J. C. Friedrich Von Schiller (1759-1805):
Introductory Note
Schiller's importance in the intellectual history of Germany is by no means
confined to his poetry and dramas. He did notable work in history and philosophy, and in
the department of esthetics especially, he made significant contributions, modifying and
developing in important respects the doctrines of Kant. In the letters on "Esthetic
Education," which are here printed, he gives the philosophic basis for his doctrine
of art, and indicates clearly and persuasively his view of the place of beauty in human
life.
Part I
Letter I.
By your permission I lay before you, in a series of letters, the results of my
researches upon beauty and art. I am keenly sensible of the importance as well as of the
charm and dignity of this undertaking. I shall treat a subject which is closely connected
with the better portion of our happiness and not far removed from the moral nobility of
human nature. I shall plead this cause of the Beautiful before a heart by which her whole
power is felt and exercised, and which will take upon itself the most difficult part of my
task in an investigation where one is compelled to appeal as frequently to feelings as to
principles.
That which I would beg of you as a favour, you generously impose upon me as a duty;
and, when I solely consult my inclination, you impute to me a service. The liberty of
action you prescribe is rather a necessity for me than a constraint. Little exercised in
formal rules, I shall scarcely incur the risk of sinning against good taste by any undue
use of them; my ideas, drawn rather from within than from reading or from an intimate
experience with the world, will not disown their origin; they would rather incur any
reproach than that of a sectarian bias, and would prefer to succumb by their innate
feebleness than sustain themselves by borrowed authority and foreign support.
In truth, I will not keep back from you that the assertions which follow rest chiefly
upon Kantian principles; but if in the course of these researches you should be reminded
of any special school of philosophy, ascribe it to my incapacity, not to those principles.
No; your liberty of mind shall be sacred to me; and the facts upon which I build will be
furnished by your own sentiments; your own unfettered thought will dictate the laws
according to which we have to proceed.
With regard to the ideas which predominate in the practical part of Kant's system,
philosophers only disagree, whilst mankind, I am confident of proving, have never done so.
If stripped of their technical shape, they will appear as the verdict of reason pronounced
from time immemorial by common consent, and as facts of the moral instinct which nature,
in her wisdom, has given to man in order to serve as guide and teacher until his
enlightened intelligence gives him maturity. But this very technical shape which renders
truth visible to the understanding conceals it from the feelings; for, unhappily,
understanding begins by destroying the object of the inner sense before it can appropriate
the object. Like the chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or the
spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art. Thus, in order to detain the
fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair
proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton
of words. Is it surprising that natural feeling should not recognise itself in such a
copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth appears as paradox?
Permit me therefore to crave your indulgence if the following researches should remove
their object from the sphere of sense while endeavouring to draw it towards the
understanding. That which I before said of moral experience can be applied with greater
truth to the manifestation of "the beautiful." It is the mystery which enchants,
and its being extinguished with the extinction of the necessary combination of its
elements.
Letter II.
But I might perhaps make a better use of the opening you afford me if I were to direct
your mind to a loftier theme than that of art. It would appear to be unseasonable to go in
search of a code for the aesthetic world, when the moral world offers matter of so much
higher interest, and when the spirit of philosophical inquiry is so stringently challenged
by the circumstances of our times to occupy itself with the most perfect of all works of
art - the establishment and structure of a true political freedom.
It is unsatisfactory to live out of your own age and to work for other times. It is
equally incumbent on us to be good members of our own age as of our own state or country.
If it is conceived to be unseemly and even unlawful for a man to segregate himself from
the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, it would be inconsistent not to
see that it is equally his duty to grant a proper share of influence to the voice of his
own epoch, to its taste and its requirements, in the operations in which he engages.
But the voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind
of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the
genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art.
For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness;
for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be
furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is
necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a degraded humanity under its iron yoke.
Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are
subservient. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight,
and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time.
The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one promise after
another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed, in proportion as the limits of science are
enlarged.
The eyes of the philosopher as well as of the man of the world are anxiously turned to
the theatre of political events, where it is presumed the great destiny of man is to be
played out. It would almost seem to betray a culpable indifference to the welfare of
society if we did not share this general interest. For this great commerce in social and
moral principles is of necessity a matter of the greatest concern to every human being, on
the ground both of its subject and of its results. It must accordingly be of deepest
moment to every man to think for himself. It would seem that now at length a question that
formerly was only settled by the law of the stronger is to be determined by the calm
judgment of the reason, and every man who is capable of placing himself in a central
position, and raising his individuality into that of his species, can look upon himself as
in possession of this judicial faculty of reason; being moreover, as man and member of the
human family, a party in the case under trial and involved more or less in its decisions.
It would thus appear that this great political process is not only engaged with his
individual case, it has also to pronounce enactments, which he as a rational spirit is
capable of enunciating and entitled to pronounce.
It is evident that it would have been most attractive to me to inquire into an object
such as this, to decide such a question in conjunction with a thinker of powerful mind, a
man of liberal sympathies, and a heart imbued with a noble enthusiasm for the weal of
humanity. Though so widely separated by worldly position, it would have been a delightful
surprise to have found your unprejudiced mind arriving at the same result as my own in the
field of ideas. Nevertheless, I think I can not only excuse, but even justify by solid
grounds, my step in resisting this attractive purpose and in preferring beauty to freedom.
I hope that I shall succeed in convincing you that this matter of art is less foreign to
the needs than to the tastes of our age; nay, that, to arrive at a solution even in the
political problem, the road of aesthetics must be pursued, because it is through beauty
that we arrive at freedom. But I cannot carry out this proof without my bringing to your
remembrance the principles by which the reason is guided in political legislation.
Letter III.
Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so
long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence, she acts for him.
But the very fact that constitutes him a man is, that he does not remain stationary, where
nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had
made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution,
and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.
When man is raised from his slumber in the senses, he feels that he is a man, he
surveys his surroundings, and finds that he is in a state. He was introduced into this
state, by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. But
as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political condition forced upon
him by necessity, and only calculated for that condition; and it would be unfortunate if
this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his
free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an instance, in his ennobling
by beauty and suppressing by moral influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by
nature in the passion of love. Thus, when arrived at maturity, he recovers his childhood
by an artificial process, he founds a state of nature in his ideas, not given him by any
experience, but established by the necessary laws and conditions of his reason, and he
attributes to this ideal condition an object, an aim, of which he was not cognisant in the
actual reality of nature. He gives himself a choice of which he was not capable before,
and sets to work just as if he were beginning anew, and were exchanging his original state
of bondage for one of complete independence, doing this with complete insight and of his
free decision. He is justified in regarding this work of political thraldom as
non-existing, though a wild and arbitrary caprice may have founded its work very artfully;
though it may strive to maintain it with great arrogance and encompass it with a halo of
veneration. For the work of blind powers possesses no authority, before which freedom need
bow, and all must be made to adapt itself to the highest end which reason has set up in
his personality. It is in this wise that a people in a state of manhood is justified in
exchanging a condition of thraldom for one of moral freedom.
Now the term natural condition can be applied to every political body which owes its
establishment originally to forces and not to laws, and such a state contradicts the moral
nature of man, because lawfulness can alone have authority over this. At the same time
this natural condition is quite sufficient for the physical man, who only gives himself
laws in order to get rid of brute force. Moreover, the physical man is a reality, and the
moral man problematical. Therefore when the reason suppresses the natural condition, as
she must if she wishes to substitute her own, she weighs the real physical man against the
problematical moral man, she weighs the existence of society against a possible, though
morally necessary, ideal of society. She takes from man something which he really
possesses, and without which he possesses nothing, and refers him as a substitute to
something that he ought to posses and might possess; and if reason had relied too
exclusively on him, she might, in order to secure him a state of humanity in which he is
wanting and can want without injury to his life, have robbed him even of the means of
animal existence which is the first necessary condition of his being a man. Before he had
opportunity to hold firm to the law with his will, reason would have withdrawn from his
feet the ladder of nature.
The great point is therefore to reconcile these two considerations: to prevent physical
society from ceasing for a moment in time, while the moral society is being formed in the
idea; in other words, to prevent its existence from being placed in jeopardy, for the sake
of the moral dignity of man. When the mechanic has to mend a watch, he lets the wheels run
out, but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a
wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions. Accordingly props must be
sought for to support society and keep it going while it is made independent of the
natural condition from which it is sought to emancipate it.
This prop is not found in the natural character of man, who, being selfish and violent,
directs his energies rather to the destruction than to the preservation of society. Nor is
it found in his moral character, which has to be formed, which can never be worked upon or
calculated on by the lawgiver, because it is free and never appears. It would seem
therefore that another measure must be adopted. It would seem that the physical character
of the arbitrary must be separated from moral freedom; that it is incumbent to make the
former harmonise with the laws and the latter dependent on impressions; it would be
expedient to remove the former still farther from matter and to bring the latter somewhat
more near to it; in short to produce a third character related to both the others - the
physical and the moral - paving the way to a transition from the sway of mere force to
that of law, without preventing the proper development of the moral character, but serving
rather as a pledge in the sensuous sphere of a morality in the unseen.
Letter IV.
Thus much is certain. It is only when a third character, as previously suggested, has
preponderance that a revolution in a state according to moral principles can be free from
injurious consequences; nor can anything else secure its endurance. In proposing or
setting up a moral state, the moral law is relied upon as a real power, and free will is
drawn into the realm of causes, where all hangs together mutually with stringent necessity
and rigidity. But we know that the condition of the human will always remains contingent,
and that only in the Absolute Being physical coexists with moral necessity. Accordingly if
it is wished to depend on the moral conduct of man as on natural results, this conduct
must become nature, and he must be led by natural impulse to such a course of action as
can only and invariably have moral results. But the will of man is perfectly free between
inclination and duty, and no physical necessity ought to enter as a sharer in this
magisterial personality. If therefore he is to retain this power of solution, and yet
become a reliable link in the causal concatenation of forces, this can only be effected
when the operations of both these impulses are presented quite equally in the world of
appearances. It is only possible when, with every difference of form, the matter of man's
volition remains the same, when all his impulses agreeing with his reason are sufficient
to have the value of a universal legislation.
It may be urged that every individual man carries, within himself, at least in his
adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The great problem of his existence is to
bring all the incessant changes of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging
unity of this ideal. This pure ideal man, which makes itself known more or less clearly in
every subject, is represented by the state, which is the objective and, so to speak,
canonical form in which the manifold differences of the subjects strive to unite. Now two
ways present themselves to the thought, in which the man of time can agree with the man of
idea, and there are also two ways in which the state can maintain itself in individuals.
One of these ways is when the pure ideal man subdues the empirical man, and the state
suppresses the individual, or again when the individual becomes the state, and the man of
time is ennobled to the man of idea.
I admit that in a one-sided estimate from the point of view of morality this difference
vanishes, for the reason is satisfied if her law prevails unconditionally. But when the
survey taken is complete and embraces the whole man (anthropology), where the form is
considered together with the substance, and a living feeling has a voice, the difference
will become far more evident. No doubt the reason demands unity, and nature variety, and
both legislations take man in hand. The law of the former is stamped upon him by an
incorruptible consciousness, that of the latter by an ineradicable feeling. Consequently
education will always appear deficient when the moral feeling can only be maintained with
the sacrifice of what is natural; and a political administration will always be very
imperfect when it is only able to bring about unity by suppressing variety. The state
ought not only to respect the objective and generic but also the subjective and specific
in individuals; and while diffusing the unseen world of morals, it must not depopulate the
kingdom of appearance, the external world of matter.
When the mechanical artist places his hand on the formless block, to give it a form
according to his intention, he has not any scruples in doing violence to it. For the
nature on which he works does not deserve any respect in itself, and he does not value the
whole for its parts, but the parts on account of the whole. When the child of the fine
arts sets his hand to the same block, he has no scruples either in doing violence to it,
he only avoids showing this violence. He does not respect the matter in which he works,
and more than the mechanical artist; but he seeks by an apparent consideration for it to
deceive the eye which takes this matter under its protection. The political and educating
artist follows a very different course, while making man at once his material and his end.
In this case the aim or end meets in the material, and it is only because the whole serves
the parts that the parts adapt themselves to the end. The political artist has to treat
his material man with a very different kind of respect from that shown by the artist of
fine art to his work. He must spare man's peculiarity and personality, not to produce a
deceptive effect on the senses, but objectively and out of consideration for his inner
being.
But the state is an organisation which fashions itself through itself and for itself,
and for this reason it can only be realised when the parts have been accorded to the idea
of the whole. The state serves the purpose of a representative, both to pure ideal and to
objective humanity, in the breast of its citizens, accordingly it will have to observe the
same relation to its citizens in which they are placed to it, and it will only respect
their subjective humanity in the same degree that it is ennobled to an objective
existence. If the internal man is one with himself, he will be able to rescue his
peculiarity, even in the greatest generalisation of his conduct, and the state will only
become the exponent of his fine instinct, the clearer formula of his internal legislation.
But if the subjective man is in conflict with the objective and contradicts him in the
character of the people, so that only the oppression of the former can give the victory to
the latter, then the state will take up the severe aspect of the law against the citizen,
and in order not to fall a sacrifice, it will have to crush under foot such a hostile
individuality, without any compromise.
Now man can be opposed to himself in a twofold manner: either as a savage, when his
feelings rule over his principles; or as a barbarian, when his principles destroy his
feelings. The savage despises art, and acknowledges nature as his despotic ruler; the
barbarian laughs at nature, and dishonours it, but he often proceeds in a more
contemptible way than the savage, to be the slave of his senses. The cultivated man makes
of nature his friend, and honours its friendship, while only bridling its caprice.
Consequently, when reason brings her moral unity into physical society, she must not
injure the manifold in nature. When nature strives to maintain her manifold character in
the moral structure of society, this must not create any breach in moral unity; the
victorious form is equally remote from uniformity and confusion. Therefore, totality of
character must be found in the people which is capable and worthy to exchange the state of
necessity for that of freedom.
Letter V.
Does the present age, do passing events, present this character? I direct my attention
at once to the most prominent object in this vast structure.
It is true that the consideration of opinion is fallen, caprice is unnerved, and,
although still armed with power, receives no longer any respect. Man has awaked from his
long lethargy and self-deception, and he demands with impressive unanimity to be restored
to his imperishable rights. But he does not only demand them; he rises on all sides to
seize by force what, in his opinion, has been unjustly wrested from him. The edifice of
the natural state is tottering, its foundations shake, and a physical possibility seems at
length granted to place law on the throne, to honour man at length as an end, and to make
true freedom the basis of political union. Vain hope! The moral possibility is wanting,
and the generous occasion finds an unsusceptible rule.
Man paints himself in his actions, and what is the form depicted in the drama of the
present time? On the one hand, he is seen running wild, on the other in a state of
lethargy; the two extremest stages of human degeneracy, and both seen in one and the same
period.
In the lower larger masses, coarse, lawless impulses come to view, breaking loose when
the bonds of civil order are burst asunder, and hastening with unbridled fury to satisfy
their savage instinct. Objective humanity may have had cause to complain of the state; yet
subjective man must honour its institutions. Ought he to be blamed because he lost sight
of the dignity of human nature, so long as he was concerned in preserving his existence?
Can we blame him that he proceeded to separate by the force of gravity, to fasten by the
force of cohesion, at a time when there could be no thought of building or raising up? The
extinction of the state contains its justification. Society set free, instead of hastening
upward into organic life, collapses into its elements.
On the other hand, the civilized classes give us the still more repulsive sight of
lethargy, and of a depravity of character which is the more revolting because it roots in
culture. I forget who of the older or more recent philosophers makes the remark, that what
is more noble is the more revolting in its destruction. The remark applies with truth to
the world of morals. The child of nature, when he breaks loose, becomes a madman; but the
art scholar, when he breaks loose, becomes a debased character. The enlightenment of the
understanding, on which the more refined classes pride themselves with some ground, shows
on the whole so little of an ennobling influence on the mind that it seems rather to
confirm corruption by its maxims. We deny nature in her legitimate field and feel her
tyranny in the moral sphere, and while resisting her impressions, we receive our
principles from her. While the affected decency of our manners does not even grant to
nature a pardonable influence in the initial stage, our materialistic system of morals
allows her the casting vote in the last and essential stage. Egotism has founded its
system in the very bosom of a refined society, and without developing even a sociable
character, we feel all the contagions and miseries of society. We subject our free
judgment to its despotic opinions, our feelings to its bizarre customs, and our will to
its seductions. We only maintain our caprice against her holy rights. The man of the world
has his heart contracted by a proud self-complacency, while that of the man of nature
often beats in sympathy; and every man seeks for nothing more than to save his wretched
property from the general destruction, as it were from some great conflagration. It is
conceived that the only way to find a shelter against the aberrations of sentiment is by
completely foregoing its indulgence, and mockery, which is often a useful chastener of
mysticism, slanders in the same breath the noblest aspirations. Culture, far from giving
us freedom, only develops, as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical
close more tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse
toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom
of life. Thus the spirit of the time is seen to waver between perversions and savagism,
between what is unnatural and mere nature, between superstition and moral unbelief, and it
is often nothing but the equilibrium of evils that sets bounds to it.
Letter VI.
Have I gone too far in this portraiture of our times? I do not anticipate this
stricture, but rather another - that I have proved too much by it. You will tell me that
the picture I have presented resembles the humanity of our day, but it also bodies forth
all nations engaged in the same degree of culture, because all, without exception, have
fallen off from nature by the abuse of reason, before they can return to it through
reason.
