More Recommended Books

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993)

Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998)

Regis Debray, Media Manifestos, trans. Eric Rauth (London and New York: Verso, 1996)

William D. Grampp, Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists, and Economics (New York: Basic Books, 1989)

Karl Ruhrberg, et al. Art of the 20th Century (New York: Taschen, 2000)

James Heilbrun and Charles M. Gray, The Economics of Art and Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001)

David Campany, Art and Photography. New York, Phaidon Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-7148-4756-6

David Hopkins, Art after Modern Art, 1945-2000 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000). ISBN: 019284234X. [=Hopkins]

Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed. Art Now, Vol. 3. Köln, London, Los Angeles:Taschen: 2008. ISBN: 978-3-8365-0511-6 [=ArtNow 3]

Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol 1928-1987: Commerce into Art. Rev. edition. Taschen, 2000. ISBN: 3822863211.

Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1986. ISBN: 9780520220409 [See also Web version]

https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/CCTP738/CCTP738-syllabus.html

MyArtsLab

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MyArtsLab is appropriate for Art Appreciation and Art History courses.

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students save time and monitor their results throughout the course.

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The primacy of perception in the era of communication

Marco Cesario
Monday, 8 September 2008
ResetDOC: Dialogues on Civilizations

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an international congress held at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris discussed once again the concepts of space and time introduced by this philosopher, whose work seems a seamless dialogue with other sciences such as psychology, neurology, physics, literature and art. A opportunity to debate not only his philosophical position set in current times, but also for using the instruments provided by his phenomenology so as to readdress the idea of space and time in the era of communication.


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A transversal study of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of time and space does not mean only analyzing the relationship between those categories and objects and events perceived by the conscience, but also to open a constructive dialogue between pure phenomenology and others sciences such as psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, neurology, biology, physics and arts. The objective is to reconstruct and develop Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “this space and this time that we are” through the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, and Whitehead, but also through the work of Proust, Claudel and Simon.

These were the conclusions of the international congress of philosophy “Merleau-Ponty. L’espace et le temps”, which took place at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris to celebrate the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth. The congress gathered together many experts from France, the United States and Japan, who attempted to answer the questions posed by Merleau-Ponty’s main work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The event has today a special meaning, because we should not only discuss his philosophical positions, but also use his ‘phenomenological instruments’ to rethink the categories of space and time in the age of global communication. The new technological instruments and the media’s increasing power, provide us with free access to knowledge, as well as the possibility to become actors in spreading this knowledge. This is an advantage compared to period during which Merleau-Ponty debated ‘spatial consciousness’ because these new technologies have provoked an enlargement of cognitive structures and perceptive consciousness.

A new conception of space

In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty affirms that space is not the ‘real’ or the ‘logical’ ambit within which things are placed, but “the environment by which the position of things becomes possible”. From this point of view, space would not be a sort of ‘ether’ in which things are suspended but - as the philosopher himself explains - “the universal power of their connections”. I can stand between objects and consider space as their natural ambit or simply as their common attribute. But I can grasp the nature of space as from a subject and his interiority. Even if prior to me, space existed only in relation to a perceiving subject. When I observe the front of a house, I’m able to guess its dimensions and the position of the side-walls even if I’m not able to observe them directly. By isolating the house from its “horizon” (the other houses, the gardens etc), the house looks as if it emerges from a flat and bi-dimensional texture to become tri-dimensional. The house ‘comes out’ thanks to a special synthesis between what the eye is able to see and what the eye is able to guess, geometrically, behind the front. If I turn around the house, the front, the side-walls, disappear progressively and the back of the house suddenly ‘appears’. But the house I see is always the house observed from one or another precise point of view. According to Merleau-Ponty, space does not exist by itself, but in relation to the subject and to the conscience’s phenomenal field. From this point of view, the body does not move because there’s an empty space. The body is “an attitude in view of a present or possible task” and space is the means for this possibility. The body is inside the space just as the heart is inside the body. It keeps the ‘vision’ of visible things alive and creates with it a system. If I walk in an empty space without having a global perception of all the possible perspectives opened by my path, I would not be able to judge those perspectives as different aspects of the same reality. Thanks to the presence of a subject within a situation, and thanks to its movement within space, this synthesis can be possible. The space is inside the subject and the conscience is itself spatial.

Space and neuro-cognitive sciences today

Today, says Alain Berthoz, we cannot talk about a ‘singular’ space anymore, because for a living organism there are a multiplicity of mechanisms and levels of treatment of spatial proceedings. Following in the footsteps of Poincaré and Einstein, Berthoz refuses an ‘axiomatic’ approach to space, because it does not consider the role of sensible experience, of action and movement. According to Berthoz, today’s dominating idea of space is based on the preconceived idea that the brain treats spatial elements with the instruments provided by Euclidean geometry. Merleau-Ponty has also managed to avoid the classical concept of depth (based on the geometrical relations between distance, width and apparent surface) to introduce the notion of a ‘changing point of view’, which allows a virtual body to evaluate a viewed and not a measured width. In the famous example of a woman with a big hat passing through a slightly low doorway, the woman includes her hat within the boundary lines of her movement. The hat becomes definitely a part of her inner bodily scheme.

Space, motility and body art

According to Merleau-Ponty, space is motility. To explore an object I must move towards it by putting it at a distance. If I change the perspective, the object’s perception also changes. Thanks to this movement, I am able to verify the depth and the thickness of the object. But the object I see is the consequence of an immediate synthesis of its geometrical proportions. According to Stephan Kristensen, of Geneva University, the subject should not be conceived as ‘substance’ but as a ‘mobile figure’ and the body is the condition of his subjectivity. From this point of view, access to the interiority is possible only through the exhibition and the representation of the body. Those concepts are the basis of modern body art. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in fact, inspired artists like Vito Acconci and Lygia Clark.

Time and simultaneity: from Saint Agustin to Einstein passing through Freud and Proust

Inspired by the ideas elaborated by Martin Heidgger in his famous lecture Der Begriff der Zeit (1925), Merleau-Ponty sets aside the conception of a ‘chronometric’ time. Time, according to Aristotle, is related to movement and duration in space. That is why it can be measured and quantified. But Merleau-Ponty’s spatial researches in the fields of neuro-cognitive sciences and experimental psychology caused him to abandon this concept of time. For instance, chronologically 3 comes before 5 but both are located within time and presuppose it. Time does not per se exist, but in relation to events occurring within it. By turning over the famous Heraclites’ metaphor, time would not be unidirectional, depending on an observer’s point of view. Time needs a “view over time”. According to Merleau-Ponty, the river is not coming from the past, passing through the present and going to the future. It is quite the opposite. The source looks like coming from the future and, once past the observer, the river falls to the abyss of past.

From this point of view, Merleau-Ponty is close to Saint Agustin whose conception of time is strictly related to the ‘presence’ of the subject in the past, the present and the future (thanks to the faculties of memory, attention and anticipation). But in the notes of Le Visible et l’Invisible, as emphasised by Mauro Carbone (Milan University), Merleau-Ponty refers also to Freud’s psychoanalysis and Proust’s Recherche. The idea of time would be connected with Freud’s unconscious and with an ‘indestructible’ and ‘a-temporal’ past. This past keeps living and modifying the present. Events do not unroll successively but simultaneously, beyond the distinction of time and space. By asserting that “reality only forms within the memory”, Merleau-Ponty means that the past is not just an illusion of reality but, thanks to temporal distance, it can develop its own meaning. Proust, in his famous pages in which he describes Méséglise’s hawthorns, by asserting that “the true hawthorns are those of the past”, paints the essence of a mythical time, a time “prior to time”, “further than India and China”.

http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000000995

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime

by Bart Vandenabeele

Much has been written on the relationship between Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Much remains to be said, however, concerning their respective theories of the sublime. First, I shall argue against the traditional, dialectical view of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime that stresses the crucial role the sublime plays in bridging the wide gap between aesthetics and ethics. Although this traditional interpretation is definitely influenced by Nietzsche, I do not maintain it is exclusively Nietzschean as such. Second, I would like to offer some points of contention concerning their accounts of the feeling of the sublime. I will try and show that, although Nietzsche's account of the Apollonian and the Dionysian is highly influenced by Schopenhauer's analysis of the sublime feeling, his analysis of Dionysian intoxication cannot be taken to simply develop out of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Moreover, by way of (a not so innocent) example, it is shown that Nietzsche's philosophy of music — although highly influenced by Schopenhauer's — cannot as easily be reconciled with Schopenhauer'stheory as is commonly believed, due to their differing accounts of the nature of the feeling of the sublime.

Schopenhauer on the Feeling of the Sublime:
Pleasure and Pain
When one tries to describe the exact relationship between the aesthetic feelings of the beautiful and the sublime in the philosophy of "Nietzsche's educator," many interpretation problems arise. 2 The main problem can be compared to a similar issue in Kant: if one agrees with Kant that the theory of the sublime is "a mere appendix to our aesthetic judging," then it is possible to restrict the Kantian critique of the aesthetic appreciation to the Analytic of the judgment of taste 2 — that is, if one neglects the subtle displacements and gaps in Kant's text. In this way, as one can read in its introduction, the [End Page 90] Critique of Judgement serves as the sought-after "bridge" between the theoretical and the practical, spanning the gulf previously created between the knowledge of objects according to the conditions of possible experience and the realization of freedom under the unconditional of moral law. Moreover, if one notices that Schopenhauer too, in his aesthetics, stresses the fact that "in the main" the feeling of the sublime "is identical with the feeling of the beautiful" and "is distinguished from that of the beautiful only by the addition, namely the exaltation beyond the known hostile relation of the contemplated object to the will in general,then the option for a similar unifying and pacifying reading seems evident. 3 I shall argue that things are far more complicated and that such a "dialectical" interpretation is far from evident.

