cognition” (Tuveson 1960: 54). Those in the constitutive
camp may also choose to emphasize Shaftesbury’s influence on
Hutcheson and Hume, whose sentimentalism is sometimes taken
to eschew commitment to mind-independent moral properties.
The representative interpretation holds, in contrast, that
the affective responses of Shaftesbury’s moral sense
represent moral facts or properties that exist independently
of our reactions to them. Irwin advances this view when he
claims that Shaftesbury “treats the moral sense as a sign of
objective moral properties, not as their metaphysical basis”
(Irwin 2008: 369), and that the moral sense has “an
indicative (or detective) role”. According to Irwin,
Shaftesbury believes that moral properties have a “logical
independence from” our beliefs and judgments about them
(Irwin 2015: 866–7). Schneewind also believes that
Shaftesbury’s moral sense detects objective moral
properties, contending that the moral faculty
is special because through it we become aware of an
objective order… The approval and disapproval themselves are
feelings, but they reveal that the set of passions being
considered either is or is not harmonious. (Schneewind 1998:
302)
Rivers develops a similar view, arguing that our moral
faculty enables us to “recognize and respond” to the
objective property of harmony (Rivers 2000a: 143; see also
126). Those in the representative camp may emphasize the
influence on Shaftesbury of the Cambridge Platonists, whose
rationalist moral theories included a clear commitment to
the existence of moral properties independent of our
reactions (Cassirer 1953: 159–202; Gill 2006: 77–82).
The representative and constitutive camps can both cite
passages that pose interpretative challenges to the other
side.
In favor of the representative interpretation and
challenging for the constitutive are claims Shaftesbury
makes that seem to imply that moral properties are
independent of human reactions. He maintains, for instance,
that what is destructive of the human species can never be
Virtue of any kind, or in any sense; but must remain still
horrid Depravity, notwithstanding any Fashion, Law, Custom,
or Religion; which may be ill and vitious it-self, but can
never alter the eternal Measures, and immutable independent
Nature of Worth and Virtue. (C 2.35–36)
He also calls himself a “realist”, and seems to do so in a
way that precludes a constitutive reading (see Irwin 2015
and Carey 2006: 98–99, 130–4). As one of his characters puts
it when speaking of the author of the Inquiry:
For being, in respect of Virtue, what you lately call’d a
Realist; he endeavours to shew, “That it is really something
in it-self, and in the nature of Things: not arbitrary or
factitious, (if I may so speak) not constituted from
without, or dependent on Custom, Fancy, or Will; not even on
the Supreme Will it-self, which can no-way govern it: but
being necessarily good, is govern’d by it, and ever uniform
with it.” (C 2.267)
Shaftesbury says as well that “the principal End” of
Characteristicks is
“To assert the Reality of a Beauty and Charm in moral as
well as natural Subjects; and to demonstrate the
Reasonableness of a proportionate Taste, and determinate
Choice, in Life and Manners.” The Standard of this kind, and
the noted Character of Moral Truth [are] firmly establish’d
in Nature it-self. (C 3.303; see 1.336)
Those in the representative camp can also claim support from
Shaftesbury’s comparison of virtue to beauty. Shaftesbury
contends that beauty is a mind-independent, objective
property. But since aesthetic responses are representative
of mind-independent reality, and our moral responses are
similar or perhaps identical to our aesthetic responses, it
follows that our moral responses are representative as well
(Schneewind 1998: 303–4; Carey 2006: 107, 125, 132–4).
In favor of the constitutive interpretation and challenging
for the representative are statements Shaftesbury makes that
seem to imply that the basis for virtue is dependent only on
human reactions and thus insensitive to any mind-independent
fact (Taylor 1989: 256–7; Den Uyl 1998: 90; Gill 2000:
538–47). He says, for instance, that our reason to be
virtuous is impervious even to the supposition that we know
nothing of the external world.
For let us carry Scepticism ever so far, let us doubt, if we
can, of every thing about us; we cannot doubt of what passes
within our-selves. Our Passions and Affections are known to
us. They are certain, whatever the Objects may be, on which
they are employ’d. Nor is it of any concern to our Argument,
how these exterior Objects stand; whether they are Realitys,
or mere Illusions; whether we wake or dream. For ill Dreams
will be equally disturbing. And a good Dream, if Life be
nothing else, will be easily and happily pass’d. In this
Dream of Life, therefore, our Demonstrations have the same
force; our Balance and Economy hold good, and our Obligation
to Virtue is in every respect the same. (C 2.173)
In a similar vein he writes,
If there be no real Amiableness or Deformity in moral Acts,
there is at least an imaginary one of full force. (C 2.43)
Commentators on either side of the
representative-constitutive divide may try to show that
passages that seem troublesome for their interpretation do
not mean what the other side claims. Towards that end,
commentators may try to soft-pedal one set of Shaftesbury’s
statements, perhaps emphasizing the different purposes and
different personae in Shaftesbury’s writings, or explicating
the fuller context of various quotations in a way that
reveals that Shaftesbury is not himself endorsing certain
claims but rather arguing that even on assumptions he does
not accept his main points about virtue will still stand.
Jaffro has argued that Shaftesbury consciously changed his
mind, or at least decided that he should change how to
express his views, moving from an early account that had
subjectivist implications to a later account that was more
objectivist (Jaffro 2007). Another possible response to this
interpretative issue is to hold that Shaftesbury is simply
inconsistent, or that he is unaware of the implications of
some of his own claims. As Raphael puts it, “The fact is
that no coherent view can be extracted from Shaftesbury
about the moral faculty or about moral theory in general”
(Raphael 1947: 17). Kivy writes,
It has been the opinion of many, from Shaftesbury’s time to
our own, that no coherent view emerges; and I am inclined,
in the last analysis, to agree. (Kivy 2003: 16)
Darwall (1995) has developed an interpretation of
Shaftesbury’s moral sense that does not fit in either the
constitutive or the representative camp. According to
Darwall, Shaftesbury believes that the normative authority
of morality leads to the view that the basis of morality is
within each agent, which conflicts with interpretations that
hold that the moral sense represents something external. But
Darwall also holds that Shaftesbury believes that there is a
rationally necessary view of morality that each agent should
come to, which conflicts with interpretations that hold that
the moral sense produces subjective and contingent emotional
experiences. On Darwall’s interpretation, Shaftesbury is
concerned with autonomy and rationality in a way that
warrants classifying him as a clear precursor to Kant. Den
Uyl has raised concerns about Darwall’s interpretation by
contending that the moral sense is the source of favorable
attitudes rather than the law-like rules of a proto-Kantian
rationalist (Den Uyl 1998: 304). Another objection to
Darwall’s interpretation can be found in Irwin, who claims
that Shaftesbury’s moral sense view is externalist—i.e.,
that one’s moral sense produces responses that have no
necessary connection to one’s motivation or reason to act
morally (Irwin 2015: 877 and 880). Darwall’s interpretation,
in contrast, requires a strongly internalist reading of
Shaftesbury.