But if we bestow some serious attention to the character of our times, we shall be
astonished at the contrast between the present and the previous form of humanity,
especially that of Greece. We are justified in claiming the reputation of culture and
refinement, when contrasted with a purely natural state of society, but not so comparing
ourselves with the Grecian nature. For the latter was combined with all the charms of art
and with all the dignity of wisdom, without, however, as with us, becoming a victim to
these influences. The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is
foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in
those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural
character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fulness of form
and fulness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic,
uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.
At the period of Greek culture, which was an awakening of the powers of the mind, the
senses and the spiria had no distinctly separated property; no division had yet torn them
asunder, leading them to partition in a hostile attitude, and to mark off their limits
with precision. Poetry had not yet become the adversary of wit, nor had speculation abused
itself by passing into quibbling. In cases of necessity both poetry and wit could exchange
parts, because they both honoured truth only in their special way. However high might be
the flight of reason, it drew matter in a loving spirit after it, and, while sharply and
stiffly defining it, never mutilated what it touched. It is true the Greek mind displaced
humanity, and recast it on a magnified scale in the glorious circle of its gods; but it
did this not by dissecting human nature, but by giving it fresh combinations, for the
whole of human nature was represented in each of the gods. How different is the course
followed by us moderns! We also displace and magnify individuals to form the image of the
species, but we do this in a fragmentary way, not by altered combinations, so that it is
necessary to gather up from different individuals the elements that form the species in
its totality. It would almost appear as if the powers of mind express themselves with us
in real life or empirically as separately as the psychologist distinguishes them in the
representation. For we see not only individual subjects, but whole classes of men, uphold
their capacities only in part, while the rest of their faculties scarcely show a germ of
activity, as in the case of the stunted growth of plants.
I do not overlook the advantages to which the present race, regarded as a unity and in
the balance of the understanding, may lay claim over what is best in the ancient world;
but it is obliged to engage in the contest as a compact mass, and measure itself as a
whole against a whole. Who among the moderns could step forth, man against man, and strive
with an Athenian for the prize of higher humanity?
Whence comes this disadvantageous relation of individuals coupled with great advantages
of the race? Why could the individual Greek be qualified as the type of his time? and why
can no modern dare to offer himself as such? Because all-uniting nature imparted its forms
to the Greek, and an all-dividing understanding gives our forms to us.
It was culture itself that gave these wounds to modern humanity. The inner union of
human nature was broken, and a destructive contest divided its harmonious forces directly;
on the one hand, an enlarged experience and a more distinct thinking necessitated a
sharper separation of the sciences, while on the other hand, the more complicated
machinery of states necessitated a stricter sundering of ranks and occupations. Intuitive
and speculative understanding took up a hostile attitude in opposite fields, whose borders
were guarded with jealousy and distrust; and by limiting its operation to a narrow sphere,
men have made unto themselves a master who is wont not unfrequently to end by subduing and
oppressing all the other faculties. Whilst on the one hand a luxuriant imagination creates
ravages in the plantations that have cost the intelligence so much labour, on the other
hand a spirit of abstraction suffocates the fire that might have warmed the heart and
inflamed the imagination.
This subversion, commenced by art and learning in the inner man, was carried out to
fullness and finished by the spirit of innovation in government. It was, no doubt,
reasonable to expect that the simple organisation of the primitive republics should
survive the quaintness of primitive manners and of the relations of antiquity. But,
instead of rising to a higher and nobler degree of animal life, this organisation
degenerated into a common and coarse mechanism. The zoophyte condition of the Grecian
states, where each individual enjoyed an independent life, and could, in cases of
necessity, become a separate whole and unit in himself, gave way to an ingenious
mechanism, whence, from the splitting up into numberless parts, there results a mechanical
life in the combination. Then there was a rupture between the state and the church,
between laws and customs; enjoyment was separated from labour, the means from the end, the
effort from the reward. Man himself eternally chained down to a little fragment of the
whole, only forms a kind of fragment; having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound
of the perpetually revolving wheel, he never develops the harmony of his being; and
instead of imprinting the seal of humanity on his being, he ends by being nothing more
than the living impress of the craft to which he devotes himself, of the science that he
cultivates. This very partial and paltry relation, linking the isolated members to the
whole, does not depend on forms that are given spontaneously; for how could a complicated
machine, which shuns the light, conaide itself to the free will of man? This relation is
rather dictated, with a rigorous strictness, by a formulary in which the free intelligence
of man is chained down. The dead letter takes the place of a living meaning, and a
practised memory becomes a safer guide than genius and feeling.
If the community or state measures man by his function, only asking of its citizens
memory, or the intelligence of a craftsman, or mechanical skill, we cannot be surprised
that the other faculties of the mind are neglected, for the exclusive culture of the one
that brings in honour and profit. Such is the necessary result of an organisation that is
indifferent about character, only looking to acquirements, whilst in other cases it
tolerates the thickest darkness, to favour a spirit of law and order; it must result if it
wishes that individuals in the exercise of special aptitudes should gain in depth what
they are permitted to lose in extension. We are aware, no doubt, that a powerful genius
does not shut up its activity within the limits of its functions; but mediocre talents
consume in the craft fallen to their lot the whole of their feeble energy; and if some of
their energy is reserved for matters of preference, without prejudice to its functions,
such a state of things at once bespeaks a spirit soaring above the vulgar. Moreover, it is
rarely a recommendation in the eye of a state to have a capacity superior to your
employment, or one of those noble intellectual cravings of a man of talent which contend
in rivalry with the duties of office. The state is so jealous of the exclusive possession
of its servants that it would prefer - nor can it be blamed in this - for functionaries to
show their powers with the Venus of Cytherea rather than the Uranian Venus.
It is thus that concrete individual life is extinguished, in order that the abstract
whole may continue its miserable life, and the state remains for ever a stranger to its
citizens, because feeling does not discover it anywhere. The governing authorities find
themselves compelled to classify, and thereby simplify, the multiplicity of citizens, and
only to know humanity in a representative form and at second hand. Accordingly they end by
entirely losing sight of humanity, and by confounding it with a simple artificial creation
of the understanding, whilst on their part the subject classes cannot help receiving
coldly laws that address themselves so little to their personality. At length society,
weary of having a burden that the state takes so little trouble to lighten, falls to
pieces and is broken up - a destiny that has long since attended most European states.
They are dissolved in what may be called a state of moral nature, in which public
authority is only one function more, hated and deceived by those who think it necessary,
respected only by those who can do without it.
Thus compressed between two forces, within and without, could humanity follow any other
course than that which it has taken? The speculative mind, pursuing imprescriptible goods
and rights in the sphere of ideas, must needs have become a stranger to the world of
sense, and lose sight of matter for the sake of form. On its part, the world of public
affairs, shut up in a monotonous circle of objects, and even there restricted by formulas,
was led to lose sight of the life and liberty of the whole, while becoming impoverished at
the same time in its own sphere. Just as the speculative mind was tempted to model the
real after the intelligible, and to raise the subjective laws of its imagination into laws
constituting the existence of things, so the state spirit rushed into the opposite
extreme, wished to make a particular and fragmentary experience the measure of all
observation, and to apply without exception to all affairs the rules of its own particular
craft. The speculative mind had necessarily to become the prey of a vain subtlety, the
state spirit of a narrow pedantry; for the former was placed too high to see the
individual, and the latter too low to survey the whole. But the disadvantage of this
direction of mind was not confined to knowledge and mental production; it extended to
action and feeling. We know that the sensibility of the mind depends, as to degree, on the
liveliness, and for extent on the richness of the imagination. Now the predominance of the
faculty of analysis must necessarily deprive the imagination of its warmth and energy, and
a restricted sphere of objects must diminish its wealth. It is for this reason that the
abstract thinker has very often a cold heart, because he analyses impressions, which only
move the mind by their combination or totality; on the other hand, the man of business,
the statesman, has very often a narrow heart, because shut up in the narrow circle of his
employment his imagination can neither expand nor adapt itself to another manner of
viewing things.
My subject has led me naturally to place in relief the distressing tendency of the
character of our own times to show the sources of the evil, without its being my province
to point out the compensations offered by nature. I will readily admit to you that,
although this splitting up of their being was unfavourable for individuals, it was the
only road open for the progress of the race. The point at which we see humanity arrived
among the Greeks was undoubtedly a maximum; it could neither stop there nor rise higher.
It could not stop there, for the sum of notions acquired forced infallibly the
intelligence to break with feeling and intuition, and to lead to clearness of knowledge.
Nor could it rise any higher; for it is only in a determinate measure that clearness can
be reconciled with a certain degree of abundance and of warmth. The Greeks had attained
this measure, and to continue their progress in culture, they, as we, were obliged to
renounce the totality of their being, and to follow different and separate roads in order
to seek after truth.
There was no other way to develop the manifold aptitudes of man than to bring them in
opposition with one another. This antagonism of forces is the great instrument of culture,
but it is only an instrument; for as long as this antagonism lasts, man is only on the
road to culture. It is only because these special forces are isolated in man, and because
they take on themselves to impose an exclusive legislation, that they enter into strife
with the truth of things, and oblige common sense, which generally adheres imperturbably
to external phaenomena, to dive into the essence of things. While pure understanding
usurps authority in the world of sense, and empiricism attempts to subject this intellect
to the conditions of experience, these two rival directions arrive at the highest possible
development, and exhaust the whole extent of their sphere. While on the one hand
imagination, by its tyranny, ventures to destroy the order of the world, it forces reason,
on the other side, to rise up to the supreme sources of knowledge, and to invoke against
this predominance of fancy the help of the law of necessity.
By an exclusive spirit in the case of his faculties, the individual is fatally led to
error; but the species is led to truth. It is only by gathering up all the energy of our
mind in a single focus, and concentrating a single force in our being, that we give in
some sort wings to this isolated force, and that we draw it on artificially far beyond the
limits that nature seems to have imposed upon it. If it be certain that all human
individuals taken together would never have arrived, with the visual power given them by
nature, to see a satellite of Jupiter, discovered by the telescope of the astronomer, it
is just as well established that never would the human understanding have produced the
analysis of the infinite, or the critique of pure reason, if in particular branches,
destined for this mission, reason had not applied itself to special researches, and if,
after having, as it were, freed itself from all matter, it had not by the most powerful
abstraction given to the spiritual eye of man the force necessary, in order to look into
the absolute. But the question is, if a spirit thus absorbed in pure reason and intuition
will be able to emancipate itself from the rigorous fetters of logic, to take the free
action of poetry, and seize the individuality of things with a faithful and chaste sense?
Here nature imposes even on the most universal genius a limit it cannot pass, and truth
will make martyrs as long as philosophy will be reduced to make its principal occupation
the search for arms against errors.
But whatever may be the final profit for the totality of the world, of this distinct
and special perfecting of the human faculties, it cannot be denied that this final aim of
the universe, which devotes them to this kind of culture, is a cause of suffering, and a
kind of malediction for individuals. I admit that the exercises of the gymnasium form
athletic bodies; but beauty is only developed by the free and equal play of the limbs. In
the same way the tension of the isolated spiritual forces may make extraordinary men; but
it is only the well-tempered equilibrium of these forces that can produce happy and
accomplished men. And in what relation should we be placed with past and future ages if
the perfecting of human nature made such a sacrifice indispensable? In that case we should
have been the slaves of humanity, we should have consumed our forces in servile work for
it during some thousands of years, and we should have stamped on our humiliated, mutilated
nature the shameful brand of this slavery - all this in order that future generations, in
a happy leisure, might consecrate themselves to the cure of their moral health, and
develop the whole of human nature by their free culture.
But can it be true that man has to neglect himself for any end whatever? Can nature
snatch from us, for any end whatever, the perfection which is prescribed to us by the aim
of reason? It must be false that the perfecting of particular faculties renders the
sacrifice of their totality necessary; and even if the law of nature had imperiously this
tendency, we must have the power to reform by a superior art this totality of our being,
which art has destroyed.
Part II.
Letter VII.
Can this effect of harmony be attained by the state? That is not possible, for the
state, as at present constituted, has given occasion to evil, and the state as conceived
in the idea, instead of being able to establish this more perfect humanity, ought to be
based upon it. Thus the researches in which I have indulged would have brought me back to
the same point from which they had called me off for a time. The present age, far from
offering us this form of humanity, which we have acknowledged as a necessary condition of
an improvement of the state, shows us rather the diametrically opposite form. If therefore
the principles I have laid down are correct, and if experience confirms the picture I have
traced of the present time, it would be necessary to qualify as unseasonable every attempt
to effect a similar change in the state, and all hope as chimerical that would be based on
such an attempt, until the division of the inner man ceases, and nature has been
sufficiently developed to become herself the instrument of this great change and secure
the reality of the political creation of reason.
In the physical creation, nature shows us the road that we have to follow in the moral
creation. Only when the struggle of elementary forces has ceased in inferior
organisations, nature rises to the noble form of the physical man. In like manner, the
conflict of the elements of the moral man and that of blind instincts must have ceased,
and a coarse antagonism in himself, before the attempt can be hazarded. On the other hand,
the independence of man's character must be secured, and his submission to despotic forms
must have given place to a suitable liberty, before the variety in his constitution can be
made subordinate to the unity of the ideal. When the man of nature still makes such an
anarchical abuse of his will, his liberty ought hardly to be disclosed to him. And when
the man fashioned by culture makes so little use of his freedom, his free will ought not
to be taken from him. The concession of liberal principles becomes a treason to social
order when it is associated with a force still in fermentation, and increases the already
exuberant energy of its nature. Again, the law of conformity under one level becomes
tyranny to the individual when it is allied to a weakness already holding sway and to
natural obstacles, and when it comes to extinguish the last spark of spontaneity and of
originality.
The tone of the age must therefore rise from its profound moral degradation; on the one
hand it must emancipate itself from the blind service of nature, and on the other it must
revert to its simplicity, its truth, and its fruitful sap; a sufficient task for more than
a century. However, I admit readily, more than one special effort may meet with success,
but no improvement of the whole will result from it, and contradictions in action will be
a continual protest against the unity of maxims. It will be quite possible, then, that in
remote corners of the world humanity may be honoured in the person of the negro, while in
Europe it may be degraded in the person of the thinker. The old principles will remain,
but they will adopt the dress of the age, and philosophy will lend its name to an
oppression that was formerly authorised by the Church. In one place, alarmed at the
liberty which in its opening efforts always shows itself an enemy, it will cast itself
into the arms of a convenient servitude. In another place, reduced to despair by a
pedantic tutelage, it will be driven into the savage license of the state of nature.
Usurpation will invoke the weakness of human nature, and insurrection will invoke its
dignity, till at length the great sovereign of all human things, blind force, shall come
in and decide, like a vulgar pugilist, this pretended contest of principles.
Letter VIII.
Must philosophy therefore retire from this field, disappointed in its hopes? Whilst in
all other directions the dominion of forms is extended, must this the most precious of all
gifts be abandoned to a formless chance? Must the contest of blind forces last eternally
in the political world, and is social law never to triumph over a hating egotism?
Not in the least. It is true that reason herself will never attempt directly a struggle
with this brutal force which resists her arms, and she will be as far as the son of Saturn
in the 'Iliad' from descending into the dismal field of battle, to fight them in person.
But she chooses the most deserving among the combatants, clothes him with divine arms as
Jupiter gave them to his son-in-law, and by her triumphing force she finally decides the
victory.
Reason has done all that she could in finding the law and promulgating it; it is for
the energy of the will and the ardour of feeling to carry it out. To issue victoriously
from her contest with force, truth herself must first become a force, and turn one of the
instincts of man into her champion in the empire of phaenomena. For instincts are the only
motive forces in the material world. If hitherto truth has so little manifested her
victorious power, this has not depended on the understanding, which could not have
unveiled it, but on the heart which remained closed to it, and on instinct which did not
act with it.
Whence, in fact, proceeds this general sway of prejudices, this might of the
understanding in the midst of the light disseminated by philosophy and experience? The age
is enlightened, that is to say, that knowledge, obtained and vulgarised, suffices to set
right at least our practical principles. The spirit of free inquiry has dissipated the
erroneous opinions which long barred the access to truth, and has undermined the ground on
which fanaticism and deception had erected their throne. Reason has purified itself from
the illusions of the senses and from a mendacious sophistry, and philosophy herself raises
her voice and exhorts us to return to the bosom of nature, to which she had first made us
unfaithful. Whence then is it that we remain still barbarians?
There must be something in the spirit of man - as it is not in the objects themselves -
which prevents us from receiving the truth, notwithstanding the brilliant light she
diffuses, and from accepting her, whatever may be her strength for producing conviction.
This something was perceived and expressed by an ancient sage in this very significant
maxim: sapere aude.1
[Footnote 1: Dare to be wise.]
Dare to be wise! A spirited courage is required to triumph over the impediments that
the indolence of nature as well as the cowardice of the heart oppose to our instruction.
It was not without reason that the ancient Mythos made Minerva issue fully armed from the
head of Jupiter, for it is with warfare that this instruction commences. From its very
outset it has to sustain a hard fight against the senses, which do not like to be roused
from their easy slumber. The greater part of men are much too exhausted and enervated by
their struggle with want to be able to engage in a new and severe contest with error.
Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly
abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts. And if it happens that nobler
necessities agitate their soul, they cling with a greedy faith to the formulas that the
state and the church hold in reserve for such cases. If these unhappy men deserve our
compassion, those others deserve our just contempt, who, though set free from those
necessities by more fortunate circumstances, yet willingly bend to their yoke. These
latter persons prefer this twilight of obscure ideas, where the feelings have more
intensity, and the imagination can at will create convenient chimeras, to the rays of
truth which put to flight the pleasant illusions of their dreams. They have founded the
whole structure of their happiness on these very illusions, which ought to be combated and
dissipated by the light of knowledge, and they would think they were paying too dearly for
a truth which begins by robbing them of all that has value in their sight. It would be
necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom: a truth that was felt at once
by him to whom philosophy owes its name.2
[Footnote 2: The Greek word means, as is known, love of wisdom.]
It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the understanding only
deserves respect when it reacts on the character; to a certain extent it is from the
character that this light proceeds; for the road that terminates in the head must pass
through the heart. Accordingly, the most pressing need of the present time is to educate
the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to render efficacious in practice the
improvement of ideas, but to call this improvement into existence.
Letter IX.
But perhaps there is a vicious circle in our previous reasoning? Theoretical culture
must it seems bring along with it practical culture, and yet the latter must be the
condition of the former. All improvement in the political sphere must proceed from the
ennobling of the character. But, subject to the influence of a social constitution still
barbarous, how can character become ennobled? It would then be necessary to seek for this
end an instrument that the state does not furnish, and to open sources that would have
preserved themselves pure in the midst of political corruption.
I have now reached the point to which all the considerations tended that have engaged
me up to the present time. This instrument is the art of the beautiful; these sources are
open to us in its immortal models.
Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all that is humanly
conventional; both are completely independent of the arbitrary will of men. The political
legislator may place their empire under an interdict, but he cannot reign there. He can
proscribe the friend of truth, but truth subsists; he can degrade the artist, but he
cannot change art. No doubt, nothing is more common than to see science and art bend
before the spirit of the age, and creative taste receive its law from critical taste. When
the character becomes stiff and hardens itself, we see science severely keeping her
limits, and art subject to the harsh restraint of rules; when the character is relaxed and
softened, science endeavours to please and art to rejoice. For whole ages philosophers as
well as artists show themselves occupied in letting down truth and beauty to the depths of
vulgar humanity. They themselves are swallowed up in it; but, thanks to their essential
vigour and indestructible life, the true and the beautiful make a victorious fight, and
issue triumphant from the abyss.
No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if he is its disciple
or even its favourite. Let a beneficent deity carry off in good time the suckling from the
breast of its mother, let it nourish him on the milk of a better age, and suffer him to
grow up and arrive at virility under the distant sky of Greece. When he has attained
manhood, let him come back, presenting a face strange to his own age; let him come, not to
delight it with his apparition, but rather to purify it, terrible as the son of Agamemnon.
He will, indeed, receive his matter from the present time, but he will borrow the form
from a nobler time and even beyond all time, from the essential, absolute, immutable
unity. There, issuing from the pure ether of its heavenly nature, flows the source of all
beauty, which was never tainted by the corruption of generations or of ages, which roll
along far beneath it in dark eddies. Its matter may be dishonoured as well as ennobled by
fancy, but the ever chaste form escapes from the caprices of imagination. The Roman had
already bent his knee for long years to the divinity of the emperors, and yet the statues
of the gods stood erect; the temples retained their sanctity for the eye long after the
gods had become a theme for mockery, and the noble architecture of the palaces that
shielded the infamies of Nero and of Commodus were a protest against them. Humanity has
lost its dignity, but art has saved it, and preserves it in marbles full of meaning; truth
continues to live in illusion, and the copy will serve to reestablish the model. If the
nobility of art has survived the nobility of nature, it also goes before it like an
inspiring genius, forming and awakening minds. Before truth causes her triumphant light to
penetrate into the depth of the heart, poetry intercepts her rays, and the summits of
humanity shine in a bright light, while a dark and humid night still hangs over the
vatleys.
But how will the artist avoid the corruption of his time which encloses him on all
hands? Let him raise his eyes to his own dignity, and to law; let him not lower them to
necessity and fortune. Equally exempt from a vain activity which would imprint its trace
on the fugitive moment, and from the dreams of an impatient enthusiasm which applies the
measure of the absolute to the paltry productions of time, let the artist abandon the real
to the understanding, for that is its proper field. But let the artist endeavour to give
birth to the ideal by the union of the possible and of the necessary. Let him stamp
illusion and truth with the effigy of this ideal; let him apply it to the play of his
imagination and his most serious actions, in short, to all sensuous and spiritual forms;
then let him quietly launch his work into infinite time.
But the minds set on fire by this ideal have not all received an equal share of calm
from the creative genius - that great and patient temper which is required to impress the
ideal on the dumb marble, or to spread it over a page of cold, sober letters, and then
entrust it to the faithful hands of time. This divined instinct, and creative force, much
too ardent to follow this peaceful walk, often throws itself immediately on the present,
on active life, and strives to transform the shapeless matter of the moral world. The
misfortune of his brothers, of the whole species, appeals loudly to the heart of the man
of feeling; their abasement appeals still louder; enthusiasm is inflamed, and in souls
endowed with energy the burning desire aspires impatiently to action and facts. But has
this innovator examined himself to see if these disorders of the moral world wound his
reason, or if they do not rather wound his self-love? If he does not determine this point
at once, he will find it from the impulsiveness with which he pursues a prompt and
definite end. A pure, moral motive has for its end the absolute; time does not exist for
it, and the future becomes the present to it directly, by a necessary development, it has
to issue from the present. To a reason having no limits the direction towards an end
becomes confounded with the accomplishment of this end, and to enter on a course is to
have finished it.
If, then, a young friend of the true and of the beautiful were to ask me how,
notwithstanding the resistance of the times, he can satisfy the noble longing of his
heart, I should reply: Direct the world on which you act towards that which is good, and
the measured and peaceful course of time will bring about the results. You have given it
this direction if by your teaching you raise its thoughts towards the necessary and the
eternal; if, by your acts or your creations, you make the necessary and the eternal the
object of your leanings. The structure of error and of all that is arbitrary must fall,
and it has already fallen, as soon as you are sure that it is tottering. But it is
important that it should not only totter in the external but also in the internal man.
Cherish triumphant truth in the modest sanctuary of your heart; give it an incarnate form
through beauty, that it may not only be the understanding that does homage to it, but that
feeling may lovingly grasp its appearance. And that you may not by any chance take from
external reality the model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not venture into its
dangerous society before you are assured in your own heart that you have a good escort
furnished by ideal nature. Live with your age, but be not its creation; labour for your
contemporaries, but do for them what they need, and not what they praise. Without having
shared their faults, share their punishment with a noble resignation, and bend under the
yoke which they find is as painful to dispense with as to bear. By the constancy with
which you will despise their good fortune, you will prove to them that it is not through
cowardice that you submit to their sufferings. See them in thought such as they ought to
be when you must act upon them; but see them as they are when you are tempted to act for
them. Seek to owe their suffrage to their dignity; but to make them happy keep an account
of their unworthiness; thus, on the one hand, the nobleness of your heart will kindle
theirs, and, on the other, your end will not be reduced to nothingness by their
unworthiness. The gravity of your principles will keep them off from you, but in play they
will still endure them. Their taste is purer than their heart, and it is by their taste
you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive. In vain will you combat their maxims, in
vain will you condemn their actions; but you can try your moulding hand on their leisure.
Drive away caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, from their pleasures, and you will banish
them imperceptibly from their acts, and length from their feelings. Everywhere that you
meet them, surround them with great, noble, and ingenious forms; multiply around them the
symbols of perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over nature.
Letter X.
Convinced by my preceding letters, you agree with me on this point, that man can depart
from his destination by two opposite roads, that our epoch is actually moving on these two
false roads, and that it has become the prey, in one case, of coarseness, and elsewhere of
exhaustion and depravity. It is the beautiful that must bring it back from this twofold
departure. But how can the cultivation of the fine arts remedy, at the same time, these
opposite defects, and unite in itself two contradictory qualities? Can it bind nature in
the savage, and set it free in the barbarian? Can it at once tighten a spring and loose
it, and if it cannot produce this double effect, how will it be reasonable to expect from
it so important a result as the education of man?
Now, although an infinite being, a divinity could not become (or be subject to time),
still a tendency ought to be named divine which has for its infinite end the most
characteristic attribute of the divinity; the absolute manifestation of power - the
reality of all the possible - and the absolute unity of the manifestation (the necessity
of all reality). It cannot be disputed that man bears within himself, in his personality,
a predisposition for divinity. The way to divinity - if the word "way" can be
applied to what never leads to its end - is open to him in every direction.
Considered in itself and independently of all sensuous matter, his personality is
nothing but the pure virtuality of a possible infinite manifestation, and so long as there
is neither intuition nor feeling, it is nothing more than a form, an empty power.
Considered in itself, and independently of all spontaneous activity of the mind,
sensuousness can only make a material man; without it, it is a pure form; but it cannot in
any way establish a union between matter and it. So long as he only feels, wishes, and
acts under the influence of desire, he is nothing more than the world, if by this word we
point out only the formless contents of time. Without doubt, it is only his sensuousness
that makes his strength pass into efficacious acts, but it is his personality alone that
makes this activity his own. Thus, that he may not only be a world, he must give form to
matter, and in order not to be a mere form, he must give reality to the virtuality that he
bears in him. He gives matter to form by creating time, and by opposing the immutable to
change, the diversity of the world to the eternal unity of the Ego. He gives a form to
matter by again suppressing time, by maintaining permanence in change, and by placing the
diversity of the world under the unity of the Ego.
Now from this source issue for man two opposite exigencies, the two fundamental laws of
sensuous-rational nature. The first has for its object absolute reality; it must make a
world of what is only form, manifest all that in it is only a force. The second law has
for its object absolute formality; it must destroy in him all that is only world, and
carry out harmony in all changes. In other terms, he must manifest all that is internal,
and give form to all that is external. Considered in its most lofty accomplishment, this
twofold labour brings us back to the idea of humanity which was my starting point.
Part III.
Letter XII.
This twofold labour or task, which consists in making the necessary pass into reality
in us and in making out of us reality subject to the law of necessity, is urged upon us as
a duty by two opposing forces, which are justly styled impulsions or instincts, because
they impel us to realise their object. The first of these impulsions, which I shall call
the sensuous instinct, issues from the physical existence of man, or from sensuous nature;
and it is this instinct which tends to enclose him in the limits of time and to make of
him a material being; I do not say to give him matter, for to dot that a certain free
activity of the personality would be necessary, which, receiving matter, distinguishes it
from the Ego, or what is permanent. By matter I only understand in this place the change
or reality that fills time. Consequently the instinct requires that there should be
change, and that time should contain something. This simply filled state of time is named
sensation, and it is only in this state that physical existence manifests itself.
As all that is in time is successive, it follows by that fact alone that something is:
all the remainder is excluded. When one note on an instrument is touched, among all those
that it virtually offers, this note alone is real. When man is actually modified, the
infinite possibility of all his modifications is limited to this single mode of existence.
Thus, then, the exclusive action of sensuous impulsion has for its necessary consequence
the narrowest limitation. In this state man is only a unity of magnitude, a complete
moment in time; or, to speak more correctly, he is not, for his personality is suppressed
as long as sensation holds sway over him and carries time along with it.
This instinct extends its domains over the entire sphere of the finite in man, and as
form is only revealed in matter, and the absolute by means of its limits, the total
manifestation of human nature is connected on a close analysis with the sensuous instinct.
But though it is only this instinct that awakens and develops what exists virtually in
man, it is nevertheless this very instinct which renders his perfection impossible. It
binds down to the world of sense by indestructible ties the spirit that tends higher and
it calls back to the limits of the present, abstraction which had its free development in
the sphere of the infinite. No doubt, thought can escape it for a moment, and a firm will
victoriously resists its exigencies; but soon compressed nature resumes her rights to give
an imperious reality to our existence, to give it contents, substance, knowledge, and an
aim for our activity.
The second impulsion, which may be named the formal instinct, issues from the absolute
existence of man, or from his rational nature, and tends to set free, and bring harmony
into the diversity of its manifestations, and to maintain personality notwithstanding all
the changes of state. As this personality, being an absolute and indivisible unity, can
never be in contradiction with itself, as we are ourselves for ever, this impulsion, which
tends to maintain personality, can never exact in one time anything but what it exacts and
requires for ever. It therefore decides for always what it decides now, and orders now
what it orders for ever. Hence it embraces the whole series of times, or what comes to the
same thing, it suppresses time and change. It wishes the real to be necessary and eternal,
and it wishes the eternal and the necessary to be real; in other terms, it tends to truth
and justice.
If the sensuous instinct only produces accidents, the formal instinct gives laws, laws
for every judgment when it is a question of knowledge, laws for every will when it is a
question of action. Whether, therefore, we recognise an object or conceive an objective
value to a state of the subject, whether we act in virtue of knowledge or make of the
objective the determining principle of our state; in both cases we withdraw this state
from the jurisdiction of time, and we attribute to it reality for all men and for all
time, that this, universality and necessity. Feeling can only say: "That is true for
this subject and at this moment," and there may come another moment, another subject,
which withdraws the affirmation from the actual feeling. But when once thought pronounces
and says: "That is," it decides for ever and ever, and the validity of its
decision is guaranteed by the personality itself, which defies all change. Inclination can
only say: "That is good for your individuality and present necessity;" but the
changing current of affairs will sweep them away, and what you ardently desire today will
form the object of your aversion tomorrow. But when the moral feeling says: "That
ought to be," it decides for ever. If you confess the truth because it is the truth,
and if you practice justice because it is justice, you have made of a particular case the
law of all possible cases, and treated one moment of your life as eternity.
Accordingly, when the formal impulse holds sway and the pure object acts in us, the
being attains its highest expansion, all barriers disappear, and from the unity of
magnitude in which man was enclosed by a narrow sensuousness, he rises to the unity of
idea, which embraces and keeps subject the entire sphere of phaenomena. During this
operation we are no longer in time, but time is in us with its infinite succession. We are
no longer individuals but a species; the judgment of all spirits is expressed by our own,
and the choice of all hearts is represented by our own act.
Letter XIII.
On a first survey, nothing appears more opposed than these two impulsions; one having
for its object change, the other immutability, and yet it is these two notions that
exhaust the notion of humanity, and a third fundamental impulsion, holding a medium
between them, is quite inconceivable. How then shall we re-establish the unity of human
nature, a unity that appears completely destroyed by this primitive and radical
opposition?
I admit these two tendencies are contradictory, but it should be noticed that they are
not so in the same objects. But things that do not meet cannot come into collision. No
doubt the sensuous impulsion desires change; but it does not wish that it should extend to
personality and its field, nor that there should be a change of principles. The formal
impulsion seeks unity and permanence, but it does not wish the condition to remain fixed
with the person, that there should be identity of feeling. Therefore these two impulsions
are not divided by nature, and if, nevertheless, they appear so, it is because they have
become divided by transgressing nature freely, by ignoring themselves, and by confounding
their spheres. The office of culture is to watch over them and to secure to each one its
proper limits; therefore culture has to give equal justice to both, and to defend not only
the rational impulsion against the sensuous, but also the latter against the former. Hence
she has to act a twofold part: first, to protect sense against the attacks of freedom;
secondly, to secure personality against the power of sensations. One of these ends is
attained by the cultivation of the sensuous, the other by that of the reason.
Since the world is developed in time, or change, the perfection of the faculty that
places men in relation with the world will necessarily be the greatest possible mutability
and extensiveness. Since personality is permanence in change, the perfection of this
faculty, which must be opposed to change, will be the greatest possible freedom of action
(autonomy) and intensity. The more the receptivity is developed under manifold aspects,
the more it is movable and offers surfaces to phaenomena, the larger is the part of the
world seized upon by man, and the more virtualities he develops in himself. Again, in
proportion as man gains strength and depth, and depth and reason gain in freedom, in that
proportion man takes in a larger share of the world, and throws out forms outside himself.
Therefore his culture will consist, first, in placing his receptivity on contact with the
world in the greatest number of points possible, and in raising passivity to the highest
exponent on the side of feeling; secondly, in procuring for the determining faculty the
greatest possible amount of independence, in relation to the receptive power, and in
raising activity to the highest degree on the side of reason. By the union of these two
qualities man will associate the highest degree of self-spontaneity (autonomy) and of
freedom with the fullest plenitude of existence and instead of abandoning himself to the
world so as to get lost in it, he will rather absorb it in himself, with all the
infinitude of its phaenomena, and subject it to the unity of his reason.
But man can invert this relation, and thus fail in attaining his destination in two
ways. He can hand over to the passive force the intensity demanded by the active force; he
can encroach by material impulsion on the formal impulsion, and convert the receptive into
the determining power. He can attribute to the active force the extensiveness belonging to
the passive force, he can encroach by the formal impulsion on the material impulsion, and
substitute the determining for the receptive power. In the former case, he will never be
an Ego, a personality; in the second case, he will never be a Non-Ego, and hence in both
cases he will be neither the one nor the other, consequently he will be nothing.
In fact, if the sensuous impulsion becomes determining, if the senses become
law-givers, and if the world stifles personality, he loses as object what he gains in
force. It may be said of man that when he is only the contents of time, he is not and
consequently he has no other contents. His condition is destroyed at the same time as his
personality, because these are two correlative ideas, because change presupposes
permanence, and a limited reality implies an infinite reality. If the formal impulsion
becomes receptive, that is, if thought anticipates sensation, and the person substitutes
itself in the place of the world, it loses as a subject and autonomous force what it gains
as object, because immutability implies change, and that to manifest itself also absolute
reality requires limits. As soon as man is only form, he has no form, and the personality
vanishes with the condition. In a word, it is only inasmuch as he is spontaneous,
autonomous, that there is reality out of him, that he is also receptive; and it is only
inasmuch as he is receptive that there is reality in him that he is a thinking force.