In the appendix to his The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer had stressed — long before Jean-François Lyotard — the enormous importance of Kant's analysis of the sublime, when he wrote that "the theory of the sublime" is "by far the most excellent thing in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" (WWR, I, 532). That theory, Schopenhauer says, is even "incomparably more successful than that of the beautiful" and "gives not only, as that does, the general method of investigation, but also a part of the right way to it, so much so that, although it does not provide the real solution to the problem, it nevertheless touches on it very closely" (WWR, I, 532).

According to Schopenhauer, the main difference between the sublime and the beautiful is that, while in the case of the latter,

pure knowledge has gained the upper hand without a struggle...and not even a recollection of the will remains [with the sublime] that state of pure knowing is obtained first of all by a conscious and violent tearing away from the relations of the same object to the will which are recognized as unfavorable, by a free exaltation, accompanied by consciousness, beyond the will and the knowledge related to it (WWR, I, 202).
The objects can be hostile to the human will in general, the body, in two different ways: by their immensity or by their threatening power. Schopenhauer thus retains Kant's distinction between the mathematically and the dynamically sublime.

At first sight, the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime seems to be reduced to a passive, will-less and serene contemplation and a troublesome, violent, and conscious elevation beyond that which threatens the will, respectively. The will-lessness and disinterestedness, two typical characteristics of the Schopenhauerian aesthetic spectator, seem to be absent from his account on the feeling of the sublime: Schopenhauer stresses the activity of the aesthetic subject in the sublime, that tears itself violently away from the relations of the object to the own will "by a free exaltation," which "must not only be won by consciousness, but also be maintained." 4

The question is, "How can such a conscious elevation take place, if it is [End Page 91] an elevation beyond the will? In what way can something that threatens or scares the will become the object of aesthetic contemplation, if one agrees with Schopenhauer that only the will can urge an organism to act, think, or perceive? Even "in all abstract employment of the mind the will is also the ruler. According to its intentions, the will imparts direction to the employment of the mind, and also fixes the attention" (WWR, II, 369). This problem is less pressing in the context of the beautiful: the feeling of the beautiful is rather passive and poised and happens on the basis of the Entgegenkommen of the objects, which transform the willing subject without any resistance or struggle into a pure, will-less subject:

The change in the subject required for this, just because it consists in the elimination of all willing, cannot proceed from the will....On the contrary, it springs only from a temporary preponderance of the intellect over the will, or, physiologically considered, from a strong excitation of the brain's perceptive activity, without any excitement of inclinations or emotions" (WWR, II, 367).
In the sublime, a purposive [absichtlich] turning away from what threatens the will, takes place. The feeling of the sublime emerges through the contrast of the meaninglessness and dependence of us as a willing subject and the consciousness of ourselves as a pure subject of knowing. The importance of the spontaneous and free activity of the intellect can hardly be overestimated. As Paul Guyer rightly remarks, the question remains how this activity can be explained in terms of Schopenhauer's own philosophical system — that one actively wills to free oneself from his or her own will is, to say the least, rather paradoxical:

Yet it seems difficult to understand such decisive mental acts except as at least in part products of the individual will. Thus there seems to be an air of paradox about Schopenhauer's account. It is not mere contemplation, which passively frees us from our will; rather we actively will to contemplate in order to free ourselves from our will. Not that there is actually a logical contradiction in such an idea — one could, after all, inflict a great pain upon oneself now in order to be free of all pain later, or freely choose to enslave oneself now and thus loose all freedom later — but there does seem to be something unsettling about it. 5
Schopenhauer suggests, however, that there is a kind of purposiveness that is not produced by the will. He speaks of an aesthetic self, which is spontaneously and purposively operative in aesthetic reflection. Outside the context of aesthetics, the self and the will were put on one and the same level. On the basis of his postulate of the aesthetic will-lessness and the identification of the purposiveness with will, the acceptance of an aesthetic, hence will-less purposiveness [Absichtlichkeit] seems to be a contradictio in adiecto. 6 Still, Schopenhauer talks more than once about aesthetic knowledge [End Page 92] that is "operative without purpose, hence will-less" and he contends that aesthetic knowledge is connected with "pure intelligence, without aims and purposes." 7

Compared with the many remarks about an aesthetic will-lessness and "aimlessness," the suggestions for an aesthetic Absichtlichkeit in the feeling of the sublime are rather marginal. The conception that the "will-free activity of the intellect" is the condition for a pure objectivity is still irreconcilable with the requirement that the intellect turns itself away from the will and "emancipates itself from that service in order to be active on its own account" by being "detached from its root, the will, by its being free to move and being nevertheless active with the highest degree of energy" and "forgetful of its own origin, is freely active from its own force and elasticity" (WWR, II, 386, 384, 388). How should one understand this autonomous elasticity within the framework of Schopenhauer's theory of the dependence, and even submissiveness, of the intellect to the will? (WWR, I, 290; II, 199-202, 214, 225). Aesthetic contemplation is founded on the unconscious activity of the will, but this coincides with a specific form of self-consciousness, which warns the Gemüt of the aesthetic character of the experienced state of consciousness.

How can Schopenhauer distinguish qualitatively between the beautiful and the sublime? This question has become more urgent due to the just signaled problems concerning the freedom of the intellect and the aesthetic self. Despite all his remarks on the dynamics and the violence with which the sublime feeling is necessarily connected, a number of excerpts state that the aesthetic subject in the sublime "may quietly contemplate, as pure, will-less subject of knowing, those very objects so terrible to the will" (WWR, I, 202, 209). He may comprehend only their Idea that is foreign to all relation, gladly linger over its contemplation, and consequently be elevated precisely in this way above himself, his person, his willing, and all willing" (WWR, I, 201). The eventual result — the serene contemplation of the Platonic Idea — appears to be identical in the beautiful and the sublime. This hampers a well-founded distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. 8 In the case of the sublime, the violent elevation above that which threatens the will and its interests shall eventually result — as in the beautiful — in the quiet contemplation of that which can be joyfully apprehended despite its hostile and perilous character.

This interpretation is dialectical (in the Hegelian, not in the Kantian sense): what scares and threatens the will can be contemplated aesthetically on a higher level (so more intensely), by neutralizing the negative affects and elevating oneself above them [Erhebung]. What results is a kind of disassociation or depersonalization. Although the subject has an experience of fear or even of terror it is not an emotion he or she regards as belonging to him or herself. 9 Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime testifies to what Hans [End Page 93] Blumenberg calls "transcendental pride": 10 one enjoys his or her own independence, one finds pleasure in the fact that something that would destroy someone as a willing individual would not even appear if it were not represented by the pure subject of knowing. Moreover, the difference between the beautiful and the sublime is often based on specific characteristics of the object. In the case of the beautiful, an object invites us to become an object of an aesthetic appreciation, whereas in the sublime the object becomes an obstacle through its unfavorable, hostile relations with the will of the subject. Schopenhauer wants to postpone a clear and straightforward definition of the aesthetic feelings.

The larger part of § 39 in The World as Will and Representation is devoted to concrete situations in which the transitions [Übergänge] from the beautiful to the sublime are sketched. With much feeling for drama, Schopenhauer sketches the gradual transitions from the beautiful to the feeble forms of the sublime and, eventually, the stronger examples of the feeling of the sublime.

"Now of in the depth of winter, when the whole of nature is frozen and stiff, we see the rays of the setting sun reflected by masses of stone, where they illuminate without warming, and are thus favorable only to the purest kind of knowledge, not to the will, then contemplation of the beautiful effect of light on these masses moves us into the state of pure knowing, as all beauty does. Yet here, through the faint recollection of the lack of warmth from those rays, in other words, of the absence of the principle of life, a certain transcending of the interest of the will is required....precisely in this way we have a transition from the feeling of the beautiful to that of the sublime. It is the faintest trace of the sublime in the beautiful [der schwächste Anhauch des Erhabenen am Schönen]" (WWR, I, 203).
A very lonely and silent region, under a perfectly cloudless sky, without animals or human beings is "as it were a summons to seriousness, to contemplation, with complete emancipation from all willing and its cravings; but it is just this that gives to such a scene of mere solitude and profound peace a touch of the sublime [einen Anstrich des Erhabenen]" (WWR, I, 203).

But "let us imagine such a region denuded of plants and showing only bare rocks; the will is at once filled with alarm through the total absence of that which is organic and necessary for our subsistence. The desert takes on a fearful character; our mood becomes tragic" (WWR, I, 204). As it demands more effort to raise oneself above the interests of the own will, the feeling of the sublime appears more intensely. Schopenhauer is often closer to Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime, than to Kant's. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke connects the sublime feeling with "anguish," "terror," and "privation." 11 In the above-quoted example, a feeling of silence and emptiness is evoked, which fills the willing individual with terror. Terror is, as Lyotard rightly remarks, closely related to privation. 12 The feeling of the sublime originates in deep terror or [End Page 94] desolation, which is always what Burke calls a violent emotion. The sublime feeling is delight and not pleasure: it is "pleasure, which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain." 13 The sublime delight is negative pleasure, "the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger." 14 It is pleasure, one can say, that is connected with the removal of pain or the escape from danger or threat. This is analogous to Schopenhauer's description of the feeling of the sublime as the feeling of the liberation from that which overwhelms or endangers the willing subject, although Schopenhauer does not mention Burke in this context.

