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FUNDAMENTALS OF A PHILOSOPHY OF ART - ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF ARTISTIC EXPERIENCE
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We are living in a time where it seems more and more not only that the different creative activities of man are being driven farther and farther apart but that the need and significance of some of them for man are actually being questioned. Philosophy, certainly, seems to have lost the position it held for so long, and art and the artist, socially speaking, at least, have been driven from the human community. Only science seems to have strengthened its position. The strange thing about all this is that it started at the very moment when it seemed at last that the different creative abilities of man had a chance really to come into their own, that they had a chance to free themselves of a certain bondage, so to speak, that had been placed upon them by the central position held by religion for so long. Certainly as far as art was concerned, it seemed that at the very moment when it appeared to come into its own, the very moment when it no longer existed because of its function for the church, etc., the very moment when artists felt free for that first time, that its position steadily worsened--which brings us to the question: Is there any metaphysical validity to art when it is not related to the over-all picture of the age? Can art stand alone? Has art in itself metaphysical significance?

But first let me make clear what I mean by physical and metaphysical. By physical I mean simply all things that come into being without the help of man, all things that come into being by themselves--which would mean that in that sense certain so-called mental phenomena such as dreams, day-dreams, associations, etc., would also be physical in that they are occurrences that are not brought consciously into being by us. By metaphysical I mean anything that is brought into being by us--that would not be there without us and that can only be brought into being by us because we are free agents.

So, using metaphysical in this sense, we must now go back to the question of whether art has any real metaphysical validity (and if so, what?) because art has been placed in a most peculiar position: a position on the one hand of being questioned as to its usefulness at all for human existence and on the other hand it has been put by a small minority (in a vain effort to assure the metaphysical validity of art) into the position of being given qualities that are not within the framework of art--of being put into the position religion held for so long as a leader in the metaphysical aspects of human activities. So art has been put in the uncomfortable position of being denied on the one hand any real validity at all and on the other hand of being made into something that it is not at all, For art to be able to be the leader of the human creative activities of man would it not mean that art would have to contain truth that could be taken literally and that could lead human activities and solve human inner situations? Can art contain truth of that kind and in that sense? Can that possibly be the role of art and the significance of art for man? And on the other hand is it Possible that art has no significance at all for man?

Here philosophy and art touch each other--sharing in common the fact that both can be questioned as to their significance and relevance for human life today. Both, it would seem, have been put into a position in this scientific age where they no longer have an established and acknowledged place in man’s life. When philosophy betrayed art with Hegel and his concept that the arts acquire metaphysical validity and significance by expressing general content (as a religious belief, a general belief of the people, etc.), it seems that philosophy too managed to betray itself and got caught after Hegel in the same corner as art. So both philosophy and art have to prove again their own metaphysical relevance and absolute significance for life--which really means that philosophy (because philosophy is the only creative human activity of man that can tell the other creative human activities what they are) has a double task: to prove by philosophy the metaphysical significance of art in order to put art back into its right place in human life and also to find its own right place in human life by finding out what living relevance to life philosophy itself has. So it becomes even more complicated and we will have to check and double-check as to metaphysical values.

We have a strange phenomenon in art and one that is curiously related to the situation of art in our time: art at the time of the cave man. Hegel felt that art, like religion and philosophy, was the highest achievement of human civilization and wanted to prove that a state is an absolute necessity in order to bring culture into society, in order to produce art. Yet, can this be so now that we have discovered the cave paintings and see that there was art at the time of the cave man--and real art--and can this be so when we see the strange relationship between two extreme poles in the development of man and his civilization: the relationship between the age of the cave man and our modern age? There is an essential similarity in these two extreme ages in human development--for both are ages where almost every human effort has had to be put into earning a living. Yet the cave man produced real art with style, form, and transcendence, and in our age, where almost everything in our cultural life loses more and more meaning from day to day, the only ones who maintain their right to produce art and who produce the only new civilization in our society are the artists. Hegel believed that style, an over-all style at least, grows only when a new way of life in a given society is already on the march and has manifested itself. Where then does this new style of art we have professing a certain common will come from? How is it possible? And how does it relate to other dispersed attempts, as in philosophy for instance, to find a position towards the world, a new way of civilization? The situation seems to be unique--and to require unique means.

Now to go back for a moment to our question of the metaphysical validity of art and what its significance for man might be. Bound up with this, of course, is the question of what art might actually be--for we can hardly try to discover the significance of art without trying to find out first what it might be and what it might do. Art, according to Hegel, was “formed significance.” The modern concept has tuned this around to: art is significant form--with a third concept in the middle of the road: art is symbolic form. Now what can Hegel’s term “formed significance” possibly mean? However can significance itself be formed? Something can be formed into significance, but certainly the term “formed significance” is meaningless. What about the term “significant form”? That too is meaningless--for when it is understood it merely leaves one with banalities and no real meaning at all.

To find the key to the riddle, we will have to use a key that is in itself a riddle. Heraclitus in speaking of Apollon and his Oracle at Delphi--putting his words also in the form of an oracle--said: “The lord whose Oracle is that at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but shows.” Now the Greek oracles of Delphi were metaphysical riddles whose deep meaning could only be experienced in the flesh: that is, only after the event had taken place and had made the wisdom of the oracle clear to everyone. Taken in this light, what could these words of Heraclitus mean? The original word translated in this saying of Heraclitus can have many shades of meaning: to show, to signify, to indicate, to give a sign, to confront with meaning--or in other words: Apollon puts you before the experience. This contains the key to the riddle of what art might be and what art might do and it will be our key to try to come to the heart of the matter--and one to which we shall return again and again in order to check and double-check ourselves.

Now the most difficult thing in an inquiry of this kind is not to find an answer to our questions, but to put the question itself--to put a question that goes to the heart of the matter and that makes possible a preliminary answer to enable us to once more put a question. We have found in this spying of Heraclitus what we think is the key to our riddle--a key which is bound to Apollon. Could it not be that the figure of Apollon himself might not give us further insight into the problem we are pursuing here? For instance: could it be entirely by accident that the Greeks made the god of art also the god of prophets and seers? Could it not be that there is a relationship between the human capability of prophecy and the human capability of making art?

Now keeping those words of Heraclitus in mind--“The lord whose oracle is that at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but shows.”--let’s see what light they might throw on a phenomenon that unfortunately is very indicative of our time and one that greatly complicates the position of the modern artist: the phenomenon of kitsch. What is kitsch? For one thing, it appeals to sentiment instead of to the mind and heart. In kitsch the human being’s god-given ability to create forms of man, to create out of mere things, things of us, is used in order to make things that have nothing to do with art, to create so-called art objects or things that have the opposite meaning to things intended by art. Artists never before were up against this phenomenon in the sense that they were in direct competition with the creators of anti-art, with the creators of kitsch--which in the meantime had been turned from non-art into anti-art. How did it come about? How did it start? When was art first “used” and how was it turned into anti-art?

Some critics believe that Michelangelo’s “Moses,” which was supposed to be a compliment to Pope Julius II, and representational art contain the beginnings of kitsch--but the beginnings of kitsch cannot be found in so-called representational art or in the fact that things, so to speak, are represented since every work of art is representative at least in the sense that it represents human artistic experience of the world. And certainly as far as Michelangelo’s “Moses” is concerned, one must ask whether Michelangelo made a statue in order to show Pope Julius II himself as the power of the law-giver incarnate or whether he created a statue to give one artistic experience: that of the tremendous possibilities of law-giving contained by man. Technically speaking, we might say that the lesser artists of the Renaissance and later, who tried only to give sensual impressions of things without a real experience of feeling, did perfect a skill that later served kitsch very well; but while their work had only attraction instead of feeling, a non-artistic event still was needed to utilize this skill against art and to make out of it first non-artistic kitsch and finally anti-artistic kitsch.

The non-artistic event that brought this about was the work of the Jesuits who, in a time when religious experience was no longer a metaphysical experience taken for granted, founded the first psychological method--that of talking one’s self back into belief. They discovered the possibility to change men by mobilizing and by disciplining the imagination--and they found that one of the best means to influence people shaky in belief was to show them very realistic scenes from the life of Christ and from the Bible. The real founders of kitsch were the “employees” of the Jesuits who provided those scenes for them (--although later, certain artists themselves came to utilize the power of art for non-artistic means. Wagner, for example, attempted to show that art could redeem mankind, that art was metaphysical, and thereby started the destruction of art itself because of the means necessary to prove his point--the necessity to appeal to the nerves directly, so to speak, to overwhelm, to blot out all controls, and to completely tyrannize in the way only music can.) and we find with them already the great distinction between art and kitsch--the distinction which lies in the way the artist utilizes the means of art and the resulting effect upon the beholder.

When art is used by artists who are not representational but fictional, by artists who replace reality with what could be reality, by artists who suggest reality, it means that certain possibilities of pure suggestion in art are being used--and being used for a non-artistic purpose. It means that the artist does not create in you, the beholder, an atmosphere of receptivity where meaningful thinking and feeling starts, where you are free, enriched, and taken into an experience of a great soul able to transmit experience to you, but rather that you are mobilized in order to induce an opinion in you. A real work of art not only leaves you free, enriched and makes it possible for you in a way to become a creator, but in addition nothing is asked of you; in kitsch, on the other hand, you are asked--you are asked to believe something. A work of art does not tell you a truth--it only puts you before an experience which contains truth only in the sense of the words of Heraclitus (“...neither reveals nor conceals, but shows [signifies]”). Kitsch not only tries to tell you something--but it tells you a lie. It commits the crime of violating the free spirit of the individual, trying to introduce in you and to employ you for an opinion. A work of art, on the other hand, by never pretending to give you a picture of reality, gives you, the beholder, a safeguard against just that.

So the words of Heraclitus gain deeper meaning from our Own experiences with kitsch and from the words of Heraclitus we gain a deeper insight into what art--and thus anti-art too--might be. It is a strange back-and-forth procedure of enriching, a strange back-and forth movement in the continuity of the human mind.

The technical beginnings of kitsch, as we have seen, stemmed from the Renaissance and found their roots in certain elements of the style and in certain ideas of Renaissance painting. The Greeks, for example, could never have made the mistake about beauty that the Renaissance did: namely, trying to describe perfect beauty by assembling a synthesis of one beautiful woman from a hundred different models. And while, for example, the synthesis of the scientific side of Leonardo da Vinci with the artistic side did not harm his art, the style itself had certain dangers which became apparent later when the technical skills were put to a different use--as they were in the portraiture of the English School which, though it had nothing to do with art, stemmed technically from the Renaissance. This relatively harmless form of this particular type of kitsch--the presenting of reality rather than experience--came to an end at the end of the 19th Century, but kitsch itself certainly did not end--on the contrary: it took on more and more an anti-artistic form.

Now let’s look for a moment at one of the toughest problems facing the artist since about the beginning of the 19th Century: the placing of the human figure in a landscape. With the breakdown of the cosmological and the theological approach brought about by Kant--that is, with the breakdown of the framework within which man had lived for so long (where the world had meaning because it was either made by God or was considered to be a cosmos that contained meaning in itself)--man’s position towards the world changed--and with this change of position the artist found himself struggling with the problem of how to re-unite the human figure with a cosmos that was not even a cosmos any more, that no longer contained meaning in itself, and that no longer carried with it still certain undertones of myth.

Approached from an over-all point of view of man’s new position in the world and his new relation to nature and things in nature (as Cezanne did approach it) the problem was tough enough (so tough in fact that even Cezanne almost faltered and after a few very early attempts only came back to the human figure itself in nature after long years of painting landscapes and still-lifes), but there was yet another complication-- especially for those artists interested in painting the nude female figure: the complication of an almost inevitable association by the beholder between the nude figure in the painting with the model who might have posed for it. Always before this--as long as the poetical image of myth lasted--the beholder of nudes in nature had had a supporting means not to be disturbed by this very disastrous association and had been prevented from being thrown out of the artistic experience by this association by another underlying association: the association of the figure in the painting with the figures of myth--with Aphrodite, with Artemis. Association with the model had been prevented by a sheer psychological non-artistic means perhaps, but still it was a means that kept the beholder within the artistic experience and once this final hold of myth broke down, it became an almost unsolvable problem to prevent this association with the model.

Manet in his “Women in the Green” prevented this by a trick. He placed in the landscape along with the nudes fully dressed men. By this means the non-artistic association of the beholder was rendered artistic by the means of a sheer intellectual performance by making the beholder ashamed to associate a living woman with the nudes in the picture. Renoir too--the late Renoir--managed to avoid this association and to bring about a unity through his discovery of a great invention of Titian’s--that the being of Woman, the being of a “She” could dominate the whole cosmos. The late Renoir, by understanding that the over-all experience of the phenomenon Woman could give insight into certain human experiences, was able to re-unite the nude with nature (which technically he achieved by making nature a sort of decoration around his nude--a sort of cottony softness around her) to a point where the stream of life of Woman united with all the stream of life and to achieve in such a picture a work of art where there was no possibility for the beholder to fall out of the artistic experience because it concentrated on giving to the beholder the essence of experience--which related in turn to certain past experiences of the beholder himself and enriched them.

Now we have a very excellent means here with this question of the nude to make a further inquiry into the workings of kitsch and to see what happens to the beholder when he looks at a nude in a work of art and when he looks at a nude produced by kitsch--when he looks for example at a late Renoir nude and when he looks at a very common form of kitsch: so-called “calendar art” or the “Esquire”-type nude. Both a Renoir nude and an “Esquire” girl are images--and, as far as material reality is concerned, images of unreality. Both are images that use lines and colors and certain means to arouse sensations and to appeal to the senses; both try to convey something to the senses--but what does the artistic image through the means of line and color and so on want to convey to the senses and what does the non-artistic one want to convey? What is the relation of the artistic image to the beholder and what is the relation of the non-artistic image to the beholder?

The artistic image--the Renoir nude--relates as soon as the essence of experience is made concrete (to mention only one point or contact first) to the woman the beholder loves. The non-artistic image does just the opposite--the “Esquire” girl disrupts the beholder’s contact with the woman he loves and is especially intended to thrust him into an inartistic experience, into error and the wrong kind of reality. An artistic image via the senses has the quality of being able through an unreality (which, as we have seen, all images are in relation to material reality) to put us into a reality--the reality of a human experience. An artistic image can, so to speak, root us in the world; it can, though it never pretends to be the reality of the world, bring us into reality by engaging us in an inner dialogue. A mere image--an artistic one--via our senses can bring to our mind an experience and can engage the mind in an experience where our own experiences are enriched. By leaving us completely free an artistic image can make our senses into servants of our mind--using our senses to convey an experience to our mind. A non-artistic image by throwing us out of artistic experience excites our senses and by means of the senses enslaves the mind by excluding us from the mind. So the effect exerted on the senses of a beholder by an artistic image in a work of art is that of working on the senses of the beholder in such a way that an experience of the mind can be given by purely sensual means. With kitsch, on the other hand, instead of the miracle that can be brought about by art--putting us into the reality of an experience--a devilish kind of black magic takes place--and by the same means: the senses. By the senses the beholder is thrown out of reality altogether and transposed into a fictional reality with which he tries to identify himself--which means that he is really bewitched.

Now this brings us to a point where we have to be most careful (and one which we will touch only preliminarily for now): the temptation to relate good and evil to art--or at least to relate evil to kitsch. To try to relate good and evil to art itself means to try to bring them into the only place--true art--where man is not in a conflict between good and evil, the one place that is beyond good and evil, and the one place where last of all a discussion of good and evil should enter in. To try to relate evil to kitsch can lead to such statements as “Kitsch is the evil in art.” (...Hermann Broch)--which implies, of course, that kitsch is art. We have to be very careful in making distinctions between art and kitsch not to attribute to kitsch qualities making it a kind of negative art--which would mean to completely misunderstand art itself--but rather to make it quite clear that kitsch is the use of artistic means for an inartistic or anti-artistic purpose and to direct our inquiry towards finding out what the difference in the use of means really is.

Now we have seen that by the use of artistic means--means of line, color, etc., which move via the senses--two entirely different purposes can be achieved: the artistic one which makes the senses serve the mind and the non-artistic one which makes the senses enslave the mind. The real difference between the use of artistic means for an artistic purpose and for an inartistic or anti-artistic purpose can perhaps best be described in terms of the difference between convincing a man in an argument and trying to talk a man into something, defeating him in an argument. When a man has really been convinced in an argument it means that he gets into a productive creative line where he begins to cooperate with the other man by bringing into the discussion new arguments for the question at hand out of his own life experience. If a man has been convinced it means that he can use a truth, that he can contribute to it and live in that truth. But if a man has been defeated in an argument, he is merely silenced; he no longer can argue because he no longer can think of any argument against the question.

Art convinces the beholder by the introduction of an inner dialogue and by mobilizing his ability to reevaluate his own experiences in a deeper context with the thing given--and art can only do this because all human beings have the same inner experience (though not always necessarily to the same heights and depths of feeling). Art can only work because of this contact with the beholder’s own experiences which enables him to get into the creative line of an inner dialogue where he is able to bring arguments, so to speak, out of his own inner experience. Art wants to convince--never to defeat (which is one of the reasons why evil in art is not possible). Kitsch, on the other hand, wants to defeat; it wants to talk the beholder into something--until finally he is compelled to act by the fictional reality the images have created for him.

Now art has one very powerful and wonderful means to protect the beholder from taking an artistic image as an image of reality itself: the miracle of form. Form has the wonderful capability to put the beholder at a distance, so to speak, so that he can never make that wrong identification that kitsch talks him into of the image and reality--which amounts to a kind of partial hypnotism. Since kitsch is formless, the beholder is always without the protection that form can always give: the negative effect of protecting the beholder from being talked into the acceptance of a fictional reality. Certain mass medias, like television and the movies, through their very technical means seem especially vulnerable to kitsch, For example: in order to introduce into us by an image an acceptance of an unreality as fictional reality (that identification of the unreality of an image with reality itself) one of the best means is hypnosis--and what better means is there for a certain kind of hypnosis than a movie theater which by its very darkness has a tendency immediately to isolate us from ourselves. This process of isolating us from ourselves is really the very beginning of hypnosis itself and makes it only too easy for us to get into a stream of moving images which finally blurs out every control we have, dissolves every restraint, taking us away from ourselves, Whether this actually happens or not depends, of course, upon the movie--whether it is a work of art or whether it is kitsch to begin with--but the outward means nevertheless are there and make it immeasurably more difficult to avoid falling into kitsch. A work of art has only one medium--it speaks to the personality--and therefore if art is dealing with a mass medium like the movies, it means that it must speak to masses of personalities directly. Whether or not it can do this depends upon whether or not it is a work of art--that is, whether or not it has form.