Consequently these two impulsions require limits, and looked upon as forces, they need
tempering; the former that it may not encroach on the field of legislation, the latter
that it may not invade the ground of feeling. But this tempering and moderating the
sensuous impulsion ought not to be the effect of physical impotence or of a blunting of
sensations, which is always a matter for contempt. It must be a free act, an activity of
the person, which by its moral intensity moderates the sensuous intensity, and by the sway
of impressions takes from them in depth what it gives them in surface or breadth. The
character must place limits to temperament, for the senses have only the right to lose
elements if it be to the advantage of the mind. In its turn, the tempering of the formal
impulsion must not result from moral impotence, from a relaxation of thought and will,
which would degrade humanity. It is necessary that the glorious source of this second
tempering should be the fullness of sensations; it is necessary that sensuousness itself
should defend its field with a victorious arm and resist the violence that the invading
activity of the mind would do to it. In a word, it is necessary that the material
impulsion should be contained in the limits of propriety by personality, and the formal
impulsion by receptivity or nature.
Letter XIV.
We have been brought to the idea of such a correlation between the two impulsions that
the action of the one establishes and limits at the same time the action of the other, and
that each of them, taken in isolation, does arrive at its highest manifestation just
because the other is active.
No doubt this correlation of the two impulsions is simply a problem advanced by reason,
and which man will only be able to solve in the perfection of his being. It is in the
strictest signification of the term: the idea of his humanity; accordingly, it is an
infinite to which he can approach nearer and nearer in the course of time, but without
ever reaching it. "He ought not to aim at form to the injury of reality, nor to
reality to the detriment of the form. He must rather seek the absolute being by means of a
determinate being, and the determinate being by means of an infinite being. He must set
the world before him because he is a person, and he must be a person because he has the
world before him. He must feel because he has a consciousness of himself, and he must have
a consciousness of himself because he feels." It is only in conformity with this idea
that he is a man in the full sense of the word; but he cannot be convinced of this so long
as he gives himself up exclusively to one of these two impulsions, or only satisfies them
one after the other. For as long as he only feels, his absolute personality and existence
remain a mystery to him, and as long as he only thinks, his condition or existence in time
escapes him. But if there were cases in which he could have at once this twofold
experience in which he would have the consciousness of his freedom and the feeling of his
existence together, in which he would simultaneously feel as matter and know himself as
spirit, in such cases, and in such only, would he have a complete intuition of his
humanity, and the object that would procure him this intuition would be a symbol of his
accomplished destiny, and consequently serve to express the infinite to him - since this
destination can only be fulfilled in the fullness of time.
Presuming that cases of this kind could present themselves in experience, they would
awake in him a new impulsion, which, precisely because the two other impulsions would
co-operate in it, would be opposed to each of them taken in isolation, and might, with
good grounds, be taken for a new impulsion. The sensuous impulsion requires that there
should be change, that time should have contents; the formal impulsion requires that time
should be suppressed, that there should be no change. Consequently, the impulsion in which
both of the others act in concert - allow me to call it the instinct of play, till I
explain the term - the instinct of play would have as its object to suppress time in time
to conciliate the state of transition or becoming with the absolute being, change with
identity.
The sensuous instinct wishes to be determined, it wishes to receive an object; the
formal instinct wishes to determine itself, it wishes to produce an object. Therefore the
instinct of play will endeavor to receive as it would itself have produced, and to produce
as it aspires to receive.
The sensuous impulsion excludes from its subject all autonomy and freedom; the formal
impulsion excludes all dependence and passivity. But the exclusion of freedom is physical
necessity; the exclusion of passivity is moral necessity. Thus the two impulsions subdue
the mind: the former to the laws of nature, the latter to the laws of reason. It results
from this that the instinct of play, which unites the double action of the two other
instincts, will content the mind at once morally and physically. Hence, as it suppresses
all that is contingent, it will also suppress all coercion, and will set man free
physically and morally. When we welcome with effusion some one who deserves our contempt,
we feel painfully that nature is constrained. When we have a hostile feeling against a
person who commands our esteem, we feel painfully the constraint of reason. But if this
person inspires us with interest, and also wins our esteem, the constraint of feeling
vanishes together with the constraint of reason, and we begin to love him, that is to say,
to play, to take recreation, at once with our inclination and our esteem.
Moreover, as the sensuous impulsion controls us physically, and the formal impulsion
morally, the former makes our formal constitution contingent, and the latter makes our
material constitution contingent, that is to say, there is contingence in the agreement of
our happiness with our perfection, and reciprocally. The instinct of play, in which both
act in concert, will render both our formal and our material constitution contingent;
accordingly, our perfection and our happiness in like manner. And on the other hand,
exactly because it makes both of them contingent, and because the contingent disappears
with necessity, it will suppress this contingence in both, and will thus give form to
matter and reality to form. In proportion that it will lessen the dynamic influence of
feeling and passion, it will place them in harmony with rational ideas, and by taking from
the laws of reason their moral constraint, it will reconcile them with the interest of the
senses.
Letter XV.
I approach continually nearer to the end to which I lead you, by a path offering few
attractions. Be pleased to follow me a few steps further, and a large horizon will open up
to you and a delightful prospect will reward you for the labour of the way.
The object of the sensuous instinct, expressed in a universal conception, is named Life
in the widest acceptation: a conception that expresses all material existence and all that
is immediately present in the senses. The object of the formal instinct, expressed in a
universal conception, is called shape or form, as well in an exact as in an inexact
acceptation; a conception that embraces all formal qualities of things and all relations
of the same to the thinking powers. The object of the play instinct, represented in a
general statement, may therefore bear the name of living form; a term that serves to
describe all aesthetic qualities of phaenomena, and what people style, in the widest
sense, beauty.
Beauty is neither extended to the whole field of all living things nor merely enclosed
in this field. A marble block, though it is and remains lifeless, can nevertheless become
a living form by the architect and sculptor; a man, though he lives and has a form, is far
from being a living form on that account. For this to be the case, it is necessary that
his form should be life, and that his life should be a form. As long as we only think of
his form, it is lifeless, a mere abstraction; as long as we only feel his life, it is
without form, a mere impression. It is only when his form lives in our feeling, and his
life in our understanding, he is the living form, and this will everywhere be the case
where we judge him to be beautiful.
But the genesis of beauty is by no means declared because we know how to point out the
component parts, which in their combination produce beauty. For to this end it would be
necessary to comprehend that combination itself, which continues to defy our exploration,
as well as all mutual operation between the finite and the infinite. The reason, on
transcendental grounds, makes the following demand: There shall be a communion between the
formal impulse and the material impulse - that is, there shall be a play instinct -
because it is only the unity of reality with the form, of the accidental with the
necessary, of the passive state with freedom, that the conception of humanity is
completed. Reason is obliged to make this demand, because her nature impels her to
completeness and to the removal of all bounds; while every exclusive activity of one or
the other impulse leaves human nature incomplete and places a limit in it. Accordingly, as
soon as reason issues the mandate, "a humanity shall exist," it proclaims at the
same time the law, "there shall be a beauty." Experience can answer us if there
is a beauty, and we shall know it as soon as she has taught us if a humanity can exist.
But neither reason nor experience can tell us how beauty can be, and how a humanity is
possible.
We know that man is neither exclusively matter nor exclusively spirit. Accordingly,
beauty, as the consummation of humanity, can neither be exclusively mere life, as has been
asserted by sharp-sighted observers, who kept too close to the testimony of experience,
and to which the taste of the time would gladly degrade it; Nor can beauty be merely form,
as has been judged by speculative sophists, who departed too far from experience, and by
philosophic artists, who were led too much by the necessity of art in explaining beauty;
it is rather the common object of both impulses, that is, of the play instinct. The use of
language completely justifies this name, as it is wont to qualify with the word play what
is neither subjectively nor objectively accidental, and yet does not impose necessity
either externally or internally. As the mind in the intuition of the beautiful finds
itself in a happy medium between law and necessity, it is, because it divides itself
between both, emancipated from the pressure of both. The formal impulse and the material
impulse are equally earnest in their demands, because one relates in its cognition to
things in their reality and the other to their necessity; because in action the first is
directed to the preservation of life, the second to the preservation of dignity, and
therefore both to truth and perfection. But life becomes more indifferent when dignity is
mixed up with it, and duty on longer coerces when inclination attracts. In like manner the
mind takes in the reality of things, material truth, more freely and tranquilly as soon as
it encounters formal truth, the law of necessity; nor does the mind find itself strung by
abstraction as soon as immediate intuition can accompany it. In one word, when the mind
comes into communion with ideas, all reality loses its serious value because it becomes
small; and as it comes in contact with feeling, necessity parts also with its serious
value because it is easy.
But perhaps the objection has for some time occurred to you, Is not the beautiful
degraded by this, that it is made a mere play? and is it not reduced to the level of
frivolous objects which have for ages passed under that name? Does it not contradict the
conception of the reason and the dignity of beauty, which is nevertheless regarded as an
instrument of culture, to confine it to the work of being a mere play? and does it not
contradict the empirical conception of play, which can coexist with the exclusion of all
taste, to confine it merely to beauty?
But what is meant by a mere play, when we know that in all conditions of humanity that
very thing is play, and only that is play which makes man complete and develops
simultaneously his twofold nature? What you style limitation, according to your
representation of the matter, according to my views, which I have justified by proofs, I
name enlargement. Consequently, I should have said exactly the reverse: man is serious
only with the agreeable, with the good, and with the perfect, but he plays with beauty. In
saying this we must not indeed think of the plays that are in vogue in real life, and
which commonly refer only to his material state. But in real life we should also seek in
vain for the beauty of which we are here speaking. The actually present beauty is worthy
of the really, of the actually, present playimpulse; but by the ideal of beauty, which is
set up by the reason, an ideal of the play-instinct is also presented, which man ought to
have before his eyes in all his plays.
Therefore, no error will ever be incurred if we seek the ideal of beauty on the same
road on which we satisfy our play-impulse. We can immediately understand why the ideal
form of a Venus, of a Juno, and of an Apollo, is to be sought not at Rome, but in Greece,
if we contrast the Greek population, delighting in the bloodless athletic contests of
boxing, racing, and intellectual rivalry at Olympia, with the Roman people gloating over
the agony of a gladiator. Now the reason pronounces that the beautiful must not only be
life and form, but a living form, that is, beauty, inasmuch as it dictates to man the
twofold law of absolute formality and absolute reality. Reason also utters the decision
that man shall only play with beauty, and he shall only play with beauty.
For, to speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he
is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays. This proposition, which at this
moment perhaps appears paradoxical, will receive a great and deep meaning if we have
advanced far enough to apply it to the twofold seriousness of duty and of destiny. I
promise you that the whole edifice of aesthetic art and the still more difficult art of
life will be supported by this principle. But this proposition is only unexpected in
science; long ago it lived and worked in art and in the feeling of the Greeks, her most
accomplished masters; only they removed to Olympus what ought to have been preserved on
earth. Influenced by the truth of this principle, they effaced from the brow of their gods
the earnestness and labour which furrow the cheeks of mortals, and also the hollow lust
that smoothes the empty face. They set free the ever serene from the chains of every
purpose, of every duty, of every care, and they made indolence and indifference the envied
condition of the godlike race; merely human appellations for the freest and highest mind.
As well the material pressure of natural laws as the spiritual pressure of moral laws lost
itself in its higher idea of necessity, which embraced at the same time both worlds, and
out of the union of these two necessities issued true freedom. Inspired by this spirit,
the Greeks also effaced from the features of their ideal, together with desire or
inclination, all traces of volition, or, better still, they made both unrecognisable,
because they knew how to wed them both in the closest alliance. It is neither charm nor is
it dignity which speaks from the glorious face of the Juno Ludovici; it is neither of
these, for it is both at once. While the female god challenges our veneration, the godlike
woman at the same times kindles our love. But while in ecstasy we give ourselves up to the
heavenly beauty, the heavenly self-repose awes us back. The whole form rests and dwells in
itself - a fully complete creation in itself - and as if she were out of space, without
advance or resistance; it shows no force contending with force, no opening through which
time could break in. Irresistibly carried away and attracted by her womanly charm, kept
off at a distance by her godly dignity, we also find ourselves at length in the state of
the greatest repose, and the result is a wonderful impression, for which the understanding
has no idea and language no name.
Letter XVI.
From the antagonism of the two impulsions, and from the association of two opposite
principles, we have seen beauty to result, of which the highest ideal must therefore be
sought in the most perfect union and equilibrium possible of the reality and of the form.
But this equilibrium remains always an idea that reality can never completely reach. In
reality, there will always remain a preponderance of one of these elements over the other,
and the highest point to which experience can reach will consist in an oscillation between
two principles, when sometimes reality and at others form will have the advantage. Ideal
beauty is therefore eternally one and indivisible, because there can only be one single
equilibrium; on the contrary, experimental beauty will be eternally double, because in the
oscillation the equilibrium may be destroyed in two ways - this side and that.
I have called attention in the foregoing letters to a fact that can also be rigorously
deduced from the considerations that have engaged our attention to the present point; this
fact is that an exciting and also a moderating action may be expected from the beautiful.
The tempering action is directed to keep within proper limits the sensuous and the formal
impulsions; the exciting, to maintain both of them in their full force. But these two
modes of action of beauty ought to be completely identified in the idea. The beautiful
ought to temper while uniformly exciting the two natures, and it ought also to excite
while uniformly moderating them. This result flows at once from the idea of a correlation,
in virtue of which the two terms mutually imply each other, and are the reciprocal
condition one of the other, a correlation of which the purest product is beauty. But
experience does not offer an example of so perfect a correlation. In the field of
experience it will always happen more or less that excess on the one side will give rise
to deficiency on the other, and deficiency will give birth to excess. It results from this
that what in the beau-ideal is only distinct in the idea, is different in reality in
empirical beauty. The beau-ideal, though simple and indivisible, discloses, when viewed in
two different aspects, on the one hand a property of gentleness and grace, and on the
other an energetic property; in experience there is a gentle and graceful beauty, and
there is an energetic beauty. It is so, and it will be always so, so long as the absolute
is enclosed in the limits of time, and the ideas of reason have to be realised in
humanity. For example, the intellectual man has the idea of virtue, of truth, and of
happiness; but the active man will only practise virtues, will only grasp truths, and
enjoy happy days. The business of physical and moral education is to bring back this
multiplicity to unity, to put morality in the place of manners, science in the place of
knowledge; the business of aesthetic education is to make out of beauties the beautiful.
Energetic beauty can no more preserve a man from a certain residue of savage violence
and harshness than graceful beauty can secure him against a certain degree of effeminacy
and weakness. As it is the effect of the energetic beauty to elevate the mind in a
physical and moral point of view and to augment its momentum, it only too often happens
that the resistance of the temperament and of the character diminishes the aptitude to
receive impressions, that the delicate part of humanity suffers an oppression which ought
only to affect its grosser part, and that this course nature participates in an increase
of force that ought only to turn to the account of free personality. It is for this reason
that at the periods when we find much strength and abundant sap in humanity, true
greatness of thought is seen associated with what is gigantic and extravagant, and the
sublimest feeling is found coupled with the most horrible excess of passion. It is also
the reason why, in the periods distinguished for regularity and form, nature is as often
oppressed as it is governed, as often outraged as it is surpassed. And as the action of
gentle and graceful beauty is to relax the mind in the moral sphere as well as the
physical, it happens quite as easily that the energy of feelings is extinguished with the
violence of desires, and that character shares in the loss of strength which ought only to
affect the passions. This is the reason why, in ages assumed to be refined, it is not a
rare thing to see gentleness degenerate into effeminacy, politeness into platitude,
correctness into empty sterility, liberal ways into arbitrary caprice, ease into
frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a most miserable caricature treads on the heels
of the noblest, the most beautiful type of humanity. Gentle and graceful beauty is
therefore a want to the man who suffers the constraint of matter and of forms, for he is
moved by grandeur and strength long before he becomes sensible to harmony and grace.
Energetic beauty is a necessity to the man who is under the indulgent sway of taste, for
in his state of refinement he is only too much disposed to make light of the strength that
he retained in his state of rude savagism.
I think I have now answered and also cleared up the contradiction commonly met in the
judgments of men respecting the influence of the beautiful, and the appreciation of
aesthetic culture. This contradiction is explained directly we remember that there are two
sorts of experimental beauty, and that on both hands an affirmation is extended to the
entire race, when it can only be proved of one of the species. This contradiction
disappears the moment we distinguish a twofold want in humanity to which two kinds of
beauty correspond. It is therefore probable that both sides would make good their claims
if they come to an understanding respecting the kind of beauty and the form of humanity
that they have in view.
Consequently in the sequel of my researches I shall adopt the course that nature
herself follows with man considered from the point of view of aesthetics, and setting out
from the two kinds of beauty, I shall rise to the idea of the genus. I shall examine the
effects produced on man by the gentle and graceful beauty when its springs of action are
in full play, and also those produced by energetic beauty when they are relaxed. I shall
do this to confound these two sorts of beauty in the unity of the beau-ideal, in the same
way that the two opposite forms and modes of being of humanity are absorbed in the unity
of the ideal man.
Part IV.
Letter XVII.