The child who, as you know, once wrote to Goethe,
Wanting to make him fancy that he loved her,
Went to the theatre one fine day.
A Uniform then stalked her way
And came towards her with a friendly smile.
"Kind Sir, Bettina wishes, for a while,
Smitten with sweet desire, to rest
Her curly head upon your breast."
The Uniform then answered rather drily,
"Bettina, that is up to you entirely!"
"Sweetie," she answered in a trice,
"Of course you're sure I have no lice!"
For the rest, I read Saint-Beuve’s book on Chateaubriand, a
writer whom I have always found repugnant. The man is
celebrated in France, because in every respect he is the
most classical incarnation of French vanité, a vanité
clothed not in light, frivolous eighteenth-century garb, but
draped in romanticism and prancing about in newly coined
phrases. Such false profundity, Byzantine exaggeration,
flirtation with emotion, motley Schillerism, word painting,
theatrical sublime, or to put it concisely, such a
hodge-podge of lies has never before been achieved, neither
in form, nor in content.
These are, on the one hand, the pronounced Radicals, who are
almost Chartists, such as a few members of the House of
Commons, the manufacturers Hindley of Ashton, and Fielden of
Todmorden (Lancashire), and, on the other hand, the
philanthropic Tories, who have recently constituted
themselves "Young England", among whom are the Members of
Parliament, Disraeli, Borthwick, Ferrand, Lord John Manners,
etc., Lord Ashley, too, is in sympathy with them. The hope
of "Young England" is a restoration of the old "merry
England" with its brilliant features and its romantic
feudalism. This object is of course unattainable and
ridiculous, a satire upon all historic development; but the
good intention, the courage to resist the existing state of
things and prevalent prejudices, and to recognise the
vileness of our present condition, is worth something
anyhow.
Moreover, Ruge was not the porter of German Enlightenment,
he was the Nicolai of modern German philosophy and thus was
able to conceal the natural banality of his genius behind a
thick hedge of speculative jargon. Like Nicolai he fought
valiantly against Romanticism because Hegel had demolished
it philosophically in the aesthetics and Heine had done the
same thing from the point of view of literature in The
Romantic School. Unlike Hegel he agreed with Nicolai in
arrogating to himself the right as an anti-Romantic to set
up a vulgar Philistinism and above all his own Philistinic
self as an ideal of perfection. With this in mind and so as
to defeat the enemy on his own ground Ruge went in for
making verses. No Dutchman could have achieved the dull
flatness of these poems which Ruge hurled so challengingly
into the face of Romanticism.
We repeat once again: our estates have fulfilled their
function as such, but far be it from us to desire to justify
them on that account. In them, the Rhinelander ought to have
been victorious over the estate, the human being ought to
have been victorious over the forest owner. They themselves
are legally entrusted not only with the representation of
particular interests but also with the representation of the
interests of the province, and however contradictory these
two tasks may be, in case of conflict there should not be a
moment's delay in sacrificing representation of particular
interest to representation of the interests of the province.
The sense of right and legality is the most important
provincial characteristic of the Rhinelander. But it goes
without saying that a particular interest, caring no more
for the province than it does for the Fatherland, has also
no concern for local spirit, any more than for the general
spirit. In direct contradiction to those writers of
fantasy who profess to find in the representation of private
interests ideal romanticism, immeasurable depths of feeling,
and the most fruitful source of individual and specific
forms of morality, such representation on the contrary
abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by
enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and
soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a
particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to
this object.
Human history is like paleontology.
Owing to a certain judicial blindness even the best
intelligences absolutely fail to see the things which lie in
front of their noses. Later, when the moment has arrived, we
are surprised to find traces everywhere of what we failed to
see. The first reaction against the French Revolution and
the period of Enlightenment bound up with it was naturally
to see everything as mediaeval and romantic, even people
like Grimm are not free from this. The second reaction is
to look beyond the Middle Ages into the primitive age of
each nation, and that corresponds to the socialist
tendency, although these learned men have no idea that the
two have any connection. They are therefore surprised to
find what is newest in what is oldest--even equalitarians,
to a degree which would have made Proudhon shudder.
The Holy Family Chapter VI 3)
d) Critical Battle Against French Materialism
“Spinozism dominated the eighteenth century both in its
later French variety, which made matter into substance, and
in deism, which conferred on matter a more spiritual
name.... Spinoza’s French school and the supporters of deism
were but two sects disputing over the true meaning of his
system.... The simple fate of this Enlightenment was its
decline in romanticism after being obliged to surrender to
the reaction which began after the French movement.”
That is what Criticism says.
To the Critical history of French materialism we shall
oppose a brief outline of its ordinary, mass-type history.
We shall acknowledge with due respect the abyss between
history as it really happened and history as it takes place
according to the decree of “Absolute Criticism”, the creator
equally of the old and of the new. And finally, obeying the
prescriptions of Criticism, we shall make the “Why?”,
“Whence?” and “Whither?” of Critical history the “object of
a persevering study”.
“Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense”, the French
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and in particular
French materialism, was not only a struggle against the
existing political institutions and the existing religion
and theology; it was just as much an open, clearly expressed
struggle against the metaphysics of the seventeenth century,
and against all metaphysics, in particular that of
Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. Philosophy was
counterposed to metaphysics, just as Feuerbach, in his first
resolute attack on Hegel, counterposed sober philosophy to
wild speculation. Seventeenth century metaphysics, driven
from the field by the French Enlightenment, notably, by
French materialism of the eighteenth century, experienced a
victorious and substantial restoration in German philosophy,
particularly in the speculative German philosophy of the
nineteenth century. After Hegel linked it in a masterly
fashion with all subsequent metaphysics and with German
idealism and founded a metaphysical universal kingdom, the
attack on theology again corresponded, as in the eighteenth
century, to an attack on speculative metaphysics and
metaphysics in general. It will be defeated for ever by
materialism, which has now been perfected by the work of
speculation itself and coincides with humanism. But just as
Feuerbach is the representative of materialism coinciding
with humanism in the theoretical domain, French and English
socialism and communism represent materialism coinciding
with humanism in the practical domain.
“Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense”, there are two
trends in French materialism; one traces its origin to
Descartes, the other to Locke. The latter is mainly a French
development and leads directly to socialism. The former,
mechanical materialism, merges with French natural science
proper. The two trends intersect in the course of
development. We have no need here to go more deeply into the
French materialism that derives directly from Descartes, any
more than into the French school of Newton and the
development of French natural science in general.