Schopenhauer's examples of the stronger degrees of the sublime — the sublime is, it seems, and contrary to Kant, more a question of intensification than of elevation — join in with Burke's contention that "a mode of terror, or of pain, is always the cause of the sublime." 15 The clearest example of the (dynamically) sublime in nature occurs, Schopenhauer maintains,

when we are abroad in the storm of tempestuous seas; mountainous waves rise and fall, are dashed violently against steep cliffs, and shoot their spray high into the air. The storm howls, the sea roars, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and thunder-claps drown the noise of storm and sea" (WWR, I, 204).
What makes this terrible scene enjoyable? According to Burke (and Lyotard), this has to do with being deprived of the privation of light, life, or language. 16 Our personal need [persönliche Bedrängnis] cannot gain the upper hand: the clearest and strongest impression of the sublime lies in the twofold sensation of terror or pain and calm superiority at the same time:

Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature...and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing....This is the full impression of the sublime (WWR, I, 204-5).
When Schopenhauer speaks about a transition from the beautiful to the sublime in a description of a landscape, one may wonder in what way the specificity of the feeling of the sublime can be guaranteed. Confronted with a desolate region, a certain elevation beyond the interest of the will is required, because the will cannot find any objects that can satisfy it. But this is not a question of a really hostile relationship to the will. Some examples point to the fact that Schopenhauer abandons the strict distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. This impression becomes even stronger when we take into account Schopenhauer's remark about the beneficent, soothing effect of the moon: "The moon is sublime....it induces in us a sublime mood [stimmt uns erhaben], because, without any reference to us, it moves along eternally foreign to earthly life and activity, and sees everything, but takes part in nothing" (WWR, II, 374). There is by no means [End Page 95] a hostile relation to the individual will. On the contrary, the will with its needs and sorrow, "vanishes from consciousness, and leaves it behind as a purely knowing consciousness [läßt es als ein rein erkennendes zurück]" (WWR, II, 375). A well-founded distinction between beauty and sublimity seems impossible (See for example, WWR, I, 433, 49). 17 This leveling of the two aesthetic categories is linked with the Platonic inspiration of Schopenhauer's aesthetics: it stresses the cognitive importance of aesthetic perception. Yet one should not, as is typical in most commentaries, overestimate this Platonic strand in Schopenhauer's aesthetics. 18 It is too far-fetched to not leave room for any differentiation between the beautiful and the sublime. In his hierarchy of the arts and especially in his interpretation of tragedy, Schopenhauer clearly acknowledges the importance of the distinction between those aesthetic feelings. The Widerständigkeit — which is essential in the experience of the sublime — is irreconcilable with Schopenhauer's contention that the capacity of the objects to enhance the state of pure perception in the subject is parallel to the grade of beauty they reach. The sublime cannot be called extremely beautiful in this sense, as the sublime precisely hampers such an easy transition from willing subject to pure subject of knowing.

Schopenhauer seems to take a lot of trouble to minimize the modification in the subject prone to the feeling of the sublime. Why? When the violence and incommensurability is stressed, the architectonics of Schopenhauer's work is shaking. At the end of the third book (on aesthetics) of The World as Will and Representation, he prepares a transition [Übergang] to the fourth one, the book on ethics, from a momentary liberation from the will to a permanent escape from it. If the harmony and will-lessness, promised in the feeling of the beautiful, turns out to be illusory, then a smooth transition from the aesthetic to the ethical domain becomes highly problematic. This is, however, just the problem, which emerges in the feeling of the sublime.

The Sublime and Music:
Between the Apollonian and the Dionysian?
The serenity and harmony of the feeling of the beautiful, which holds the promise of a unified, will-less subject, has totally disappeared in the feeling of the sublime. It is, of course, still a question of exaltation above the will [Erhebung über den Willen] and a feeling of purity (WWR, I, 201, 209). That is what renders it a purely aesthetic feeling. It does not form the particularity of the feeling of the sublime, though. When we acknowledge the importance of violence and ambivalence in the sublime feeling, it cannot be maintained that the feeling of the sublime helps to fulfill the preparatory role of the beautiful in the perspective of the denial of the will (WWR, I, 200-7). 19 The sublime reveals the fundamental twofold nature [Duplizität] of human consciousness in an ambivalent and painful way: [End Page 96]

Then in the unmoved beholder of this scene the twofold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest distinctness. Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces; and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing, who as the condition of every object is the supporter of this whole world (WWR, I, 204-5).
The subject is confronted with something boundless that completely overwhelms him — this is, as Nietzsche would say, the Dionysian — but at the same time it manages to contemplate this in a serene, disinterested, "Apollonian" way.

There is more to it: ontologically speaking, the will struggles against the individual it has created itself. In this sense, the sublime is completely unnatural [naturwidrig]. The sublime is an excessive feeling: either originating in qualitative excess (dynamically sublime) or in quantitative excess (mathematically sublime). The subject is confronted with something that surpasses its imaginative power. Hence the transformation into a pure, will-less subjectivity that knows how to turn this ravished scene into an enjoyable picture. This subjectivity is naturwidrig: it is pure objectivity — a term which Nietzsche is to use again in The Birth of Tragedy, one which Schopenhauer identifies with genius, and which borders on madness (WWR, I, 188-94; II, 399-402). In the sublime the incessant battle between presenting and willing, between knowledge and drive, between the ideal and the empirical, or — in Nietzschean terms — between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, takes place: "With sublime gestures he [Apollo, BV] reveals to us how the whole world of torment is necessary so that the individual can create the redeeming vision, and then, immersed in the contemplation of it, sit peacefully in his tossing boat amid the waves." 20 The individual will feels threatened and wants to turn away from the perilous and the immeasurable, but the contemplating faculty does not surrender. It tries and presents the "unpresentable." It pains itself to apprehend that it can apprehend. It is this terrible violence that reveals the need to transcend individuality. Thus the excessive threat becomes the excess of presentation: the individual faculty of presentation reaches its limit and a desire for the boundless announces itself. This sounds almost perverted: one is threatened and scared to death [bedroht und geängstigt], humiliated and annihilated [verkleinert und vernichtet], and still one persists in his state of pure perception or contemplation.

The beautiful and the sublime can be interpreted as extremes on a gradual axis. This interpretation is explicitly supported by many passages in Schopenhauer's work (WWR, I, 203; II, 374, 433, 449). The beautiful as well as the sublime are felt by a "pure" subject; in both cases the power to apprehend in a disinterested manner is enjoyed; 21 the pleasure [Wohlgefallen] or joy [Freude] is accompanied by the contemplation of an Idea; and an exaltation [End Page 97] above the will is demanded. The differences are essential, however. The beautiful is an Apollonian feeling of harmony, discipline, and measure: the objects invite us to feel disinterested pleasure. The sublime, on the contrary, originates in a boundless and immoderate scene that threatens the individual will. The importance of this fundamental difference cannot be overestimated, whatever J.E. Atwell may say. 22

What is at stake is the life of the individual. The throbbing heart of subjectivity itself, the will, is threatened to death. The moment at which consciousness tears itself loose is not just a detail but is exceptionally fundamental. In the sublime, the subject is attracted and rejected at the same time: as a willing subject it is ravished and withdraws, as a presenting subject it persists in its own activity. The gap in subjectivity is sublime. In the sublime, the extremely paradoxical possibility is maintained to enjoy aesthetically of the deep gap that characterizes consciousness. This is not to be confused with Nietzsche's concept of Selbstentzweiung; in Schopenhauer, no Dionysian loss of the self or violent auto-destruction is taken into consideration. According to Schopenhauer, there is a conscious subject divided between a passively experienced affection of the will and the active will-less contemplation: either one takes refuge or one wants to remain contemplative. The feeling of the sublime is no sensation or a series of sensations that can be reported to an Ich denke. Still, it is felt! Not as a lucid insight, a feeling that can be enjoyed serenely as is the case in the beautiful. It is the felt "presence," as Lyotard would say, of the incommensurability of subjectivity itself. It can only be felt as the paradoxical and strenuous mixture of pleasure and pain which is the sublime.

This (aesthetic) feeling can only occur if the exaltation is "accompanied by a constant recollection of the will [von einer steten Erinnerung an den Willen begleitet]" which contaminates the so-called will-lessness, typical of the beautiful (WWR, I, 202). So no Erhabenheit, as in Schiller for instance: the elevation above the will never succeeds completely. There is no room for happiness and harmony in the sublime. In this way, and this is crucial for a thorough understanding of Schopenhauer's philosophy, it is rather the beautiful than the sublime that prepares a successful ethical escape from the torments of willing. 23 The transition to the so-called quieter (of the will) is, in a way, easier from the beautiful — which is closer to the spiritual serenity of the saint — than from the restless and painful feeling of the sublime. The sublime is not a purely spiritual feeling, as it is essentially "accompanied by a constant recollection of the will...of human willing in general, insofar as it is expressed universally through its objectivity, the human body" (WWR, I, 202). In this way, an interpretation that considers the aesthetic and the artistic as a route to a kind of Buddhist liberation from all willing and suffering, is highly problematic. 24 The sublime functions as an aesthetic border crossing-point that hampers a smooth passage to the realm of ethics. [End Page 98]

This does not alter the fact that Schopenhauer's remark about the permanent recollection of the will in the sublime remains fairly enigmatic. It cannot mean that the individual will is affected, since if this happened we would end up in the contrary of the sublime: the charming or attractive (das Reizende): "Since opposites throw light on each other, it may here be in place to remark that the real opposite of the sublime is something that is not at first sight recognized as such, namely the charming or attractive" (WWR, I, 207). In the charming, one is merely passive and no really cognitive activity or purely aesthetic affection of the mind [Gemüt] takes place. The charming is sensual pleasure and not liking [Wohlgefallen] or joy [Freude]. Every confusion or mixture on this level would destroy the particularity of the aesthetic. In the charming, the individual will is affected, because immediate satisfaction is being promised. This immediately disturbs the purity of the aesthetic feeling (WWR, I, 207). That every beautiful thing of a cheering nature is usually called charming or attractive is "due to a concept too widely comprehended through want of correct discrimination," and Schopenhauer objects to it (WWR, I, 207). The charming or attractive "draws the beholder down from pure contemplation," which is crucial to a purely aesthetic feeling, and thus he "becomes the needy and dependent subject of willing" (WWR, I, 207). No such Genuss is present in the feeling of the sublime, but there is still the constant recollection of the will, or, rather, of human willing in general [sondern an das menschliche Willen überhaupt] (WWR, I, 202):