While we were only engaged in deducing the universal idea of beauty from the conception
of human nature in general, we had only to consider in the latter the limits established
essentially in itself, and inseparable from the notion of the finite. Without attending to
the contingent restrictions that human nature may undergo in the real world of phaenomena,
we have drawn the conception of this nature directly from reason, as a source of every
necessity, and the ideal of beauty has been given us at the same time with the ideal of
humanity.
But now we are coming down from the region of ideas to the scene of reality, to find
man in a determinate state, and consequently in limits which are not derived from the pure
conception of humanity, but from external circumstances and from an accidental use of his
freedom. But although the limitation of the idea of humanity may be very manifold in the
individual, the contents of this idea suffice to teach us that we can only depart from it
by two opposite roads. For if the perfection of man consist in the harmonious energy of
his sensuous and spiritual forces, he can only lack this perfection through the want of
harmony and the want of energy. Thus then, before having received on this point the
testimony of experience, reason suffices to assure us that we shall find the real and
consequently limited man in a state of tension or relaxation, according as the exclusive
activity of isolated forces troubles the harmony of his being, or as the unity of his
nature is based on the uniform relaxation of his physical and spiritual forces. These
opposite limits are, as we have now to prove, suppressed by the beautiful, which
reestablishes harmony in man when excited, and energy in man when relaxed; and which, in
this way, in conformity with the nature of the beautiful, restores the state of limitation
to an absolute state, and makes of man a whole, complete in himself.
Thus the beautiful by no means belies in reality the idea which we have made of it in
speculation; only its action is much less free in it than in the field of theory, where we
were able to apply it to the pure conception of humanity. In man, as experience shows him
to us, the beautiful finds a matter, already damaged and resisting, which robs him in
ideal perfection of what it communicates to him of its individual mode of being.
Accordingly in reality the beautiful will always appear a peculiar and limited species,
and not as the pure genus; in excited minds in the state of tension, it will lose its
freedom and variety; in relaxed minds, it will lose its vivifying force; but we, who have
become familiar with the true character of this contradictory phaenomenon, cannot be led
astray by it. We shall not follow the great crowd of critics, in determining their
conception by separate experiences, and to make them answerable for the deficiencies which
man shows under their influence. We know rather that it is man who transfers the
imperfections of his individuality over to them, who stands perpetually in the way of
their perfection by his subjective limitation, and lowers their absolute ideal to two
limited forms of phaenomena.
It was advanced that soft beauty is for an unstrung mind, and the energetic beauty for
the tightly strung mind. But I apply the term unstrung to a man when he is rather under
the pressure of feelings than under the pressure of conceptions. Every exclusive sway of
one of his two fundamental impulses is for man a state of compulsion and violence, and
freedom only exists in the cooperation of his two natures. Accordingly, the man governed
preponderately by feelings, or sensuously unstrung, is emancipated and set free by matter.
The soft and graceful beauty, to satisfy this twofold problem, must therefore show herself
under two aspects - in two distinct forms. First as a form in repose, she will tone down
savage life, and pave the way from feeling to thought. She will, secondly, as a living
image equip the abstract form with sensuous power, and lead back the conception to
intuition and law to feeling. The former service she does to the man of nature, the second
to the man of art. But because she does not in both cases hold complete sway over her
matter, but depends on that which is furnished either by formless nature or unnatural art,
she will in both cases bear traces of her origin, and lose herself in one place in
material life and in another in mere abstract form.
To be able to arrive at a conception how beauty can become a means to remove this
twofold relaxation, we must explore its source in the human mind. Accordingly, make up
your mind to dwell a little longer in the region of speculation, in order then to leave it
for ever, and to advance with securer footing on the ground of experience.
Letter XVIII.
By beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; by beauty the spiritual man
is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense.
From this statement it would appear to follow that between matter and form, between
passivity and activity, there must be a middle state, and that beauty plants us in this
state. It actually happens that the greater part of mankind really form this conception of
beauty as soon as they begin to reflect on its operations, and all experience seems to
point to this conclusion. But, on the other hand, nothing is more unwarrantable and
contradictory than such a conception, because the aversion of matter and form, the passive
and the active, feeling and thought, is eternal and cannot be mediated in any way. How can
we remove this contradiction? Beauty weds the two opposed conditions of feeling and
thinking, and yet there is absolutely no medium between them. The former is immediately
certain through experience, the other through the reason.
This is the point to which the whole question of beauty leads, and if we succeed in
settling this point in a satisfactory way, we have at length found the clue that will
conduct us through the whole labyrinth of aesthetics.
But this requires two very different operations, which must necessarily support each
other in this inquiry. Beauty it is said, weds two conditions with one another which are
opposite to each other, and can never be one. We must start from this opposition; we must
grasp and recognise them in their entire purity and strictness, so that both conditions
are separated in the most definite matter; otherwise we mix, but we do not unite them.
Secondly, it is usual to say, beauty unites those two opposed conditions, and therefore
removes the opposition. But because both conditions remain eternally opposed to one
another, they cannot be united in any other way than by being suppressed. Our second
business is therefore to make this connection perfect, to carry them out with such purity
and perfection that both conditions disappear entirely in a third one, and no trace of
separation remains in the whole, otherwise we segregate, but do not unite. All the
disputes that have ever prevailed and still prevail in the philosophical world respecting
the conception of beauty have no other origin than their commencing without a sufficiently
strict distinction, or that is not carried out fully to a pure union. Those philosophers
who blindly follow their feeling in reflecting on this topic can obtain no other
conception of beauty, because they distinguish nothing separate in the totality of the
sensuous impression. Other philosophers, who take the understanding as their exclusive
guide, can never obtain a conception of beauty, because they never see anything else in
the whole than the parts, and spirit and matter remain eternally separate, even in their
most perfect unity. The first fear to suppress beauty dynamically, that is, as a working
power, if they must separate what is united in the feeling. The others fear to suppress
beauty logically, that is, as a conception, when they have to hold together what in the
understanding is separate. The former wish to think of beauty as it works; the latter wish
it to work as it is thought. Both therefore must miss the truth; the former because they
try to follow infinite nature with their limited thinking power; the others, because they
wish to limit unlimited nature according to their laws of thought. The first fear to rob
beauty of its freedom by a too strict dissection, the others fear to destroy the
distinctness of the conception by a too violent union. But the former do not reflect that
the freedom in which they very properly place the essence of beauty is not lawlessness,
but harmony of laws; not caprice, but the highest internal necessity. The others do not
remember that distinctness, which they with equal right demand from beauty, does not
consist in the exclusion of certain realities, but the absolute including of all; that is
not therefore limitation, but infinitude. We shall avoid the quicksands on which both have
made shipwreck if we begin from the two elements in which beauty divides itself before the
understanding, but then afterwards rise to a pure aesthetic unity by which it works on
feeling, and in which both those conditions completely disappear.
Letter XIX.
Two principal and different states of passive and active capacity of being determined1 can be distinguished in man; in like manner two states of passive and active
determination.2 The explanation of this proposition leads us most readily to
our end.
[Footnote 1: Bestimmbarkeit.]
[Footnote 2: Bestimmung.]
The condition of the state of man before destination or direction is given him by the
impressions of the senses is an unlimited capacity of being determined. The infinite of
time and space is given to his imagination for its free use; and, because nothing is
settled in this kingdom of the possible, and therefore nothing is excluded from it, this
state of absence of determination can be named an empty infiniteness, which must not by
any means be confounded with an infinite void.
Now it is necessary that his sensuous nature should be modified, and that in the
indefinite series of possible determinations one alone should become real. One perception
must spring up in it. That which, in the previous state of determinableness, was only an
empty potency becomes now an active force, and receives contents; but at the same time, as
an active force it receives a limit, after having been, as a simple power, unlimited.
Reality exists now, but the infinite has disappeared. To describe a figure in space, we
are obliged to limit infinite space; to represent to ourselves a change in time, we are
obliged to divide the totality of time. Thus we only arrive at reality by limitation, at
the positive, at a real position, by negation or exclusion; to determination, by the
suppression of our free determinableness.
But mere exclusion would never beget a reality, nor would a mere sensuous impression
ever give birth to a perception, if there were not something from which it was excluded,
if by an absolute act of the mind the negation were not referred to something positive,
and if opposition did not issue out of nonposition. This act of the mind is styled judging
or thinking, and the result is named thought.
Before we determine a place in space, there is no space for us; but without absolute
space we could never determine a place. The same is the case with time. Before we have an
instant, there is no time to us; but without infinite time - eternity - we should never
have a representation of the instant. Thus, therefore, we can only arrive at the whole by
the part, to the unlimited through limitation; but reciprocally we only arrive at the part
through the whole, at limitation through the unlimited.
It follows from this, that when it is affirmed of beauty that it mediates for man, the
transition from feeling to thought, this must not be understood to mean that beauty can
fill up the gap that separates feeling from thought, the passive from the active. This gap
is infinite; and, without the interposition of a new and independent faculty, it is
impossible for the general to issue from the individual, the necessary from the
contingent. Thought is the immediate act of this absolute power, which, I admit, can only
be manifested in connection with sensuous impressions, but which in this manifestation
depends so little on the sensuous that it reveals itself specially in an opposition to it.
The spontaneity or autonomy with which it acts excludes every foreign influence; and it is
not in as far as it helps thought - which comprehends a manifest contradiction - but only
in as far as it procures for the intellectual faculties the freedom to manifest themselves
in conformity with their proper laws. It does not only because the beautiful can become a
means of leading man from matter to form, from feeling to laws, from a limited existence
to an absolute existence.
But this assumes that the freedom of the intellectual faculties can be balked, which
appears contradictory to the conception of an autonomous power. For a power which only
receives the matter of its activity from without can only be hindered in its action by the
privation of this matter, and consequently by way of negation; it is therefore a
misconception of the nature of the mind, to attribute to the sensuous passions the power
of oppressing positively the freedom of the mind. Experience does indeed present numerous
examples where the rational forces appear compressed in proportion to the violence of the
sensuous forces. But instead of deducing this spiritual weakness from the energy of
passion, this passionate energy must rather be explained by the weakness of the human
mind. For the sense can only have a sway such as this over man when the mind has
spontaneously neglected to assert its power.
Yet in trying by these explanations to remove one objection, I appear to have exposed
myself to another, and I have only saved the autonomy of the mind at the cost of its
unity. For how can the mind derive at the same time from itself the principles of
inactivity and of activity, if it is not itself divided, and if it is not in opposition
with itself?
Here we must remember that we have before us, not the infinite mind, but the finite.
The finite mind is that which only becomes active through the passive, only arrives at the
absolute through limitation, and only acts and fashions in as far as it receives matter.
Accordingly, a mind of this nature must associate with the impulse towards form or the
absolute, an impulse towards matter or limitation, conditions without which it could not
have the former impulse nor satisfy it. How can two such opposite tendencies exist
together in the same being? This is a problem that can no doubt embarrass the
metaphysician, but not the transcendental philosopher. The latter does not presume to
explain the possibility of things, but he is satisfied with giving a solid basis to the
knowledge that makes us understand the possibility of experience. And as experience would
be equally impossible without this autonomy in the mind, and without the absolute unity of
the mind, it lays down these two conceptions as two conditions of experience equally
necessary without troubling itself any more to reconcile them. Moreover, this immanence of
two fundamental impulses does not in any degree contradict the absolute unity of the mind,
as soon as the mind itself, - its selfhood - is distinguished from these two motors. No
doubt, these two impulses exist and act in it, but itself is neither matter nor form, nor
the sensuous nor reason, and this is a point that does not seem always to have occurred to
those who only look upon the mind as itself acting when its acts are in harmony with
reason, and who declare it passive when its acts contradict reason.
Arrived at its development, each of these two fundamental impulsions tends of necessity
and by its nature to satisfy itself; but precisely because each of them has a necessary
tendency, and both nevertheless have an opposite tendency, this twofold constraint
mutually destroys itself, and the will preserves an entire freedom between them both. It
is therefore the will that conducts itself like a power - as the basis of reality - with
respect to both these impulses; but neither of them can by itself act as a power with
respect to the other. A violent man, by his positive tendency to justice, which never
fails in him, is turned away from injustice; nor can a temptation of pleasure, however
strong, make a strong character violate its principles. There is in man no other power
than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some privation of
self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob man of his internal freedom.
An external necessity determines our condition, our existence in time, by means of the
sensuous. The latter is quite involuntary, and directly it is produced in us, we are
necessarily passive. In the same manner an internal necessity awakens our personality in
connection with sensations, and by its antagonism with them; for consciousness cannot
depend on the will, which presupposes it. This primitive manifestation of personality is
no more a merit to us than its privation is a defect in us. Reason can only be required in
a being who is self-conscious, for reason is an absolute consecutiveness and universality
of consciousness; before this is the case, he is not a man, nor can any act of humanity be
expected from him. The metaphysician can no more explain the limitation imposed by
sensation on a free and autonomous mind than the natural philosopher can understand the
infinite, which is revealed in consciousness in connection with these limits. Neither
abstraction nor experience can bring us back to the source whence issue our ideas of
necessity and of universality; this source is concealed in its origin in time from the
observer, and its super-sensuous origin from the researches of the metaphysician. But, to
sum up in a few words, consciousness is there, and, together, with its immutable unity,
the law of all that is for man is established, as well as of all that is to be by man, for
his understanding and his activity. The ideas of truth and of right present themselves
inevitable, incorruptible, immeasurable, even in the age of sensuousness; and without our
being able to say why or how, we see eternity in time, the necessary following the
contingent. It is thus that, without any share on the part of the subject, the sensation
and self-consciousness arise, and the origin of both is beyond our volition, as it is out
of the sphere of our knowledge.
But as soon as these two faculties have passed into action, and man has verified by
experience, through the medium of sensation, a determinate existence, and through the
medium of consciousness, its absolute existence, the two fundamental impulses exert their
influence directly their object is given. The sensuous impulse is awakened with the
experience of life - with the beginning of the individual; the rational impulsion with the
experience of law - with the beginning of his personality; and it is only when these two
inclinations have come into existence that the human type is realised. Up to that time,
everything takes place in man according to the law of necessity; but now the hand of
nature lets him go, and it is for him to keep upright humanity which nature places as a
germ in his heart. And thus we see that directly the two opposite and fundamental impulses
exercise their influence in him, both lose their constraint, and the autonomy of two
necessities gives birth to freedom.
Letter XX.
That freedom is an active and not a passive principle results from its very conception;
but that liberty itself should be an effect of nature (taking this word in its widest
sense), and not the work of man, and therefore that it can be favoured or thwarted by
natural means, is the necessary consequence of that which precedes. It begins only when
man is complete, and when these two fundamental impulsions have been developed. It will
then be wanting whilst he is incomplete, and while one of these impulsions is excluded,
and it will be re-established by all that gives back to man his integrity.
Thus it is possible, both with regard to the entire species as to the individual, to
remark the moment when man is yet incomplete, and when one of the two exclusions acts
solely in him. We know that man commences by life simply, to end by form; that he is more
of an individual than a person, and that he starts from the limited or finite to approach
the infinite. The sensuous impulsion comes into play therefore before the rational
impulsion, because sensation precedes consciousness; and in this priority of sensuous
impulsion we find the key of the history of the whole of human liberty.
There is a moment, in fact, when the instinct of life, not yet opposed to the instinct
of form, acts as nature and as necessity; when the sensuous is a power because man has not
begun; for even in man there can be no other power than his will. But when man shall have
attained to the power of thought, reason, on the contrary, will be a power, and moral or
logical necessity will take the place of physical necessity. Sensuous power must then be
annihilated before the law which must govern it can be established. It is not enough that
something shall begin which as yet was not; previously something must end which had begun.
Man cannot pass immediately from sensuousness to thought. He must step backwards, for it
is only when one determination is suppressed that the contrary determination can take
place. Consequently, in order to exchange passive against active liberty, a passive
determination against an active, he must be momentarily free from all determination, and
must traverse a state of pure determinability. He has then to return in some degree to
that state of pure negative indetermination in which he was before his senses were
affected by anything. But this state was absolutely empty of all contents, and now the
question is to reconcile an equal determination and a determinability equally without
limit, with the greatest possible fullness, because from this situation something positive
must immediately follow. The determination which man received by sensation must be
preserved, because he should not lose the reality; but at the same time, in so far as
finite, it should be suppressed, because a determinability without limit would take place.
The problem consists then in annihilating the determination of the mode of existence, and
yet at the same time in preserving it, which is only possible in one way: in opposing to
it another. The two sides of a balance are in equilibrium when empty; they are also in
equilibrium when their contents are of equal weight.
Thus, to pass from sensation to thought, the soul traverses a medium position, in which
sensibility and reason are at the same time active, and thus they mutually destroy their
determinant power, and by their antagonism produce a negation. This medium situation in
which the soul is neither physically nor morally constrained, and yet is in both ways
active, merits essentially the name of a free situation; and if we call the state of
sensuous determination physical, and the state of rational determination logical or moral,
that state of real and active determination should be called the aesthetic.
Letter XXI.
I have remarked in the beginning of the foregoing letter that there is a twofold
condition of determinableness and a twofold condition of determination. And now I can
clear up this proposition.
The mind can be determined - is determinable - only in as far as it is not determined;
it is, however, determinable also, in as far as it is not exclusively determined; that is,
if it is not confined in its determination. The former is only a want of determination -
it is without limits, because it is without reality; but the latter, the aesthetic
determinableness, has no limits, because it unites all reality.