We shall therefore merely say the following:
Descartes in his physics endowed matter with self-creative
power and conceived mechanical motion as the manifestation
of its life. He completely separated his physics from his
metaphysics. Within his physics, matter is the sole
substance, the sole basis of being and of knowledge.
Mechanical French materialism adopted Descartes’ physics in
opposition to his metaphysics. His followers were by
profession anti-metaphysicians, i.e., physicists.
This school begins with the physician Le Roy, reaches its
zenith with the physician Cabanis, and the physician La
Mettrie is its centre. Descartes was still living when Le
Roy, like La Mettrie in the eighteenth century, transposed
the Cartesian structure of the animal to the human soul and
declared that the soul is a modus of the body and ideas are
mechanical motions. Le Roy even thought Descartes had kept
his real opinion secret. Descartes protested. At the end of
the eighteenth century Cabanis perfected Cartesian
materialism in his treatise: Rapport du physique et du moral
de 1'homme.
Cartesian materialism still exists today in France. It
has achieved great successes in mechanical natural science
which, “speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense”, will be
least of all reproached with romanticism.
The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, represented in
France by Descartes, had materialism as its antagonist from
its very birth. The latter’s opposition to Descartes was
personified by Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean
materialism. French and English materialism was always
closely related to Democritus and Epicurus. Cartesian
metaphysics had another opponent in the English materialist
Hobbes. Gassendi and Hobbes triumphed over their opponent
long after their death at the very time when metaphysics was
already officially dominant in all French schools.
Voltaire pointed out that the indifference of the French of
the eighteenth century to the disputes between the Jesuits
and the Jansenists[32] was due less to philosophy than to
Law’s financial speculations. So the downfall of
seventeenth-century metaphysics can be explained by the
materialistic theory of the eighteenth century only in so
far as this theoretical movement itself is explained by the
practical nature of French life at that time. This life was
turned to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and
worldly interests, to the earthly world. Its
anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialistic practice
demanded corresponding anti-theological, anti-metaphysical,
materialistic theories. Metaphysics had in practice lost all
credit. Here we have only to indicate briefly the
theoretical course of events.
In the seventeenth century metaphysics (cf. Descartes,
Leibniz, and others) still contained a positive, secular
element. It made discoveries in mathematics, physics and
other exact sciences which seemed to come within its scope.
This semblance was done away with as early as the beginning
of the eighteenth century. The positive sciences broke away
from metaphysics and marked out their independent fields.
The whole wealth of metaphysics now consisted only of beings
of thought and heavenly things, at the very time when real
beings and earthly things began to be the centre of all
interest. Metaphysics had become insipid. In the very year
in which Malebranche and Arnauld, the last great French
metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, died, Helvétius
and Condillac were born.
The man who deprived seventeenth-century metaphysics and
metaphysics in general of all credit in the domain of theory
was Pierre Bayle. His weapon was scepticism, which he forged
out of metaphysics’ own magic formulas. He himself proceeded
at first from Cartesian metaphysics. Just as Feuerbach by
combating speculative theology was driven further to combat
speculative philosophy, precisely because he recognised in
speculation the last drop of theology, because he had to
force theology to retreat from pseudo-science to crude,
repulsive faith, so Bayle too was driven by religious doubt
to doubt about the metaphysics which was the prop of that
faith. He therefore critically investigated metaphysics in
its entire historical development. He became its historian
in order to write the history of its death. He refuted
chiefly Spinoza and Leibniz.
Pierre Bayle not only prepared the reception of materialism
and of the philosophy of common sense in France by
shattering metaphysics with his scepticism. He heralded the
atheistic society which was soon to come into existence by
proving that a society consisting only of atheists is
possible, that an atheist can be a man worthy of respect,
and that it is not by atheism but by superstition and
idolatry that man debases himself.
To quote a French writer, Pierre Bayle was “the last
metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth century and
the first philosopher in the sense of the eighteenth
century”.
Besides the negative refutation of seventeenth-century
theology and metaphysics, a positive, anti-metaphysical
system was required. A book was needed which would
systematise and theoretically substantiate the life practice
of that time. Locke’s treatise An Essay Concerning Humane
Understanding came from across the Channel as if in answer
to a call. It was welcomed enthusiastically like a
long-awaited guest.
The question arises: Is Locke perhaps a disciple of Spinoza?
“Profane” history can answer:
Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain.
Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, “whether
it was impossible for matter to think?”
In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God’s
omnipotence, i.e., he made theology preach materialism.
Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of
materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.
The real progenitor of English materialism and all modern
experimental science is Bacon. To him natural philosophy is
the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the
experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural
philosophy. Anaxagoras and his homoeomeriae, Democritus and
his atoms, he often quotes as his authorities. According to
him the senses are infallible and the source of all
knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists
in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational
method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison,
observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a
rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter,
motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of
mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form
of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension — or a ‘Qual’, to
use a term of Jakob Böhme’s — of matter. The primary forms
of matter are the living, individualising forces of being
inherent in it and producing the distinctions between the
species.
In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still holds back
within itself in a naive way the germs of a many-sided
development. On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a
sensuous, poetic glamour, seems to attract man’s whole
entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically
formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported
from theology.
In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided.
Hobbes is the man who systematises Baconian materialism.
Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it
passes into the abstract experience of the geometrician.
Physical motion is sacrificed to mechanical or mathematical
motion; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences.
Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its
opponent, misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism, and that on
the latter’s own ground, materialism has to chastise its own
flesh and turn ascetic. Thus it passes into an intellectual
entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency,
regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.
Hobbes, as Bacon’s continuator, argues thus: if all human
knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts,
notions, and ideas are but the phantoms of the real world,
more or less divested of its sensual form. Philosophy can
but give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to
more than one of them. There may even be names of names. But
it would imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we
maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of
sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a
word; that besides the beings known to us by our senses,
beings which are one and all individuals, there existed also
beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily
substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body,
being, substance, are but different terms for the same
reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter
that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes
going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless,
unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an
endless process of addition. Only material things being
perceptible, knowable to us, we cannot know anything about
the existence of God. My own existence alone is certain.
Every human passion is a mechanical movement which has a
beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we
call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power
and freedom are identical.
Hobbes had systematised Bacon without, however, furnishing a
proof for Bacon’s fundamental principle, the origin of all
human knowledge and ideas from the world of sensation.
It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Humane Understanding,
supplied this proof.
Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian
materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley,
similarly shattered the last theological bars that still
hemmed in Locke’s sensationalism. At all events, for
materialists, deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid
of religion.
We have already mentioned how opportune Locke’s work was for
the French. Locke founded the philosophy of bon sens, of
common sense; i.e., he said indirectly that there cannot be
any philosophy at variance with the healthy human senses and
reason based on them.