Now it might be said that a happening of life-giving is the miracle of art, a happening of death-giving the black magic of kitsch, and to find out what the strange relation between these two phenomena in this respect might be we must go back to the Greek gods and ask Dionysus--because in the mythical context there is a relation of a very strange nature between life and death to be found in Dionysos himself and also between Apollon and Dionysos, between Apollon as the god of clear vision, the god of arts, and Dionysos as that double god of joy and suffering, who feels everything and who just lives, so to speak.

Dionysos was conceived of as an insane god--or rather as a god who fell sometimes into insanity; he was also the god of wine and, according to Nietzsche (who saw in Dionysos the will to power that must be put to use by Apollon, the god of seeing) he was also the god of music. Now what kind of a strange god was this? A god who seemed to have such double powers of joy, wisdom, and life--or of tyranny, numbness, suffering and death--and a god who fell sometimes into insanity! There seems to be a strange linking here of wine and music to occasional insanity; a strange relation of certain possibilities of wine and music to certain symptoms of insanity--to being possessed, being tyrannized, being enslaved, losing control of the mind; a certain binding together of life-giving possibilities with death-giving possibilities. And what could be the strange bond between Apollon--who was conceived of as the god of clear vision, the god of prophets and seers, the god of the pictorial arts, the god who had everything in restraint--with Dionysos, the god of wine, and, as Nietzsche conceived of him, the god of music--that double god of life and death?

Nietzsche knew very well why he thought of Dionysos as the god of music. Music is the most subjective expression in art. In its Dionysian character music can rule us; it can make us dance; it can put us in certain moods; it can carry us away; it can tyrannize us--and as such it has always been used in rituals and for such things as hypnotic dances (as the hypnotic crow dance done by little girls in Bali). Music--when its very special power over the senses is not used to convey an experience to the mind--can be, and is, misused. Even works of art in music, where that experience for the mind is there for the listening, so to speak, are misused--and constantly so--by the largest part of the public who get drunk with music, carried away for sensation without the experience of the mind. But music is still art--it is only misused.

These same double qualities of giving life or death, giving mastery or enslavement, are also to be found in that other gift of Dionysos: the gift of wine. Wine can give us wisdom or it can give us complete dumbness; it can give us joy or misery; it can enslave or free us--it is only a question of degree, of how much and why. Drunkenness enslaves us to our motions and emotions--but what does wine in only a lesser degree do? It makes us the master of our moods. This is the double meaning of drunkenness--and it carries a very clear insight for our inquiry into the phenomenon of kitsch for kitsch too enslaves the mind, carries it away, and even makes it act for this fictional reality it is trying to bring us into by means of the senses.

We have seen that form seems to be the miracle that keeps the beholder of a work of art at a certain distance, so to speak, so he can never make that disastrous association of the unreality of the image with reality, and one of the best means to see how this really works is in relation to feeling and sentimentality. Aristotle thought that tragedy brought the beholder into pity and suffering in order to purify him of these two passions:-I, as the beholder, suffer with this person on the stage, and I pity with this person on the stage, and by this identification I suffer less and pity less--but one thing I do not do: I do not identify this image of unreality with reality in such a way that it is possible for me to lose myself in this person on the stage--as I can and mostly do when I see a movie. I recognize the reality of an experience that touches my own inner experience when I see “King Lear”--but I certainly never for a moment believe either that Lear is a real man or that I am Lear. I do not lose my own identity in that of the person on the stage.

Now what is being appealed to here when I see a tragedy? My feelings. And because tragedy as a work of art is form it gives my feelings--here suffering and pity--form, and by that makes my burden lighter. Kitsch, on the other hand, appeals to sentimentality. There is a definition in science of dirt as misplaced matter. Sentimentality is misplaced feeling, feeling in the wrong place. And how is it misplaced? By reflection--by the wrong kind of reflection, by endless reflection and re-reflection on one’s self, meaningless reflection that is a kind of mirroring and re-mirroring of one’s self. Odysseus in “The Odyssy” weeps only once--and when? When at last still unknown he is in his own hall and hears the bard sing of his, Odysseus’, sufferings, and he weeps. He is suddenly forced to look at his own sufferings and memory and tears come, but his tears are a far cry from the tears of self-pity that come from false reflection and sentimentality, from the tears that come from permanently reflecting everything upon one’s self, from the tears that come when the right feeling that could drive to tears is changed by the wrong kind of reflection into the false feeling of sentimentality that also drives to tears--but tears of self-pity. By and because of sentimentality and wrong reflection we have become such great weepers--weepers either of tears of self-pity (self-pity as the habit of the wrong kind of reflection--the habit to reflect permanently upon one’s self all that happens) or tears of frustration (because frustration too is only another kind of sentimentality brought about by false reflection, brought about by not facing experience but by endlessly reflecting on the feeling of experience).

So as real feeling is used and appealed to in tragedy, sentimentality is used in kitsch--the sentimentality of false identification. I, as a beholder of a movie, for example, am put out of business until there is only the association of things that happen to people on the screen (where, unfortunately, as we have seen, this identification is only too easy to make) and my putting myself in their place. This is not true identification or tragic identification. In tragic art I can identify my own personality with the tragic hero--with Lear, with Oedipus--because as true art this image of unreality puts me into the one reality of art: the reality of experience. I can identify with the tragic hero because while the experience is real the distance of form is always there to prevent any pretense of taking the image of unreality for reality--as in the movies the hero can be taken as an image of an unreal man who is supposed to be real. In the movies there is no distance (which means no form), no reminder that this is not real--and I, as the beholder, am taken into this fictional reality, losing myself, being driven to tears by sentimentality and false identification, Kitsch produces a stupor that is as bad as constant alcoholism--a stupor that works on the mind, enslaving it, deadening it. Kitsch is a destroyer--a destroyer of personalities--and one that can be and has been put to use by a totalitarian system for the systematic destruction of the personality. Since works of art are the only things created by human beings that always enforce freedom--that always speak directly to the personality, training it, enriching it, but never trying to take it away to put it to some non-artistic use--it is small wonder that in a totalitarian system kitsch and the hatred growing against art today are not only used but are put to systematic use against the personality, against freedom. This means conversely, does it not, that if man wants to be a free, whole human personality who can act to put meaning into the world, and not merely be acted upon, who can condition and not merely be conditioned (which is man’s great possibility), that the existence of the two human creative abilities that are most closely related to freedom--art and philosophy--are a matter of life and death to him. And make no mistake about it, in an age where we have seen the full consequences of what loss of freedom and the human personality can mean, art and philosophy have become a matter of life and death for man--art because it re-enforces man’s freedom, so to speak, by speaking directly to the human personality, strengthening it, enriching it, but always leaving it free; philosophy because it is the one creative human activity that is directly concerned with freedom, that cares first for freedom.

Let’s go back for a moment to Greek myth and the Greek gods--and especially Apollon--to see what further insight they might be able to give us into this question of what art and artistic activity might be and do for man and to see if we cannot gain a little understanding of the atmosphere that made certain concepts so pertinent to art possible. Human beings in the world of Greek myth were to find their own way through that world of fate. Their gods were not there to love them or help them or save them in the sense of the Jewish or Christian God. The Greek gods were gods of fate, ironical gods, who did not pretend to love human beings-- though they could be seduced by strange means to love them. It was a most ambiguous relationship and one which perhaps was best revealed by that most ambiguous of all things: the Greek oracle.

The Hebrews too had their prophecies--and some very ambiguous ones from their prophets. But there was one quality in the ambiguity of Hebrew prophecies never to be found in Greek ones: the Hebrews believed that the good men who wanted to know would understand, that only the bad ones would die. With the Greek prophecies there was never a question of such a thing as goodness or badness, or men who would be saved and men who would not be saved. The Greek prophecy only managed things in such a way so that men would be overwhelmed by the truth.

Nietzsche felt that it was to meet the danger of such a pessimistic world that the Greeks created art in order to be able to create the kind of life they felt it to be--life which was “at bottom, in spite of all alternations of appearances, indestructible, powerful and joyous.” Since Greek art and Greek myth were so united and interwoven (to a point where Plato when he wanted to destroy myth felt he had to attack art because art was, so to speak, the carrier of myth), these words of Nietzsche also show us the way of man with myth--man who out of the deepest longing for meaning tried first to give meaning to the world by creating myth. The fact that later he destroyed that self-created myth and in the end had to face once again the inexplicable means among other things that we now have the opportunity to retrace and regain the beginnings of the thinking of man which were lost in this long development of the human mind and to gain out of those beginnings the deep insights and fundamental basic quality of thought they can show to us.

Kafka, for example, out of our modern needs was able to draw out of Greek myth the most pertinent insights for our situation--and in that strange way of the human mind with its capability to throw light backwards, so to speak, was able also to discover the strange existential situation the Greeks themselves lived in and to best reveal Greek existential thought. Kafka in his parable of Ulysses and the Sirens shows that little childish and inadequate means, little artifices that may not even be taken seriously by the man who uses them, may serve to rescue him, to distract him from the dangers of life--and, as in the case of Ulysses, even enable him to betray the gods, those Greek gods who do not do so well by man, those gods who envy man and try to destroy him when he does something extraordinary. In Kafka’s story the sirens represent woman’s seducing--not by song but woman at her most dangerous moment: when she is silent and only the eyes speak. Ulysses knew very well the sirens were silent, but being a Greek he also knew that to have escaped knowingly and to have shown it would have meant that the gods would have destroyed him (because by Greek standards he would have exceeded human bonds, he would have been guilty of hybris). So he set the stage to convince the gods (and thereby convincing himself too) and pretended not to “hear” the silence. He was such a fox that he was able to escape knowingly and not to show it. Kafka with this parable of Ulysses and the little artifices used by Ulysses to betray the gods and to save himself gives us such an insight into art itself and into Greek art and the role it played, that perhaps now we can approach Apollon and ask him: What is the meaning of art?

Apollon, like Dionysos, was a double god--a god who gave prophecies and songs. He had two weapons--the bow and the lyre. Both were a piece of wood bent and on both were strings. Yet one sent the mortal arrow, the other song. Or did the lyre perhaps send arrows too? How did the Greeks come to conceive of the god of art as a killer? Or what did death in that sense mean? There was the symbol of song on the one hand and death on the other--and we must ask: Is there something in artistic activity that justifies the way the Greeks used the symbols of the bow and lyre? And what did the arrow mean? What did the double armor of Apollon mean?

Apollon was the giver of oracles. What could oracles in the sense of that double god of prophecy and song, that god of the double armor, have meant? Can we find in the oracles themselves perhaps a hint? “The lord whose oracle is that at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but shows.” The oracle did not say anything though it spoke clearly and did not hide the truth. There was only one thing that would reveal the meaning of the oracle: the action of the man to whom the oracle was given and as soon as that action set in everything became clear. When a king came to the oracle to ask what would happen if he went to war with the Persians, the oracle answered: “If you cross the river, you will destroy a great empire.” The empire he destroyed was his own. Truth was given--which meant that it could only be used by a man who cared for truth. He should have heard rightly and then he could have stopped fate but he did not care for truth so he could not hear. By the oracle was given the chance to get out of fate, but he himself was entirely responsible whether he did so or not. It was entirely a matter of whether he was truthful or not--for only the truthful could understand and handle the truth of Apollon. Anyone who asked Apollon was given his own fate--but it was shown to him on his own body. Either he was truthful and could use the truth--which meant it built him up--or he was not truthful and it burnt him. The mercilessness of that kind of oracle has been the only art form round to render some experience of how the gods would have spoken to man if they did speak and while it was super-human, it was entirely human if understood and used rightly.

Socrates, for example, received an oracle he did not ask for, but he was such a fox that not even the goddess of fate could pierce his armor. When an over-enthusiastic student of Socrates went to the Delphic oracle to ask who was the wisest of all men, he received from the Oracle the answer: “Socrates.” Socrates knew that once before the oracle had spoken so directly(1) and that it was deadly, so he invented a shield of pretension to protect himself from Apollon. He said: “Yes, Socrates is the wisest of men--but only because he is the only one who knows that he knows nothing.” The Athenians were Greeks and finally killed Socrates for precisely the reason that he was the wisest of men--nevertheless he managed to betray the gods and to postpone the judgment and envy of Apollon.

Socrates was a man of irony, as Apollon was a god of irony (which was one reason why Apollon was really the only god for Socrates--if he had a god at all). What the irony of Socrates could mean we have had a glimpse of--a glimpse that shows us the start of all original philosophical thinking: namely, to know that we cannot know and what we cannot know--which, of course, makes us wise men. What the irony of Apollon could mean we have also had a glimpse of--a glimpse which leads us to the question: Is there something in art that is similar to the Greek oracle--something whose full sense can only be shown and developed by the full mobilization of the beholder himself who takes in art? Is it possible that the Greeks in conceiving of Apollon as the god of prophecy and also as the god of art were able to embody both those qualities in one god because there is something in art in relation to the beholder that is similar to an oracle in relation to the man who asks for it--a certain soul-searching, so to speak, that goes on in art as well as in prophecy?

Now there is another very strange ability of art and the artist which also comes to light in Greek myth. Orpheus was the singer of the Greeks-- a singer and a seer. Of him it was said that he could understand the birds and the stones. All nature spoke to him and in turn when he was singing everything in nature understood human beings, everything understood the art of human beings. His song gained him entry even into Hades, touching all and even regaining Eurydice for him until the moment he ceased to be artist and lost the magical power of art--until the moment when he looked back, wanting Eurydice in reality and not just in imagination. But what strange and wonderful kind of magic is this--where the artist through the power of art can make the stones speak, can make the universe speak--can make then speak and can understand them?

The recognition of this strange ability of art and the artist is contained not only in Greek myth but is to be found in many popular folk sayings and stories of all peoples where special qualities--qualities of the senses--have always been ascribed to the artist: he saw things other people could not see, felt things other people could not feel, heard things other people could not hear. It has always been conceived in folk ways that the artist as to the senses was uniquely gifted, that the artist had, so to speak, super-senses. (But that did not mean, either in myth or in folklore, that the artist was considered to be super-personal. It was not until the 19th Century that the idea of the artist as super-personal or the idea that the genius was absolutely different from other human beings came about and could be expressed in the negative sense.) Along with this also there has always been the very special position accorded to the artist who had lost one of his senses. If one of the senses--especially the visual sense--had been taken away from the artist, it could be a sign--a sign of super-sensibility brought about by the loss of one sense where the artist could really see things that others could not see (as the blind Homer was all-seeing). Blind seers typified this also in a synthesis of all senses into one sense completely aware of what was going on.

All these abilities attributed to art and the artist in folklore and especially in Greek myth--the ability of an Orpheus through the power of art to make all nature speak to him and in turn to make all nature understand human beings, the ability of the artist to hear, to see, to feel special things others cannot experience, the very special ability of a blind Homer to synthesize all remaining senses into one all-seeing sense--contain a clue for us, a clue to art in relation to the senses, and we have to ask: Is there something special that happens to the senses in art? Can men perhaps by over-sensitivity see things that pertain to the spirit? Can there be a kind of inner sense?

Now just as we have seen that no matter how many times we go back to Greek myth fresh insights and new questions arise endlessly out of the original mythical vision of art as experienced in Greek myth, we have also see that old philosophy (contrary to Greek myth!) did not really seem to understand art. Nevertheless, it was not until Hegel that philosophy really betrayed art with Hegel’s concept of content--with his concept that it seemed that no great human content could be expressed any longer in art--thereby denying that there was something absolutely eternal in art, thereby denying in fact art a rightful place at all. But we cannot accept this position, as it seems to have been accepted, quite so readily without asking first the question that philosophy should have asked: Is not the performance of art perhaps an activity that is absolutely necessary for human life? Can man really do without art without losing his standing as a human being?

Philosophy by never asking this question did a great disservice to art (and incidentally to itself) because only philosophy--free philosophy, pure philosophy--can answer this question for us. If we approach the question from the point of view of history of art, for example, from the point of view, let’s say, that we know there was intense artistic activity going on already at the time of the cave man (as we can see from the cave paintings), we realize that for art to have existed so early must mean there is more of an inner need for art than has ever been suspected, but still we do not really get an answer because all history of art can tell us is that art has always been there without giving us the answer of whether art is a basic source for life. Only philosophy, pure philosophy, free philosophy, can do that for us; only philosophy can give us an indication whether art is of such a basic quality for human life.

The fact that this question has never really been put and that art has really always been considered as derivative and never considered as a way of creating a way of life is very well indicated by the fact that until modern art was able to go back to other styles of other times and approach them, it rarely happened that people were interested in any other style of art than their own (except for the Renaissance and their very mistaken revival of Greek art). This possibility of modern art really to be able for the first time to go back to art styles of other times, strangely enough, came out of a very negative thing: out of the chaos of life and the resulting chaos of the non-style in art of the 19th Century where art was only a theatrical performance, faked, without knowing anything, philosophically speaking, about the originals. Out of this weakness to take every style for imitation’s sake without understanding the thing, grew the tremendous strength of modern art to transcend and to transform all styles into its own, building bridges of immediacy, so to speak, to every experience, creating a kind of internationality with all the dead peoples of the world-- and this possibility that we along with modern art can discover in art, in all art and all styles, is one of the greatest blessings of the curse of the terrible situation we find ourselves in.