The mind is determined, inasmuch as it is only limited; but it is also determined
because it limits itself of its own absolute capacity. It is situated in the former
position when it feels, in the second when it thinks. Accordingly the aesthetic
constitution is in relation to determinableness what thought is in relation to
determination. The latter is a negative from internal infinite completeness, the former a
limitation from internal infinite power. Feeling and thought come into contact in one
single point, the mind is determined in both conditions, the man becomes something and
exists - either as individual or person - by exclusion; in other cases these two faculties
stand infinitely apart. Just in the same manner, the aesthetic determinableness comes in
contact with the mere want of determination in a single point, by both excluding every
distinct determined existence, by thus being in all other points nothing and all, and
hence by being infinitely different. Therefore, if the latter, in the absence of
determination from deficiency, is represented as an empty infiniteness, the aesthetic
freedom of determination, which forms the proper counterpart to the former, can be
considered, as a completed infiniteness; a representation which exactly agrees with the
teachings of the previous investigations.
Man is therefore nothing in the aesthetic state, if attention is given to the single
result, and not to the whole faculty, and if we regard only the absence or want of every
special determination. We must therefore do justice to those who pronounce the beautiful,
and the disposition in which it places the mind, as entirely indifferent and unprofitable,
in relation to knowledge and feeling. They are perfectly right; for it is certain that
beauty gives no separate, single result, either for the understanding or for the will; it
does not carry out a single intellectual or moral object; it discovers no truth, does not
help us to fulfil a single duty, and, in one word, is equally unfit to found the character
or to clear the head. Accordingly, the personal worth of a man, or his dignity, as far as
this can only depend on himself, remains entirely undetermined by aesthetic culture, and
nothing further is attained than that, on the part of nature, it is made profitable for
him to make of himself what he will; that the freedom to be what he ought to be is
restored perfectly to him.
But by this, something infinite is attained. But as soon as we remember that freedom is
taken from man by the one-sided compulsion of nature in feeling, and by the exclusive
legislation of the reason in thinking, we must consider the capacity restored to him by
the aesthetical disposition, as the highest of all gifts, as the gift of humanity. I admit
that he possesses this capacity for humanity, before every definite determination in which
he may be placed. But as a matter of fact, he loses it with every determined condition,
into which he may come, and if he is to pass over to an opposite condition, humanity must
be in every case restored to him by the aesthetic life.
It is therefore not only a poetical license, but also philosophically correct, when
beauty is named our second creator. Nor is this inconsistent with the fact the she only
makes it possible for us to attain and realise humanity, leaving this to our free will.
For in this she acts in common with our original creator, nature, which has imparted to us
nothing further than this capacity for humanity, but leaves the use of it to our own
determination of will.
Letter XXII.
Accordingly, if the aesthetic disposition of the mind must be looked upon in one
respect as nothing - that is, when we confine our view to separate and determined
operations - it must be looked upon in another respect as a state of the highest reality,
in as far as we attend to the absence of all limits and the sum of powers which are
commonly active in it. Accordingly we cannot pronounce them, again, to be wrong who
describe the aesthetic state to be the most productive in relation to knowledge and
morality. They are perfectly right, for a state of mind which comprises the whole of
humanity in itself must of necessity include in itself also - necessarily and potentially
- every separate expression of it. Again, a disposition of mind that removes all
limitation from the totality of human nature must also remove it from every social
expression of the same. Exactly because its "aesthetic disposition" does not
exclusively shelter any separate function of humanity, it is favourable to all without
distinction; nor does it favour any particular functions, precisely because it is the
foundation of the possibility of all. All other exercises give to the mind some special
aptitude, but for that very reason give it some definite limits; only the aesthetical
leads him to the unlimited. Every other condition, in which we can live, refers us to a
previous condition, and requires for its solution a following condition; only the
aesthetic is a complete whole in itself, for it unites in itself all conditions of its
source and of its duration. Here alone we feel ourselves swept out of time, and our
humanity expresses itself with purity and integrity as if it had not yet received any
impression or interruption from the operation of external powers.
That which flatters our senses in immediate sensation opens our weak and volatile
spirit to every impression, but makes us in the same degree less apt for exertion. That
which stretches our thinking power and invites to abstract conceptions strengthens our
mind for every kind of resistance, but hardens it also in the same proportion, and
deprives us of susceptibility in the same ratio that it helps us to greater mental
activity. For this very reason, one as well as the other brings us at length to
exhaustion, because matter cannot long do without the shaping, constructive force, and the
force cannot do without the constructible material. But on the other hand, if we have
resigned ourselves to the enjoyment of genuine beauty, we are at such a moment of our
passive and active powers in the same degree master, and we shall turn with ease from
grave to gay, from rest to movement, from submission to resistance, to abstract thinking
and intuition.
This high indifference and freedom of mind, united with power and elasticity, is the
disposition in which a true work of art ought to dismiss us, and there is no better test
of true aesthetic excellence. If after an enjoyment of this kind we find ourselves
specially impelled to a particular mode of feeling or action, and unfit for other modes,
this serves as an infallible proof that we have not experienced any pure aesthetic effect,
whether this is owing to the object, to our own mode of feeling - as generally happens -
or to both together.
As in reality no purely aesthetical effect can be met with - for man can never leave
his dependance on material forces - the excellence of a work of art can only consist in
its greater approximation to its ideal of aesthetic purity, and however high we may raise
the freedom of this effect, we shall always leave it with a particular disposition and a
particular bias. Any class of productions or separate work in the world of art is noble
and excellent in proportion to the universality of the disposition and the unlimited
character of the bias thereby presented to our mind. This truth can be applied to works in
various branches of art, and also to different works in the same branch. We leave a grand
musical performance with our feelings excited, the reading of a noble poem with a
quickened imagination, a beautiful statue or building with an awakened understanding; but
a man would not choose an opportune moment who attempted to invite us to abstract thinking
after a high musical enjoyment, or to attend to a prosaic affair of common life after a
high poetical enjoyment, or to kindle our imagination and astonish our feelings directly
after inspecting a fine statue or edifice. The reason of this is that music, by its
matter, even when most spiritual, presents a greater affinity with the senses than is
permitted by aesthetic liberty; it is because even the most happy poetry, having for its
medium the arbitrary and contingent play of the imagination, always shares in it more than
the intimate necessity of the really beautiful allows; it is because the best sculpture
touches on severe science by what is determinate in its conception. However, these
particular affinities are lost in proportion as the works of these three kinds of art rise
to a greater elevation, and it is a natural and necessary consequence of their perfection,
that, without confounding their objective limits, the different arts come to resemble each
other more and more, in the action which they exercise on the mind. At its highest degree
of ennobling, music ought to become a form, and act on us with the calm power of an
antique statue; in its most elevated perfection, the plastic art ought to become music and
move us by the immediate action exercised on the mind by the senses; in its most complete
development, poetry ought both to stir us powerfully like music and like plastic art to
surround us with a peaceful light. In each art, the perfect style consists exactly in
knowing how to remove specific limits, while sacrificing at the same time the particular
advantages of the art, and to give it by a wise use of what belongs to it specially a more
general character.
Nor is it only the limits inherent in the specific character of each kind of art that
the artist ought to overstep in putting his hand to the work; he must also triumph over
those which are inherent in the particular subject of which he treats. In a really
beautiful work of art, the substance ought to be inoperative, the form should do
everything; for by the form, the whole man is acted on; the substance acts on nothing but
isolated forces. Thus, however vast and sublime it may be, the substance always exercises
a restrictive action on the mind, and true aesthetic liberty can only be expected from the
form. Consequently the true search of the master consists in destroying matter by the
form; and the triumph of art is great in proportion as it overcomes matter and maintains
its sway over those who enjoy its work. It is great particularly in destroying matter when
most imposing, ambitious, and attractive, when therefore matter has most power to produce
the effect proper to it, or, again, when it leads those who consider it more closely to
enter directly into relation with it. The mind of the spectator and of the hearer must
remain perfectly free and intact; it must issue pure and entire from the magic circle of
the artist, as from the hands of the Creator. The most frivolous subject ought to be
treated in such a way that we preserve the faculty to exchange it immediately for the most
serious work. The arts which have passion for their object, as a tragedy for example, do
not present a difficulty here; for, in the first place these arts are not entirely free,
because they are in the service of a particular end (the pathetic), and then no
connoisseur will deny that even in this class a work is perfect in proportion as amidst
the most violent storms of passion it respects the liberty of the soul. There is a fine
art of passion, but an impassioned fine art is a contradiction in terms, for the
infallible effect of the beautiful is emancipation from the passions. The idea of an
instructive fine art (didactic art) or improving (moral) art is no less contradictory, for
nothing agrees less with the idea of the beautiful than to give a determinate tendency to
the mind.
However, from the fact that a work produces effects only by its substance, it must not
always be inferred that there is a want of form in this work; this conclusion may quite as
well testify to a want of form in the observer. If his mind is too stretched or too
relaxed, if it is only accustomed to receive things either by the senses or the
intelligence, even in the ost perfect combination, it will only stop to look at the parts,
and it will only see matter in the most beautiful form. Only sensible of the coarse
elements, he must first destroy the aesthetic organisation of a work to find enjoyment in
it, and carefully disinter the details which genius has caused to vanish, with infinite
art, in the harmony of the whole. The interest he takes in the work is either solely moral
or exclusively physical; the only thing wanting to it is to be exactly what it ought to be
- aesthetical. The readers of this class enjoy a serious and pathetic poem as they do a
sermon; a simple and playful work, as an inebriating draught; and if on the one hand they
have so little taste as to demand edification from a tragedy or from an epos, even such as
the "Messias," on the other hand they will be infallibly scandalised by a piece
after the fashion of Anacreon and Catullus.
Part V.
Letter XXIII.
I take up the thread of my researches, which I broke off only to apply the principles I
laid down to practical art and the appreciation of its works.
The transition from the passivity of sensuousness to the activity of thought and of
will can be effected only by the intermediary state of aesthetic liberty; and though in
itself this state decides nothing respecting our opinions and our sentiments, and
therefore leaves our intellectual and moral value entirely problematical, it is, however,
the necessary condition without which we should never attain to an opinion or a sentiment.
In a word, there is no other way to make a reasonable being out of a sensuous man than by
making him first aesthetic.
But, you might object: Is this mediation absolutely indispensable? Could not truth and
duty, one or the other, in themselves and by themselves, find access to the sensuous man?
To this I reply: Not only is it possible, but it is absolutely necessary that they owe
solely to themselves their determining force, and nothing would be more contradictory to
our preceding affirmations than to appear to defend the contrary opinion. It has been
expressly proved that the beautiful furnishes no result, either for the comprehension or
for the will; that it mingles with no operations, either of thought or of resolution; and
that it confers this double power without determining anything with regard to the real
exercise of this power. Here all foreign help disappears, and the pure logical form, the
idea, would speak immediately to the intelligence, as the pure moral form, the law,
immediately to the will.
But that the pure form should be capable of it, and that there is in general a pure
form for sensuous man, is that, I maintain, which should be rendered possible by the
aesthetic disposition of the soul. Truth is not a thing which can be received from without
like reality or the visible existence of objects. It is the thinking force, in his own
liberty and activity, which produces it, and it is just this liberty proper to it, this
liberty which we seek in vain in sensuous man. The sensuous man is already determined
physically, and thenceforth he has no longer his free determinability; he must necessarily
first enter into possession of this lost determinability before he can exchange the
passive against an active determination. Therefore, in order to recover it, he must either
lose the passive determination that he had, or he should enclose already in himself the
active determination to which he should pass. If he confined himself to lose passive
determination, he would at the same time lose with it the possibility of an active
determination, because thought need a body, and form can only be realised through matter.
He must therefore contain already in himself the active determination that he may be at
once both actively and passively determined, that is to say, he becomes necessarily
aesthetic.
Consequently, by the aesthetic disposition of the soul the proper activity of reason is
already revealed in the sphere of sensuousness, the power of sense is already broken
within its own boundaries, and the ennobling of physical man carried far enough, for
spiritual man has only to develop himself according to the laws of liberty. The transition
from an aesthetic state to a logical and moral state (from the beautiful to truth and
duty) is then infinitely more easy than the transition from the physical state to the
aesthetic state (from life pure and blind to form). This transition man can effectuate
alone by his liberty, whilst he has only to enter into possession of himself not to give
it himself; but to separate the elements of his nature, and not to enlarge it. Having
attained to the aesthetic disposition, man will give to his judgments and to his actions a
universal value as soon as he desires it. This passage from brute nature to beauty, is
which an entirely new faculty would awaken in him, nature would render easier, and his
will has no power over a disposition which, we know, itself gives birth to the will. To
bring the aesthetic man to profound views, to elevated sentiments, he requires nothing
more than important occasions; to obtain the same thing from the sensuous man, his nature
must at first be changed. To make of the former a hero, a sage, it is often only necessary
to meet with a sublime situation, which exercises upon the faculty of the will the more
immediate action; for the second, it must first be transplanted under another sky.
One of the most important tasks of culture, then, is to submit man to form, even in a
purely physical life, and to render it aesthetic as far as the domain of the beautiful can
be extended, for it is alone in the aesthetic state, and not in the physical state, that
the moral state can be developed. If in each particular case man ought to possess the
power to make his judgment and his will the judgment of the entire species; if he ought to
find in each limited existence the transition to an infinite existence; if, lastly, he
ought from every dependent situation to take his flight to rise to autonomy and to
liberty, it must be observed that at no moment is he only individual and solely obeys the
law of nature. To be apt and ready to raise himself from the narrow circle of the ends of
nature, to rational ends, in the sphere of the former he must already have exercised
himself in the second; he must already have realised his physical destiny with a certain
liberty that belongs only to spiritual nature, that is to say, according to the laws of
the beautiful.
And that he can effect without thwarting in the least degree his physical aim. The
exigencies of nature with regard to him turn only upon what he does upon the substance of
his acts; but the ends of nature in no degree determine the way in which he acts, the form
of his actions. On the contrary, the exigencies of reason have rigorously the form of his
activity for its object. Thus, so much as it is necessary for the moral destination of
man, that he be purely moral, that he shows an absolute personal activity, so much is he
indifferent that his physical destination be entirely physical, that he acts in a manner
entirely passive. Henceforth with regard to this last destination, it entirely depends on
him to fulfil it solely as a sensuous being and natural force (as a force which acts only
as it diminishes) or, at the same time, as absolute force, as a rational being. To which
of these does his dignity best respond? Of this, there can be no question. It is as
disgraceful and contemptible for him to do under sensuous impulsion that which he ought to
have determined merely by the motive of duty, as it is noble and honourable for him to
incline towards conformity with laws, harmony, independence; there even where the vulgar
man only satisfies a legitimate want. In a word, in the domain of truth and morality,
sensuousness must have nothing to determine; but in the sphere of happiness, form may find
a place, and the instinct of play prevail.
Thus then, in the indifferent sphere of physical life, man ought to already commence
his moral life; his own proper activity ought already to make way in passivity, and his
rational liberty beyond the limits of sense; he ought already to impose the law of his
will upon his inclinations; he ought if you will permit me the expression - to carry into
the domain of matter the war against matter, in order to be dispensed from combatting this
redoubtable enemy upon the sacred field of liberty; he ought to learn to have nobler
desires, not to be forced to have sublime volitions. This is the fruit of aesthetic
culture, which submits to the laws of the beautiful, in which neither the laws of nature
nor those of reason suffer, which does not force the will of man, and which by the form it
gives to exterior life already opens internal life.
Letter XXIV.
Accordingly three different moments or stages of development can be distinguished,
which the individual man, as well as the whole race, must of necessity traverse in a
determinate order if they are to fulfil the circle of their determination. No doubt, the
separate periods can be lengthened or shortened, through accidental causes which are
inherent either in the influence of external things or under the free caprice of men; but
neither of them can be overstepped, and the order of their sequence cannot be inverted
either by nature or by the will. Man, in his physical condition, suffers only the power of
nature; he gets rid of this power in the aesthetical condition, and he rules them in the
moral state.
What is man before beauty liberates him from free pleasure, and the serenity of form
tames down the savageness of life? Eternally uniform in his aims, eternally changing in
his judgments, self-seeking without being himself, unfettered without being free, a slave
without serving any rule. At this period, the world is to him only destiny, not yet an
object; all has existence for him only in as far as it procures existence to him; a thing
that neither seeks from nor gives to him is non-existent. Every phaenomenon stands out
before him, separate and cut off, as he finds himself in the series of beings. All that
is, is to him through the bias of the moment; every change is to him an entirely fresh
creation, because with the necessary in him, the necessary out of him is wanting, which
binds together all the changing forms in the universe, and which holds fast the law on the
theatre of his action, while the individual departs. It is in vain that nature lets the
rich variety of her forms pass before him; he sees in her glorious fullness nothing but
his prey, in her power and greatness nothing but his enemy. Either he encounters objects,
and wishes to draw them to himself in desire, or the objects press in a destructive manner
upon him, and he thrusts them away in dismay and terror. In both cases his relation to the
world of sense is immediate contact; and perpetually anxious through its pressure,
restless and plagued by imperious wants, he nowhere finds rest except in enervation, and
nowhere limits save in exhausted desire.
"True, his is the powerful breast and the mighty hand of the Titans. . . . A
certain inheritance; yet the god welded Round his forehead a brazen band; Advice,
moderation, wisdom, and patience, Hid it from his shy, sinister look. Every desire is with
him a rage, And his rage prowls around limitless." - Iphigenia in Tauris.
Ignorant of his own human dignity, he is far removed from honouring it in others, and
conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every creature that he sees like
himself. He never sees others in himself, only himself in others, and human society,
instead of enlarging him to the race, only shuts him up continually closer in his
individuality. Thus limited, he wanders through his sunless life, till favouring nature
rolls away the load of matter from his darkened senses, reflection separates him from
things, and objects show themselves at length in the after-glow of the consciousness.