If a single real act of will were to enter consciousness through actual personal affliction and danger from the object, the individual will, thus actually affected, would at once gain the upper hand...the impression of the sublime would be lost, because it had yielded to anxiety, in which the effort of the individual to save himself supplanted every other thought" (WWR, I, 202).
What is the exact meaning and status of the steten Erinnerung an den Willen? It has to be remarked, first, that "recollection" is closely connected to the aesthetic in Schopenhauer's work:

it is also that blessedness of will-less perception which spreads so wonderful a charm over the past and the distant, and by a self-deception presents them to us in so flattering a light. For by conjuring up in our minds days long past spent in a distant place, it is only the objects recalled by our imagination [Phantasie], not the subject of will, that carried around its incurable sorrows with it as much then as it does now....We can withdraw from all suffering just as well through present as through distant objects" (WWR, I, 198-99).
The same blessed will-lessness can be found in remembrances as in the aesthetic contemplation. Our memory is a form of self-deception: we imagine that reality was as pure and untouched by the will as is the image in our imagination now. 25 This, Schopenhauer argues, explains the wonderful [End Page 99] flattering light that accompanies the images and the distant scene flits across our minds "like a lost paradise" (WWR, I, 198).

In the feeling of the sublime another kind of recollection takes place: it is a constant recollection — it lasts as long as the aesthetic perception continues. One notices here a remarkable sort of temporality: the aesthetic consciousness is, according to Schopenhauer, timeless after all. Aesthetic contemplation does not seem to take time and yet a constant recollection takes place, which is clearly temporal. The will is present in the (will-less) consciousness, but it is not experienced as "being present at the moment"; it is "only" a recollection and, hence, a product of our imagination. A constant oscillation takes place, which has far-reaching consequences for the interpretation of the sublime. This intricate issue can only be dealt with summarily.

First of all, if the fact that it is (only) a recollection is secondary, then the distinction between the sublime and the charming (the attractive) is blurred. If its status as recollection is subordinate, then there is no purely aesthetic feeling; every actual presence of the will disturbs the purity of the aesthetic feeling. That is the danger of Atwell's interpretation of the sublime feeling. He contends that the will does not disappear as such, but that only "consciousness of the will disappears." 26 How else, however, can a constant recollection of the will be interpreted than as a mode of consciousness?

But second, if it is unimportant that the will is present as recollection — so if the presence of the will in consciousness is accidental — the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is blurred. In the feeling of the beautiful, the will is completely absent from consciousness, not even present as a faint memory! Something is beautiful, if it invites us to become the object of a disinterested contemplation and it is very beautiful, if it forces us to contemplate it aesthetically. In the sublime, however, "a constant recollection of human willing as such" occurs, which is difficult to grasp. A moment of displeasure cannot be absent and that pain remains there, so long as the aesthetic feeling remains. This aesthetic feeling should not take any time. All this is very enigmatic as it is. Schopenhauer wanted to avoid the Dyonisian "trap" of "becoming a work of art" that Nietzsche seems to glorify: the complete self-forgetfulness and total self-destruction by becoming one with the whole of reality: "Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole of nature reveals itself to the supreme gratification of the primal Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication" (BT, I, 18).

In Schopenhauer's aesthetics there can be no such thing, not even in the experience of music, since a kind of self-awareness — be it pleasurable or not — is the strict condition to speak about an aesthetic feeling. One should not, however, as Atwell seems to do, try and avoid the complexities of Schopenhauer's account by reducing the aesthetic and the ethical to the dichotomy: [End Page 100]

liberation from the individual will/liberation from the noumenal will altogether....I suggest then that contemplation is liberation from the individual will but not from will altogether (else contemplation would not be knowledge in which the will knows itself), while saintly resignation is liberation from the will altogether (thus from every trace of knowledge). 27
The feeling of the beautiful is the promise of pure inner blessed serenity and harmony. The sublime feeling is pleasure and displeasure at the same time. The feeling of the sublime is to be situated in the contrast, the fissure, the resistance [Widerstand] and the differend; it is joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, exaltation and terror at the same time. It is paradoxical and thoroughly ambivalent. It cannot be identified with the feeling of immortality, as Julian Young thinks: "The experience of the sublime is, we may say, an intimation of immortality, an experience which, as Kant puts it, makes us 'alive to the feeling of the supersensible side of our being.'" 28 It cannot be considered as the harmonious feeling of the beautiful, in which one enjoys its own undisturbed serenity. The beautiful is cheerful and serene. In the sublime this happy quietness and cheerfulness is permanently threatened by the constant recollection of the will, which causes deep pain and violent emotion.

However different Schopenhauer's account of the sublime is from the one of the feeling of the beautiful, it is perhaps even more different from Nietzsche's analysis of the Dionysian. In Schopenhauer's description of the sublime feeling, the subject seems to be divided between willing and pure perception, or between unconscious drive and conscious contemplation, whereas in Nietzsche the (Dionysian) subject has become intoxicated and is "joyfully penetrating the whole of nature" (BT, I, 17). As in the Kantian account of the sublime feeling, the sublime sets one shuddering, casts one into the movement of Erschütterung, overwhelming and exceeding one in such a way that one is drawn beyond narrow individuality to a universal destination. Yet, for Nietzsche that destination would be, not moral, but aesthetic: "for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified" (BT, V, 32). It has nothing to do with Kant's discovery of our ethical destination nor with Schopenhauer's premonition of the denial of the will. Nietzsche writes of the tragic spectator which "shudders at the sufferings that will befall the hero and yet anticipates in them a higher, much more overpowering joy. He sees more extensively and profoundly than ever and yet wishes he were blind" (BT, XXII, 105). As with dissonance in music, there is desire to hear and at the same time longing to get beyond all hearing. 29 True, Nietzsche almost literally repeats Schopenhauer when he argues that "subjectivity becomes a complete forgetting of the self" and "each man feels himself not only united, reconciled, and at one with his neighbor, but one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been rent and now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primal Oneness" (BT, I, 17). [End Page 101] But it remains very anti-Schopenhauer to claim that one feels "like a god... enraptured and elated" in aesthetic experience and "man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art" (BT, I, 18). Nietzsche goes still further than Schopenhauer does, when he maintains — in one of the very few passages where he literally mentions the sublime [das Erhabene] — that the sublime is "the mantle of the ugly." 30 In Schopenhauer — contrary to what is often assumed — the sublime is not a kind of protection against or a masking of the pain and horrors of the world. It is an ambivalent confrontation with the horrid or threatening aspects of the world.

Nietzsche, or the young Nietzsche, seems still very much influenced by Aristotle's idea of catharsis, when he writes that the sublime is "the taming of horror through art [die künstlerische Bändigung des Entsetzlichen]" (BT, VII, 40). According to Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, in the sublime one experiences courage in the face of "horror and terror of existence," and one is able to "say Yes to life even in its strangest and sternest problems." 31 This is so because, in the experience of art, one shares in the artist's "Dionysian," "orgiastic" transcendence of individual subjectivity. One identifies with the "will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility." 32 Julian Young's claim that Nietzsche's account of the sublime effect is truly Schopenhauerian, is incorrect. 33 According to Schopenhauer, in the sublime feeling no "Yes to life" is possible. The sublime is, as I have argued, an ambivalent mixture of joy and pain and the subject retains its contemplative stance, instead of completely disappearing and fusing with what Nietzsche calls "primal Oneness" (BI, I, 17, 18; IV, 25). Although both philosophers seem to believe that life and suffering are inseparable — though for different reasons — Nietzsche stresses that art is to be of service to life, whereas Schopenhauer stresses that art enhances, among other things, pure "objective" perception of the Ideas (or, in the case of music, of the will as such). Instead of a complete destruction of the subject, as seems to be the case in Nietzsche's Dionysian sublime, the Schopenhauerian aesthetic subject attains an exceptional state of purity that allows it to discover the (transcendental) conditions of life. 34 It perceives at a glance what makes life possible: will. Therefore, Schopenhauer feels the need to stick to Kant's "disinterestedness" in aesthetic appreciation. In describing aesthetic perception as disinterested — something Nietzsche cannot agree with — Schopenhauer means that in the aesthetic state normal categories and concepts of perception are suspended, thereby enabling us to become alive to usually unnoticed aspects, to the "significant form" of the object.

This is completely different from what Nietzsche means when he states that the subject is completely transformed or transfigured in the aesthetic stance. Nietzsche's Dionysian rapture [Verzückung], transgression, overflowing energy, Rausch, and ecstasy should not be confused with theSchopenhauerian aesthetic transcendence of our ordinary mode of perceiving [End Page 102] the world. According to Schopenhauer, art is by no means "a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming" but (at best) merely offers some insight in the deep structure of reality and frees us momentarily from the thralls and boredom of the ordinary world (BT, XXIV, 14). The subject is not destroyed, not swallowed by the whole of reality; its self-awareness has radically been transformed so that it can discover the conditions of its own existence.

It is often claimed that Nietzsche remains true to Schopenhauer's philosophy of music. Despite Nietzsche's sustained homage to Schopenhauer's doctrine of music, Nietzsche, from the first versions of The Birth of Tragedy is radically opposed to this doctrine. 35 Music is the sublime art par excellence. Schopenhauer situates music "completely outside the other arts" (WWV, I, 256). Music is the direct copy [Abbild] of the thing in itself, the will. Music speaks of being. It does not simply imitate being, but the intimate essence of the phenomena, their affective essence. It is "the copy of an original that can itself never be represented directly" (WWV, I, 257). Schopenhauer argues that music does not express a particular joy or affliction. It delivers these affects in abstracto or it presents them as they essentially are.