It has been possible, for instance, for Picasso to revive old experiences of Attic Greek art and even to enrich them, to enrich the meaning of Greek art backwards--which is one of the greatest possibilities of the human mind. In genuine philosophy when a great thinker comes along and thinks anew, he always goes back to fundamental questions, and in doing so, every new insight he gains throws light backwards, so to speak. After Kant had done his work, it seemed in going back to Plato that Plato had never really been understood before. New things were discovered in Plato that had always been there, of course, but had never been found. All fundamental meta-physical thinking goes on in one context that never breaks and when the human mind discovers new possibilities, it always enriches old experiences. The same is true now in art. We are able for the first tine to experience art as a living body of human experience in which no part dies and in which each new part enriches all the other parts, to experience for the first time this miracle of the coherence of artistic experience that does not die with the new and enriches meaning for us if we go into it for life’s sake--which means there is an eternal quality in such a thing. We are able now not only to grasp the living body of thought in philosophy, but to grasp the living body of images in art too--with one simple pre-condition: the pre-condition that in order to be able to do so--in order to be able, for example, to use the magic key of mythology (as we are trying to use it here)--we must be able to reinforce whatever we use with our own experiences. Once we understand this, the arts can give us by this new phenomenon a thread of Ariadne to lead us out of the labyrinth to a new platform to stand on to re-experience the most different possible experiences of mankind in the past. And surely for art to be able to do such a thing for man must mean that there is something absolutely original in art that stands alone.

Art has always been supposed to be a language, a means of communication, but if this is so, is it not strange that the eternal essence of art comes out even more clearly once we have lost the immediate conditions and immediate time of a work of art, and that our understanding seems to grow in direct proportion to the extent the work of art becomes less and less communicative--as time withers away from it, as the iconic elements are no longer understood (or misunderstood)? It is not important, for example, to know whether the sculptor who built an animistic statue was an animist; it is only necessary to understand what could have helped the artist’s imagination so that he got such an overwhelming strength of expression--and even that is only a technical problem. In view of all that it seems doubtful that art is a language, a means of communication at all.

Language was the earliest creation of mankind--and all the definitions of man (man as a political animal, as a thinking animal, etc) depend upon the initial definition of man as a speaking animal, a language-creating animal (if man can be spoken of as an animal at all). All the creative abilities of man have been needed to make hint the creator of language, including, of course, artistic creativity (for example: certain words try to reproduce along with the meaning intended also the experience of the word, which is almost artistic experience in this sense)--but this does not make language an art, nor does it justify the use of the term “language” for art. The use of the term “language” in relation to art (the “language of color” the “language of music,” etc.) stems from the will to interpret art as a means of communication--underlying which is the idea that something is conveyed to me as the beholder by the artist and by the work of art, that the artist tells me something by the work of art. If it is true that art is a special form of language, then every work of art would have to tell me, the beholder, something--but this would contradict the words of Heraclitus: “The lord whose oracle is that at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but shows.” He shows, he signifies, he indicates--but he does not tell anything. A painting can tell a story, that is true, but that is not what makes it a work of art and the less contact with a story (communication) I, as the beholder, have with a picture, the more it means to me. Story telling means there is a time element involved, and as the time element becomes less and less, the work of art strikes me more and more.

The very meaning of the term “communication” itself makes it impossible to conceive of a work of art as a form of communication because there is always one condition for communication: an answer must always be possible-- which means that communication, strictly speaking, is only possible directly between human beings, directly with each other. Certainly, in a work of art this answer is never possible--either with the artist or with the work of art itself. My answer can never reach the artist of the picture because I do not face the artist, a man, but a work of art; and with a work of art itself such an answer is not possible because a work of art never engages me in a discussion--nor is it ever possible for me to enter into a discussion with a work of art.

But if a work of art is not communication, if it does not speak to me, what does happen to me, the beholder, when I look at a work of art? First of all, it is a question not of what the work of art does but what the work of art itself is. It is a question not of the work of art trying to transmit something to me, the beholder, which I should answer, but rather a question of the ability of a work of art, as a work of art, to bring me into an experience, and nothing else--which means that it is not communication but an engagement in participation where contact is established by my being taken into the work of art by form. To say that art is communication when it has the ability to bring the beholder into a procedure of participation means to underestimate and to misunderstand art because participation is a much higher possibility than communication and one which is surpassed only by the possibility of human beings in the creative human performance of love: the possibility of identification. Participation, therefore, as the possibility expressed by art, lies directly between those two other possibilities of human beings--the possibility of communication as expressed in language, for example, and the possibility of identification as expressed in love--and just as communication and identification have their own special abilities and laws, so to speak, participation also has its own special ability (the ability to engage the beholder in an experience) and its own special law (the law of form).

Now the objection might be raised: “Oh! That’s all very well what you say about language and art in terms of painting, but what about poetry--which is an art of language itself?” But in poetry is language really used as language? Do we not find that in the specific form of poetry itself, in the very changing around of words for rhymes and rhythms, is expressed the intention and deep meaning to get rid of language, to get rid of the quality of language? Does not the form of poetry itself take the mind of the reader away from language in the sense of communication, making language a means of pure expression to give instead of communication participation?

In prose at first glance language does seem to be the thing itself-- but do we speak prose or do we speak language? Some do speak prose--writers who try always to improve their style, who try to speak written language with long sentences, paragraphs, or even whole essays--but as soon as some one speaks prose he gives us a negative point for our argument because a man who speaks essays or articles, so to speak, can no longer communicate. He is not carrying on a conversation or discussion with someone else but merely speaking in the sense of reading aloud or quoting a memorized statement--which means that prose too must not be a means of communication. Prose in general is for description, for written thought, for transmitting information--certainly, it is not meant to be used, as the fool who speaks prose uses it. So at second glance it would seem that prose in general, let alone artistic prose, must not of necessity be communication merely because of language and that artistic prose itself, like poetry, actually gets rid of language as a means of communication and is able by means of appealing entirely to the inner sense of man, trying to mobilize his intelligence and understanding and to arouse direct sensual impressions, to bring the reader into an experience of participation.

This question of art and its relation, if any, to communication brings us back to Heidegger and the vicious circle be discovered because one very important factor in this vicious circle has been the underlying concept that art is a means of communication--a concept we are trying very hard to break since it seems that art simply cannot be approached in terms of communication. If for no other reason, we would have to discard this approach because nothing can put us into a work of art but the work of art itself. All the talking in the world by the artist of what he meant “to communicate” (and only a very bad artist would try such a thing) could not bring us into an experience that was not in the work of art itself or could make us see anything the work of art could not make us see.

But let’s go on now to another question brought up by Heidegger in his attempt to get out of the vicious circle because it brings us into a very valuable line of inquiry and one which will eventually lead back to a question we have already touched upon: the special role played by the senses in art. Heidegger tried the approach that a work of art is a thing, and then went on to show that being a thing it must consist of matter--and look! It does. This approach that a work of art is a thing opens up some very interesting possibilities for us. Certainly, literally speaking, a canvas as a work of art, or a piece of sculptured stone, or even vibrating air as in music, is a thing--but what kind of a thing? It is a thing like nothing else. First, it is an entirely produced thing--a thing that seems to have no necessity of existence. It is brought into existence entirely by human will and the world would be exactly as it is without it. It is a thing that seems to be definitely added to the world, an addition made by man--like a child born, but without the necessity (since a child is born out of a certain stream of necessity). Second, this additional thing is a thing that is entirely useless within the context of cause and effect. It seems neither to be caused nor to cause within that stream of cause and effect (unless it is considered to be a means of communication--which would put it where it does not belong)--a quality that can be discovered in no other thing except perhaps in man himself (who also can put himself out of the context of cause and effect). It seems to be a thing--this dead thing, this stone, canvas or certain continuity of vibrating air--that has no similarity to any other thing except to man to whom it is most alike. But how could such a thing have a similarity to man and to nothing else? What kind of performance would be necessary to create such a thing?

First, we must look at what it is made of: stone, wood, pigment, canvas, sounds, and words--all things (with the possible exception of words, which would seem to carry their own meaning) that are meaningless in themselves, all things that are dead things. Only words seem to be meaningful and alive--but once again we have to ask: How are words used in poetry and artistic prose? The trick of poetry is to take words out of their original communicative purpose in order to enable them to draw us into the participation of a certain experience--which means that the words as used in poetry have lost their original meaning in the communicative sense and have been rejuvenated by art. In art words are taken as dead material and loaded with the meaning of a certain specific experience. This artistic meaning can load words so heavily with such an association of experiences that the metaphorical content and meaning will carry over into communication--and to such a point that those words will never become entirely empty (which is the reason, on the other hand, why language becomes emptier and emptier the moment that poetry is not there to do this). A word like evening, for example, can gain through poetry such an ability to carry meaning, can become so loaded by great artistic experience that even when it is used in a simple phrase like “Good Evening” the associations are still there and “He who says ‘Good Evening’ says much.” And not only poetry--artistic prose can do the same. After reading Joyce one will find that many hollow words suddenly seem to have taken on new meaning, new associations of experience.

Art is the one activity of man where he can make himself most sure of being a conditioner, the one capability of man where he has to reckon least with conditions, where he is able to show that he can change things around as he wants to, where things (color, sound, wood, etc.) become the slaves of man and where they as things have the least to say--where man, more than at any other time, feels himself to be the master. Through art man has the possibility of all this power over things, but once again we have to inquire more deeply into the things themselves--into those strange things meaningless in themselves that become the materials used in art to express a very alive thing--because there is still more to it. There seems at least two more indications to be found in the materials of which art is made--and very strange ones: first, the indication that although material, of course, is used, there is the strange quality about this material that it seems to be as little a physical thing as possible and second, that it is bound to the senses in a very special way. In painting, for example, we have color. Now colors, as we all know, do not exist as such but are certain waves of reflected light of a certain length. Colors belong only to the human perception of the thing, to the manner in which we perceive waves of light. It is our visual sense that transforms the waves of light into perception of color--so in a way we could say that colors do not belong to things. Paint itself, of course, contains certain matter, and as such has to be considered a thing, but there again the matter itself is not used for itself but only because it can convey color. In music we hear sounds--but how? Waves of vibrating air become musical sounds to us through our ears--but actually all we hear are waves of air which through the ears are translated into sound. So sound again is a thing that seems to be almost without matter, that seems to be as little a thing as possible.

(Modern art in a way has given us a strange argument of this in re-verse. Plato thought art was imitation, that a painted table, for example, was only an imitation of a real table, but he had to wait a long time be-fore the modern artist put the real table, so to speak, into a picture-- which he did in the collage. In collages the modern artist thought he could put the “real thing” into a picture and by that take the meaning out of the thing itself, using real things to make them into non-things, to make them only conveyors of experience.)

Now this all seems very true as long as we are talking about painting with its waves of reflected light and music with its waves of vibrating air--but what about sculpture? Stone seems to be a very massive thing indeed-but, as it is used in art, is it really? Can we say (unless we would be able to invent a light that would show every interior grain of the stone) that in sculpture the “whole” of the stone is used? Is not the surface of the stone really the material used? And once again--since the surface is just the border where the thing ceases to exist--is it not as little of the thing as possible? But even if we acknowledge that in sculpture we also take a thingless thing, so to speak, and use it for a work of art, we still have to consider whether the second strange indication of the materials used in painting and music holds true. We still have to ask: Do we have the same dependence upon the senses with a surface that we have with color and sound. Can we say that a surface used in a piece of sculpture, like color and sound, only exists within our senses as such? Can we say that the same transformation takes place with a surface that happens with a wave of reflected light or vibrating air where those waves are transformed by the senses into another thing--into color or sound--and are taken to make a work of art only in the form into which they have been transformed?

Surface seemed to be different since we cannot prove so readily as we can in painting, for example, that the surface seen in the piece of sculpture is as different from surface as the border plane of a thing as color is from reflected waves of light--or in other words, it seems we cannot prove that surface, as the material used in sculpture, exists in the work of art only in the senses in the same way that color or sound do in painting and music. But in a piece of sculpture has not the same transformation taken place? Is not the artistic experience of a piece of sculpture based not on the border plane of a thing but on the immediate surface we have when we feel it. Is not sculpture dependent on our sense of feeling as painting is on our visual sense or music on our audio sense? Does not the same transformation have to take place in our senses? Is it not on our sense of feeling the experience of the surface that a work of art in sculpture is based--using the surface in order to mobilize our sense of feeling and touch? So can we not say that in sculpture also not only is as little of a thing as is possible used, but that it is used in the work of art only as it has been transformed by our senses?

Now what about poetry--and artistic prose, of course. Words, especially in poetry, are led back to sound--which, as in music, exists only as something through the sense of hearing--with this difference: sound in music is inarticulate sound while sound in poetry (and abstractly in prose) with its added material, so to speak, of words is articulate sound. This added burden, so to speak, of words may make things a little more difficult for poetry and prose (as we can see in an alliance between the two such as opera where articulate sound cannot compete with inarticulate sound--great poetry, as a matter of fact, can even be harmful to music with both destroying each other) but even so articulate sound still exists only as matter for our senses, is still a material event only for our senses and nowhere else.

So it seems that all the means used in the arts are made up in a way “of the stuff dreams are made of”--for they are things that are on that borderline of our senses where we touch the world exactly, that borderline between outwardness and inwardness that runs within our senses. Art is made of things--but special things that exist only within and for our senses (which is the meaning of the mythical Greek insight that Orpheus could hear the sound of trees and stones and could make himself understood to them). In general our senses are our means to communicate our will to the world, but in art a very strange thing happens. Our senses instead of being used for practical purposes are used in art to convey to them some-thing they otherwise would never experience: joy. Art--via the senses, as we have seen--has the strange capability to bring joy to the senses. A work of art must be a joy for the senses--a painting for the eyes, a Greek statue for the sense of touch and feeling, music for the ears--otherwise we would never be able through art to bring the senses into their own right and to show them that they are able to perceive more in life than just seeing, feeling, and hearing things. Art then mobilizes the senses in quite a different way--bringing them into their own, bringing them into their own in a way so they become autonomous. There is no other means except in terms of the senses to explain the effect that art has upon us.

Once we realize this, it must also become apparent that the only way to educate people to understand works of art is by educating the senses--leading the senses into the perception needed (the eyes, for example, into recognizing form, color and so on). By educating the senses we can make art speak to man; we can enable art to give back to man its power of self-explanation. A work of art never tells anything, but it has via the senses the power of self-explanation and if the power of self-explanation of a real work of art is lost, it means that the real loss is not in the work of art itself, but in the loss of our own sense perception and our moral loss of perception itself. So it seems that the senses--that strange borderline between outwardness and inwardness, that borderline where we touch the world exactly--are the only thing able to lead us into another strange realm: the realm where all art takes place, the realm that is like a small strip of land that can be claimed entirely by the world or entirely by man as belonging to him alone, the realm that is a kind of no-man’s land between the world and man where both realms meet and become indistinguishable.

But, once we have discovered that art is a thing that can only be approached by the senses, we still must go on further to ask: What kind of a thing is this thing?--for there is more to art than meets the senses. Having tried the one approach via the senses, we must now try the counter-approach: the approach via the concept of the thing itself--first trying to find out what it might be, then how it could be, what it is that makes it a thing. Is it a thing brought into being entirely by human beings? Is it a thing that would not exist at all if human beings did not make it? And what do we mean by a thing generally?

IX(2)

The purpose of philosophy (aside from the academic approach) is to make every man a philosophical man; the purpose of art is by works of art to make every man an artistic man. And just as every man can become a philosophical human being, he can also become by means of art an artistic human being. Man is a very strange being who has the wonderful possibility of becoming (and here becoming in the true sense of the word) more and more a human being and of realizing more and more, by bring them about, certain deep underlying dreams of man (the deep desire of living in a world that has meaning, for example--or the deep desire, which can be fulfilled in a work of art, of the perfect identity of essence and existence, meaning and being)--but first and most of all, man is a questioning being, a being who when faced, for example, with a phenomenon of something absolutely unique (as a work of art is) is put into a state of astonishment and out of this state of astonishment (or marveling as Aristotle says) starts to ask questions. Man starts to ask the question: Why are things at all?-- trying to get to the root of the question of being itself.

Philosophy is the one creative ability of man most concerned with such questions, the one creative ability of man primarily concerned with basic fundamental questions--which is why philosophy is the only creative ability that can explain all the other creative abilities to themselves and why we call philosophy in here to help us in our inquiry into what art might be. Philosophy, for example, can help us bring to light the basic joys that every work of art can give us--basic joys that because they are fundamental are hidden, but which also, because they are fundamental, became self-evident once they are brought to light. This is the strange thing above fundamental things--although they are hidden, they are always perfectly self-evident once they are found.

Now (to go on with our inquiry into what a work of art might be) let’s approach for a moment the question of what a work of art as a whole is--and whether it can be compared, as it often has been, to an organism. Is not a work of art rather an entity--an entity in the real sense of the word where everything in the work of art is ruled by one central over-all vision of form, where each thing is relative to the other and all relative to this one absolute, where every part of the work of art has such a relation to the whole that even a part of it carries the whole with it (in the way, for example, that a remaining portion of a Greek statue can still create for the beholder the feeling of the whole work of art)? How can something like that be compared to an organism? How can any concept of an organism ever give us an insight into a work of art or ever be adequately compared to a work of art--or to any other creative endeavor of man for that matter?

The idea that something like a work of art or a human community (that other favorite choice for comparison with an organism) can possibly be a higher degree of an organism simply does not hold water. A work of art, which finally resembles nothing so much as man himself, can no more be considered simply to be a higher degree of organism than man himself can be, and certainly a human community as a system of human relations based on man-made laws to create a certain human order (in order to make it possible, for example, for human justice to emerge) is a much higher entity than any identification with an organism could imply. Even from the point of view of organization, the comparison simply is not valid--for as far as a work of art is concerned, the artisan part aside, it has nothing to do with organization at all, and while it is perfectly true that a human community is organized, it cannot be considered as an organism even in that sense of the word because free will already enters in.