It is true we cannot point out this state of rude nature as we have here portrayed it
in any definite people and age. It is only an idea, but an idea with which experience
agrees most closely in special features. It may be said that man was never in this animal
condition, but he has not, on the other hand, ever entirely escaped from it. Even in the
rudest subjects, unmistakable traces of rational freedom can be found, and even in the
most cultivated, features are not wanting that remind us of that dismal natural condition.
It is possible for man, at one and the same time, to unite the highest and the lowest in
his nature; and if his dignity depends on a strict separation of one from the other, his
happiness depends on a skilful removal of this separation. The culture which is to bring
his dignity into agreement with his happiness will therefore have to provide for the
greatest purity of these two principles in their most intimate combination.
Consequently the first appearance of reason in man is not the beginning of humanity.
This is first decided by his freedom, and reason begins first by making his sensuous
dependence boundless; a phaenomenon that does not appear to me to have been sufficiently
elucidated, considering its importance and universality. We know that the reason makes
itself known to man by the demand for the absolute - the self - dependent and necessary.
But as this want of the reason cannot be satisfied in any separate or single state of his
physical life, he is obliged to leave the physical entirely and to rise from a limited
reality to ideas. But although the true meaning of that demand of the reason is to
withdraw him from the limits of time and to lead him up from the world of sense to an
ideal world, yet this same demand of reason, by a misapplication - scarcely to be avoided
in this age, prone to sensuousness can direct him to physical life, and, instead of making
man free, plunge him in the most terrible slavery.
Facts verify this supposition. Man raised on the wings of imagination leaves the narrow
limits of the present, in which mere animality is enclosed, in order to strive on to an
unlimited future. But while the limitless is unfolded to his dazed imagination, his heart
has not ceased to live in the separate, and to serve the moment. The impulse towards the
absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality, and as in this cloddish
condition all his efforts aim only at the material and temporal, and are limited by his
individuality, he is only led by that demand of the reason to extend his individuality
into the infinite, instead of to abstract from it. He will be led to seek instead of form
an inexhaustible matter, instead of the unchangeable an everlasting change and an absolute
securing of his temporal existence. The same impulse which, directed to his thought and
action, ought to lead to truth and morality, now directed to his passion and emotional
state, produces nothing but an unlimited desire and an absolute want. The first fruits,
therefore, that he reaps in the world of spirits, are cares and fear - both operations of
the reason; not of sensuousness, but of a reason that mistakes its object and applies its
categorical imperative to matter. All unconditional systems of happiness are fruits of
this tree, whether they have for their object the present day or the whole of life, or
what does not make them any more respectable, the whole of eternity, for their object. An
unlimited duration of existence and of well-being is only an ideal of the desires; hence a
demand which can only be put forth by an animality striving up to the absolute. Man,
therefore, without gaining anything for his humanity by a rational expression of this
sort, loses the happy limitation of the animal over which he now only possesses the
unenviable superiority of losing the present for an endeavour after what is remote, yet
without seeking in the limitless future anything but the present.
But even if the reason does not go astray in its object, or err in the question,
sensuousness will continue to falsify the answer for a long time. As soon as man has begun
to use his understanding and to knit together phaenomena in cause and effect, the reason,
according to its conception, presses on to an absolute knitting together and to an
unconditional basis. In order merely to be able to put forward this demand man must
already have stepped beyond the sensuous, but the sensuous uses this very demand to bring
back the fugitive.
In fact it is now that he ought to abandon entirely the world of sense in order to take
his flight into the realm of ideas; for the intelligence remains eternally shut up in the
finite and in the contingent, and does not cease putting questions without reaching the
last link of the chain. But as the man with whom we are engaged is not yet capable of such
an abstraction, and does not find it in the sphere of sensuous knowledge, and because he
does not look for it in pure reason, he will seek for it below in the region of sentiment,
and will appear to find it. No doubt the sensuous shows him nothing that has its
foundation in itself, and that legislates for itself, but it shows him something that does
not care for foundation or law; therefore thus not being able to quiet the intelligence by
showing it a final cause, he reduces it to silence by the conception which desires no
cause; and being incapable of understanding the sublime necessity of reason, he keeps to
the blind constraint of matter. As sensuousness knows no other end than its interest, and
is determined by nothing except blind chance, it makes the former the motive of its
actions, and the latter the master of the world.
Even the divine part in man, the moral law, in its first manifestation in the sensuous
cannot avoid this perversion. As this moral law is only prohibited and combats in man the
interest of sensuous egotism, it must appear to him as something strange until he has come
to consider this self-love as the stranger, and the voice of reason as his true self.
Therefore he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter impose on him,
without having the consciousness of the infinite emancipation which it procures for him.
Without suspecting in himself the dignity of lawgiver, he only experiences the constraint
and the impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke, because in this experience
the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion, he gives to the law of necessity a
beginning in him, a positive origin, and by the most unfortunate of all mistakes he
converts the immutable and the eternal in himself into a transitory accident. He makes up
his mind to consider the notions of the just and the unjust as statutes which have been
introduced by a will, and not as having in themselves an eternal value. Just as in the
explanation of certain natural phaenomena he goes beyond nature and seeks out of her what
can only be found in her, in her own laws; so also in the explanation of moral phaenomena
he goes beyond reason and makes light of his humanity, seeking a god in this way. It is
not wonderful that a religion which he has purchased at the cost of his humanity shows
itself worthy of this origin, and that he only considers as absolute and eternally binding
laws that have never been binding from all eternity. He has placed himself in relation
with, not a holy being, but a powerful. Therefore the spirit of his religion, of the
homage that he gives to God, is a fear that abases him, and not a veneration that elevates
him in his own esteem.
Though these different aberrations by which man departs from the ideal of his
destination cannot all take place at the same time, because several degrees have to be
passed over in the transition from the obscure of though to error, and from the obscure of
will to the corruption of the will; these degrees are all, without exception, the
consequence of his physical state, because in all the vital impulsion sways the formal
impulsion. Now, two cases may happen: either reason may not yet have spoken in man, and
the physical may reign over him with a blind necessity, or reason may not be sufficiently
purified from sensuous impressions, and the moral may still be subject to the physical; in
both cases the only principle that has a real power over him is a material principle, and
man, at least as regards his ultimate tendency, is a sensuous being. The only difference
is, that in the former case he is an animal without reason, and in the second case a
rational animal. But he ought to be neither one nor the other: he ought to be a man.
Nature ought not to rule him exclusively; nor reason conditionally. The two legislations
ought to be completely independent and yet mutually complementary.
Letter XXV.
Whilst man, in his first physical condition, is only passively affected by the world of
sense, he is still entirely identified with it; and for this reason the external world, as
yet, has no objective existence for him. When he begins in his aesthetic state of mind to
regard the world objectively, then only is his personality severed from it, and the world
appears to him an objective reality, for the simple reason that he has ceased to form an
identical portion of it.
That which first connects man with the surrounding universe is the power of reflective
contemplation. Whereas desire seizes at once its object, reflection removes it to a
distance and renders it inalienably her own by saving it from the greed of passion. The
necessity of sense which he obeyed during the period of mere sensations, lessens during
the period of reflection; the senses are for the time in abeyance; even ever-fleeting time
stands still whilst the scattered rays of consciousness are gathering and shape
themselves; an image of the infinite is reflected upon the perishable ground. As soon as
light dawns in man, there is no longer night outside of him; as soon as there is peace
within him the storm lulls throughout the universe, and the contending forces of nature
find rest within prescribed limits. Hence we cannot wonder if ancient traditions allude to
these great changes in the inner man as to a revolution in surrounding nature, and
symbolise thought triumphing over the laws of time, by the figure of Zeus, which
terminates the reign of Saturn.
As long as man derives sensations from a contact with nature, he is her slave; but as
soon as he begins to reflect upon her objects and laws he becomes her lawgiver. Nature,
which previously ruled him as a power, now expands before him as an object. What is
objective to him can have no power over him, for in order to become objective it has to
experience his own power. As far and as long as he impresses a form upon matter, he cannot
be injured by its effect; for a spirit can only be injured by that which deprives it of
its freedom. Whereas he proves his own freedom by giving a form to the formless; where the
mass rules heavily and without shape, and its undefined outlines are for ever fluctuating
between uncertain boundaries, fear takes up its abode; but man rises above any natural
terror as soon as he knows how to mould it, and transform it into an object of his art. As
soon as he upholds his independence toward phaenomenal nature, he maintains his dignity
toward her as a thing of power and with a noble freedom he rises against his gods. They
throw aside the mask with which they had kept him in awe during his infancy, and to his
surprise his mind perceives the reflection of his own image. The divine monster of the
Oriental, which roams about changing the world with the blind force of a beast of prey,
dwindles to the charming outline of humanity in Greek fable; the empire of the Titans is
crushed, and boundless force is tamed by infinite form.
But whilst I have been merely searching for an issue from the material world and a
passage into the world of mind, the bold flight on my imagination has already taken me
into the very midst of the latter world. The beauty of which we are in search we have left
behind by passing from the life of mere sensations to the pure form and to the pure
object. Such a leap exceeds the condition of human nature; in order to keep pace with the
latter we must return to the world of sense.
Beauty is indeed the sphere of unfettered contemplation and reflection; beauty conducts
us into the world of ideas, without however taking us from the world of sense, as occurs
when a truth is perceived and acknowledged. This is the pure product of a process of
abstraction from everything material and accidental, a pure object free from every
subjective barrier, a pure state of self-activity without any admixture of passive
sensations. There is indeed a way back to sensation from the highest abstraction; for
thought teaches the inner sensation, and the idea of logical and moral unity passes into a
sensation of sensual accord. But if we delight in knowledge we separate very accurately
our own conceptions from our sensations; we look upon the latter as something accidental,
which might have been omitted without the knowledge being impaired thereby, without truth
being less true. It would, however, be a vain attempt to suppress this connection of the
faculty of feeling with the idea of beauty, consequently, we shall not succeed in
representing to ourselves one as the effect of the other, but we must look upon them both
together and reciprocally as cause and effect. In the pleasure which we derive from
knowledge we readily distinguish the passage from the active to the passive state, and we
clearly perceive that the first ends when the second begins. On the contrary, from the
pleasure which we take in beauty, this transition from the active to the passive is not
perceivable, and reflection is so intimately blended with feeling that we believe we feel
the form immediately. Beauty is then an object to us, it is true, because reflection is
the condition of the feeling which we have of it; but it is also a state of our
personality (our Ego), because the feeling is the condition of the idea we conceive of it:
beauty is therefore doubtless form, because we contemplate it, but it is equally life
because we feel it. In a word, it is at once our state and our act. And precisely because
it is at the same time both a state and an act, it triumphantly proves to us that the
passive does not exclude the active, neither matter nor form, neither the finite nor the
infinite; and that consequently the physical dependence to which man is necessarily
devoted does not in any way destroy his moral liberty. This is the proof of beauty, and I
ought to add that this alone can prove it. In fact, as in the possession of truth or of
logical unity, feeling is not necessarily one with the thought, but follows it
accidentally; it is a fact which only proves that a sensitive nature can succeed a
rational nature, and vice versa; not that they co-exist, that they exercise a reciprocal
action one over the other, and lastly that they ought to be united in an absolute and
necessary manner. From this exclusion of feeling as long as there is thought, and of
thought so long as there is feeling, we should on the contrary conclude that the two
natures are incompatible, so that in order to demonstrate the pure reason is to be
realised in humanity, the best proof given by the analysis is that this realisation is
demanded. But, as in the realisation of beauty or of aesthetic unity, there is a real
union, mutual substitution of matter and of form, of passive and of active, by this alone
in proved the compatibility of the two natures, the possible realisation of the infinite
in the finite, and consequently also the possibility of the most sublime humanity.
Henceforth we need no longer be embarrassed to find a transition from dependent feeling
to moral liberty, because beauty reveals to us the fact that they can perfectly co-exist,
and that to show himself a spirit, man need not escape from matter. But if on one side he
is free, even in his relation with a visible world, as the fact of beauty teaches, and if
on the other side freedom is something absolute and supersensuous, as its idea necessarily
implies, the question is no longer how man succeeds in raising himself from the finite to
the absolute, and opposing himself in his thought and will to sensuality, as this has
already been produced in the fact of beauty. In a word, we have no longer to ask how he
passes from virtue to truth, which is already included in the former, but how he opens a
way for himself from vulgar reality to aesthetic reality, and from the ordinary feelings
of life to the perception of the beautiful.
Letter XXVI.
I have shown in the previous letters that it is only the aesthetic disposition of the
soul that gives birth to liberty, it cannot therefore be derived from liberty nor have a
moral origin. It must be a gift of nature, the favour of chance alone can break the bonds
of the physical state and bring the savage to duty. The germ of the beautiful will find an
equal difficulty in developing itself in countries where a severe nature forbids man to
enjoy himself, and in those where a prodigal nature dispenses him from all effort; where
the blunted senses experience no want, and where violent desire can never be satisfied.
The delightful flower of the beautiful will never unfold itself in the case of the
Troglodyte hid in his cavern always alone, and never finding humanity outside himself; nor
among nomads, who, travelling in great troops, only consist of a multitude, and have no
individual humanity. It will only flourish in places where man converses peacefully with
himself in his cottage, and with the whole race when he issues from it. In those climates
where a limpid ether opens the senses to the lightest impression, whilst a life-giving
warmth developes a luxuriant nature, where even in the inanimate creation the sway of
inert matter is overthrown, and the victorious form ennobles even the most abject natures;
in this joyful state and fortunate zone, where activity alone leads to enjoyment, and
enjoyment to activity, from life itself issues a holy harmony, and the laws of order
develope life, a different result takes place. When imagination incessantly escapes from
reality, and does not abandon the simplicity of nature in its wanderings; then and there
only the mind and the senses, the receptive force and the plastic force, are developed in
that happy equilibrium which is the soul of the beautiful and the condition of humanity.
What phaenomenon accompanies the initiation of the savage into humanity? However far we
look back into history the phaenomenon is identical among all people who have shaken off
the slavery of the animal state, the love of appearance, the inclination for dress and for
games.
Extreme stupidity and extreme intelligence have a certain affinity in only seeking the
real and being completely insensible to mere appearance. The former is only drawn forth by
the immediate presence of an object in the senses, and the second is reduced to a
quiescent state only by referring conceptions to the facts of experience. In short,
stupidity cannot rise above reality, nor the intelligence descend below truth. Thus, in as
far as the want of reality and attachment to the real are only the consequence of a want
and a defect, indifference to the real and an interest taken in appearances are a real
enlargement of humanity and a decisive step towards culture. In the first place it is the
proof of an exterior liberty, for as long as necessity commands and want solicits, the
fancy is strictly chained down to the real; it is only when want is satisfied that it
developes without hindrance. But it is also the proof of an internal liberty, because it
reveals to us a force which, independent of an external substratum, sets itself in motion,
and has sufficient energy to remove from itself the solicitations of nature. The reality
of things is effected by things, the appearance of things is the work of man, and a soul
that takes pleasure in appearance does not take pleasure in what it receives but in what
it makes.
It is self-evident that I am speaking of aesthetical evidence different from reality
and truth, and not of logical appearance identical with them. Therefore if it is liked it
is because it is an appearance, and not because it is held to be something better than it
is: the first principle alone is a play whilst the second is a deception. To give a value
to the appearance of the first kind can never injure truth, because it is never to be
feared that it will supplant it - the only way in which truth can be injured. To despise
this appearance is to despise in general all the fine arts of which it is the essence.
Nevertheless, it happens sometimes that the understanding carries its zeal for reality as
far as this intolerance, and strikes with a sentence of ostracism all the arts relating to
beauty in appearance, because it is only an appearance. However, the intelligence only
shows this vigorous spirit when it calls to mind the affinity pointed out further back. I
shall find some day the occasion to treat specially of the limits of beauty in its
appearance.
It is nature herself which raises man from reality to appearance by endowing him with
two senses which only lead him to the knowledge of the real through appearance. In the eye
and the ear the organs of the senses are already freed from the persecutions of nature,
and the object with which we are immediately in contact through the animal senses is
remoter from us. What we see by the eye differs from what we feel; for the understanding
to reach objects overleaps the light which separates us from them. In truth, we are
passive to an object; in sight and hearing the object is a form we create. While still a
savage, man only enjoys through touch merely aided by sight and sound. He either does not
rise to perception through sight, or does not rest there. As soon as he begins to enjoy
through a sight, vision has an independent value, he is aesthetically free, and the
instinct of play is developed.
The instinct of play likes appearance, and directly it is awakened it is followed by
the formal imitative instinct which treats appearance as an independent thing. Directly
man has come to distinguish the appearance from the reality, the form from the body, he
can separate, in fact he has already done so. Thus the faculty of the art of imitation is
given with the faculty of form in general. The inclination that draws us to it reposes on
another tendency I have not to notice here. The exact period when the aesthetic instinct,
or that of art, developes, depends entirely on the attraction that mere appearance has for
men.
As every real existence proceeds from nature as a foreign power, whilst every
appearance comes in the first place from man as a percipient subject, he only uses his
absolute sight in separating semblance from essence, and arranging according to subjective
law. With an unbridled liberty he can unite what nature has severed, provided he can
imagine his union, and he can separate what nature has united, provided this separation
can take place in his intelligence. Here nothing can be sacred to him but his own law: the
only condition imposed upon him is to respect the border which separates his own sphere
from the existence of things or from the realm of nature.