Locke’s immediate pupil, Condillac, who translated him into
French, at once applied Locke’s sensualism against
seventeenth-century metaphysics. He proved that the French
had rightly rejected this metaphysics as a mere botch work
of fancy and theological prejudice. He published a
refutation of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and
Malebranche.
In his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines he
expounded Locke’s ideas and proved that not only the soul,
but the senses too, not only the art of creating ideas, but
also the art of sensuous perception, are matters of
experience and habit. The whole development of man therefore
depends on education and external circumstances. It was only
by eclectic philosophy that Condillac was ousted from the
French schools.
The difference between French and English materialism
reflects the difference between the two nations. The French
imparted to English materialism wit, flesh and blood, and
eloquence. They gave it the temperament and grace that it
lacked. They civilised it.
In Helvétius, who also based himself on Locke, materialism
assumed a really French character. Helvétius conceived it
immediately in its application to social life (Helvétius, De
1'homme). The sensory qualities and self-love, enjoyment and
correctly understood personal interest are the basis of all
morality. The natural equality of human intelligences, the
unity of progress of reason and progress of industry, the
natural goodness of man, and the omnipotence of education,
are the main features in his system.
In Lamettrie’s works we find a synthesis of Cartesian and
English materialism. He makes use of Descartes’ physics in
detail. His Man Machine[33] is a treatise after the model of
Descartes’ animal-machine. The physical part of Holbach’s
Système de la nature is also a result of the combination of
French and English materialism, while the moral part is
based essentially on the morality of Helvétius. Robinet (De
la nature), the French materialist who had the most
connection with metaphysics and was therefore praised by
Hegel, refers explicitly to Leibniz.
We need not dwell on Volney, Dupuis, Diderot and others, any
more than on the physiocrats, after we have proved the dual
origin of French materialism from Descartes’ physics and
English materialism, and the opposition of French
materialism to seventeenth-century metaphysics, to the
metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz.
This opposition only became evident to the Germans after
they themselves had come into opposition to speculative
metaphysics.
Just as Cartesian materialism passes into natural science
proper, the other trend of French materialism leads directly
to socialism and communism.
There is no need for any great penetration to see from
the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and
equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of
experience, habit and education, and the influence of
environment on man, the great significance of industry, the
justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily
materialism is connected with communism and socialism.
If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the
world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then
what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in
such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to
what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of
himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the
principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be
made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is
unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through
the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the
positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must
not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social
sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be
given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being.
If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be
made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his
true nature only in society, and the power of his nature
must be measured not by the power of the separate individual
but by the power of society. These and similar propositions
are to be found almost literally even in the oldest French
materialists. This is not the place to assess them. The
apologia of vices by Mandeville, one of Locke’s early
English followers, is typical of the socialist tendencies of
materialism. He proves that in modern society vice is
indispensable and useful. [Bernard de. Mandeville, The Fable
of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits] This was
by no means an apologia for modern society.
Fourier proceeds directly from the teaching of the French
materialists. The Babouvists were crude, uncivilised
materialists, but developed communism, too, derives directly
from French materialism. The latter returned to its
mother-country, England, in the form Helvétius gave it.
Bentham based his system of correctly understood interest on
Helvétius’ morality, and Owen proceeded from Bentham’s
system to found English communism. Exiled to England, the
Frenchman Cabet came under the influence of communist ideas
there and on his return to France became the most popular,
if the most superficial, representative of communism. Like
Owen, the more scientific French Communists, Dézamy, Gay and
others, developed the teaching of materialism as the
teaching of real humanism and the logical basis of
communism.
Where, then, did Herr Bauer or, Criticism, manage to acquire
the documents for the Critical history of French
materialism?
1) Hegel’s [Vorlesungen über die] Geschichte der Philosophie
presents French materialism as the realisation of the
Substance of Spinoza, which at any rate is far more
comprehensible than “the French school of Spinoza’.
2) Herr Bauer read Hegel’s Geschichte dear Philosophie as
saying that French materialism was the school of Spinoza.
Then, as he found in another of Hegel’s works that deism and
materialism are two parties representing one and the same
basic principle, he concluded that Spinoza had two schools
which disputed over the meaning of his system. Herr Bauer
could have found the supposed explanation in Hegel’s
Phänomenologie, where it is said:
“Regarding that Absolute Being, Enlightenment itself fails
out with itself ... and is divided between the views of two
parties.... The one ... calls Absolute Being that
predicateless Absolute ... the other calls it matter ....
Both are entirely the same notion — the distinction lies not
in the objective fact, but purely in the diversity of
starting-point adopted by the two developments” (Hegel,
Phänomenologie, pp. 420, 421, 422)
3) Finally Herr Bauer could find, again in Hegel, that when
Substance does not develop into a concept and
self-consciousness, it degenerates into “romanticism”. The
journal Hallische Jahrbücher at one time developed a similar
theory.
But at all costs the “Spirit” had to decree a “foolish
destiny” for its “adversary”, materialism.
Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels
1877
Introduction
General
Modern socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of
the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms
existing in the society of today between proprietors and
non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on
the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production.
But, in its theoretical form, modern socialism originally
appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the
principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the
eighteenth century. Like every new theory, modern socialism
had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual
stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots
lay in economic facts.
The great men, who in France prepared men's minds for the
coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists.
They recognised no external authority of any kind whatever.
Religion, natural science, society, political institutions —
everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism;
everything must justify its existence before the
judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became
the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as
Hegel says, the world stood upon its head; first in the
sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by
its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and
association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that
the reality which was in contradiction to these principles
had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of
society and government then existing, every old traditional
notion was flung into the lumber room as irrational; the
world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by
prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and
contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of
day, henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege,
oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal
Right, equality based on nature and the inalienable rights
of man.
We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more
than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this
eternal Right found its realisation in bourgeois justice;
that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality
before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as
one of the essential rights of man; and that the government
of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, [21] came into
being, and only could come into being, as a democratic
bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth
century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond
the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.
But, side by side with the antagonism of the feudal nobility
and the burghers, was the general antagonism of exploiters
and exploited, of rich idlers and poor workers. It was this
very circumstance that made it possible for the
representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward
as representing not one special class, but the whole of
suffering humanity. Still further. From its origin the
bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists
cannot exist without wage-workers, and, in the same
proportion as the mediaeval burgher of the guild developed
into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman and the day-labourer,
outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And
although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle
with the nobility, could claim to represent at the same time
the interests of the different working classes of that
period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there were
independent outbursts of that class which was the
forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern
proletariat. For example, at the time of the German
Reformation and the Peasant War, Thomas Münzer; in the great
English Revolution, the Levellers [22]; in the great French
Revolution, Babeuf. There were theoretical enunciations
corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings of a class
not yet developed; in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries utopian pictures of ideal social conditions [23];
in the eighteenth, actual communistic theories (Morelly and
Mably). The demand for equality was no longer limited to
political rights; it was extended also to the social
conditions of individuals. It was not simply class
privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions
themselves. A communism, ascetic, Spartan, was the first
form of the new teaching. Then came the three great
utopians: Saint-Simon, to whom the middle-class movement,
side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain
significance; Fourier, and Owen, who in the country where
capitalist production was most developed, and under the
influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked out
his proposals for the removal of class distinctions
systematically and in direct relation to French materialism.