Now we have said that a work of art, if it can be compared to anything, resembles man himself more than anything else--but how and why? Since we are beings who are born as sketches only of human beings with the possibility of becoming more and more human beings--beings who are not born free, wise or just but only with the possibility of becoming more and more so--we are beings who can only become ourselves, so to speak, at the end of a successful life. But then we might get the feeling from a long life of developing and continuity that everything has been put into a framework of interrelation that gives sense and meaning. We might finally get the feeling that we have become a real living entity--an entity where nothing is senseless, where everything has meaning and falls into place. It is to us--to man in this sense--that a work of art finally can only be compared (and conversely it is the work of art that gives us the greatest assurance of our possibility to become an entity for how can the creator of something have less possibilities than the thing he is able to create). We as creators of art have the possibility to create entities--entities that are the fulfillment of our innermost ideal: the identity of essence and existence, being and meaning--the possibility to assemble everything in ourselves and to bring life into one unity that has sense and meaning. We as the creators of art on the one hand have the possibility to bring about in every work of art the fulfillment of that deep longing of man and as the beholders of art on the other hand are able to sense that fulfillment in every work of art and to be put to rest by it.

And that brings us to the problem of the beholder and the work of art--to the questions: What happens to the beholder? How does the work of art work on him and how does it come about? What is the relation of the beholder to the work of art? What is the way he faces the work of art? The medieval mystic’s way of facing God was to see truth--to see God and to behold Him. Then he was in felicity with no questions left, no effort required. He knew who he was and he was what he knew. The beholder’s main problem is much the same: to be able to give himself up entirely to the experience of the work of art. But how does this come about? How does the work of art start to work on the beholder? One means, of course, is through the senses, but leaving that aside for the moment, how does the work of art work on the beholder otherwise? What is done to the beholder by the work of art?

To answer that let’s go back once more to the Greeks--to Heraclitus this time and to a concept of his which is particularly pertinent to our problem. Heraclitus within his whole philosophical system conceived of the world as the playing of Zeus--the great world-child Zeus playing the infinite play of change, constant change that moves by itself, infinite change that is process itself (which is quite a different proposition from Hegel’s concept of change). This concept of God conceived by the man who founded the scientific method itself by his concept of change and by his position that the laws of nature were limited laws that could be discovered by man is one of the harshest and cruelest concepts of God to be found--but nevertheless we find in the idea of Zeus’ play very much the same kind of experience that a work of art puts us into. The play of a god is creative play; the play a work of art can put us into is also creative play--creative play in the sense that art can set our senses into play in the two fundamental aspects of time and space (since a work of art as formed lives in time and space) in such a way that what is a task for us in the world is turned into joy, into play.

We as human beings in the world are not only concerned passively with time and space, but we are also concerned actively with them. We have a task with them; we work with them. Insofar as time and space are physical (as they are in science) our relation to them can be conceived of only as passive (space is considered as objective space, space as given in the physical world, time as physical time), but there are also metaphysical time and space and there our relation to the phenomena of time and space can only be conceived of as active. Our relation to metaphysical tine and space involves, for example, time and space perceptions--which are actions, something we do actively (as Caesar said when asked about warfare: “The eyes are the first to be defeated.”). By space and time perceptions we space ourselves and time ourselves (which means we are not only in time and space but we also have time and space) and unconsciously we all do this. In the blind man, for example, other senses have to be developed to replace his eyes so he can space himself--touch, smell, hearing have to be developed in order to replace to a certain extent the loss of sight. In moments of extreme danger, as in cases of dizziness in climbing or drowning, we must space ourselves consciously. We must actively assemble space phenomena around us in order to orient ourselves again.

In art this ability of ours becomes play. One of the basic wonderments of art is the great miracle that when we see a painting we are suddenly made beholders of space entirely mastered by us. We are the location itself and everything is related to us and our location. This space becomes alive to us, opens up only to us and takes us into it. We are not only masters of space but we understand for the first time space in its meaning and it becomes meaningful. Space in the world can only be objective. We live in space and can work with space, but it does not convey meaning. Space can be abstracted into mathematical formulas by us, but they only make sense--they do not convey meaning to us. We time and we space in the world, but as a nuisance, as a task--but through art this is turned into a joy, into play: we enjoy it. Our ability to space and to time are actively turned into something transcendent and we are made masters of time and space--masters of space in painting and masters of time in music--and of tine and space that becomes meaningful.

Just as painting gives us mastery over space, music gives us mastery over time--complete mastery because music is entirely in time. In music we are put before a phenomenon of eternity that is the same kind of a phenomenon in time that we can have in space: namely, the phenomenon of eternity that when it deals with finite space it can nevertheless be infinite because it is closed in itself. In music we have this kind of eternity in time--an extension of time given as a whole. We are forced by the work of art to go back and forth--we are before it and sometimes behind it and by a constant going back and forth are set above time. We have a sense of duration of ourselves that spreads all over the extension of time--which means we have time in music in the same sense we have space in painting: in a way that transforms our ability to space and time our-selves (and thus to have space and time as well as be in space and time) from a task in the world to creative play, to something that brings us joy. A work of art by activating our senses in a creative concept to produce joy is able to give us an ability of creative play that is exactly the same as that of the world-child Zeus in Heraclitus.

Now we have said that in a work of art, though the basic joys are hidden at first because they are fundamental, there is nothing that pretends to be hidden. This makes it possible for us to trust the work of art and to give ourselves to it--and since we approach a work of art through the senses, it means that with a work of art we do something we never do except as children or in love: we trust our senses and trust them absolutely. As children we trust our parents through the senses and later when we face our beloved we take the tremendous risk of trusting our senses--but it is only with a work of art that we feel we run no risk. We do the fantastic and courageous thing of trusting our senses--giving them up fully to the experience, letting the work of art work on us to the full--and the reward is tremendous. That is why when we try to make works or art understandable to people who do not understand them that it cannot be done by intellectual means but only through the senses. A work of art educates our senses and we are able to trust our senses in a way we can do with nothing else because we feel there is or can be no harm in a work of art. Why? Why are we able to put such trust in a work of art? Because we sense the fact that a work of art has one absolute incapability--and one that cannot be said of anything else: the absolute incapability of hiding any possible harm to us. So we are able to let ourselves go into the experience of the senses-- and then something very strange starts to happen: our senses seem to think. But then we have to ask: What kind of thinking? Are there different kinds of thinking, and if so what can they be?

There are three different kinds of creative thinking: fundamental thinking, which we have in philosophy; analytical thinking, which we have in science; and synthetical thinking which we have in art--not synthetic in the scientific sense of synthesis but rather in the sense of metaphorical thinking where the work of art not only makes us think but to associate too--and here, once again, not associate in the scientific sense, but in a creative way. In psychoanalysis there is certain process of association which, because it is involuntary and cannot be controlled, is physical in my meaning of the word (as dreams are physical in that sense too). In art, on the other hand, we have a creative procedure of association. The medium is the same--the human mind--but a creative procedure of association in the mind of the beholder is brought about by the form of the work of art itself--which is a crystallization of experiences expressed multi-metaphorically.

This phenomenon of the crystallization of human experience (once we are brought through the means of the senses into the work of art) causes us to speculate by touching experiences of our own corresponding to those already expressed in the work of art--setting in motion a procedure of creative association (which is one reason why a work of art can be interpreted indefinitely). We are able to remobilize forgotten experiences-- touching them again and adding by that to the work of art itself. We are working (working really rather than interpreting) on the work of art our-selves. We are in the middle of a great inner dialogue with the work of art--in a line of metaphorical thinking, adding to the work of art and interpreting it for ourselves in different stages of our life.

And--because it is a metaphorical crystallization of life experience-- a work of art can do even more: it can become a mirror of our experiences too where the deeper we look into the work of art the deeper it throws us back into ourselves--which is an experience given to man nowhere else but in art. Genuine artistic experience is the key that opens our own inwardness to us (and in this sense can become in a way our judge too). This is the living relation that art brings about for us as beholders. We are led back into ourselves by the work of art through enlightenment and in such a way that it has the possibility to reinforce our own capabilities-- to reinforce, for example, our ability to love. Beholding a work of art is a sense experience and as such takes on inwardly the color of sensuous feelings relating back to experiences and insights of certain moments of our own life. By beholding a work of art we are able to become ourselves more and more, to unify ourselves more and more--and here as beholders, we have an advantage that the artist who created the work of art never has: we become men who have the possibility of living metaphorical thinking and experience without the necessity of ever getting out of the real creative process--which the artist has to do. We, as beholders, have the possibility of an entirely creative experience--while the artist has one uncreative side to him: in order to be able finally to create the work of art he has to get out of the creative process--or rather he has to try to put himself above the creative process.

But this is an extremely complicated question and one we will have to come back to because for one thing there is a great difference between the artist trying to put himself above the creative process in order to create a work of art and the other danger that can happen to an artist: the danger to be thrown entirely out of the creative process. The artist mostly does not know (or cannot at least consciously think about) what he is doing in the creative process itself of producing a work of art--and Plato who was a great lover of art and artistic himself (although Plato as a philosopher bitterly attacked art--but this was for quite another reason[3]) was one of the first to show us that there must be a cleavage between the artist’s learning and his art, that the artist must rule knowledge out of art because as soon as he brings analytical conscious thinking into his work he throws himself out of the creative process. But if this should be truer we are faced then immediately with the question: Does this also mean on the other hand that the artist really is only, as Plato thought he was, “the mouthpiece of Apollon,” who as soon as the gift of Apollon is given to him speaks in beauty of the truth but does not know what he is doing?--which means that in order really to inquire into this problem we have to inquire into such questions as: What is the creative process and what else, if anything, is necessary to produce a work of art? Is the creative process one that only possesses the artist, so to speak, or is it a free activity? Is the artist only “the mouthpiece of Apollon” or do other things enter in too?

The artist as a human being (not to mention as a creator of art) has found himself in a steadily worsening situation until at last he finds himself in the position of being both a genius and a monster. And to make matters worse, as if it were not bad enough on the one hand to be considered a monster, genius itself has come to mean something almost as bad in terms of a human being. The artist is placed in the terrible predicament of being considered on the one hand a special type of human being, with special qualities as a human being, who because he is a “genius” and thus so special is to be excused from the responsibilities of life and not to be measured by the usual yardstick, and on the other hand of being considered demonical, a danger for society, a monster. This impossible situation for the artist personally has been another result generally of the breakdown of the framework of theological and cosmological thinking and specifically, of course, an indication of the changed position of art itself.

Within the old order of cosmological and theological thinking the artist was still considered to be “the mouthpiece of Apollon,” and though we might have a few serious questions about this now, it still assured the artist--both as a creator of art and as a human being--of a tenable position. All this lasted until Kant destroyed the foundations of this old order, but since these things take such a very long time to be felt and understood, Kant himself was still able to conceive of the artist in the old way and wanted to reserve the word “genius” only for the artist (as the one who was inspired and rightly could be so, as the one who could use intuition, and rightly so--as the philosopher or scientist could not). But once the old order of things was really gone the situation became more and more pathological for the artist. The artist as a human being frightened other human beings, and came to be considered more and more dangerous for society--for a society that had no room now for a metaphysical concept of life but only recognized a physical concept of life--until the artist finally found himself in the terrible situation of living in a world that either had no place for him at all or considered him to be super-human--of living in a world that looked at him as a sort of combined genius-monster.

Now this predicament of the dual position, so to speak, of the artist has its parallel, of course, in the position of art itself and the split that came about putting art into a position on the one hand where it no longer was considered to have any significance for a scientific world and where on the other hand, it was given significance that did not belong to it. Since it does not seem likely that this was caused entirely by the development that followed Kant, there must have been some basis for it at least in Western thinking about art that had gone on before--and there was, of course.

Plato, as we have seen, felt that the artist was “the mouthpiece of Apollon,” who could speak in beauty of the truth when this gift of Apollon was given to him. Plato also felt that the artist should never try to imitate things as they appear but should try to give true being (which to Plato, of course, was ideas)--and from this stems the distinction between form and content. We tried to make a distinction between thought and form--which accounts for many things that have crept into art. Bother these statements of Plato’s concerning art and the artist prevailed up to Nietzsche--and then with Nietzsche came the final explosion of all the basic fundamental errors of Western philosophy, and the split in philosophy itself that started with Hegel was completed. As Hegel brought out one bias--the scientific one--developing logic and the scientific approach to the full and by that spoiling thinking itself--so Nietzsche brought out and developed the other bias: the aesthetical one. With that philosophy broke in two.

Now every philosophical statement is not only a statement but a pro-position implying action. Half of a philosophical statement is a situational judgment of a certain situation, which can be checked (“This is how I, as a philosopher, evaluate this situation from the facts at hand.”); the other half of the statement is a proposition which proposes a course of action to be agreed upon (“This is what I, as a philosopher, feel to be the best position and course of action to take in this situation, and if you agree, let’s proceed on this way.”). This propositional element of a philosophical statement has not been acknowledged, nor the element of agreement in it recognized (a philosophical statement mostly having been considered simply as a statement), but nevertheless these elements of will, intention, and subsequent action are there and have to be under-stood if we do not want to fall prey to every proposition that comes along.

Nietzsche recognizing the terrible dangers and implications of Hegel’s approach tried to set art against science and tried to design a whole system of metaphysics on the premise that man lives by art. Everything has value only because of its aesthetical value--including man--which puts the artist in the position of being some kind of a super-man. We have the concept of the artist as a super-man with man taking the same position as the artist takes and with the artist trying to teach man how to take that position--and it is a concept that tries to make genius the creator of everything and genius itself completely free, completely arbitrary. But this is only the opposite end of the pole which means that Nietzsche too fell into the trap. To say that art is more than life, that it is the top of all thinking means to think of the artist in a mythical way--to think of the artist as a “mouthpiece of Apollon” (and here with Nietzsche as the mouthpiece of the will to power).

Nietzsche overrated art because he loved it so much. He like Plato was a highly gifted poet and he, also like Plato, deliberately sacrificed his artistic capabilities in order to be a philosopher--which was not an easy proposition for someone who loved art as much as Nietzsche did. He said once in talking about poetry: “Are there People who know what the poets of the strong ages called inspiration?” It seemed to him, as a poet himself, that it was a state of enlightenment--and of such enlightenment that everything could be used at once to write the truth, everything begged to be used--with a tremendous richness and fullness of forms moving on and into him. This is an accurate description of the state of mind in which a work of art starts--but again in the mythical realm, again the concept of “the mouthpiece of Apollon.” Nothing seems to be really done by the artist; everything seems to be being done and only using the artist. But what is the artistic process? Is it an unconscious or a free activity?

Now we have seen there are three kinds of thinking--fundamental thinking in philosophy, analytical thinking in science, and the activity of metaphorical thinking in art--and we have also seen that in metaphorical thinking there is a certain process of association. This, of course, immediately brings in an almost inevitable comparison of the association that goes on in metaphorical thinking with the associative process found in psychoanalysis. But to compare them too closely would mean to take the artist as a possessed man--a man possessed by involuntary associations he cannot control--which in turn would mean to compare the artist to the insane man because the insane man is also possessed. So we must ask: Is metaphorical thinking really possessed thinking? Is the artist really only “the mouthpiece of Apollon?”

Now the three kinds of thinking--fundamental, analytical, and metaphorical--are very closely related to that only too well known and most aggravating of all questions to a parent: Why, Daddy? When a child asks: Why Daddy is it so?, he is usually satisfied with a how or what--with how it works or what it is--which means that most children are usually content with an analytical answer. But then there is the child who when he has heard the how or what still asks: But why? This child who really wants to know why cannot get the answer from the how of it or the what of it--which means he has entered into a stream of fundamental thinking and philosophizing. The third child, on the other hand, never asks a question at all--he just gives an immediate answer. He sees a happening and immediately gives an explanation; he identifies it with himself inwardly and then invents and tells a story of what happened. Now which child would we say has suffered the greatest impact of reality? All have felt the impact of reality, but it is the child who does not ask but answers who is the most hurt by it. The answer is the result of the awareness of a real event in a mind that cannot bear the impact, but must fortify itself by transcending it, by transforming it into something unreal. This process can also be seen in a psychopath, and philosophically speaking, these answers are lies.

So it seems that metaphorical thinking transforms reality by a psycho-pathological process into a lie. But is there more to it than that? What, for example, makes the psychopath and the artist different? Why can an insane man and a child do artistic painting? What do they have in common with the artist and what divides them from the artist? This seems all bound up with mental processes--which say nothing in themselves but produce forms--and with the question of being possessed by mental processes. Being possessed is a mental phenomenon that philosophically is explained by fundamentalized thinking of the demonical and scientifically explained by studying some of the mental processes. But where does the child fit into this?--for there seems to be a strange bond that links the child, the insane man, and the artist.

The child who shields himself against the impact of reality by a process of transformation is a child who withdraws into himself first and then answers this impact, if it is a very great one, by transforming reality into unreality. But when the impact is not so great that it has to be answered by a lie but can be answered only by inner transcendence, we have a painting child--and one who has a tremendous advantage over an art student who is trying to learn how to paint things as they look. When this child paints a cat, for example, he tries to make a cat, not paint one; and when he is finished the painting is not a picture of a cat, it is a cat to him--which means, artistically speaking, that the mentality of the child gives him the same advantage that the animistic painter had when he believed not that he was painting a likeness of a god, but that he was actually making a god. This naive state of mind (which only a child with the absolute belief of making something or a primitive believer, as the animistic artist was, can have) is one undisturbed by reflection; it is pure reaction of the mind. But while reflections cannot come into this, the disadvantage is that the form either creates itself by this process or form cannot be created at all because it cannot be controlled. The child and the animistic painter identify themselves absolutely with the object and the object with themselves. This is an ability that has to be regained as an active performance by every artist, but with this difference: he has to be the master and not the slave of the process (as the child is).