This human right of ruling is exercised by man in the art of appearance; and his
success in extending the empire of the beautiful, and guarding the frontiers of truth,
will be in proportion with the strictness with which he separates form from substance: for
if he frees appearance from reality he must also do the converse.
But man possesses sovereign power only in the world of appearance, in the unsubstantial
realm of imagination, only by abstaining from giving being to appearance in theory, and by
giving it being in practice. It follows that the poet transgresses his proper limits when
he attributes being to his ideal, and when he gives this ideal aim as a determined
existence. For he can only reach this result by exceeding his right as a poet, that of
encroaching by the ideal on the field of experience, and by pretending to determine real
existence in virtue of a simple possibility, or else he renounces his right as poet by
letting experience encroach on the sphere of the ideal, and by restricting possibility to
the conditions of reality.
It is only by being frank or disclaiming all reality, and by being independent or doing
without reality, that the appearance is aesthetical. Directly it apes reality or needs
reality for effect it is nothing more than a vile instrument for material ends, and can
prove nothing for the freedom of the mind. Moreover, the object in which we find beauty
need not be unreal if our judgment disregards this reality; for if it regards this the
judgment is no longer aesthetical. A beautiful woman if living would no doubt please us as
much and rather more than an equally beautiful woman seen in painting; but what makes the
former please men is not her being an independent appearance; she no longer pleases the
pure aesthetic feeling. In the painting, life must only attract as an appearance, and
reality as an idea. But it is certain that to feel in a living object only the pure
appearance, requires a greatly higher aesthetic culture than to do without life in the
appearance.
When the frank and independent appearance is found in man separately, or in a whole
people, it may be inferred they have mind, taste, and all prerogatives connected with
them. In this case, the ideal will be seen to govern real life, honour triumphing over
fortune, thought over enjoyment, the dream of immortality over a transitory existence.
In this case public opinion will no longer be feared and an olive crown will be more
valued than a purple mantle. Impotence and perversity alone have recourse to false and
paltry semblance, and individuals as well as nations who lend to reality the support of
appearance, or to the aesthetical appearance the support of reality, show their moral
unworthiness and their aesthetical impotence. Therefore, a short and conclusive answer can
be given to this question - How far will appearance be permitted in the moral world? It
will run thus in proportion as this appearance will be aesthetical, that is, an appearance
that does not try to make up for reality, nor requires to be made up for by it. The
aesthetical appearance can never endanger the truth of morals: wherever it seems to do so
the appearance is not aesthetical. Only a stranger to the fashionable world can take the
polite assurances, which are only a form, for proofs of affection, and say he has been
deceived; but only a clumsy fellow in good society calls in the aid of duplicity and
flatters to become amiable. The former lacks the pure sense for independent appearance;
therefore he can only give a value to appearance by truth. The second lacks reality, and
wishes to replace it by appearance. Nothing is more common than to hear depreciators of
the times utter these paltry complaints - that all solidity has disappeared from the
world, and that essence is neglected for semblance. Though I feel by no means called upon
to defend this age against these reproaches, I must say that the wide application of these
criticisms shows that they attach blame to the age, not only on the score of the false,
but also of the frank appearance. And even the exceptions they admit in favour of the
beautiful have for their object less the independent appearance than the needy appearance.
Not only do they attack the artificial colouring that hides truth and replaces reality,
but also the beneficent appearance that fills a vacuum and clothes poverty; and they even
attack the ideal appearance that ennobles a vulgar reality. Their strict sense of truth is
rightly offended by the falsity of manners; unfortunately, they class politeness in this
category. It displeases them that the noisy and showy so often eclipse true merit, but
they are no less shocked that appearance is also demanded from merit, and that a real
substance does not dispense with an agreeable form. They regret the cordiality, the
energy, and solidity of ancient times; they would restore with them ancient coarseness,
heaviness, and the old Gothic profusion. By judgments of this kind they show an esteem for
the matter itself unworthy of humanity, which ought only to value the matter inasmuch as
it can receive a form and enlarge the empire of ideas. Accordingly, the taste of the age
need not much fear these criticisms, if it can clear itself before better judges. Our
defect is not to grant a value to aesthetic appearance (we do not do this enough): a
severe judge of the beautiful might rather reproach us with not having arrived at pure
appearance, with not having separated clearly enough existence from the phaenomenon, and
thus established their limits. We shall deserve this reproach so long as we cannot enjoy
the beautiful in living nature without desiring it; as long as we cannot admire the
beautiful in the imitative arts without having an end in view; as long as we do not grant
to imagination an absolute legislation of its own; and as long as we do not inspire it
with care for its dignity by the esteem we testify for its works.
Part VI.
Letter XXVII.
Do not fear for reality and truth. Even if the elevated idea of aesthetic appearance
became general, it would not become so, as long as man remains so little cultivated as to
abuse it; and if it became general, this would result from a culture that would prevent
all abuse of it. The pursuit of independent appearance requires more power of abstraction,
freedom of heart, and energy of will than man requires to shut himself up in reality; and
he must have left the latter behind him if he wishes to attain to aesthetic appearance.
Therefore a man would calculate very badly who took the road of the ideal to save himself
that of reality. Thus reality would not have much to fear from appearance, as we
understand it; but, on the other hand, appearance would have more to fear from reality.
Chained to matter, man uses appearance for his purposes before he allows it a proper
personality in the art of the ideal: to come to that point a complete revolution must take
place in his mode of feeling, otherwise he would not be even on the way to the ideal.
Consequently, when we find in man the signs of a pure and disinterested esteem, we can
infer that this revolution has taken place in his nature, and that humanity has really
begun in him. Signs of this kind are found even in the first and rude attempts that he
makes to embellish his existence, even at the risk of making it worse in its material
conditions. As soon as he begins to prefer form to substance and to risk reality for
appearance (known by him to be such), the barriers of animal life fall, and he finds
himself on a track that has no end.
Not satisfied with the needs of nature, he demands the superfluous. First, only the
superfluous of matter, to secure his enjoyment beyond the present necessity; but
afterwards he wishes a superabundance in matter, an aesthetical supplement to satisfy the
impulse for the formal, to extend enjoyment beyond necessity. By piling up provisions
simply for a future use, and anticipating their enjoyment in the imagination, he outsteps
the limits of the present moment, but not those of time in general. He enjoys more; he
does not enjoy differently. But as soon as he makes form enter into his enjoyment, and he
keeps in view the forms of the objects which satisfy his desires, he has not only
increased his pleasure in extent and intensity, but he has also ennobled it in mode and
species.
No doubt nature has given more than is necessary to unreasoning beings; she has caused
a gleam of freedom to shine even in the darkness of animal life. When the lion is not
tormented by hunger, and when no wild beast challenges him to fight, his unemployed energy
creates an object for himself; full of ardour, he fills the re-echoing desert with his
terrible roars, and his exuberant force rejoices in itself, showing itself without an
object. The insect flits about rejoicing in life in the sunlight, and it is certainly not
the cry of want that makes itself heard in the melodious song of the bird; there is
undeniably freedom in these movements, though it is not emancipation from want in general,
but from a determinate external necessity.
The animal works, when a privation is the motor of its activity, and it plays when the
plenitude of force is this motor, when an exuberant life is excited to action. Even in
inanimate nature a luxury of strength and a latitude of determination are shown, which in
this material sense might be styled play. The tree produces numberless germs that are
abortive without developing, and it sends forth more roots, branches and leaves, organs of
nutrition, than are used for the preservation of the species. Whatever this tree restores
to the elements of its exuberant life, without using it, or enjoying it, may be expended
by life in free and joyful movements. It is thus that nature offers in her material sphere
a sort of prelude to the limitless, and that even there she suppresses partially the
chains from which she will be completely emancipated in the realm of form. The constraint
of superabundance or physical play, answers as a transition from the constraint of
necessity, or of physical seriousness, to aesthetical play; and before shaking off, in the
supreme freedom of the beautiful, the yoke of any special aim, nature already approaches,
at least remotely, this independence, by the free movement which is itself its own end and
means.
The imagination, like the bodily organs, has in man its free movement and its material
play, a play in which, without any reference to form, it simply takes pleasure in its
arbitrary power and in the absence of all hindrance. These plays of fancy, inasmuch as
form is not mixed up with them, and because a free succession of images makes all their
charm, though confined to man, belong exclusively to animal life, and only prove one thing
- that he is delivered from all external sensuous constraint - without our being entitled
to infer that there is in it an independent plastic force.
From this play of free association of ideas, which is still quite material in nature
and is explained by simple natural laws, the imagination, by making the attempt of
creating a free form, passes at length at a jump to the aesthetic play: I say at one leap,
for quite a new force enters into action here; for here, for the first time, the
legislative mind is mixed with the acts of a blind instinct, subjects the arbitrary march
of the imagination to its eternal and immutable unity, causes its independent permanence
to enter in that which is transitory, and its infinity in the sensuous. Nevertheless, as
long as rude nature, which knows of no other law than running incessantly from change to
change, will yet retain too much strength, it will oppose itself by its different caprices
to this necessity; by its agitation to this permanence; by its manifold needs to this
independence, and by its insatiability to this sublime simplicity. It will be also
troublesome to recognise the instinct of play in its first trials, seeing that the
sensuous impulsion, with its capricious humour and its violent appetites, constantly
crosses. It is on that account that we see the taste, still coarse, seize that which is
new and startling, the disordered, the adventurous and the strange, the violent and the
savage, and fly from nothing so much as from calm and simplicity. It invents grotesque
figures, it likes rapid transitions, luxurious forms, sharply marked changes, acute tones,
a pathetic song. That which man calls beautiful at this time, is that which excites him,
that which gives him matter; but that which excites him to give his personality to the
object, that which gives matter to a possible plastic operation, for otherwise it would
not be the beautiful for him. A remarkable change has therefore taken place in form of his
judgments; he searches for these objects, not because they affect him, but because they
furnish him with the occasion of acting; they please him, not because they answer to a
want, but because they satisfy a law, which speaks in his breast, although quite low as
yet.
Soon it will not be sufficient for things to please him; he will wish to please: in the
first place, it is true, only by that which belongs to him; afterwards by that which he
is. That which he possesses, that which he produces, ought not merely to bear any more the
traces of servitude, nor to mark out the end, simply and scrupulously, by the form.
Independently of the use to which it is destined, the object ought also to reflect the
enlightened intelligence which imagines it, the hand which shaped it with affection, the
mind free and serene which chose it and exposed it to view. Now, the ancient German
searches for more magnificent furs, for more splendid antlers of the stag, for more
elegant drinking horns; and the Caledonian chooses the prettiest shells for his festivals.
The arms themselves ought to be no longer only objects of terror, but also of pleasure;
and the skilfully worked scabbard will not attract less attention than the homicidal edge
of the sword. The instinct of play, not satisfied with bringing into the sphere of the
necessary an aesthetic superabundance for the future more free, is at last completely
emancipated from the bonds of duty, and the beautiful becomes of itself an object of man's
exertions. He adorns himself. The free pleasure comes to take a place among his wants, and
the useless soon becomes the best part of his joys. Form, which from the outside gradually
approaches him, in his dwellings, his furniture, his clothing, begins at last to take
possession of the man himself, to transform him, at first exteriorly, and afterwards in
the interior. The disordered leaps of joy become the dance, the formless gesture is
changed into an amiable and harmonious pantomime, the confused accents of feeling are
developed, and begin to obey measure and adapt themselves to song. When, like the flight
of cranes, the Trojan army rushes on to the field of battle with thrilling cries, the
Greek army approaches in silence and with a noble and measured step. On the one side we
see but the exuberance of a blind force, on the other the triumph of form and the simple
majesty of law.
Now, a nobler necessity binds the two sexes mutually, and the interests of the heart
contribute in rendering durable an alliance which was at first capricious and changing
like the desire that knits it. Delivered from the heavy fetters of desire, the eye, now
calmer, attends to the form, the soul contemplates the soul, and the interested exchange
of pleasure becomes a generous exchange of mutual inclination. Desire enlarges and rises
to love, in proportion as it sees humanity dawn in its object; and, despising the vile
triumphs gained by the senses, man tries to win a nobler victory over the will. The
necessity of pleasing subjects the powerful nature to the gentle laws of taste; pleasure
may be stolen, but love must be a gift. To obtain this higher recompense, it is only
through the form and not through matter that it can carry on the contest. It must cease to
act on feeling as a force, to appear in the intelligence as a simple phaenomenon; it must
respect liberty, as it is liberty it wishes to please. The beautiful reconciles the
contrast of different natures in its simplest and purest expression. It also reconciles
the eternal contrast of the two sexes, in the whole complex framework of society, or at
all events it seeks to do so; and, taking as its model the free alliance it has knit
between manly strength and womanly gentleness, it strives to place in harmony, in the
moral world, all the elements of gentleness and of violence. Now, at length, weakness
becomes sacred, and an unbridled strength disgraces; the injustice of nature is corrected
by the generosity of chivalrous manners. The being whom no power can make tremble, is
disarmed by the amiable blush of modesty, and tears extinguish a vengeance that blood
could not have quenched. Hatred itself hears the delicate voice of honour, the conqueror's
sword spares the disarmed enemy, and a hospitable hearth smokes for the stranger on the
dreaded hill-side where murder alone awaited him before.
In the midst of the formidable realm of forces, and of the sacred empire of laws, the
aesthetic impulse of form creates by degrees a third and a joyous realm, that of play and
of the appearance, where she emancipates man from fetters, in all his relations, an from
all that is named constraint, whether physical or moral.
If in the dynamic state of rights men mutually move and come into collision as forces,
in the moral (ethical) state of duties, man opposes to man the majesty of the laws, and
chains down his will. In this realm of the beautiful or the aesthetic state, man ought to
appear to man only as a form, and an object of free play. To give freedom through freedom
is the fundamental law of this realm.
The dynamic state can only make society simply possible by subduing nature through
nature; the moral (ethical) state can only make it morally necessary by submitting the
will of the individual to the general will. The aesthetic state alone can make it real,
because it carries out the will of all through the nature of the individual. If necessity
alone forces man to enter into society, and if this reason engraves on his soul social
principles, it is beauty only that can give him a social character; taste alone brings
harmony into society, because it creates harmony in the individual. All other forms of
perception divide the man, because they are based exclusively either in the sensuous or in
the spiritual part of his being. It is only the perception of beauty that makes of him an
entirety, because it demands the co-operation of his two natures. All other forms of
communication divide society, because they apply exclusively either to the receptivity or
to the private activity of its members, and therefore to what distinguishes men one from
the other. The aesthetic communication alone unites society, because it applies to what is
common to all its members. We only enjoy the pleasures of sense as individuals, without
the nature of the race in us sharing in it; accordingly, we cannot generalise our
individual pleasures, because we cannot generalise our individuality. We enjoy the
pleasures of knowledge as a race, dropping the individual in our judgment; but we cannot
generalise the pleasures of the understanding, because we cannot eliminate individuality
from the judgments of others as we do from our own. Beauty alone can we enjoy both as
individuals and as a race, that is, as representing a race. Good appertaining to sense can
only make one person happy, because it is founded on inclination, which is always
exclusive; and it can only make a man partially happy, because his real personality does
not share in it. Absolute good can only render a man happy conditionally, for truth is
only the reward of abnegation, and a pure heart alone has faith in a pure will. Beauty
alone confers happiness on all, and under its influence every being forgets that he is
limited.
Taste does not suffer any superior or absolute authority, and the sway of beauty is
extended over appearance. It extends up to the seat of reason's supremacy, suppressing all
that is material. It extends down to where sensuous impulse rules with blind compulsion,
and form is undeveloped. Taste ever maintains its power on these remote borders, where
legislation is taken from it. Particular desires must renounce their egotism, and the
agreeable, otherwise tempting the senses, must in matters of taste adorn the mind with the
attractions of grace.
Duty and stern necessity must change their forbidding tone, only excused by resistance,
and do homage to nature by a nobler trust in her. Taste leads our knowledge from the
mysteries of science into the open expanse of common sense, and changes a narrow
scholasticism into the common property of the human race. Here the highest genius must
leave its particular elevation, and make itself familiar to the comprehension even of a
child. Strength must let the Graces bind it, and the arbitrary lion must yield to the
reins of love. For this purpose taste throws a veil over physical necessity, offending a
free mind by its coarse nudity, and dissimulating our degrading parentage with matter by a
delightful illusion of freedom. Mercenary art itself rises from the dust; and the bondage
of the bodily, in its magic touch, falls off from the inanimate and animate. In the
aesthetic state the most slavish tool is a free citizen, having the same rights as the
noblest; and the intellect which shapes the mass to its intent must consult it concerning
its destination. Consequently in the realm of aesthetic appearance, the idea of equality
is realised, which the political zealot would gladly see carried out socially. It has
often been said that perfect politeness is only found near a throne. If thus restricted in
the material, man has, as elsewhere appears, to find compensation in the ideal world.
Does such a state of beauty in appearance exist, and where? It must be in every finely
harmonised soul; but as a fact, only in select circles, like the pure ideal of the church
and state - in circles where manners are not formed by the empty imitations of the
foreign, but by the very beauty of nature; where man passes through all sorts of
complications in all simplicity and innocence, neither forced to trench on another's
freedom to preserve his own, nor to show grace at the cost of dignity.
Source: Literary and philosophical essays: French, German and Italian. With introductions
and notes. New York, Collier [c1910] Series: The Harvard classics, 32.
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