One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears
as a representative of the interests of that proletariat
which historical development had, in the meantime, produced.
Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to
emancipate a particular class, but all humanity. Like them,
they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal
justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as
heaven from earth, from that of the French philosophers.
For the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these
philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and,
therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily
as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure
reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this
has been the case only because men have not rightly
understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of
genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth.
That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly
understood, is not an inevitable event, following of
necessity in the chain of historical development, but a mere
happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500
years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years
of error, strife, and suffering.
This mode of outlook is essentially that of all English and
French and of the first German socialists, including
Weitling. Socialism is the expression of absolute truth,
reason and justice and has only to be discovered to conquer
all the world by virtue of its own power. And as absolute
truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical
development of man,. it is a mere accident when and where it
is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and
justice are different with the founder of each different
school. And as each one's special kind of absolute truth,
reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective
understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of
his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no
other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths
than that they shall be mutually exclusive one of the other.
Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic,
average socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the
present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist
workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing
of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of less
striking critical statements, economic theories pictures of
future society by the founders of different sects, a
mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more the
definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are
rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in
a brook.
To make a science of socialism, it had first to be placed
upon a real basis.
Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels
1877
Part III: Socialism
I. Historical
We saw in the “Introduction” [100] how the French
philosophers of the eighteenth century, the forerunners of
the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all
that is. A rational government, rational society, were to be
founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reason was
to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this
eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealised
understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then
evolving into the bourgeois.
The French Revolution had realised
this rational society and government. But, the new order of
things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions,
turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The state
based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau’s Contrat
Social had found its realisation in the Reign of Terror,
from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their
own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the
corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing
of the Napoleonic despotism. [101]
The promised eternal peace was turned
into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon
reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and
poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had
become intensified by the removal of the guild and other
privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over, and by
the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church.
The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made
poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of
existence of society. The number of crimes increased from
year to year. Formerly, the feudal vices had openly stalked
about in broad daylight; though not eradicated, they were
now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead,
the bourgeois vices, hitherto practiced in secret, began to
blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater
and greater extent cheating. The “fraternity” of the
revolutionary motto [102] was realised in the chicanery and
rivalries of the battle of competition.
Oppression by force was replaced by
corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold.
The right of the first night was transferred from the feudal
lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution increased
to an extent never heard of. Marriage itself remained, as
before, the legally recognised form, the official cloak of
prostitution, and, moreover, was supplemented by rich crops
of adultery. In a word, compared with the splendid
promises of the philosophers, the social and political
institutions born of the “triumph of reason” were bitterly
disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the
men to formulate this disappointment and they came with the
turn of the century.
Over two centuries ago, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant
wrote an essay entitled ‘Was ist Aufklarung?’ [What is the
Enlightenment?]. For Kant, the Enlightenment represented an
age when human consciousness was liberated from ignorance
and error, culminating in a full understanding of nature as
well as the human self.
As a great turning point in the struggle for human rights,
The Enlightenment turned philosophy into a vehicle for
social and political reform. It was an international
phenomenon with a political and ideological dynamic whose
core values derived from the scientific revolution, and the
liberalism of the 17th century.
The main figures of the Enlightenment were from the major
European countries and from British North America. They
ranged from the Isaac Newton and John Locke, whose works
provided many of the key stimulants for the Enlightenment,
to David Hume and Edward Gibbon in England, François Marie
Arouet Voltaire, Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu,
Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Jacques Turgot and
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet in France,
the Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Germans Paul-Henri
Thiry d’Holbach, Kant and Johann Gottfried von Herder, and
the American Benjamin Franklin. Slightly less influential
but important figures included Julien Offray de La Mettrie,
Claude Adrien Helvetius, Jeremy Bentham, the Italian Cesare
Beccaria, the systematizer of political economy Adam Smith,
as well as a number of other Scots, and the first makers of
a constitution providing civil liberties--- Thomas
Jefferson, John Adams and Sam Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.
They shared the broad perspective of criticizing the ancient
regime, of striving to emancipate humanity through
knowledge, education and science, from superstition,
theological dogma, and clerical control. The Enlightenment’s
chief and linked targets werefeudal absolutism and religious
dogmatism. As Diderot wrote in 1771, the characteristic
spirit of the century, as visualized by the philosophes, was
liberty.
For sections of the Enlightenment, there was a commitment to
republicanism, tolerance, and experimentation. Despite
limitations it was universal in its rhetoric, and this
enabled wider masses of the “third estate” a new sense of
their rights and their dignity. Emphasizing separation of
Church and state, Liberalism proposed secular responses to
the sufferings of the people, in opposition to organized
religion and its claims. It tried to replace prejudice and
force by reasoned responses to grievances. While liberalism
was firmly committed to bourgeois class power, it was also
to initiate a concern with constraining the arbitrary
exercise of power of the state. Liberalism in England was
produced in response to royalist absolutism as well as
democracy. For the Whigs led by the Earl of Shaftesbury, it
was necessary to forge an alliance with former Cromwellians
and even former Levelers, while ensuring that political
power was retained by the bourgeoisie. The political theory
put forward by Locke, one of Shaftesbury’s associates,
identified the public domain with “political society” or the
state and the private domain with the interplay of
particular interests and private property in “civil
society.” And the state should engage in only the most
important tasks and essentially leave “civil society” to run
its course. He made certain abstract assumptions about human
nature, identified them with the rising bourgeoisie, and
drew the consequences for politics, namely, the fact that
protection of property was the reason for forming the state.
He acknowledged the right of people to resistance if the
executive power overstepped its limits. But by making a
distinction between express consent and tacit consent, he
created a separation between the bourgeoisie and the
subaltern classes. But all citizens were to retain the
rights to “life, liberty, and property”, which would later
receive a slightly different expression in the American
Declaration of Independence as the right to “life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness”. Locke also anticipated
Montesquieu in making a case for the separation of powers.