The insane man also is a slave to a mental process. He is always under the impact of one impact he has never gotten rid of--and one that eventually swallows everything up with it--which means that through the mental process which controls him he makes a negative process of an aim of every human being: the aim to be able to unite at the end of human life everything into one unity that makes sense. This takes place in the insane mind in a negative way--as a process of decay. The complete unity is achieved by the complete destruction of every meaning into an idée fixe, for example (which is one of the clearest examples of this). The insane man is a complete slave; he has lost any free decision. The unifying logic of insanity breaks out in him unifying everything in the wrong sense, making everything revolve around one thing which controls him. When the psychiatrist brings this person to painting it is for several reasons. For one thing, the mere handicraft of painting or drawing in itself is a physical activity that soothes the mind. For another thing, especially if the patient is hopelessly insane, it is the most harmless way for him to spin on his fantasies in the process of insanity. Daydreaming accelerates the process too much, but by transforming the same process into the activity of drawing or painting, a delaying process is brought about that is much slower than thinking. And then, of course, the psychiatrist also wants to study the drawing or painting and to find out more about the illness from what is for him a mere illustration of the mental process.

Now in painting with both the child (in an innocent and sane way) and the insane person (in a possessed way) there is an identification of the person with the object and the object with the person. An insane person can only produce infinite artistic elements, never a work of art; a child by chance may produce a work of art if the form becomes united--but neither is an artist. Yet they, the child and the insane man, are the ones that the artist has always been supposed to be--but never really has been. The difference lies in the leading of this process into a productive process where the artist is the master, where he is not possessed by but possesses, where he is not controlled by but controls the process and by that produces works of art. But this basic experience of total identification, which is absolute in the child and insane man, still has to be preserved by the artist--though not in the same way. Why?

The immediacy of the answer given by a child who answers before any question is raised can only be explained by a basic metaphor. This child in being thrown into a world that he does not understand experiences existential fear (the fear of nothingness) which he tries to overcome by immediate action--and this is the main source itself of creative activity: suffering the full impact of the thing but overcoming it by having the courage to take the jump. When a small frightened boy starts whistling in the dark it means, philosophically speaking, that he has responded to the full impact of unknown reality by trying to re-assert himself in the very moment when he is about to lose himself. He tries to overcome this feeling of losing himself and to steady himself against the reality of the unknown by re-asserting himself--and by one of the best means there is: by making sound. To make sound in such moments--any kind of sound at first, a whisper, a cry, a gasp--is a great help, psychologically speaking, because it recomposes us by making us realize we are still there, that we are not so lost after all. The small boy in the dark who has re-asserted himself so far that not only can he make sound but can even whistle a tune has really created a very primitive work of art. In such cases we are setting against the reality of the unknown a building of our own that we have made and can rely on absolutely. This is the beginning of artistic activity and this too has to be regained.

Everyone is born with a dream: the child shows he has the dream, though by the time he has grown he has usually forgotten it; the insane person is caught by the dream and being devoured by it after having forgotten it; only the artist realizes the dream--and it is this process of realization that distinguishes the creative activities of the artist from the creative activities of others. This process of realization has to enter into the creative activities, this jump has to be made in order to place the artist above his own creative processes, in order to make him the master and not the slave of them.

Perhaps the double armor of Apollon--the bow and the lyre--might give us a further clue into art and into what artistic activity might be and what really might distinguish the activities of the artist from those of a painting child or insane man. Mythological things are kernels out of which everyone can build beautiful things--not the truth perhaps, but moving within the orbit of truth. In this sense the double symbol of Apollon, the bow and lyre, might have an indication for us in what these two opposites that are identified together as weapons of Apollon might mean in regard to the artist, art, and artistic activity--an indication related in general to a certain identity of opposites to be found in art and specifically to a very special identity at opposites to be found both in art and artistic activity. The artist, as the human being who can create art, must have the capability of building up essence by existence and building up existence by essence--which means the capability of building certain identities; the work of art itself must have certain identities (and ones that only a work of art has)--the identity of essence and existence, meaning and being, the identity of form and content, the identity of space and the spaceless, the identity in music of time and the timeless--and one other special identity that marks the work of art as well as the artistic process that brings about the work of art: the identity of thinking and doing in the work of art and in the process itself of the artist and the creation of works of art.

Now both the bow and the lyre are pieces of wood bent into a curve, both have strings. The one, the bow, is a symbol for extreme doing with no thinking; the other, the lyre, a symbol for almost doing nothing but thinking. So the double symbol of Apollon is a mythical symbol for thinking with almost no content but thinking itself and the establishment of relations with movement--both of which are indistinguishable in the work of art. As everything is given by the senses, no thinking is required, no task is set (as distinguished from metaphysical or fundamental thinking which does set a task). Everything is thought and done--the deed is the thought, the thought is the deed. This absolute unity of thought and deed given to the senses by the work of art must be given to the work of art itself, of course, by the artist--who enters into a process where he cannot distinguish between doing and thinking because they interchange so fast. But this does not mean that this process, which is the productive process, is an unconscious one; it only seems so because it is such a very fast inter-change of thinking and doing which by its very speed gets its unity. But, metaphysically speaking, the unconscious or subconscious is involved and once again we have to ask: Is it really a free activity of man or only a physical process going on that is given to him?

The artist is making a thing--and, as we have seen, in such a way that thinking and doing are indistinguishable both in the process of making it and in the work of art itself. The moment he would become conscious of the process he would jump into a stream at analytical thinking, reflecting on himself--which might give much joy but could never produce a work of art. He would also by doing this be jumping into the beginning of an insane process where he would become the prey of the metaphorical process which might destroy him. The worst thing in terms of being an artist is to want to be an artist--to try, so to speak, to approach being an artist backwards, to want, for example, as so many people seem to want these days, to be a writer. But a man can never become an artist by first wanting to be an artist. The conditions under which a work of art can be produced of necessity rule out that approach since it is only explicitly by force and discipline (though not consciously so) and by action that the artist produces. This rules out intellectual reflection because otherwise he would never get the speed between thought and action that finally become one. The productive process--which is not a state of reaction (even though it might be unconsciously motivated) but action--is what distinguishes the artist from the artistic man. The artist must go out of the creative process; he must rise above it, master and control it--which means that the artist must get above the stream of metaphorical thinking, that he must, so to speak, be able to build a boat so that he not only can row on that stream, but can row in a certain direction.

Now we have said that the type of thinking used in art is metaphorical thinking, and have been trying to find out what kind of thinking it might be--but what could the metaphor itself be? Is the metaphor really only a synonym, so to speak, for a symbol, as it is mostly taken to be--or does it have a special quality all its own that makes it possible for it to play the role it does in art? In philosophy in the past, as in science, as well as in aesthetics, we have come mainly to use the term as a symbol-- as something that stands for something else. The symbol is a very valuable tool, but since it is a means of communication, and essentially a scientific tool, it can be used in art least of all. A symbol can be used in art to create additional meaning, but it never creates form, and to think of the metaphor in those terms--as being a symbol only--not only means to very much underrate the metaphor, but to fail to understand it at all. Both the symbol and the metaphor stand for something else, but--and here is the essential difference between them--while the symbol only stands for something else, the metaphor also stands in itself. The symbol stands for something else, but never has any meaning in itself; the metaphor, on the other hand, while standing for many other things also, has meaning in itself. A symbol can be valid without its own meaning (as the symbol of numbers, for example) and can explain something else without being identical with it. The metaphor, on the other hand, when taken only in itself as a metaphor still must have meaning in itself--which means that the metaphor is a means of participation.

The metaphor is usually taken only as a figurative expression, but there must be much more to it than that if the metaphor is for all art production the only genuine means of art, if the metaphor is the means in art that can assemble other things metaphorically until a unity of metaphors is approached and brought about, a unity of metaphors meaning one thing. The role that the metaphor plays in art in itself would seem to indicate how very much we have underestimated the metaphor as a tool of the human mind--but there is another strange verification of the power of the metaphor and one that comes from the very thing with which the metaphor is usually confused: the symbol. If we take the symbol in its purest form, the mathematical form, then a very strange phenomenon appears. Mathematics, having developed into so-called free mathematics, with arbitrary symbols, can design a whole system of mathematics that seems to have no reality and that seems to have no value in itself except logically. Yet this same system of symbols--a theorem or a formula--that seemingly relates to nothing but logic will suddenly seem to relate to certain things in nature, to apply to a certain theory of action. There is only one thing that can account for the fact that human beings can create such symbols--completely arbitrary symbols developed into a system consistent only in itself that suddenly seems to have the power to relate to something in the physical world--and that is the metaphor.

But before we ask, as we have to ask: How is it possible that we can make a metaphor at all? and what are we doing when we make a metaphor, when we express a metaphor? let’s first take a look now at what the metaphor was able to do in relation to one of its most powerful forms of expression: the myth. Even after the real world of myth broke down and we entered into the world of metaphysics with its theological and cosmological approach, we still lived in a certain realm of myth that finally only broke down with the breakdown of the cosmological and theological approach itself brought about by Kant--at which time we did not, as we supposed, merely give up the old beliefs and with it myth, but started instead to replace myth with legends (and fine legends they were too!--the legend of history, the legend of society, the legend of nature). I am not suggesting that we go back to that world of myth, even if we could, but, I certainly do suggest that we with our legends do not dismiss quite so lightly that world of myth and what it could do for man. Living in myth was a strange and very creative experience and one that made possible the building of great cultures. And we have to ask: What is myth that it has this power? and what is the metaphor that it can create that myth?

An artist when he answers the impact of unknown reality by a metaphorical invention of his own creates a work of art which, as we have seen, has a reality of its own--the reality of an experience--but which is never taken as reality itself. The myth, on the other hand--and here is where the difference lies--is an artistic activity transformed into realistic relevance, where the myth answers to seeming meaninglessness by a genuine over-all meaning given to mythical figures. The general form for the myth has been given by art by the same means of art itself: the means of a metaphorical performance that springs from conscious or unconscious identification of outward reality with inward reality--with the one difference that while in art it is mixed in pure form given as identity, in myth it is just mixed.

The metaphor itself therefore, seems to take shape within the process of trying to identify inward and outward reality--which means that the metaphor as the very means of art must live in and spring from the same strange realm that is the realm of art itself: that strange territory of the senses, that no-man’s land, so to speak, that in-between land where the outward world meets the inward world and both realms overlap in such a way that they seem to become identical. Outward reality and inward reality meet and become a unity within the metaphor--which if it has been well done also becomes form and thus art (since a form-building element also is contained in the metaphor--one that is made possible because the experience of other human beings identifies with our own experience and has the same implication even though it has taken on another shape).

XI

In life experience the artist, as compared to other human beings, shifts ground, avoiding self-reflection and objectivity and instead of experiencing his own experiences personally, so to speak, he experiences rather an experience of man, an experience of an experience. He is not entirely in the experience in the sense that the situation interests him more than the emotional impact of it. This action on the part of the artist, contrary to the involuntary withdrawal of a shy or neurotic person, is a voluntary action, a voluntary action of having withdrawn. The neurotic cannot be hurt because he has escaped behind a wall of withdrawal. The artist cannot be hurt either in a way, but only because he is not interested in his involvement any more--or rather, the artist can be hurt but by voluntary withdrawal refuses to be involved personally and shifts his interest voluntarily to the experience of an experience of man.

Between this voluntary shifting of ground by the artist and the involuntary withdrawal of the neurotic is a vast difference--and one that should be sharply marked because to apply, as it has been applied, the term “subconscious,” which involves irresponsibility, to this action of the artist in the same way as it is applied to the neurotic means to ignore the fact that in the action of the artist is involved intention and will. To act voluntarily, as the artist does, means to act with responsibility; to act involuntarily as the neurotic does, implies irresponsibility because involved in this is a certain responsibility coming not from the person as such, but from other acts. There are many theories floating around today regarding involuntary action and mental processes, but however one might feel about them, one thing is sure: the voluntary action of the artist and the involuntary action of the neurotic, the day-dreamer or compulsive thinker are as far apart as the ends of a stick--and that distinction must not be forgotten if we are ever to understand what art, the artist, and artistic activity might be. It is difficult enough these days, it seems, to make the simplest distinctions (as for instance a distinction I would make concerning the neurotic: so long as a man only hurts others he is not a neurotic man but merely a mean one; a man is only neurotic when he hurts himself too), so we must be doubly careful when we are dealing with a question as complicated as this one is.

Now we have seen the vast difference that lies between the voluntary shifting of ground of the artist and the involuntary withdrawal of the neurotic--but then we have to ask: Can the same distinctions be made between the activities themselves of the artist and the neurotic? And if so, how are the creative activities of the artist distinguished from the mental activities of the neurotic? Can a distinction be made, for example, between what seems to be daydreaming in the artist and the daydreaming of the neurotic? Can a distinction be made between metaphorical thinking with its associative power of the metaphor and the mental process of the neurotic which also involves association? Is there a difference between thinking and a mental process? Is there the same basic distinction to be found in the activities themselves engaged in by the artist and the neurotic as we have found in their general life experiences--or in other words, is there the same sharp distinction of voluntary action to be found in the actual creative procedure itself engaged in by the artist as we find in his general relation to experience?

The long procedure that the artist engages in to produce a work of art might seem at first glance to be subconscious and not to carry this distinction, but a closer look will show us that this too is absolutely voluntary. The artist who is engaged in this procedure seems to be a daydreamer, but once again we find a vast difference between the so-called daydreaming of the artist and the daydreaming of the neurotic (which, intellectually speaking, is simply reflective). For one thing, while the process of daydreaming of the neurotic stops the same day as to one situation, the procedure that is going on in the artist--which is not daydreaming at all but rather a procedure of metaphorical comparison-- does not stop. The artist has had a certain kind of vision; he has experienced, so to speak, the experience of an experience, and now he is obsessed by a coming general metaphor that will cover that situation. He does not let go--and even if he does, it will return again. This is artistic procedure--involving a voluntary procedure as something the artist does and not an involuntary process that is something that does him, so to speak.

Now this procedure bound to the metaphor we have called artistic procedure and, as such, is a specific kind of thinking and one that, as we have found, is distinguished from all other kinds of thinking by the fact that activity becomes thinking and doing as well--the thought becomes doing, the doing becomes thought and both are identified not only in the procedure of thinking but in the work of art as well. The speed of transition is so terrific that it is hard to see what is going on, but still it is going on--which brings us once again to the distinction between the activities of the artist and the neurotic:--here in terms first of what might be the difference between the procedure the artist is engaged in and the process the neurotic is caught up in and second, the differences to be found in the associative power of the metaphor and the involuntary association found in mental processes.

The activity the artist is engaged in producing a work of art is one of thinking--which means first of all that he is engaged in a procedure and not a process since thinking itself is a procedure rather than a process. The activity the neurotic is involved in, on the other hand, is not thinking but a mental process where by the means of involuntary associations not the man thinks but the brains thinks--which is quite a different proposition. This phenomenon we find not only in the mental processes of the neurotic or insane man, but also in dreams--where we do not think but rather the brain functions in relation to sense sensations plus other mobilized images. Thus dreams, as well as all other involuntary processes of association (a process of association, for example, caused by “a wound of the soul” which brings about a mobilizing of the brain) must be considered to be physical in my sense of the word because they are “given” in the sense that we do not bring them about--as we bring about thoughts, for instance.

Now although the metaphor, as we have seen, is the tool of artistic thinking (as the symbol is of scientific or analytical thinking and the concept of philosophical or fundamental thinking), it has not been re-cognized to be so and we have to ask: Why has it been so especially difficult to discover the role of the metaphor in art--or even for that matter to discover what the metaphor actually is? The metaphor, though it is basically the tool of art, can also be used by other kinds of thinking (and has been used) but the difficulty of recognizing the metaphor as the tool of art does not lie in this fact, but rather in the one that the metaphor is usually used in a symbolic sense. It is the actual confusion itself of the metaphor with the symbol that has caused the difficulty of recognition-- for while a metaphor can very well be used by philosophy, for example, it still can only be used as a genuine metaphor and not a symbol. Even though the metaphor as used in philosophy has to be controlled to the point where all the other possible assemblages of other metaphors are not allowed to come in, nevertheless it still must hold water, speak in itself, and stand by itself. (Plato, for example, used metaphors in this sense, applying them only to one specific thought--but they still held meaning when isolated.)

What is this strange power the metaphor has? Goethe (who along with Leonardo da Vinci was one of the few artists who had a mind that was philosophically productive and who also like da Vinci had the gift of analytical thinking) gave us a hint when he spoke of “the coined form that develops organically”--though he was not speaking of art but of nature. But while this concept could not be true in relation to the thing he applied it to (nature), it is most valuable for us viewed from another point of view:--from the point of view of the experience of man that made it possible to project this into nature--and Goethe himself certainly had such an experience: the experience as an artist of experiencing the “becoming” of every work of art within himself which started with one “coined vision,” one basic form that developed organically, so to speak--a basic form that had the ability to work as a catalyzer. So although Goethe’s “Metamorphosis of Plants”--in which he applied the term “coined form”--may be nonsense scientifically, it is wonderful for philosophy of art because “coined form” expresses so very well the basic fundamental idea that is a form in the artist’s mind and is the basic vision that leads to the work of art. The same procedure in the artist has to set in that Goethe ascribes to plants--a procedure that utilizes and adjusts everything to it by a procedure of constant adjusting and readjusting according to basic forms. We can get a real lead to a concept of the metaphor by following through this hint of Goethe’s and relating the metaphor to a procedure of metamorphosis--by conceiving of the metaphor as being metamorphical, but now metamorphical only in a special way: not as a changing of forms but a becoming of forms (because, contrary to what Hegel thought, change is not also becoming). So we could say the metaphor is the means by which the artist is able to bring about this procedure of becoming that leads to a work of art.