Nietzsche's (admittedly speculative) theory breaks with the idea that music imitates, even if it be most immediately and with the most penetrating intuition, the will. 36 There is no possible distinction or division between a pure eternal will and its musical phenomenalization, just as there is not, on the one hand, the One, and on the other, its multiple appearances or manifestations. The will is music, as the One is its splitting into images. Music does not speak of being, as Schopenhauer would have it, does not recount its vicissitudes in the processes of nature. 37 It is "an originary melody of pleasure and displeasure." The question is, however, why one would still call this pre-melodic and pre-harmonic event music? It is silent. It is the still unheard tones of the world that the composer gathers. This latent musicality is not a symbol, but the thing-in-itself, that is, a plurality of pulsations in the process of concordance and discordance. In Schopenhauer, the will manifests itself directly in the sublime tuning of the instruments before the orchestra starts performing. It enhances our insight in the deep structure of the world. According to Nietzsche, however, the music of the world is "a rather chtonian music, a music of elements, winds, waters, of trees and rocks, both deep and light; it is cosmic, in circular expansion rather than the Platonic concentric music of the spheres, music of the sky before it resonates through beings." 38 It is music that can never be played on an instrument. Nietzsche claims that the incessant rush of affects that oscillate from joy to pain and from pain to joy, which is at the heart of Schopenhauer's account, only yields an approximation of the song of the earth. This primal chaos is only intelligible and can "only be immediately grasped through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance; just as music alone, placed [End Page 103] next to the world can give us an idea of what we might understand by 'the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon'" (BT, XXIV, 115). It is the magic of music as "the very voice of the abyss" that transforms the spectacle of annihilation into superior pleasure. 40 Music and tragedy "play with the sting of displeasure," and both "use this play to justify the existence even of the 'worst world'" (BT, XXV, 116-17). Schopenhauer would never have drawn such a close analogy between music and tragedy: tragedy is the highest poetic art and music is completely different, as it is simply beyond his hierarchy of the arts. At least one of the important reasons for that, if not the most important, is his completely different idea of what sublimity is.

According to Schopenhauer, the feeling of the sublime is the inseparable intertwining of joy and sorrow, which enables the subject to encounterthe will without being destroyed. The "worst world" cannot be justified, Schopenhauer maintains, only contemplated. Yet according to Nietzsche, a split subject dwelling in two no matter how different worlds does not experience Dionysian sublimity. It is the unbridled and self-destructive jouissance — as Jacques Lacan would say — of excessive intoxication, a creative state that finds itself jubilant and anguished to the point of death. 38 Perhaps the pupil is least faithful to his master when he believes to be following him closest.

Bart Vandenabeele is Research Fellow in the Institute of Philosophy (Center for Logic, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Language) at the Catholic University Leuven. He is also the current Vice-President of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics. He has published in aesthetics, philosophy of language, and history of philosophy.

Notes
1. See C. Janaway, ed., Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). See also Philippe Granarolo, "Le maître qui permet à Nietzsche de devenir ce qu'il était," [The master that permitted Nietzsche to become what he was] in Schopenhauer, ed. J. Lefranc (Paris: L'Herne, 1997), 277-92.

2. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, § 23, AA, 246: "einen bloßen Anhang zur ästhetischen Beurteilung" [A mere Appendix to our aesthetic judging].

3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation [Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung] vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 202. Schopenhauer's magnum opus will be cited in the text for all subsequent references as WWR, followed by the volume and page numbers. I have altered the English translation where it seemed appropriate.

4. Here I paraphrase some arguments used in Bart Vandenabeele,"Schopenhauer on the Beautiful and the Sublime: A Qualitative or Gradual Distinction?" Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 82 (2001): 99-112.

5. Paul Guyer, "Pleasure and Knowledge in Schopenhauer's Aesthetics," in Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 116 and Barbara Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität. Kritische Analysen zu Schopenhauers Ästhetik im Horizont seiner Willensmetaphysik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 365-85.

6. See Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität, 371: "Auf der Basis von Schopenhauers Postulat ästhetischer Willenlosigkeit einerseits und der Zuordnung von Absicht zum Willen andererseits scheint die Annahme einer ästhetischen Absichtlichkeit also eine contradctio in adiecto zu implizieren." [On the basis of Schopenhauer's postulate of aesthetic will-lessness on the one [End Page 104] hand and the placement of the orientation [Absicht] to the will on the other, the acceptance of an aesthetic purposiveness [Absichtlichkeit] seems to imply acontradiction in adiecto].

7. See Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena (Darmstadt: Löhneysen edition, 1989) V, 494, 491.

8. See Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität, 377: "Dem Erfordernis spezifischer und damit qualitativer Differenz zwischen den 'beiden Arten der ästhetischen Auffassung' wird auf diese Weise wohl schwerlich genüg geleistet." [The need for a specific and hence qualitative difference between "both kinds of aesthetic perception" has hardly succeeded in this way].

9. See Julian Young, Willing and Unwilling: A Study in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 90.

10. See Hans Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979) 58-69.

11. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; reprinted, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 36, 42, 65, 79, 121, 124.

12. See Jean-François Lyotard, "Le sublime et l'avant-garde," in Idem, L'inhumain. Causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 110: "Or les terreurs sont liées à des privations: privation de la lumière, terreur des ténèbres; privation d'autrui, terreur de la solitude; privation du langage, terreur du silence; privation des objects, terreur du vide; privation de la vie, terreur de la mort." [Terrors are linked to privation: privation of light, terror in darkness; privation of others, terror of solitude; privation of language, terror of silence; privation of objects, terror of emptiness; privation of life, terror of death].

13. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas, 33.

14. Ibid., 34.

15. Ibid., 124.

16. See Lyotard, "Le sublime et l'avant-garde," 105.

17. See also Der Handschriftliche Nachlass (Frankfort am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1966), I, 45; Der Handschriftliche Nachlass IV, 249.

18. Typical examples of this overestimation are Chris Janaway, "Knowledge and Tranquility: Schopenhauer on the Value of Art," in Jacquette, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, 39-61; Clèment Rosset, L'esthétique de Schopenhauer (Paris: PUF, 1969); and Neymeyr, Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität. One had better keep in mind Bertrand Russell's remark in History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1996), 722: "He acknowledges three sources of his philosophy, Kant, Plato, and the Upanishads, but I do not think he owes as much to Plato as he thinks he does."

19. See the frequent use of terms such as Gewalt, Widerstand, Bedrängnis, Kampf, Kontrast, Losreissung, and Vernichtung.

20. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (London: Penguin, 1993), 26. This book will be cited in the text as BT for all subsequent references.

21. See Bart Vandenabeele, "On the Notion of Disinterestedness: Kant, Lyotard, Schopenhauer," Journal of the History of Ideas, 62 (2001): 99-112.

22. J.E. Atwell defends the view that the sublime is the extremely beautiful, and that both aesthetic feelings prepare for a complete liberation from willing (that is completed in ascetic renunciation). See J.E. Atwell, "Art as Liberation: A Central Theme of Schopenhauer's Philosophy," in Jacquette, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, 81-106.

23. See Bart Vandenabeele, "Wij wenen maar zijn niet gewond. Het sublieme gevoel in Schopenhauers esthetica," Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 61 (1999): 663-95.

24. I am thinking of, for example, D.W. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 111 and passim; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990): 162-63; A.L. Cothey, The Nature of Art (London: Routledge, 1992): 70-71; Atwell, "Art as Liberation," 81-106. [End Page 105]

25. On the importance of imagination in art and aesthetic contemplation, see Cheryl Foster, "Ideas and Imagination, Schopenhauer on the Proper Foundation of Art," in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. Chris Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 213-51.

26. See Atwell, "Art as Liberation," 100.

27. Ibid, 91.

28. Young, Willing and Unwilling, 100. This equalization of the intimation of immortality with the awareness of the super-sensible side of our being is highly disputable as such.

29. John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 100.

30. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin, 1969), 74.

31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1992), 50-51; "Affirmation of life in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types — that is what I called dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet."

32. Ibid.

33. This is not minimizing Schopenhauer's significant influence on Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, as Julian Young seems to believe. See Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1992, 26.

34. See also Michel Haar, "The Joyous Struggle of the Sublime and the Musical Essence of Joy," Research in Phenomenology 25 (1995): 68-89, for typical Apollonian types of the sublime in Nietzsche.

35. See Haar, "Joyous Struggle of the Sublime," 75.

36. Ibid., 76.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 77.

39. Contrary to Schopenhauer's contention, temporality plays a crucial part in the sublime. See also E.P. Miller, "Sublime Time: Nietzsche's Tragic Re-Thinking of Kant's Aesthetic Temporality," Eidos 14 (1997): 49-68.

40. The importance of Nietzsche's connection between creativity, eros and art cannot be stressed enough. See B.E. Babich, "Nietzsche and Eros between the Devil and God's Deep Blue Sea: The Problem of the Artist as Actor-Jew-Woman," Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 159-88.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_journal_of_aesthetic_education/v037/37.1vandenabeele.html#authbio

Aesthetic Perception as a Mode of Transcendence

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online
From entry: Arthur Schopenhauer
First published Mon May 12, 2003; substantive revision Sat Nov 17, 2007

5. Transcending the Human Conditions of Conflict

5.1 Aesthetic Perception as a Mode of Transcendence
Schopenhauer's violence-filled vision of the daily world sends him on a quest for tranquillity, and he pursues this by retracing the path through which the Will objectifies itself. He discovers more peaceful states of mind by directing his everyday, practically-oriented consciousness towards more extraordinary, universal and less-individuated states of mind, since he believes that the violence that a person experiences, is proportional to the degree to which that person's consciousness is individuated and objectifying. His view is that with less individuation and objectification, there is less conflict, less pain and more peace.