However, the universalist claims were elided by the
exclusion of the propertyless, of atheists, Catholics and
women. Despite the exclusion of Catholics and atheists from
full citizenship, however, Locke, in his ‘letter on
toleration,’ argued in favor of toleration as the prudent
way to deal with differences and dogmatism. Locke was
actually quite moderate and he ultimately separated the
rights of the bourgeoisie and the rights of wage-workers.
But his liberalism was couched in terms acceptable to the
radicals whom Shaftesbury wanted to bring into alliance
(e.g., former Levelers), and therefore was capable of being
interpreted as arguing that grievances of the weak and
exploited demand rational adjudication, failing which
revolution becomes legitimate.
The Enlightenment was also deeply influenced by Rene
Descartes and Newton, and the idea that scientific method
should be applicable to all walks of life developed. Newton
established the dynamic view of the universe in place of the
static one that had dominated ancient and medieval Europe.
This transformation, combined with his atomism, showed that
Newton was in unconscious harmony with the economic and
social world of his time, in which static feudal hierarchy
was giving way to dynamic capitalism and individual
enterprise. Indeed, the most immediate effect of his ideas
was in the economic and political field. Through Locke and
Hume, these ideas were to create the general skepticism of
authority and of a divinely constituted social order, while
strengthening belief in laissez-faire. The war of words
between Catholics and various shades of reformed churches
brought the bible into question, assisted by the growth of
critical scholarship. Uncritical acceptance of the letter of
the bible was giving way to increasing questioning of
revealed religion. Pierre Bayle, an unorthodox Huguenot,
wrote a Dictionnaire that gave prominence to such questions.
II. A Science of Man
Central to the Enlightenment was a search for a Science of
Man, analogous to the science of nature. La Mettrie and
other materialists, who denied the existence of an
independent soul, wanted to develop a science of physiology
to understand man. Locke, Helvetius and others sought to
understand the thinking process. Giambattista Vico and
Gibbon were concerned with history. Montesquieu and Hume
were among those who thought the important thing was to
analyze the political and economic laws governing the
relationships between society and the individual. Hume
expressed this most clearly in his desire to create a
science of politics and to be the ‘Newton of the moral
science’.
The developments in astronomy, cosmology, and physics had
destroyed the harmonies of geocentric universe. The earth
had ended up as a tiny planet displaced from the center of
the universe. The new mechanical philosophy of the
scientists saw nature as a network of particles governed by
mathematically expressible universal laws. This was a
massive triumph of investigation and conceptualization
through a procedure whereby experimentation and first-hand
experience, and the regularity of nature would be used to
reveal the laws of human existence as a conscious being in
society. The Enlightenment stress on humans mastering nature
had a dual characteristic. On one hand, it meant a
confidence in human progress through science. On the other
hand, it also meant, when extended too far, a
non-recognition that humans are part of the natural world,
and a potential for damaging the environment. Voltaire
emphasized in his Lettres philosophiques, that Newton’s
achievement truly demonstrated that science was the key to
human progress. In England, the fact that the bourgeoisie
was well entrenched in power meant an ideological compromise
with religion, admirably expressed in Alexander Pope’s
epitaph on Newton (“God said, Let Newton be! And All was
Light”).
*Robert Boyle, a founder of modern chemistry, created by his
Will the Boyle lectures, designed to prove that God and
Christianity were compatible with the new science. This was
a firm rejection of consistent materialism.
But in the continent, a more radical program of critique was
developed, based on an assumption about the human capacity
for progress. Christianity had characterized humans as
irremediably flawed due to the ‘original sin’. Enlightenment
dismissed such an approach as unscientific, and argued also
that passions like love, desire, pride and ambition were not
necessarily evil. ‘Private vice’, it was argued, could
provide ‘public benefits’. Helvetius and Bentham developed a
psychological approach whereby enlightened social policy
should encourage enlightened self-interest to ensure the
greatest good of the greatest number. The Scottish political
economist Adam Smith developed similar ideas in the case of
economics. To change humankind, it was necessary and
possible to educate them. From Locke onwards, the
Enlightenment therefore sought to develop better education.
V. The Enlightenment and Revolution
There had existed from Edmund Burke onwards,a conspiracy
theory that the Enlightenment had conspired to bring about
the French Revolution. This is no longer held by any serious
historian. Yet the Enlightenment certainly played a more
complex role in the Atlantic Revolutions. The American
Enlightenment began from the 1690s, and culminated in the
1730s. Apart from the European Enlightenment, the Americans
also had a strong influence of the Puritans in their
Enlightenment. Puritan colleges played an important role in
the development of new thinking. A desire for new knowledge
led people to push for developments in science as well as
politics. Explorations and their reports formed one way in
which the Americans participated in the scientific
community. At the same time, such explorations had the
motive of gathering, classifying and systematizing knowledge
about the colonies. A different and important kind of
contribution to the scientific community came from Franklin
and his experiments on electricity, showing that all
electricity was one, rather than there being different types
of electricity. Franklin was convinced that new scientific
discoveries like electricity should be put to use for the
improvement of human life. Franklin was also a major
political figure in the American colonies, and was a member
of the Committee that drafted the Declaration of
Independence.
The most influential aspects of the American Enlightenment
were political developments. The ideas of the American
Enlightenment led to America's independence and the
principles of the United States Constitution. Through
Enlightenment ideals people began to think that a ruler had
to be held accountable to higher laws. The ideas of
James Harrington, Locke, Hume and others were translated by
American political thinkers and leaders like Jefferson,
Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and James
Madison to debate the nature of representative government
and the rights of states, and of individuals. The Bill of
Rights, like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen, is a fundamentally Enlightenment document.
Pateman (1988) has broadened the scope
of the feminist critique by arguing that the entire social
contract theory was founded on an ‘original contract’made by
brothers, literally or metaphorically, who, after
overthrowing the rule of the father, then agree to share
their domination of the women who were previously under the
exclusive control of one man, the father.
In the same way, the Enlightenment was in practice a
class bound project. Yet however bourgeois the
Enlightenment project, seeing égalité as a property-based
legal right rather than as a social condition of
fulfillment, even that proclamation was possible only as an
act of revolution overcoming the feudal order, where fixity
of social status and superstition, absolutism and religious
hierarchy had been central. Marxism clearly sought to
radicalize Enlightenment rationality, extending its concept
of equality and progress not to certain privileged sectors
but to the whole of humanity. Marx built on Enlightenment
idealism (in its continuation in Hegel), to create its
opposite, historical materialism. Marxism sought to see
history in terms of class structure, and to argue that
progress does not end with the coming to power of the
bourgeoisie, but extends forward till the emancipation of
all humanity. This does not mean that Marxist view of
historical materialism denies all power to other categories
like gender and race. Marxist practice repeatedly
demonstrated that. The influence of Marxism was evident in
the first International’s support to the abolition of
slavery by the U.S. government under Abraham Lincoln. Marx
and Engels supported the Indian revolt of 1857. It was the
Communist International, that sought to relate the class
struggle of the proletariat to the struggles for national
liberation in the colonies. Classical Marxism began
developing a concept of women’s liberation that, while
perhaps not complete from a contemporary viewpoint, went
well beyond anything liberal feminism of the 19th century
had to offer. By linking the struggle for socialism with the
struggle for women’s emancipation, it redefined not just
women’s liberation but also socialism. But the point about
class struggle cannot be minimized, or reduced to one among
many factors. Marx extends the universalism of the
Enlightenment by seeking to create a society of associated
producers, where the denial of humanity will be overcome,
and the coerced alienation of production will be ended.