Now with this further insight into the metaphor, let’s once again go back to the question: What is metaphorical thinking? is it possessed thinking or is it thinking that can be controlled? is the artist involved in a subconscious process or in a real procedure of thinking? Metaphorical thinking can only be considered to be subconscious in that it seemingly is not self-controlled, but fundamentally it is entirely self-controlled because every thought is related to the intended content and to nothing else--which means that while seemingly uncontrolled, it is self-controlled in a very funny way: it is really self-controlled by a basic vision and a “coined form.” This vision does not become conscious to the artist because he does not reflect upon it--but that does not mean that it is a subconscious process. Actually, it is a procedure that lies somewhere in the middle between being entirely consciously controlled by the artist on the one hand and completely controlling the artist on the other. The controlling factor of the basic vision is the inspiration of the artist--who while still controlling the productive part is controlled by the basic vision. This is not a subconscious process but a very hidden procedure--or to put it in old terms: the artist is not being directly inspired by Apollon himself but is inspired by Apollon through the medium of the “coined form.” There-fore, the metaphorical procedure can be described as being the conscious control of all metaphors, controlled by one basic vision--one basic vision that is the rowboat we were talking about on the stream of creative activity.

But, once again, we have to ask: What is a metaphor and what empowers it to be a controlling force? where do we have that strange ability from of creating something that is self-living and how can it touch upon count-less correspondences in other experiences? And, what is the experience of the beholder in relation to all this? is the beholder by the work of art also brought into a creative artistic procedure and controlled by one basic vision?

XII

What is a metaphor that it has this strange ability to create a vision of form in the artist and to connect in one basic vision so many different fields of activity? We have a unique witness to a metaphor becoming form in Kafka’s account of how a line of thinking about a whole complexity of things finally turned into “The Castle.” He was walking along in Prague one day when he saw up above him but separated by a wall of fog a chateau that had once belonged to the old rulers of Bohemia. There before him was literally the abyss between the ruled and the rulers; from there he went on first to that other unbridgeable abyss between the I and myself of a schizophrenic person; and then on to all the unbridgeable abysses that might run through human life in all fields and areas, and especially the abyss of non-understanding between persons--from the abyss that might exist even between those who know each other very well on to the permanent abyss that always exists between people who know each other only slightly, on to the ever-widening abyss of fragmentary glimpses of people passed in the world, and then finally on to the fragmentary people with which he peopled “The Castle”.

We can see with this, first-hand, so to speak, how the metaphor can relate so many fields of human experience at once and on parallel levels, and it gives us an even sharper means to see what difference there really is between the metaphor as the tool of artistic thinking and the symbol as the tool of analytical thinking, between the metaphor as something that not only stands for something else but has meaning in itself and the symbol as something that only stands for something else with no meaning in itself. The action of the symbol is the mere translation of thought; its structure an abstract form or shape; and one of its greatest powers, since everything in the physical world is shaped, is to be able to give through its use in mathematics the relation of those shapes. That means the symbol, when applied to physical things where it rightly belongs, can be a wonderfully powerful tool to handle things with--but it also means that the symbol, when applied to metaphysical things where it has no right to be applied at all, can be a terribly destructive tool. This is the double power of the symbol. It can either be a weapon with which we attack or defend ourselves against things and bring them to function for what we consider a suitable purpose for our world; or--since it also has the terrible power to change beings into things--it can when applied to human beings, when human beings are approached as things, destroy man’s character of being. If we follow the symbol blindly and are not aware that the symbol is the tool of analytical thinking, that it is our tool to handle physical things with, and if we do not limit it to that, then we lose our rule over the symbol and become not the rulers but the victims of our own tool, the victims of the symbol.

The metaphor, on the other hand, serves quite another purpose--but just as the symbol carries with it the danger than when it is not rightly used we can fall prey to scientific thinking, the metaphor also carries a danger with it--and one that has existed for most of the time of human history: the danger of living in myth. The metaphor, as one of the means by which we attack the outside world, has been the tool of myth as well as of art: that means as long as the metaphor and metaphorical thinking were applied as reality (as long as Zeus, Apollon, Dionysos, and so on were projected into reality as real persons living in the world and not as images, as long as it was not recognized that while they had a special world of their own--the personal world of human inwardness--it was not after all the world of reality itself) we were living in myth. We protected ourselves against fear by pretending to know the world, but actually we only changed it into fantasy and believed it to be reality. But once we cease to live in myth--as we have ceased to (though unfortunately we still continue to live in superstition--and the worst kind of superstition these days)--a very strange thing happens: we can look back and see in all myths a metaphorical content that makes those figures of myth live forever in our minds. Once myth and the figures of myth like Prometheus, Odysseus, Sisyphos, Apollon are taken out of their wrong world of outward reality and put back into their proper world of inwardness, they become works of art for us and now live on in us. The power of the metaphor and metaphorical thinking becomes even stranger now and we have to ask: What enables us to create such a thing?

By the tool of the symbol we are able to change things, and to make things--physical things, things that come into existence by themselves-- function for our purposes. By means of the symbol we are able to answer the attack that things make on us by developing a counter-attack of our own, changing those things into our slaves--and, as we have seen, the symbol has even the power when wrongly applied to change beings into things. By the tool of the metaphor, on the other hand, we are able to change things into beings. The metaphor has the strange and wonderful power to change everything into a being--either in the way it was used in myth or in the only way it is used now: in art. A work of art is an image of being and within that work of art things are taken into its context and changed into images of being--as an apple in a Cezanne painting is changed into an image of being. We have never been able in our whole system of aesthetics to anywhere near approach the essence of art because we always supposed along with Plato that on the one hand things were only an imitation (in relation to Plato’s theory of ideas) and yet on the other hand, as Plato also said, that “the artist should not show the reality but the ideas.” But there is no imitation in art at all--or rather art is an imitation of being itself and of nothing else. An image is given but it is an image of being--never one where an imitation of objects is meant.

And this is true as well of the modern style of transformation as any other, of course, for while anthropomorphic painting (taking being into nature) has been rejected, images of being are still created in art. The charge so often made against modern art, that it is an art of de-humanization, simply is not true. A Cezanne tree, though not human, is an image of being--and what a being! An artist like Cezanne tries to create a being that has personal qualities, that is a living thing, a being of such magnitude that it is almost a giant or a hero--and yet a being that also at the same time is far removed from any human trends. That may mean, as it certain does, that it is free from any of the sentimentality that crept into so much of the painting of the 19th Century, but it certainly does not mean that it is an art of de-humanization. On the contrary, it is a procedure of de-individualization in order to be able to give better the essence of being. It is an art, as all art is, of personalization; an art that not only never individualizes (as no art does), but actually de-individualizes in order to better be able to go about its purpose of giving the essence of being. Cezanne, when asked once why he painted so many still-lifes answered: “I suppose you have never heard the conversation between apples, a vase and a table.” His apples were entirely de-individualized in human terms, but he made an apple into a being that could talk and influence other beings.

By the means of the metaphor and works of art we are able to transform the dangerous world around us into a world that has our qualities, We are able to change things into beings or at least into images of beings, and so transform by and by the whole world into images of beings, surrounding ourselves with another world of beings only. There are no things, just beings, in the world of works of art. It is a trans-realistic world--this world of art--which means that while we have now come out of the error to apply the metaphor directly to reality, we have not ceased to apply the metaphor to the real world. We now only apply it indirectly by surrounding ourselves with another world of images of beings and by taking the world of the metaphor back into ourselves in order to strengthen and enrich our personal qualities--which means that while an indirect use only of myth is made now, we still are creating myth (and always will).

Now we have seen that the metaphor builds form, but we have to ask: What is form and how is it possible for the metaphor to have this power? The artist applies metaphors that he has created out of his life experience and projects them into the outer world--just as the other way around things of the outer world are projected into him. Form starts where these two things meet--where the realm of inside out, so to speak, meets and crosses the realm of outside in--which means that form starts at that borderline of outward reality and inward reality: the human senses. Art is created by form and form emerges from the mutual transmutation of life, of the being of beings and the being of things. On that borderline of the senses where the two realms meet--the realm of the metaphysical and the realm of the physical--form emerges because form is their identity; form is where both become identical, interchangeable and not to be taken apart. A synthesis occurs--which means that in the realization of metaphorical thinking (the realization of the basic vision) form (which is the very identity of the metaphysical and the physical) makes at least an image of the fulfillment of a great fundamental dream of man: the great dream that there should be no split between the realms of the physical and metaphysical, that existence and essence, being and meaning should be identical. The phenomenon of this image of the fulfillment of man’s dream (the image of the identity of the physical and metaphysical, the image of a world where everything is a being) we call beauty--this phenomenon made possible by form which can give truth to the senses. So through the means of the metaphor (which is the form-building tool that makes term and beauty and thus art possible) we are able to redeem the world in the sense that we are able in a work of art to create a world in which we would want to live.

And this brings us to the question of revelation--for there seems to be a quality of revelation in art in relation to this other world we are able to create. Schelling in his work on myth and revelation answered the question of what revelation is by saying: “Myth changed to revelation when we believed that God spoke directly.” Revelation in this sense (in the sense that God has spoken directly) would mean that another world, an unknown world, has been revealed to us. In art also there is another world--a world that, contrary to the world of religious revelation, we ourselves have created--but then we have to ask: Is it possible that in that world we have created, an unknown world also is revealed to us?

Kant in speaking of his real concern in philosophy said he was most concerned with those simple, self-evident things that everyone thought he understood but hardly ever did--and art, certainly, seems to have a strange ability in respect to this. We very often hear the remark, “It has been a revelation to me.”--and when applied to art, it is a remark that contains a real grain of truth. When a person says concerning a work of art, “That has been a revelation to me.”, what it really means first is that certain fundamental self-evident matters have been touched and that he is really saying, whether he knows it or not, that he not only has judged a work of art but has been judged in return. Through the metaphorical experience that emerged from the work of art and from that process of interchanging which is the peculiar power of the metaphor, this person suddenly saw, sensed and felt experiences of his own past more intensely than ever before-- and while his own experiences made it possible for him to relate to the basic experience of the work of art, the work of art was also able to throw light backwards on his own experiences. So in that sense we have to ask: Is art revelation--and if so, what does it reveal?

Man is able through the experience of human qualities to create a metaphor--to fuse different things into one metaphor where they all have one indication in common: an experience of a certain definite quality. It is here that revelation starts. Out of that world he has created, an unknown world is revealed to man--a world of which he knows little and a world that can reveal one thing to him that is revealed nowhere else: human qualities. Human qualities are infinite and the only means to reveal those--his own qualities--to man is art because art is the one creative ability of man that is only concerned with those qualities. The artist is only concerned with personal qualities, with beings, and because of this every work of art is able to reveal different new personal qualities to man himself since every work of art is the manifestation of those very human qualities he can realize in himself. It is this that enables man to create the tool of the metaphor and by that to reveal himself to himself in infinity. This gift of Apollon--the gift of being able to create the metaphor--is the one gift that enables man to know himself, that gives him the capacity to create a world of images in his own image that mirrors all of the qualities man values here on earth and that enables him to enhance his own personal qualities.

So man has been able to build and to erect another world on top of this world--a world not apart from this world or against it, but an image of another world in the sense of an Olympos that is set right on top of the real world; a world that man also lives in partly--a world where he gathers new strength of human personal qualities to cope with the real world. The artist is there in that world as a worker--not to enjoy it but to enlarge it--but in general that world is for man what the earth was for Antaeus (the giant who doubled his strength whenever he touched the earth and who was finally only defeated by Heracles when Heracles lifted him off the ground so he could not touch the earth). Man is born to the earth, but he doubles his strength in the world of Olympos because he finds there that his own personal qualities have grown--which means that man thereby relates the world he has made to the one he lives in.

So if once again we go back to the words of Heraclitus--“The lord whose oracle is that at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but shows.”-- in order to check ourselves, it becomes clear that indeed we can say that the essence of art is the process of self-revelation of man--as it also becomes equally clear that regardless of the fact that in art there can be the revelation of human qualities in the negative as well as in the positive sense, there must also be the total absence of good and evil in art. Since art is not supposed to be taken as real myth, it is entirely out of the realm of good and evil--which means we cannot moralize or apply moral terms to art. No ethical conclusions whatsoever can be drawn out of a work of art or should there be because this world of imagery is a world that is supposed to be an image of a world where there is no difference between things and beings. It is a perfect world--and since we do not have to take this world of art as a mythical world to conform to but rather only as a world to take back into ourselves, it is a world that does not need or want the distinction between good and evil (which is another great difference between art and kitsch, for kitsch wants to make just that distinction). So although art reveals to us negative as well as positive qualities, no ethical conclusions whatsoever are necessary because those qualities can never be applied directly. They first must be put through the filter of our own personality--or to put it in another way: we must first return from Olympos before we can use our regained strength because to try to do it directly by art means to leave the world of art and to start living in myth. Art in that sense can once more be compared to the Greek Oracle for art is the free giving of personal experience to the beholder for his own use--but what that use might be is entirely his own responsibility.

So we see that art is that wonderful capability of man that not only is able to give the image at least of the fulfillment of one of the deepest and most fundamental longings of man--the synthesis of both the metaphysical and physical--but is able to give it in one over-all image of beauty. This would seem to indicate that art indeed has a place of its own right and standing as one of the creative capabilities of man that he cannot possibly do without--and this is a most important point to establish not only for the sake of art itself but for the sake also of the other creative abilities of man because all the creative abilities are inter-related in such an intimate way, reinforcing and enriching each other so much, that there is always the great danger that if one of them (in this case, art) is taken away the other kinds of creative thinking might die too. That is why we should make very sure before dismissing quite so lightly certain creative abilities as no longer so essential or pertinent for us that we are not along with it needlessly crippling ourselves.

XIII

We have been able in the run of this course to return again and again to Greek myth and to gain each time a deeper insight into art. This has been possible for the simple reason that all Greek myth has a fundamental bearing on art. The nearness of myth and art was so close with the Greeks that one could be translated into the other permanently. Not only was there no myth not supported by art and artistic experience, but the relation-ship in Greek myth was made even closer by the fact that Greek myth had never fallen into the hands of the priests and had never been organized within theology or a special discipline (losing thereby its fertility). Since Greek myth was not organized, it was possible for artists to take myth for their work (and even in turn, as Hesiod and especially Homer did, to create for the Greeks their gods--which the Greeks very well knew) and it was an interchange that not only was taken most seriously but one that reached a point where myth and the creativity of the artist almost became one (which led later with Plato to the inevitability of an attack upon art the moment myth was attacked for while Plato was not an enemy of art--on the contrary--he was an enemy of myth and therefore had no choice but also to attack art). This is the reason why all mythical fundamental ideas of the Greeks have a bearing on art and why only there they give their full meaning.

Now we have seen that in a time where art seems cut off from all the old ties and the bond between art and myth completely broken, that art still continues to create myth--although it is myth that is used only in-directly now. We no longer take the other world that we create by art as reality itself, but we still create that other world--that other world of Olympos which is the world of art itself, a world constantly growing and a world we constantly have to re-enter to gain new strength for reality--and the fact that we can still create that world of art when art seemingly stands alone severed from myth, religion and philosophy gives us for the first time the chance to find out not only what the real place of art in relation to the other creative abilities of man might be--which has been impossible up to now because art was always taken as a derivative of religion, myth, or philosophy--but also to find out what art and its inherent qualities and means might be. We have the chance, for example, to find out for the first time what form might really be and to see, as we are able to gain more insight into art and what its strange abilities are, that what we have always taken for form--the artistic quality of the work of art--must only be an outward sign and that form must surely be more than that. For one thing, if the metaphor through the means of form is able to create art, then form must also be connected with the same special quality of art to be found in everything expressed by art--the special quality to reveal human personal qualities in a way that is only given to the senses--and indeed it is out of this quality itself that form actually develops.

This possibility of form is the reason why this other world of art can be built and why it is always consistent and growing--and it proves to us for the first time, and even objectively so, that every man belongs to man. It proves to us that human personal qualities are the same at all times--which in general makes communication with past times possible, and specifically in art makes it possible for us to understand works of art of past times. Art transcends historical man and proves to us that there is something personal in man himself, and men of all times, that in principle is absolutely the same as we are--which means that although in different times customs and cultures may be different, man cannot be considered to be absolutely different in different historical times in terms of person or personal qualities. The ability of art to build this consistent, constantly growing other world of art proves to us that in quality men have always been the same and that we need not feel quite so sorry for those who have not had the great good fortune to be born in our wonderful Twentieth Century with all its glories of progress and development-- that as to quality and profundity of thought we might do very well to look twice at those men of the past (at those men, for example, who first were able to create myths so deep and fundamental that we are able to return to them again and again).

Now we have seen that as time withers away from art--as knowledge no longer is required--we begin to gain more and more insight into what a work of art really is. As soon as art requires on principle understanding only, as soon as it requires to be understood and not known (as fetishes can be understood but never known), we begin to get deeper and deeper into the experience of the work of art itself. There is only one kind of art that we have never seemed able to approach at all, or only in relation to knowledge--and that is Tibetan art. Tibetan art seems to be the one art we have never been able to understand, the one art in which we have never been able to gain an understanding of the form or metaphor that speaks out of all time and space--and this can provide us with a most valuable op-opportunity to inquire a little more deeply into that favorite question of aesthetics, the question of form versus content and content versus form, and to see if it is possible to make such a distinction in art between form and content or if it is not rather bound up with the same question of identity that we find in relation to things and beings, being and meaning, essence and existence.

With this purpose in mind let’s first suppose for a moment that our inability to approach Tibetan art has not been caused by the fact we have been unable to find the key to it but rather by the fact that we have here a phenomenon where things have been built without artistic creativity at all, a phenomenon where things have not been changed into beings but are only symbols of content. This would mean that form and content would never be able to meet here--and certainly for us form and content never do meet in Tibetan art. We can know the shape or form of Tibetan art and can know the content and idea perfectly, but we can never bring both together for the simple reason that we can never have a feeling of form without an understanding of the metaphor used. If we would continue with our supposition that this has been caused not by our inability to understand the metaphor but by the fact we are dealing with something that is not art at all, then it would mean, of course, that we find here the possibility to make things look like art used for an inartistic purpose--the purpose of conveying an ideological message rather than human qualities--which, of course, would be kitsch. But the important thing here is not whether our supposition is true or not, but that by the means of this supposition (which was the reason we made it, of course) we can see quite clearly that the old argument of form versus content and content versus form simply cannot be made.