One way to achieve a more tranquil state of consciousness, according to Schopenhauer, is through aesthetic perception. This is a special state of perceptual consciousness where we apprehend some spatio-temporal object and discern through this object, the Platonic Idea that corresponds to the type of object in question. In this form of perception, we lose ourselves in the object, forget about our individuality, and become the clear mirror of the object. For example, during the aesthetic perception of an individual apple tree, we would perceive shining through the tree, the archetype of all apple trees (i.e., the Ur-phenomenon, as Goethe would describe it) in an appreciation of every apple tree that was, is, or will be.

Since Schopenhauer assumes that the quality of the subject of experience must correspond to the quality of the object of experience, he infers that in the state of aesthetic perception, where the objects are universal, the subject of experience must likewise become universal (WWR, Section 33). Aesthetic perception thus raises a person into a pure will-less, painless, and timeless subject of knowledge (WWR, Section 34).

Few people supposedly have the capacity to remain in such an aesthetic state of mind for very long, and most are denied the transcendent tranquillity of aesthetic perception. For Schopenhauer, only the artistically-minded genius has the capacity to remain in the state of pure perception, and it is to these individuals that we must turn — as we appreciate their works of art — to obtain a more concentrated and knowledgeable glimpse of the Platonic Ideas. The artistic genius contemplates these Ideas, creates a work of art that portrays them in a manner more clear and accessible than is usual, and thereby communicates the universalistic vision to those who lack the idealizing power to see through, and to rise above, the ordinary world of spatio-temporal objects.

Schopenhauer states that the highest purpose of art is to communicate Platonic Ideas (WWR, Section 50). As constituting art, he has in mind the traditional five fine arts minus music, namely, architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry. These four arts he comprehends in relation to the Platonic Ideas — those universal objects of aesthetic awareness that are located at the objective pole of the universal subject-object distinction that is general root of the principle of sufficient reason. Schopenhauer's account of the visual and literary arts corresponds to the world as representation in its immediate objectification, namely, the field of Platonic Ideas as opposed to the field of spatio-temporal objects.

As a counterpart to his interpretation of the visual and literary arts, Schopenhauer develops an account of music that coordinates it with the subjective pole of the universal subject-object distinction. Separate from the other traditional arts, Schopenhauer maintains that music is the most metaphysical art and is on a subjective, feeling-centered level with the Platonic Ideas themselves. Just as the Platonic Ideas contain the patterns for the types of objects in the daily world, music formally duplicates the basic structure of the world as a whole: the bass notes are analogous to inorganic nature, the harmonies are analogous to the animal world, and the melodies are analogous to the human world. The sounding of the bass note produces more subtle sonic structures in its overtones; similarly, inanimate nature produces animate life.

In short, Schopenhauer discerns in the structure of music, a series of analogies to the structure of the physical world that allow him to claim that music is a copy of the Will itself. His view might seem extravagant upon first hearing, but underlying it is the thought that if one is to discern the truth of the world, it might be advantageous to apprehend the world, not exclusively in scientific, mechanical and causal terms, but rather in aesthetic, analogical, expressive and metaphorical terms that require a sense of taste for their discernment. If the form of the world is best reflected in the form of music, then the most philosophical sensibility will be a musical sensibility. This partially explains the positive attraction of Schopenhauer's theory of music to thinkers such as Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom combined musical and philosophical interests in their work.

With respect to the theme of achieving more peaceful and transcendent states of mind, Schopenhauer believes that music achieves this by embodying the abstract forms of feelings, or feelings abstracted from their particular everyday circumstances. This allows us to perceive the quintessence of emotional life — “sadness itself,” “joy itself,” etc. — without the contingent contents that would typically cause suffering. By expressing emotion in this detached or disinterested way, music allows us to apprehend the nature of the world without the frustration involved in daily life, and hence, in a mode of aesthetic awareness that is akin to the tranquil philosophical contemplation of the world.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/#5.1

Art and the Aesthetic Experience in Arthur Schopenhauer

By Daniel J. Ford


Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) presented in his masterwork Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung an account of the world as consisting of two discrete aspects; will and idea, or will and representation. The essence of the self is similarly comprised of dual aspects, being simultaniously an object of perception and a manifestation of the will.

Schopenhauer argues that in our everyday lives we experience suffering as a result of our mind representing the world around us as an egocentric perception, consisting of external objects of perception and their relation to oneself. Our conciousness is, for Schopenhauer, in service of the will. Objects are perceived by individual wills not in terms of intrinsic objective qualities, but rather in terms of utility to the individual will. Suffering is ultimately caused by the frustration and conflict that arises from competition between individual wills. Schopenhauer is sometimes considered, mistakenly, to be a pessamist. However he clearly holds that through art and the aesthetic experience we can escape the suffering of our ordinary mental state.

In ordinary consciousness we are in the service of the will. That is, “our consciousness is filled by our will” (Schopenhauer 1969: Vol. I, 196) It is the will that enables our survival; without the will filling up our consciousness we could not survive because we would have a disinterested perception of the would. That is, our perception would not be directed to attend to those things in the world that are relevant to our welfare. In our ordinary consciousness we see things in relation to ourselves; we have an egoistic view of the world. We do not see individual objects in the world in terms of their own intrinsic nature and qualities. Instead we see things in terms of utility, and specifically their utility to ourselves.

Schopenhauer holds that in our ordinary consciousness we actively contribute to our perceptions of the world; part of our everyday experience consists in ideas that we project onto the world. He calls these projections we make onto the world to form our everyday experience “relative essences”. (Schopenhauer 1969: Vol. II, 372) The relative essences can take the form of threats to our welfare, which may be either potential or actual. They can also be objects of desire, things that spark a yearning desire within us to be fulfilled. For so long as each craving is desired but not satisfied we suffer. The relative essences can also be means of preserving our welfare in the face of threats, or else means of satisfying our desires in order to bring to an end the suffering caused by feeling an unfulfilled desire.

It is essential for us to see the world not objectively but subjectively, adding our own projections into experience in order to survive. It seems therefore fair to claim that our ordinary consciousness is acting in our best interest; it is allowing us to recognise threats and react to them. It also allows us to have desires that are needed in order to survive. For instance, it is essential for us to desire to eat regularly in order to nourish ourselves; if we failed to do this we would die. It is also essential to the survival of the species that we desire to procreate; if enough of us failed to do so then our species would become extinct. So relative essences can be seen from two points of view; firstly, that they cause our desires and fears thereby causing us endless suffering, and secondly, that they cause our desires and fears thereby allowing our survival. Schopenhauer fixates on the former viewpoint, claiming the relative essences keep us trapped in a false perception of the world. On this point of view “[t]he world is my representation” (Schopenhauer 1969: Vol. I, 3)

Schopenhauer seems to suppose that it is desirable to transform ones state of consciousness, turning it away from the will in order to free oneself from suffering. He seems inclined to think of ordinary consciousness as something undesirable from which we ought to seek salvation. The genius is a rare individual with the capacity to transform his consciousness in this way for prolonged periods of time, but we all have the capacity to transform our consciousness for brief periods with the aid of aesthetic contemplation; contemplation of artworks created by a genius.

Art facilitates the transition “from the common knowledge of particular things [that is, the mental state of ordinary experience] to knowledge of the Idea [that is, the mental state of aesthetic experience]” (WWR I: 178) This by no means happens with every artwork, it is great works of art that Schopenhauer concerns himself with. Great art should allow the non-genius, which is the vast majority of us, to temporarily transform from the ordinary mental state to that of the aesthetic mental state, which Schopenhauer calls the “aesthetic method of consideration” (WWR I: 195). The genius is differentiated here because Schopenhauer holds that the genius is one who is able to enter into the aesthetic state for sustained periods of time and who does not require the aid of an existing artwork in order to transform his mental state.

The genius is able to create new works of art by virtue of being able to enter into that state in which he is free of subjectivity. This is an ability that goes entirely against what Schopenhauer holds is the fate of all mankind, to be in the service of the will. It surely follows that the genius is more at risk than the rest of us from threats and dangers because unlike the non-genius who sees the world in terms of utility, that is, subjectively, the genius sees the world objectively for extended periods of time. It seems that evolution should not allow the genius to survive given his persistence in seeing the world objectively for prolonged periods of time. This concern is not directly addressed by Schopenhauer, though he notes that genius is very rare.

If we consider roles played by both the ordinary consciousness and aesthetic state issue it seems that it is actually desirable that things are as they are. That is, we ought to recognise that our suffering serves a great good; the promotion of our own survival. Therefore ordinary consciousness is not something to be resented and avoided. I hold that Schopenhauer is partly mistaken in thinking that we should seek to deny the will and escape from ordinary consciousness. Schopenhauer is mistaken, as I see it, not in holding that we should seek to free ourselves of the will per se, but rather it in thinking that this a mental state from which we ought to aim to permanently escape.

The cumulative psychological toll that results from consistently being in the state of ordinary consciousness is a difficult burden to bear, and it is important that we obtain some respite from it for our own well-being. Schopenhauer’s account of the transformation from our everyday state of ordinary consciousness into the aesthetic state is a brilliant insight into that change of mental state which we undeniably experience when contemplating great works of art. If one puts aside the failing of wanting this to be a permanent mental transformation, and considers the account of the dual mental states themselves, and their relation, then Schopenhauer offers a compelling account of the aesthetic experience.