Finally, the Enlightenment has been criticized for being
Eurocentric. Yet this is only partly true. The radical heirs
of the Enlightenment extended its scope. The French
Revolution did extend human rights to blacks during its
radical phase.
*Rightwing attacks on the Enlightenment began with
resistance to revolution, democracy or simple toleration,
and was pushed forward by among other institutions the
Catholic Church. Racists who tried to view world history as
a battle between Aryans and Jews, like Houston Stewart
Chamberlain likewise rejected the Enlightenment. With the
Russian Revolution, and Marxism claiming globally the mantle
of the radical Enlightenment, attacks on the Enlightenment
sharpened further. The Nazi “revolution” not only used
massive repression to smash the proletariat, but also
proclaimed the rejection of the French Revolution and the
Enlightenment. This denial paved the way for the Holocaust.
It is worth remembering that Nazism was a conscious opposite
of the democratic principles of the 1848 revolution,
principles which were inspired by Lessing’s views. Rightwing
attacks on Marxism and the Russian Revolution broadened,
even in the academic field, during the Cold War, to include
the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.
Art for art's sake
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the English expression. For the 10cc
song, see Art for Art's Sake (song). For the 1938 Swedish
film, see Art for Art's Sake (film).
"Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a
French slogan from the early 19th century, "l'art pour l'art",
and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art,
and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic,
moral, or utilitarian function. Such works are sometimes
described as "autotelic", from the Greek autoteles,
"complete in itself", a concept that has been expanded to
embrace "inner-directed" or "self-motivated" human beings.
The term is sometimes used commercially. A Latin version of
this phrase, "ARS GRATIA ARTIS", is used as a motto by
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the circle around the
roaring head of Leo the Lion in its motion picture logo.
"Art for art's sake" was a bohemian creed in the
nineteenth century, a slogan raised in defiance of those who
– from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of
socialist realism – thought that the value of art was to
serve some moral or didactic purpose. It was a rejection of
the marxist aim of politicising art. "Art for art's
sake" affirmed that art was valuable as art, that artistic
pursuits were their own justification and that art did not
need moral justification – and indeed, was allowed to be
morally neutral or subversive.
In fact, James McNeill Whistler wrote the following in which
he discarded the accustomed role of art in the service of
the state or official religion, which had adhered to its
practice since the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth
century: "Art should be independent of all claptrap – should
stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or
ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign
to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like."[3]
Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that there is no art for art’s
sake, arguing that the artist still expresses his/her being
through it:
When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man
has been excluded from art, it still does not follow by any
means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless
— in short, l'art pour l'art, a worm chewing its own tail.
"Rather no purpose at all than a moral purpose!" — that is
the talk of mere passion. A psychologist, on the other hand,
asks: what does all art do? does it not praise? glorify?
choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens
certain valuations. Is this merely a "moreover"? an
accident? something in which the artist's instinct had no
share? Or is it not the very presupposition of the artist's
ability? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or rather at
the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life? Art is
the great stimulus to life: how could one understand it as
purposeless, as aimless, as l'art pour l'art?[4]
Criticism by Marxists
Marxists have argued that art should be politicised for the
sake of transmitting the socialist message[5].
George Sand, who was a socialist writer[6][7], wrote in 1872
that L'art pour l'art was an empty phrase, an idle sentence.
She asserted that artists had a "duty to find an adequate
expression to convey it to as many souls as possible,"
ensuring that their works were accessible enough to be
appreciated.[8]
Former Senegal president and head of the Socialist Party of
Senegal Leopold Senghor and anti colonial Africanist writer
Chinua Achebe have criticised the slogan as being a limited
and Eurocentric view on art and creation. In "Black African
Aesthetics," Senghor argues that "art is functional" and
that "in black Africa, 'art for art's sake' does not exist."
Achebe is more scathing in his collection of essays and
criticism entitled Morning Yet on Creation Day, where he
asserts that "art for art's sake is just another piece of
deodorised dog shit" (sic).[9]
Walter Benjamin, one of the developers of Marxist
hermeneutics[10], discusses the slogan in his seminal 1936
essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction." He first mentions it in regard to the
reaction within the realm of traditional art to innovations
in reproduction, in particular photography. He even terms
the "L'art pour l'art" slogan as part of a "theology of
art" in bracketing off social aspects. In the Epilogue
to the essay Benjamin discusses the links between fascism
and art. His main example is that of Futurism and the
thinking of its mentor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. One of the
slogans of the Futurists was "Fiat ars - pereat mundus"
("Let art be created, though the world perish").
Provocatively, Benjamin concludes that as long as fascism
expects war "to supply the artistic gratification of a sense
of perception that has been changed by technology," then
this is the "consummation," the realization, of "L'art pour
l'art."[11]
Diego Rivera, who in life was a member of the Mexican
Communist Party and "a supporter of the revolutionary
cause"[12], claims that the "art for art's sake" theory
would further divide the rich from the poor. Rivera goes
on to say that since one of the characteristics of so
called "pure art" was that it could only be appreciated by a
few superior people, the art movement would strip art
from its value as a social tool and ultimately make art into
a currency-like item that would only be available to the
rich. [13]
Former Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong said: "There is
in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands
above classes, art that is detached from or independent of
politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the
whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin
said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary
machine."[14]
To our forebears, the world could appear mysterious and even
enchanted, with sightings of green men, dog heads and alien
beings commonplace. But as the Middle Ages grew to a close,
it became a place to be mastered, even exploited.
OU on the BBC: Inside The Medieval Mind - Knowledge
Updated Monday 16th April 2012
Explore the way medieval eyes saw the world – a place of
mystery, enchantment, culminating in birth of the modern
world and the discovery of America.
In Knowledge, Professor Bartlett explores the way medieval
man understood the world as a place of mystery, even
enchantment - a book written by God.
The medieval world was full of marvels as revealed through
medieval sources. He unearths records of strange sightings
of fish men caught off the coast of Suffolk, or green men in
Essex. Travelling to Hereford Cathedral he decodes the Mappa
Mundi, with its three continents (Europe, Africa and Asia)
and its strange beasts thought to exist on the periphery of
the earth: hermaphrodites, unicorns, men with the heads of
dogs.