And now to go back to the question of the senses for a moment. We have seen that the work of art exists for nothing but the senses, that the exact location where the other world of art is built is the realm of the human senses, and that the procedure of double projection we have in art (the projection of ourselves into the work of art and the work of art into us) also meets in this realm of the human senses--all of which would seem to indicate strange powers of the senses that cannot be explained simply by considering the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell in the way we usually consider them. If we consider the role of the senses in art, we see there seems to be an indication that not only do we have outward senses as such, but inner senses too--and that all of them must have a double direction, all of them must be senses that can both send and receive in the sense that they can become creative on the one hand and can on the other hand receive creative messages voluntarily (in the scientific sense).

This would immediately seem to make a sharp break between the senses of sight, hearing, and touch and the senses of taste and smell (and would explain why all experiments to make works of art that could be received by the sense of smell or taste have never succeeded). We immediately seem to have the distinction here between active senses and passive senses, between senses that can send and receive and senses that can only receive. We seem to have on the one hand certain senses that have a corresponding inner sense and on the other hand certain senses that are not connected with the human mind but only with a very small part of the intellect (which has nothing to do with the mind and cannot work in imagination). But now the question becomes even more complicated because we seem to be left with only three senses in art--sight, hearing, and touch; we seem to be short two very essential senses: the sense we use in architecture and dancing and the second sense by which we receive and give music. Is it possible there are two other senses which have never been recognized as such--two hidden senses which nevertheless fulfill our requirements here? And there are, of course: the sense of balance and that very strange second sense of music located in the solar plexus.

So we seem to be getting deeper and deeper into our inquiry. We have gained some understanding at least of what the metaphor and metaphorical thinking might be and the realm in which they exist; we have seen what the metaphor with its form-building power is able to do; we have proved that the concept of content and form cannot be true; we have met the phenomenon of beauty, and we have seen that this phenomenon of beauty must have some identity with form. We have also seen that up to now it has been impossible not only to find the real place of art itself, but also to discover what such things as form and beauty might be. And we have to ask: What messed the whole thing up? Why was it impossible, for example, for the concept of beauty and form to be made in the old aesthetics? Why was it impossible to see that they must be related or perhaps even identical?

The last concept of beauty was made by Kant and the real stumbling stone that prevented him from discovering the possibility of the identity of form and beauty was the same one that handicapped all thinkers in the old line of aesthetics: he had to think in terms of content and form--which meant that even though Kant was the one who destroyed myth in life completely (the one who by making philosophy self-critical and by questioning certain assumptions of metaphysics destroyed thereby, without realizing it or in-tending to, the possibility of metaphysics itself and myth, and along with it, of course, the metaphysical position that had made such a concept as the one of form and content possible), he nevertheless remained bound, as we even now have somehow remained bound, to the aesthetics of that last mythical supposition. But while content and form as a metaphysical concept was a philosophical mistake, and one we are not entitled to make any more, we also have to discover what made this position possible, what value it had in itself, and then--since philosophical thinking, contrary to scientific thinking cannot discard thoughts of the past simply as being errors (there is no such thing as an error in the scientific sense in philosophical thinking; it is a matter only of more or less truth)--not reject it but overcome it.

Old thinkers in philosophy, contrary to Dewey, did put meaning into their formulations regarding art, but it was meaning that was related to the relation of myth and art as it formerly had been and that stemmed, of course, from the basic over-all position taken towards the world. We must realize that as long as men remained within the cosmological or theological framework--that is, as long as they believed that the world was either a cosmos that contained meaning in itself or that the world was a world created by God and therefore had been given meaning by God-- they could never, as we do now, question the old concept of form and content, make intention a condition of beauty, or make the distinction we now make between shape, as the contour, so to speak, of things given, and form itself. They could never consider shape, as we do now, as something that has not been created, as something that shows no intention, as something that has been given by occurrences and that must therefore be only functionality. The old thinkers within mythical belief when they beheld in nature what we call shapes still had to consider them to be forms because they could not distinguish between shapes without meaning and form since God’s intention must be visible in them or they must have been given meaning by a cosmos that contained meaning in itself. That meant, therefore, that the old way in art was either a procedure of de-forming, so to speak, a given form (as in mythical art--which we see in Egyptian art, for example) or later, beginning with the Greeks, a procedure of re-forming a given form rather than transforming a given shape into form (which is the procedure of modern art).

Kant himself, who made all this possible, was never able to break far enough through the old concepts to come to the concept that beauty was not in things but only in what we interpreted into them--but how very near he must have come to this. Certainly, he came so far in science as to be able to destroy all mythical thinking there by discovering there is a possibility that space and time are not really there, as such, in nature, but are conditions only of human thinking and the human senses, and it would have been but a small step to discover that form and beauty are no more contained in nature as such than time and space might be. But the steps forward that are made in fundamental thought, though deep and mighty ones, are also very slow ones--so very slow that if there is not half a step backwards there is at least a very long pause between them. So it has taken a long time until we have seen that there are no forms or beauty in nature and that in art it is not a procedure of re-forming form, as it formerly was, but rather a procedure of transforming shapes, things given, into form, a procedure of transmutation not only outwardly of shapes into forms but also inwardly of things into beings, of things into beings with inner personal qualities.

Now in many degrees of given development--in the world of the physical, which is function--there occurs a thing we call beauty too, but it is rather an experience in one of the sciences of something that suddenly makes sense rather than something that is meaningful--which means that it is attractive and has functionality rather than beauty and intention. In this sense too we often speak of pretty or beautiful girls, but since beauty in relation to the human being is physiognomic rather than physiological, if mere biological attractiveness is meant, it cannot be a matter of beauty but only attractiveness. Beauty with human beings too is a phenomenon that has to be interpreted, that has to have intention. Since the human being has, of course, a physical body which follows certain biological laws there is the temptation sometimes, especially in this age of science, to reduce the human being to his biological part, but the human being is also a meta-physical being who is capable of will and intention and it is in that sense rather than the biological one that we can speak of beauty in the human being. When we speak of beauty in a human being we can only speak of it in the sense of responding to an inner glow, so to speak, of what that human being as a person is that comes shining through the body (the physis) and gives beauty--or to put it more prosaically, in the sense of responding to an inner message that has been delivered of what that human being as a person is.

When we make physiognomic judgments--since we are judging a given shape (here a face) that has been taken in hand by the power of the personality and transformed into form which is identical with the meaning of that personality--we are really making judgments as to the personality expressed. When we say, for example, “I don’t like that mouth.”, we are really saying “I don’t like the personality that ‘grew’ that mouth.”--or when we say “What a beautiful face.”, we are really responding to the personality that transformed that face into form (and here, as well as in art, form exists in beauty or otherwise it is miscarried form). This procedure of transforming a given shape into form, as in art, is a mutual proceeding of transmutation (although in art it goes on willing while in the human being it goes on unwilling, so to speak, in the sense that he does not directly set about to transform his face--with the exception of the actor, who does--but rather expresses through his face the kind of a person he is) and, also as in art, is a phenomenon only to be understood in the realm of the human senses (we see it, not know it, since it is to the senses that it immediately speaks). But while all these physiognomic elements are closely related to art, it must also be said they are related only--and even then only while they have capabilities of creativity and only while they are actors of the personality itself (actors not in a negative way but in a way expressive of what that personality is).

And now that we have some of these things in hand let’s take another look at Cezanne and at what it really meant to be the first artist to experience the full impact of all these tremendous changes. We have seen that once the framework of the theological and cosmological approach completely broke down that it meant art and myth for the first time were entirely distinguished, but these things take a long time to be completely felt and while they were reflected more and more in the new problems facing the artist, Cezanne was the first to be put into a situation where he was faced to the full with a fundamental turn in the situation. He was the first to be faced as an artist with the full impact of realizing he was surrounded by a physical world which could only make sense, never meaning, and which could only contain shapes, never forms out of which the artist could bring inherent meaning and beauty--and he was so hurt by this new world that he made an enemy of nature, saying, “How can I put sense [meaning] into that!” He was afraid with his eyes, and so afraid with his inner eye that later he tried to explain what he had done by the fact that perhaps his eye was faulty. He was all alone, eaten up by one experience he could not explain--and from this come the one fundamental insight to which every-thing in his work related (as everything in Bach also related to one fundamental insight) and from this also came his illness. (Cezanne did not gain such a great insight into this new situation of man or become such a great artist because he was ill--quite the opposite. Contrary to certain beliefs, to become an artist is not quite such a simple proposition as just to be a neurotic.)

Cezanne was aware that the cosmos had lost its meaning, that man was lost, alone in the world and he had a feeling of absolute helplessness against the world revealed to him, but out of this suffering and awareness he was able to gain the deepest insight and to bring forth the most comprehensive answer:--the insight that man had to forget the superstition that there is consolation (the old metaphysical position) or that there is form in things in a world that contains meaning in itself (the old artistic position), that in a world able at best only to make sense man had to take heart now and had to fight from that new position; and the answer of the only way that man could fight: the answer of counter-action against the new situation by man himself changing the meaningless into the meaningful, by man creating any meaning that was to be put into the world--and as to art itself the answer that if there were to be any form it must be brought out by man himself, that man must transform given shapes into form, that form was now the phenomenon created by man to get hold of the realm of the physical and to transform it into that other realm of art, and that if there were to be a possible new style in art, reflecting man’s changed position in the world, the very pre-condition for it had to be this procedure of the transformation of shapes into form, of the given into the meaningful--which means that Cezanne almost by himself was able to change the whole artistic procedure into one of an artistic consciousness of form, bringing forth the fundamental elements and laying the foundations for a whole new style of transformation (which is not our so-called “modern style” but the real style of our times).

This achievement of Cezanne’s--the achievement of laying the foundations for a new style--means first of all that Cezanne is obligatory for everyone who wants to be an artist or to live artistically because there is a very odd thing about style: since style is the phenomenon in art that has the strange ability to be all-comprehensive and to permanently open up new vistas, once a new style starts to grow that growing style is obligatory for everyone involved in art. But still it is hard at first glance to realize what a really tremendous achievement this was of Cezanne’s and in order to understand it a little better we have first to go into the question of style and form and into the question of what it means not only generally when a new style starts to grow, but also specifically in terms of the actual means of art--what it means in relation to color, the brushstroke, structure, perspective, space, etc.

Perhaps the best question to approach first is the one of the brush-stroke--not only because it is one of the most characteristic examples of what Cezanne was able to do with the means of art but also because it is a most excellent example for our other question of the relation of form and style. Form and style are related unbreakably--and in a very odd way: not only does style grow out of form, but style is preconditioned by form so that once a new style is there all the forms have already the strange quality that they relate to each other. This becomes quite clear when we look at what happened to the brushstroke with Cezanne--who succeeded in making out of the brushstroke an absolutely new thing. Cezanne was able, for example, to make the visible brushstroke not merely a means of the individual signature of the artist (as it had been used in Baroque times and later), but to make it a means to bring about a density where the brushstrokes by their very diversity made the densest surface possible, where the brushstrokes made every color spot relate to every other color spot by a definite relating of the brushstrokes, and to bring about by that not merely a fitting together or unity of different colors and areas into a kind of mosaic, but to make out of it a real tensional relation between different forces (as seen in modern architecture)--which means that Cezanne was able to use the visible brushstroke as a means of transformation and as a means of expressing a new position taken towards the world.

And, of course, it was not only with the brushstroke that Cezanne wrought such a transformation of use. He was able, in fact, to achieve in his work all the great fundamental turns that mark the new style: the new concept first of form itself; then the discovery of the possibility of the interchangeability of essential forms--which came about first from his discovery of the possibility to give pure activity itself and then his development of a unity of activities, of different activities expressed in the visible brushstroke and in color, and second when he was able to bring all shapes in nature to, as he put it, a common denominator which made them interchangeable (which was one of his main means); and finally the discovery of a completely new concept of space and the discovery of a new kind of structure (laying thereby the foundations also for the new style in architecture--and architecture not just as the putting up of buildings, but as the art where we can get inside structure, so to speak, and architecture as the art where essences of generalities and forms are boiled down only to their significance for time and space).

We have only to look at “The Card Players” to see what Cezanne was able to do--especially in regard to structure. If we turn this picture around, viewing the top of the table as a windowsill, we see that we have a Cezanne landscape in miniature where the legs of the card players have suddenly become Cezanne trees and the space under the table suddenly the space of a Cezanne landscape. The real key to this was structure (but structure in the artistic sense only)--structure that made it possible for Cezanne not only to make the smallest space infinite (giving universal space in a still-life, for example) or an infinite phenomenon the smallest (since the structure was always the same), but structure also that had the possibility as a means or transition to unite new forms in their plurality into one great form of style.

XIV

One of the greatest difficulties in gaining an understanding of what the metaphor as the tool of art might really be is that in two of the arts-- poetry and literature--the metaphor seems unbreakably tied up with an idea. So to make matters a little easier for us we have to ask first: How does the metaphor apply to those two arts, painting and music, where it does not seem unbreakably bound to an idea? And then: Is the metaphor bound up with an idea at all? But first let’s go back for a moment to certain basic distinctions between the way things are used in art and the way they are used in science and once again to the distinctions between the metaphor and the symbol.

In art, as well as in everything else, the abstract and the concrete exist only in relation to each other. Even to be able to think of the abstract we must have an idea of the concrete, and to think of the concrete an idea of the abstract (which is one reason why so-called abstract art is not possible)--or as Juan Gris formulated it so well for painting: “Without the concrete what do I have to control the abstract with and without the abstract what do I have to control the concrete with?”--but this does not mean that abstraction in the scientific sense is used in art or the metaphor. Here again we have our basic distinction between science as the creative ability of man which deals entirely with the physical and art as the creative ability of man which can change things into beings and between the symbol as the tool of science and the metaphor as the tool of art--which means, since abstraction is a scientific term and ability, that what is usually taken for abstraction in art must be something different. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to approach it by the way of a power shared both by the symbol and the metaphor: the power of association.

If we go back to Kafka’s experience of the abyss which finally culminated in “The Castle,” taking that as an example of an artist’s experience with a metaphor, we see that the symbol as well as the metaphor has the power to associate to the abyss--the abyss here as a personal human experience for the artist--but with one great difference: one is passive, the other active--passive and active in the sense that in the case of the metaphor the association is really not even association but attraction, not passive but active with the quality of being able to attract and to assemble around it other experiences relating in essence to that one basic experience of the abyss. Everything the artist has ever experienced in life to give him the feeling of the abyss goes into that metaphor, on every level of life basic experience is given:--which means that the metaphoric abyss--since a metaphor has a definite meaning encompassing a whole group of metaphors with the same essence or same basic experience--is not an abstraction but a generality; that its ability to grasp other things and experiences is not an ability of abstraction, as the symbol’s is, but an ability of generalization.

This constant marking of the distinctions between science and art as perhaps the two most contrasting of all man’s creative abilities and the symbol and metaphor as the tools of each ability is not a matter of splitting hairs, but something most essential to our purpose--not only because there has been such a tendency not to make the distinctions but also because the basic essential differences are so sharp that it gives us an excellent means to see more clearly what the special qualities of art might be. One of the sharpest, and perhaps the key distinction, between science and art (and thus between the symbol and the metaphor) is the part played by the human will in science and the part played by the human will in art. Human will, of course, is manifested in both science and art--but in entirely opposite ways. In science the human will is manifested by abolishing this will in order to give things a chance to impress themselves on the scientist (which is a means of being impressed that only the human being has because while an animal also can be impressed, it can never receive the outer world through the means of abolishing its will). In art, on the other hand, human will is manifested in exactly the opposite manner. Art through the means of the metaphor has the possibility to show the boundlessness of human will by being able to take everything that relates to one basic metaphor and to assimilate and make a whole out of it regardless of what the individual experiences in themselves might have meant--and this is the ability that gives the metaphor its tremendous power.

Now what about time and space as they are approached in science and time and space as they are approached in art--time and space as natural phenomena and time and space metaphysically speaking? In science we create symbols which by enabling us to disregard our personal time and space completely make it possible for us to receive the most pure physical time and space by receiving only the physical; in art--though it differs in the different arts (In poetic art, for example, where time and space are never related directly to physical time and space as they are in pictorial art and music, there is only the indication that it is a conception of general experience. Elements of time and space may be taken in, as in lyrical poetry with rhythm and sound or in dramatic poetry, but it is indirect time and space only and never directly given.)--the relation-ship of art in general to time and space is quite a different one, the purpose quite a different one. Art, since it also deals with metaphysical time and space can give man the feeling of having space, not merely being in space, of having tine, not merely being in time--which means that time and space as found in art carry with them, as physical time and space can never do, a very real relation to eternity.

But let’s go back now to our question of whether the metaphor is bound unbreakably to an idea and to the question of how the metaphor works in the different arts--especially in music and painting where the contact with an idea is the least. The most direct connection of the metaphor to an idea seems, of course, to be in the novel where a use is made out of the metaphor that has along with the other qualities of the metaphor a direct idea relation, content that has to be taken in. Poetry already seems much less bound to an idea because poetry can start with mere sound which immediately carries a metaphor--but since it is also working with language, the metaphor in poetry too seems to have a certain relation to an idea. Nevertheless, the metaphor in prose and poetry, and especially when it is strictly used, is not as unbreakably bound to an idea as it would seem at first glance because artistic prose, as well as poetry (although it is easier in poetry because it is more closely related to sound) has the deep need to get rid of language as a means of communication and to be able by arousing direct sensual impressions to bring the beholder into participation.