However, there is one further major difficulty I find in his presentation of the aesthetic experience. The will, being the ultimate cause of our fears and desires, is the ultimate cause of our suffering. We can be freed of our suffering though during aesthetic experience because in the aesthetic state (of consciousness) we are able to perceive the will objectively. This seems to be internally inconsistent however; how can we be free of suffering by losing our individuality and perceiving the will objectively when the will is evil in nature?

It seems to be inconsistent to hold both that (i) the will is evil and the cause of all suffering, and also that (ii) by contemplating the will objectively through the Ideas we can escape suffering and enjoy a sense of tranquillity in the aesthetic state, are both true. Yet this is what Schopenhauer does seem to say.

It seems unlikely that Schopenhauer would have failed to recognize such an obvious logical inconsistency in his own work. If one adopts the position that Schopenhauer did not hold his theory to contain a logical inconsistency on this point it becomes necessary to try to find a plausible hypothesis in which this objection is overcome.

Michael Tanner mentions briefly this very problem in his book on Schopenhauer, though he does not really discuss it. He writes that art, in its various forms offers us a way “of renouncing the will-to-live, until one loses one’s individuality altogether and achieves oneness – but with what? With, of course, the only thing that there really is: the will itself. Is that what we would want to do, given his accounts of it? It is hard to see how we could.” (Tanner 1998: 53)

I agree with Tanner that it is problematic, and it is difficult to see how we might be able to resolve the problem. I think there must be a strategy to negotiate the problem of the logical inconsistency as Schopenhauer, presumably saw no problem. Quite simply, it must either be the case that there is an internal inconsistency which Schopenhauer ignored or failed to recognise, or that there is a way of understanding Schopenhauer which yields no such inconsistency. My aim here is simply to offer a possible understanding which does not yield the inconsistency we have observed above.

My strategy is to reformulate the formal argument to restate the premises so as to avoid a logical contradiction. The argument can be formulated in terms something like the following:

(i) The will is demonic in nature and causes all suffering.

(ii) The contemplation of art enables one to enter the aesthetic state.

(iii) The aesthetic state is a state of consciousness in which one is free of suffering by means of having a will-less (objective) knowledge of the deeper reality of the world; the will.

Formulated in this way (i) and (iii) appear logically inconsistent. However if one can distinguish between the will itself and the will as acting on the subject it is possible to avoid the inconsistency. Reformulated on this understanding the argument would look something like this:

(i) The will is the deeper reality of all things.

(ii) The will causes us to impose our own projections on our everyday experience (relative essences) and this causes suffering.

(iii) The contemplation of art enables one to enter the aesthetic state.

(iv) The aesthetic state is a state of consciousness in which one is free of suffering by means of having a will-less (objective) knowledge of the deeper reality of the world; the will.

On this formulation of the argument the inconsistency is avoided by changing the premise that the will is evil in nature to simply claiming that it is the underlying cause of suffering, because it is the will that causes us to have relative essences, but that it is not evil per se.

However Schopenhauer clearly thinks that the will is intrinsically evil, and so it seems that my reformulation will not work. Recall though what I previously argued; that Schopenhauer was mistaken in thinking we ought to seek permanent escape from the will-driven ordinary consciousness. I have in fact shown that his conception of the will was mistaken on the grounds that he failed to properly appreciate the great good that the will actualises: our survival. If he had acknowledged this great good as being dependent upon the will, which it clearly is, it would be implausible to also maintain that the will is malicious or demonic in nature.

The will cannot be evil since it is life-supporting which is a quality generally held to be altruistic. The will, like the world, may be seen as having two aspects; promoting our survival (positive) and necessitating our having relative essences which by their nature cause us to suffer (negative). It seems plausible to hold that the will has either a dual nature, being both good and evil, or else that it is good in nature because it supports life and that the suffering which we endure is unavoidable and therefore blameless on the will. It does not seem plausible however to hold that the will is evil for the reasons I have just stated. Thus we can be confident in thinking that Schopenhauer was mistaken to think of the will as being evil or demonic. As the will cannot be evil in nature there is no inconsistency. It remains clear that we suffer though, and this is clearly the result of the relative essences which Schopenhauer says act upon us in our ordinary consciousness.

We therefore need to re-evaluate Schopenhauer’s philosophy in light of this realisation. It is by no means a catastrophic blow to Schopenhauerian philosophy to accept what I have argued here, at least in terms of his account of the aesthetic experience. I have argued that Schopenhauer failed to appreciate the great good that is actualised by the will. This great good is the life we have. He fixated on the suffering we endure, which is caused by having fears and desires, and he claimed that we should seek a sort of salvation from suffering by means of entering the aesthetic state, in which we have a will-less knowledge of the world. He thought that the will was evil in nature. I have argued that Schopenhauer was mistaken and that the will cannot be evil in nature, and also that he was mistaken to think we should seek a permanent refuge, or salvation in the aesthetic state because it is inconsistent with evolution as we need to have fears and desires in order to survive.

By modifying our understanding of Schopenhauerian thought on the aesthetic experience in line with what I have argued here the Schopenhauerian account is made stronger. By acknowledging that Schopenhauer made an error to think of the will as intrinsically evil it is possible to address inconsistencies that resulted from this error in his philosophical system.


______________________________________________________________


References

Alperson, Philip 1981: ‘Schopenhauer and Musical Revelation’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 40, pp. 155 – 166.
Magee, Bryan 2005: ‘Philosophy’s Neglect of the Arts’. Philosophy, 80, pp. 413 – 422.
Schopenhauer, Arthur 1969: The World as Will and Representation Volume I. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications Inc.
Schopenhauer, Arthur 1969: The World as Will and Representation Volume II. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications Inc.
Tanner, Michael 1998: Schopenhauer. London: Phoenix.
Young, Julian 2005: Schopenhauer. London and New York: Routledge.

Dialectic: A Philosophy Journal
http://dialecticonline.wordpress.com/autumnwinter-issue-no-1/art-and-the-aesthetic-experience-in-arthur-schopenhauer/

Artist: One Who Makes Art

It is very interesting to consider that some find this standard far too liberal — that one might be a great painter, for instance, but an "artist" is something significantly above and beyond that in achievement. Nevertheless, a distinction is generally drawn between an artist and an artisan, just as there can be merit to making distinctions between the making of art and craft.

As every definition of art must be controversial, so any definition of artist must be. Wherever the boundaries of a definition of artist are placed, the more interesting question becomes: What makes one artist more significant than another? Or better: What is it that improves an artist? And too, What diminishes an artist?

Typical factors in such discussions involve an artist's art education of course, along with the use of creativity, craft, and originality. Of ultimate importance are the qualities of an artist's world-view, which informs his or her sense of design and style (or zeitgeist), resulting in a heightened ability to see and to create with discrimination.

An artist must do all three of the following: make choices, organize, and create.

Rare synonyms for artist include: iconogenitor, iconographer, and iconoplast.


"Art is a jealous mistress and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1888), American essayist, critic, and philosopher. See transcendentalism.


"The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give."
Ralph Waldo Emerson.


"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his nature into his pictures."
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), American clergyman.


"He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest numbers of the greatest ideas."
John Ruskin (1819-1900) English critic. Modern Painters, Vol. I, part I, chapter 2, 1843. See art critic.


"The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all."
Julia Cameron (1815-1879), Indian-born English photographer. See masterpiece and photography.


"An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time."
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet and art critic.


"History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; Art has remembered the people, because they created."
William Morris (1834-1896), English artist, poet, and social reformer; leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement.


"The artist is the confidant of nature. Flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him."
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), French sculptor.


"The past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), British poet and playwright, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," a long political essay, 1891. See aestheticism.


"All Artists are Anarchists."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright. Quoted by painter Augustus John, c. 1945, Chiaroscuro.


"When the artist is alive in any person . . . he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for better understanding."
Robert Henri (1865-1929), American painter. See Ashcan school and The Eight.

"An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible."
Robert Henri.


"The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel."
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), modern Dutch painter, leader of De Stijl.


"The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist."
Ananda Coomraswamy (1877-1947), Indian writer. Transformation of Nature in Art.


"Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony."
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), French poet and art critic.


"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), modern Spanish artist. See cubism.


"But when I am alone with myself, I have not the 'courage' to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term."
Pablo Picasso.


"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician? . . . On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly on the alert to the heart-rending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likeness."
Pablo Picasso.


"The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust."
George Bellows (1882-1925), American painter. See Ashcan school.


The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful."
George Bellows.


"Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love."
Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), Lebanese poet and writer, worked in the USA. See beauty, love, and truth.


"To be an artist, one must . . . never shirk from the truth as he understands it, never withdraw from life."
Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Mexican painter. See mural and truth.


"In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society."
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), French-born American. See Dada.


"The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
Ben Shahn (1898-1969), Lithuanian-born American painter. See New Deal art and social realism.


"What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British writer.


"Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories."
Aldous Huxley. See beauty, form, metaphysics, theory, and truth.


"An artist is a creature driven by demons — he usually doesn't know why they chose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
William Faulkner (1897-1962), American novelist.


"To be an artist is to believe in life."
Henry Moore (1898-1986), English sculptor. See English art and sculpture.


"The artist must say it without saying it."
Duke Ellington (1899-1974), American jazz musician. See music.


"There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists."
Ernst H. Gombrich (1909-2001), English art historian, The Story of Art, 1950. See art history.


"We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren't."
Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967), American painter. See Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.


"Every man is an artist."
Joseph Beuys (1912-1992), German artist. See Fluxus.


"The artist is an educator of artists of the future."
Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), Romanian-born American artist. See educator.


"Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing — then a work of art may happen."
Andrew Wyeth (1917-), American painter. See realism.


"The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art."
Lucian Freud (1920-), German-born English painter. See English art and Diego Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez) (Spanish, 1599-1660) in Spanish art.