Medieval science was not nonsense: it was known that the
world was round, for example. But for medieval man it was
possible to attribute both a natural and a divine cause to a
single event – an eclipse could be caused by the movement of
the planets and be a sign from God.
In a medieval chained library Robert explains how for
hundreds of years learning remained (almost literally) in
the hands of monks and how the monopoly was challenged with
the discovery of the classical learning of Aristotle, and of
Arabic science, in the great libraries of Spain, seized by
Christian soldiers in the 11th and 12th centuries.
Though theologians like Thomas Aquinas worked hard to
reconcile classical learning with Christian teaching,
scientists such as Roger Bacon pushed back the frontiers of
knowledge in favour of a more evidence-based analysis of the
world.
Marco Polo and other travellers returned with amazing tales
of the East, signalling the beginning of the end for the
established medieval world view. They found not dog-heads
but great civilisations.
When Columbus sailed off to find a new route to the East he
was helped by all the new technology of the time – better
sailing ships, gunpowder, compasses. As the Middle Ages grew
to a close, the world had become a place not to be
contemplated, but mastered, even exploited.
********************************************************************** Sex
Bartlett unearths remarkable evidence of the complex
passions of Medieval men and women. The Church preached
hatred of the flesh, promoted the cult of virginity and
condemned woman as the sinful heir to Eve. Yet this was the
era that gave birth to the idea of romantic love.
OU on the BBC: Inside The Medieval Mind - Sex
Updated Monday 23rd April 2012
Unearth remarkable evidence of the complex passions of
medieval men and women in the medieval world, as Robert
Bartlett explores Sex.
In Sex, we unearth remarkable evidence of the complex
passions of medieval men and women.
On the one hand, there was a down-to-earth approach you
might expect in a peasant society; on the other was an
obsessive abhorrence of desire grounded in religious fervour.
Professor Robert Bartlett explores the subject using
medieval sources, and quotes some of the questions the 11th
century Church recommended priests to ask their
parishioners: "Have you committed fornication with your
step-mother, your sister-in-law, your son’s fiancée, your
mother?"
Medieval knowledge about sexual difference was rudimentary
and governed by a misogyny rooted in the Bible. Eve was the
cause of original sin for tempting Adam in the Garden of
Eden. An early church father had this to say to women: "The
curse God pronounced on your sex weighs still upon the
world. You are guilty – you must bear its hardships. You are
the Devil’s gateway".
The Church preached hatred of the flesh and promoted the
cult of virginity. Robert tells of the compelling story of
Christina of Markyate who defied her parents and her husband
to maintain her chastity.
And yet it was the medieval world that gave birth to the
modern concept of romantic love. 12th century troubadours
began to sing songs of love to women who were to be adored.
For the upper classes at least, the rules of love were
reinvented in lengthy treatises, the heroes and heroines of
love celebrated in poems: Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan
and Iseult.
Robert tells the tragic story of the real life lovers
Abelard and Héloise – Abelard the great scholar, Héloise the
niece of a canon at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Their love
letters from the 12th century are astonishing in their
frankness, passion and willingness to break conventions.
Our forebears believed they shared the world with the dead
and that angels and demons battled for control of human
souls. As the church's grip on our beliefs increased, men
and women were dragged before religious courts and
multitudes were killed in the name of God.
OU on the BBC: Inside The Medieval Mind - Belief
Updated Monday 30th April 2012
How the world of religion, the supernatural, the cult of the
saints and the Crusades shaped the Medieval Mind.
In Belief, Robert Bartlett explores belief in the
supernatural. The medieval dead shared the world with the
living: encounters with the dead and visions of the next
world ensured a two-way traffic between this world and the
next. Robert uses medieval sources to create a keen sense of
the after-life.
The cult of the saints was part of the medieval
preoccupation with death. The holy dead were active in their
intercession for the living, and their relics were prized.
Robert explores this preoccupation through one of the few
medieval relics in Britain, the skull of St Simon Stock at
Aylesford Priory.
The Church governed the lives of the faithful through its
teachings and in the sacraments, which Robert explores in a
visit to Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland, where the prayers of
medieval monks held the devil at bay.
The programme explores how from the 11th Century, the church
became increasingly hostile towards outsiders, exemplified
in the First Crusade and the so-called Muslim ‘infidels’. A
legacy Robert explores in the Temple Church of the crusading
Knights Templar in London. Closer to home, the Jewish
community comes under scrutiny, culminating in the massacre
at York in 1190, while a growing number of reformers such as
John Wycliff and the Lollards face persecution as a threat
to the established belief of the Church.
********************************************************************** Power
Bartlett lays bare the brutal framework of the medieval
class system, where inequality was part of the natural
order, the life of serfs little better than those of animals
and the knight's code of chivalry more one of caste
solidarity than morality. Yet a social revolution would
transform relations between those with absolute power and
those with none.
OU on the BBC: Inside The Medieval Mind - Power
Updated Monday 7th May 2012
The brutal framework of the medieval class system is laid
bare, in the programme Power
In Power, Professor Robert Bartlett lays bare the brutal
framework of the medieval class system. Inequality was as
part of the natural order, the life of serfs little better
than those of animals, the knight’s code of chivalry more
one of caste solidarity than morality. The class you were
born into determined who you were.
There were three classes, or estates: those who pray (the
clergy), those who fight (the aristocratic warrior class of
knights) and those who work (everybody else – in practice,
usually serfs on a knight’s estate).
Robert looks at the penalties to be paid by serfs who ran
away, and describes the harsh laws which protected the
hunting rights of the king in the vast forests of medieval
Britain.
Medieval lords were not so much landlords as warriors. Their
land was given to them by the king precisely because they
were warriors and supported him in military campaigns.
Fighting was in their blue blood.
These knights followed the international codes of chivalry –
a word today synonymous with gallantry and noble behaviour.
Knights could behave nobly, but it was generally towards
their own class.
To hold such a violent society together was no easy task. It
would need divine help. As Robert explains in Westminster
Abbey, that is just what medieval kings had – at the
ceremony of the Coronation the new monarch was anointed with
holy oil, signifying his divinely sanctioned right to rule.
But this rigid order was fatally undermined by the Black
Death, creating a labour shortage which resulted in the serf
achieving higher wages and geographical mobility. At
Blackheath and at the Tower of London learn how the drama of
the Peasants’ Revolt unfolded, when the despised third
estate – those who work – began to taste a new freedom.
Inside The Medieval Mind: Power was first broadcast on BBC
Four, May 8th, 2008. For further broadcast details, and to
watch online where available, visit bbc.co.uk
A War on Science
2006, Science - 50 min
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-science/