"An artist needs the best studio instruction, the most rigorous demands, and the toughest criticism in order to tune up his sensibilities."
Wayne Thiebaud (1920-), American painter. See Pop art.


" 'Artist' refers to a person, willfully enmeshed in a dilemma of categories, who performs as if none of them existed."
Allan Kaprow (1927-), American artist. See conceptual art and Happening.


"An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he — for some reason — thinks it would be a good idea to give them."
Andy Warhol (1928-1987), American painter. See Pop art.


"Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job."
Andy Warhol.


"Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time."
John Baldessari (1931-), American photographer. See photography.

Bruce Nauman (American, 1941-), Window, 1967, neon tubing, 59 x 55 inches. It reads "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths"


http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/a/artist.html

The Art of Joseph Beuys, Tate Modern

A man of mystery

Twenty years after his death, Joseph Beuys is regarded by artists as a giant of modern art. As a new exhibition proves, his reputation has never been higher

Sean O'Hagan The Observer, Sunday 30 January 2005 Article history
Joseph Beuys ... fabulist and realist, romantic and activist.

He was a member of the Luftwaffe and a founder of Germany's Green Party. He told tall stories about his life and even taller stories in his art. He gave lectures that lasted 12 hours and once spent a week living in a cage with a wild coyote. His most epic work, entitled 7,000 Oaks, consisted of the planting of exactly that number of trees on his native German soil.

He was Joseph Beuys, fabulist and realist, romantic and activist, a man who made his life into one long, continuous and often seemingly contradictory art performance. Beuys was the last of art's great 20th-century myth-makers, an artist who, since his death in 1986, has attained mythic status. 'He seemed almost a fictional character,' says British artist Cornelia Parker, who, during her student days, travelled to Edinburgh to hear him speak in 1980. 'I was drawn to his work because he was mysterious, a romantic figure with a huge charisma. His attraction was that he was someone I was constantly trying to work out.'

We are still trying to work Joseph Beuys out today, even as his ideas have infiltrated contemporary art to the point where we no longer notice them. His presence is palpable in Hirst's floating shark, in Richard Long's elemental works in stone, in Tracey Emin's tents and quilts, in Jeremy Deller's epic reconstructed dramas, and in Parker's meshing of art with science. This week, Tate Modern hosts Britain's first major retrospective of his work, entitled Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments . ('Actions' was the term Beuys gave to his performances, many of which tended towards the raw and elemental. Vitrines were the miniature environments he constructed from found objects and materials.) The show is co-curated by the gallery's director, Nicholas Serota, who places Beuys among 'those artists regarded as the most significant of the 20th century'.

After a period where he seemed to have fallen out of favour with the cognoscenti, the Tate show may signal the beginning of a long overdue reappraisal of Beuys's extraordinarily eclectic body of work. Perhaps it is his eclecticism, though, that makes Beuys such a problematic artist. There is an air of unfinished business about most of the work he created, which some interpret as a lack of rigour. On to that work, too, he loaded all manner of often obscure mystical beliefs, insisting, above all, on the now unfashionable notion that art was a magical, even occult, pursuit. Beuys elevated the artist - and himself in particular - to the role of a latterday shaman with the power to heal his own, and the world's, ills.

'I suppose there is what might be called "the quasi factor" about his work - quasi-scientific, quasi-mystical, quasi quite a lot of things,' says Parker, 'but it's not fake. It's just something I personally don't know exactly where to place.'

For all his obscurantism, Beuys also believed passionately in the democratisation of art and the demystifying of the artist. His most famous and oft-stated dictum was: 'Everyone an artist', to which the equally controversial performance artist Gustav Metzger once retorted: 'Every man is an artist; what Himmler too?' Beuys's response went unrecorded.

His work, he said, belonged out in the world, not just in the gallery, but there is a sense still that Beuys, the mythic figure, is somehow bigger than the work. A cult figure while alive, he remains one of those artists whose name is invoked more than his art. 'The exhibitions seem like residues really,' elaborates Parker, 'it's almost like the life was the real art work, the actions spoke louder than the works.'

Even the life, though, was shrouded in mystery and controversy. 'He was a very good Stuka pilot, but not a very good artist,' says Dinos Chapman dismissively, referring to the most controversial example of Beuysian self-mythologising. Though Beuys never tried to hide the fact that he had been a member of the Hitler Youth, he also maintained that he was the pilot of a Stuka that had been shot down over the Crimea during the Second World War. His life had been saved, he said, by a band of Tartars, who covered his burnt body in fat and then wrapped him in felt to keep him warm, hence the recurrence of those same raw materials in his work. German war records subsequently revealed that Beuys had never been a pilot but a radio operator, a trade that does not quite possess the same heroic resonance. The small lie has led some to doubt the veracity of the entire story but this seems not to have perturbed him in the slightest. He was a man who, in life and in art, seldom let the facts interfere with a good story.

Like the Dadaists, Beuys saw absurdism as one response to the horrors of history. In his case, though, it was personal. He was born and raised in Kleve, a small town near Düsseldorf, and, revealingly, was set to pursue an education in medicine when Hitler took power. Whatever the details of his shooting down during the war, he was physically and psychologically altered by his near-death experience and the manner of his survival. His face was badly scarred from the burns he received and he had to have a metal plate inserted in his skull. 'It was a very real and also a very mythologised experience,' elaborates Caroline Tisdall, a close friend of Beuys's who travelled extensively with him, photographing him at work and at play, 'but its impact on his life, and on his work, was immeasurable. It is the single event that made him into an artist.'

After the war, Beuys suffered from severe depression and cured himself by returning to labouring in the fields of his youth. His self-healing continued when he gradually started making small sculptures of animals and objects, all of them imbued with early Christian symbolism or the talismanic symbols of German myths and folklore: the hare, the stag, the oak tree.

'He had a very traditional Catholic upbringing in Kleve, this small Celtic enclave in Germany,' says Tisdall. 'It is called "the Terror Landscape" by Germans because it is so misty and mysterious. He tried always to instil some of that mystery in his work.'

Later, his early grounding in science resurfaced, and his work, bigger and bolder now, began to use what seemed to be conflicting raw materials: electricity and animal fat, batteries and swaths of felt, wire cables and great chunks of stone. Unifying all this was a belief in the primal, transformative power of energy, whether electrical or human, scientific or artistic. In 1961, he took a professorship at Düsseldorf Art Academy, a job that inevitably brought him into conflict with the establishment. He sided with the student activists of the late Sixties and was sacked in 1971 after he led an occupation of the academy's offices. His work, too, had become confrontational, and he was one of the first German artists to explore the nation's uneasiness with its Nazi past.

'In Germany in the Sixties and Seventies, the past was taboo,' says Tisdall. 'The whole Nazi appropriation of the old myths of blood and oak and earth had made even the folk songs taboo. He felt he had to confront the past, and that Germany had to confront it, or it was in danger of becoming what he called "historyless". He said over and over, "A rootless people are a dangerous people."'

His most monumental work, the planting of those oaks in Kassel was a grand ecological gesture, but it also invoked the dark forests of German folklore and, as Tisdall points out: 'It was an artistic reclaiming of the oak tree whose leaves had been used by the Nazis in the decoration of the Iron Cross.' Beuys was also the first German artist to enter a competition for a monument for Auschwitz, and his rejected plan was to create a vast perspective of the railway lines running towards the entrance gates.

In all this, his facing of the buried collective past, and his passionate belief in an ecologically driven future, he was both a prescient artist and a political activist. There was a naivety there, too, though, perhaps best illustrated by his barnstorming attempts to convince the public at large of the healing power of his art. Tisdall remembers him striding though the streets of nationalist Belfast at the height of the Troubles, in felt hat and great coat, engaging local lads, passing pensioners and the occasional tramp in surreal conversations about Celtic mythology.

'He was instinctively drawn to the Celtic fringes, the periphery of Europe, where he believed the old magic was strong. I think that Belfast in 1972 tested that belief somewhat,' she says, laughing.

Nevertheless, Beuys persevered. He walked though 'Free Derry', staged a politically provocative show entitled The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland in Belfast, and lectured to whoever would listen. 'At one point,' Tisdall remembers, 'a bomb went off beside the art college in Bedford Street. There was this huge explosion and a piece of masonry landed at Joseph's feet, a big chunk of concrete with a slice of red brick underneath. He picked it up, turned it over and and said, "Behold! The Northern Irish tongue!" He was pretty unflappable, really.'

His work spoke directly to outsiders such as Jimmy Boyle, now an artist, but back in the early Seventies a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder in the progressive special unit of Barlinnie jail in Glasgow. Boyle was out on day-release when he wandered into an exhibition of Tisdall's photographs of Beuys's action I Like America and America Likes Me, in which the artist had locked himself in a cage with a coyote for a week, protecting himself from its occasional attacks by wrapping himself in felt. Boyle identified directly with the coyote, saying: 'The only worthwhile [art] statement that has had any effect on me and others in my environment has been Joseph Beuys's dialogue with the coyote.' Boyle began a correspondence with Beuys, who later went on hunger strike in protest at Boyle's relocation to another more traditional prison where he was not allowed to make art.

For all Beuys's often wilfully obscure statements and actions, his art, in this instance, communicated its message loudly and clearly, and with a life-changing force. For many of us, though, it remains mysterious, and not always, one suspects, for the reasons that Beuys wanted it to be. That, however, may be the whole point of Joseph Beuys. 'The thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions, as attempts to find out something,' wrote Nietzsche, the most provocative of all German thinkers. 'Success and failure are for him answers above all.' You suspect that Beuys, even - especially in his sense of mystery and his creation of unfinished art - knew this to be true.

· Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments is at Tate Modern

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/jan/30/art2