The metaphor as it is used in music (that creative ability that relates to the self-feeling of man) carries, of course, no such implication of an idea but before we go more deeply into the form of the metaphor in music, we have to stop for a moment with music itself because music has one indication that none of the other arts has: an indication of tyranny. Music is the only art that can dominate man--the only art that can put man into a mood he may not even want (as military music can) or that can be put to such uses as music has been put in primitive societies (re-enforcing, for example, the power of ritual). In all the other arts there is a certain screen, so to speak, between the work of art and the beholder that allows or even sets a certain distance between the work of art and the sense perceptions of the beholder, but in music, and especially in certain kinds of music, there is the possibility of a sense perception so direct that the beholder can be completely overwhelmed. This is possible because music has the strange ability to work by vibration and rhythm not only on one sense, the sense of hearing, but also to work on a second inner sense, the sense of the vegetative nervous system located in the solar plexus, and to work on it in two ways--either indirectly, so to speak, through the ears or directly hitting this sense. It is the possibility of music to hit this sense directly that gives music its terrible power because this is the sense that translates psychological shocks into physical ones and the sense that is the exact location, corporeally speaking, of inner feeling.

If music works on this sense only indirectly, so to speak, as music that is real art does, it makes possible for the beholder a synthesis of a stream of feeling and a line of thought, bringing him by that into a real artistic experience--which means that music as art does not exert its full power of tyranny. Music as art does not exert the possibility of music to speak directly to this inner sense and by that to overwhelm, blot out all the beholder’s possible controls over the piece of music; the possibility to utilize to the full the physical character of immediateness that this inner sense gives music; the possibility to utilize to the full this special means that only music has on the human body--a means that not only makes it impossible physically to resist it, but one that can even change the bodily disposition of a man. This terrible possibility of music to leave no freedom at all for the beholder if he is really subjected to it is what Nietzsche meant when in “Birth of Tragedy” he spoke of the Dionysian principle in music--when he spoke of Dionysos as that wild god of life and death who had a terrible means in his hands to make of people what he wanted: the means of music. Music has either the power (when a line of feeling is synthesized in the beholder with a line of thought) to bring the beholder into a procedure of participation or music has the power (when the stream of feeling is not counterbalanced by a line of thought) to overwhelm, to tyrannize, to bring the beholder into a state where he just delivers himself to it.

And now to go back to the question of what the special form of the metaphor in music might be and of how it might be used. In science we relate by means of the symbol things that are into things that stand for things; in art we relate by means of the metaphor things as they are perceived into things of us, into things that have an implication of our own being. But in music, which relates, of course, to time, the symbol and the phrase (the nuclear form of the metaphor in music) are very near each other. If we count one-two-three-four, this is a symbolic performance, but if we make an abstraction from all things and utter the sound mmm mmm mmm, we relate now only to human will itself. This uttering is an abstraction from the time that things have and are into an uttering that is a time uttering of metaphysical time (time that is within us, that we are). Now if we change the mmm mmm mmm to mmm mmmn mmm mmmn mm mm mm, we are still within the concrete of our own time, but we get rhythm. The phrase is the magic means we have in music to be able by the measure to superimpose on physical time our mastership over our metaphysical time and by that to make a synthesis of metaphysical time with physical time, a synthesis of the will of time with the time of no will. This makes musical form and the means, of course, is the phrase which can produce all elements of music--rhythmical, melodic, etc.--and which, as the special form of the metaphor in music, is the unification of human will and human experience into time.

And now we come to the form of the metaphor in painting--the ornament-- which is not only the special means in painting but which also must have been the start of pictorial art itself. Cave drawing and painting, for example, show such a highly developed style that it is inconceivable that they were the first pictorial efforts of man--which would seem to indicate that art starts with its so-called abstract elements: pottery, decoration, and the ornament itself, of course. The ornament (which could be said to be an art in itself) as the metaphor in painting is concerned only with the innermost movements of a space expression and a time expression of a certain style period, with giving only essences of specific style forms-- and like the phrase in music also is very near to the symbol.

But this very nearness to the symbol, on the other hand, serves also to point up the essential differences--and one of the best examples for this is Egyptian art where the relation seems very close indeed. Hegel, for example, thought Egyptian art was symbolic because mathematics was made an expression of art. This is not quite the case, but Hegel’s statement contained the insight of the role played by mathematics in Egyptian art. In Egyptian art mathematical symbols were taken in for art creation. The very ornamental intentions themselves had mathematical intentions (which was only true with the Egyptians). But while there has never been an art style where the artists were under such a yoke as the Egyptian artists were-- where artists had such a difficult superimposed inartistic shape to conform to--there still was no use of real mathematical symbols in my sense of the symbol. The Egyptians were able to take the mathematical symbol into their art, but it was only possible for it to enter into the metaphor in Egyptian art because of the fact that mathematics, which they idealized, was also mythical with them. It was the mythical implications of the mathematical symbol that made it possible for the Egyptians to use the triangle in the pyramid, for example, or the cylinder in the statue and by the slightest deviation from the mathematical role get into the expressive ornament (and when we look at all other expressions of the ornament, it becomes very apparent that the Egyptian performance did result in a real ornament).

But while Egyptian art used mathematical elements in a way no other art has used them, we find in all art the same means as in mathematics: the symbol, the plane, the line, the curve, etc. But here again, we find the same essential difference between things used in science and things used in art even though they are the same means. If an artist, for example, draws a straight line--one as absolutely straight as one drawn with a ruler--it still not only is used for a different purpose but it has an entirely different quality: the quality given by having been done with feeling and free will. Lines drawn automatically have the implication of still being in the concrete as to things in the sense of still abstracting from things, but drawing lines free hand with an ornamental purpose is related to voluntary human will and to inner space--not to analyzing and following space but to making space and relating inner space with outer space.
The first expression of this ability of man must have been done in relation to an abstract purpose, but regardless of whether pictorial art started with the ornament as an abstract art conception or not, the ornament is the special form of the metaphor in painting and as such has all the power of the metaphor: the power of relating the physical to the meta-physical and the metaphysical to the physical, the power of making given shapes conform, so to speak, to a general ornamental vision and by that transforming them, and bringing about that identity of the given and the meaningful.

So what Juan Gris said in relation to the concrete and abstract can very well be paraphrased in relation to the ornament (and still carry his meaning in a way): If I do not have the ornament, how can I transform shapes or if I do not have shapes given how can I control whether the ornament is working in space. In other words, if we do not have the ornament how can we create form itself in painting because to create form in painting means to create the identification of the given (shapes) with the meaningful by transforming the given by means of the ornament that comes from within and creates its own space (as the specific form in music is created by the phrase which makes it possible for physical time to be interpreted in terms of metaphysical time and metaphysical time to be interpreted in terms of physical time bringing about that identity of physical and metaphysical time).

This means, of course, that the metaphor in art (in whatever form) in order to be able to bring about this relation between the physical and metaphysical (whatever relation it might be) is bound in some way to the concrete--which in painting means to given shapes. The basic ornamental vision differs in each painting in the sense that it relies on the vision of experience given in each work of art, but it still has to keep fairly near to the given shape no matter how it might do it. This interplay of ornamental vision and concrete shape--that is, what the relation of the ornament is to the given shapes that are used in the creative procedure of transforming the physical and metaphysical into one world where they are identical--is the means by which we can control the intentions of all styles developed in art.

Each of the three great over-all style periods of art--the first one which included all art (with the exception of Chinese art) up to the Greeks with another appearance again in the time of Byzantine art; the second one which started with Greek art and developed a continuity as to style up to Cezanne; and the third one (which is our style) which started with Cezanne--have had a distinguishing style as to the transformation of given shapes as the concrete element and ornamental vision as the abstract one, given shapes as the physical element and the ornament as the metaphysical element.

The first great style was one where the transformation of given shapes took on the significance of deformation. The given world was raped, so to speak, in a tyrannical way by the ornament. In order to bring forth the real underlying significance of that style of art--in order to bring forth the representation of that real other world that had to be brought forth--the ornament was used in a tyrannical way. The second great style was one where the transformation of given shapes took on the significance of reformation because in a world where physical shapes contained meaning in themselves (either because they were part of a meaningful cosmos or because they were given meaning by God) it was a question of re-forming, so to speak, forms in nature that already contained meaning. The third great style--the style of transformation itself--came into being with Cezanne when he realized that meaning could no longer be considered to be in given shapes but only in man and in metaphysical things, and that in order to establish the interplay between the concrete and abstract, the physical and metaphysical, given shapes and the metaphor of painting, both had to be transformed from the procedure of art into the very means of art itself.

Now the ornament as the form of the metaphor in art plays a most complicated role--not only is every great over-all style determined by the specific interplay between ornamental vision and given shapes but every style has a basic fundamental ornament which indicates the basic will that underlies the whole style. Cezanne without painting so-called ornaments transformed this ability of interplay between the concrete and abstract, so to speak (which the ornament always has as to the interplay between given shapes as the concrete element and ornamental vision as the abstract one, given shapes as the physical element and the ornament as the metaphysical element), into the means of expressing the fundamental basic will underlying the whole style of transformation. Underlying all his pictures is expressed something that is constantly disturbed but which nevertheless constantly comes back into balance. By his use of ornamental design--by his use of color and the visible brushstroke--he achieved not only a unity but more: he achieved a tensional effect where everything forms before our very eyes into the concrete form of the shape of figures and being--giving the very procedure of art an expression of art itself. Cezanne by his discovery of this new creative ornamental element--which at first glance seems to have no symmetry but which has at once a perfect equilibrium of contrasting forces--was able to give us an over-all vision of the world that corresponded to scientific discoveries made later, and although he knew nothing of them, to certain metaphysical propositions put forward by Nietzsche.

First of all, by means of this Cezanne was able to give the new space of the modern style. Because of the tension created by this structural equilibrium, so to speak, of contrasting forces that stay together in a dynamic way, of forces working against each other and by that being forced to work with each other (which is the working tension of the whole modern style) space is created--a new space which reflects scientific discoveries made later about the relation of space to the observer. It was found that the observer cannot be kept out of natural space, that it changes with him, that space is bound to the specific observation conditions of the observer. This new vision of space Cezanne gave us--and with it the entirely new kind of perspective that necessarily related to it: a perspective now that cannot be perspective in the old sense but which must be considered from the point of view that every human being himself is perspective and throws his own perspective into the world.

Secondly, Cezanne by means of this ornamental element, which is also able to give the movement, the action, so to speak, of particles arranged in an equilibrium of contrasting forces--and by that to be able to give the possibility of tension and the over-all expression of action--was able to show us matter as being in constant action, to make us see the activity of things, the doing of things, to show us being of all kind in the procedure of being, interwoven into an active density, so to speak, and by that to give us an experience of the same thing that scientists later discovered in nature as fields of activities (fields that regardless of what type of activity--electrical, magnetic, etc., are always activity of some kind) and that Nietzsche expressed as the “will to power.”

Nietzsche in attempting to overcome Hegel’s identification of the physical and metaphysical presented a vision of the universe where he tried to prove--by ascribing to everything in nature the quality of human will, by making of everything the will to power, by making in his vision of the universe a universe full of purpose and intention--that although the process of continual change was not a process that could be described as a process of becoming in the way Hegel tried to do it (a process which physically existed but which, contrary to Hegel, was neither a process in which man was involved nor a process of either becoming or going away but merely one of change) that it was nevertheless really a process of becoming--which meant that Nietzsche presented a vision of the world that corresponded exactly to the one painted by Cezanne (although it was one that Nietzsche as a philosopher, contrary to Cezanne as an artist, was not en-titled to present). As Nietzsche wanted to ascribe to everything a will to power (by which he really meant the utmost exertion of strength of every particle in being to stand its own ground and to influence others) and ended up by giving only effect, Cezanne, who was concerned only with one thing--how to put meaning back into things and to unify them--saw that nature could only be described in quantities of effect, that all life could only be described now in terms of action and that whatever unity there was must be unity of action.

This basic concern of Cezanne to show in all his pictures being in action explains a great deal about Cezanne’s work--not only in terms of the over-all impact visually of being presented with an energetic and dynamic world picture where being is only measured in terms of dynamics of effect, but also in terms of his specific use of the visible brushstroke and especially color--which he thought best expressed that intensity and action of being he wanted to give and which he used as the means to unify all his pictures. Cezanne once said, “I paint and by painting I draw.” And he was right--he only drew by painting. He gave graphic structure by structural organization--a structural organization brought about by color and united by color.

Now we have seen that each creative ability of man has its own tool-- fundamental or philosophical thinking the tool of the concept, analytical or scientific thinking the tool of the symbol, artistic or metaphorical thinking the tool of the metaphor--and we have also seen that the metaphor itself can be divided into three basic forms as it is used in the different arts: the phrase in music, the ornament in art, and the literary metaphor in poetry and literature. This is bound up with another great human ability: the gesture--the gesture as an expression of the human being and the gesture in its various forms as it can be used by the different human capabilities. Words, for example, can be gestures and are used as such in politics where the gesture is a making ready for action--a means to bring someone into action, to arouse will and immediate action of a specific kind. The three forms of the metaphor in art--the phrase, ornament and literary metaphor--are also gestures (just as the passive gesture of physiognomics becomes an active gesture in acting and dancing).

With the gesture, especially as it is used in art, there is the possibility of a synthesis where the human gesture gets hold of an outer phenomenon-non--which means among other things that once again abstraction only takes place in science with symbols for the different forms of the metaphor as gestures have already the basic indication of that unification of the human gesture with an objective phenomenon. This ability of the metaphor in art to be a gesture whether it be in the form of the phrase, ornament, or literary metaphor, is one reason why in painting the ornament as a fundamental gesture of artistic intention has the power to carry the meaning of a certain style--where style, to put it yet another way, is the unity of a set of creative gestures given by one basic over-all gesture expressing a certain fundamental position taken by man toward the world in a certain situation of life and being (just as in fundamental thought there can be a given set of conceptions of metaphysical thought that stem from one basic over-all position taken by man in the world).

Now the event that brought about the fundamental change of position that made the modern style the kind of a style it is was, as we have seen, the breakdown of the cosmological and theological approach, and the difficulties that made the establishment of this style so very difficult were, as we have also seen, greatly complicated by the fact that along with all this all the creative abilities of man suffered except one: science-- which on the other hand forged ahead. Certainly in philosophy, except for the work of a very few genuine nihilistic philosophers, metaphysical concepts were not created, and in the pictorial arts there was a complete loss of style and diminishing of the ornament until Cezanne laid the foundations for the modern style of transformation. With Cezanne’s tremendous achievement of the establishment of a new growing style, the great possibilities of modern art came about but most certainly all modern art is not conceived in this style--on the contrary--and this too has to be under-stood and the distinctions made if we are ever really going to understand the new style itself. Perhaps one of the best ways to approach this is to go back to our example of the brushstroke and to see first how the brush-stroke became intentionally visible--not merely in an arbitrary way but in a way where it began to indicate itself, where it began to be discovered as a means for form itself--and then to see what the role of the brushstroke is in relation to this new style and to the fundamental over-all ornament that expresses the basic will and intention of this style.

Although Hieronymus Bosch in a certain sense created the brushstroke (but without creating a tradition) and we saw it first in a very shy way with Titian, and obviously so in the Venetian School, developing then with the Spanish painters until it came to a certain peak with Hals and Rubens, there was always one very definite characteristic about the way it was used up to Hals: it was only an accompaniment, so to speak. With Rembrandt, for example, it had a special individual meaning--being used merely to give fluctuating interferences of dark and light--but still he did not want to express something with it. So we have to ask: Why was the brushstroke used up to Hals only in this manner? How was it possible that the brush-stroke then came to be used to express something? How was it possible for the brushstroke to break out into its own absolute as it did with Constable and Delacroix? How did it finally become possible for the brushstroke to be used as a means of art?

In the Renaissance, for example, there were no brushstrokes in this sense, but in the Baroque period--with its interest in motion, its desire to bring out figures and things and to show beings in motion--Baroque painters needed the development of the brushstroke as a secondary element. But it was never used so intensely as to destroy volume, or the given set form--any more than Baroque perspective was allowed to break specific form. Both remained secondary means only of an over-all style, so how did it be-come possible--as it did with Delacroix and Constable, for example--that the brushstroke became the main means of painting? The change is bound up with two things relating to the romanticism and naturalism that also came to the fore: one was the use of the brushstroke to express certain individual moods of the painter, the individuality itself of the painter; the other, the rendering of process--where the brushstroke became not a means of showing beings in motion, but rather a means for expression of the dissolving of all things into motion itself, rendering the whole thing into process itself. This rendering of process given in a mixture with the rendering of individual moods (also given as a process) we find in the painting of the 19th Century--and the brushstroke became a most important means for both these purposes.

With the Impressionists, for example--who pretended to be mainly concerned with appearance but who were in reality also naturalistic and romantic--we find process with them became absolute. By means of an infinity of broken brushstrokes (which were still highly individualistic but in an entirely different way than the individuality of the brushstrokes of a painter like Manet) and slight color patches they tried to give the full impact of a sensual impression of process in nature, to reconstruct reality merely by sense impressions--and since the individual trend was also there, sensual impressions that were set by the mood of the individual.

With Van Gogh the brushstroke once again became something different and Impressionism was transformed into Expressionism--into modern self-expressionism which was really founded by Van Gogh and which was quite different from the kind of expressionism meant when El Greco and Rembrandt have been referred to (and rightly so) as expressionists. The essential difference lies in the fact that painters like El Greco and Rembrandt, although considered expressionistic, did not express themselves but the feelings of their subject matter. (The religiosity in the painting of El Greco, for example, was not necessarily an expression of his own feelings but rather the feelings of his subject.) But with Van Gogh it became a question of Van Gogh seen through the world, Van Gogh’s individual feelings expressed through the world. This was, of course, the exact opposite of the purpose of the Impressionists--although as far as process was concerned, an inner process was still rendered (and to a point in fact where this processual thinking was absolutely freed).

We can perhaps get the best idea of what really happened by the difference between the Impressionists and Van Gogh and Cezanne and then the great difference between Van Gogh and Cezanne both in the use of the brush-stroke and color. With Van Gogh brushstrokes--while they seemed even more voluntary, arbitrary and sweeping than those of the whole individualistic movement and while they remained to the end a means of individualistic expression--were always used in an intensive way and for the first time brushstrokes became organized. Brushstrokes came to have an ornamental element and were used in a decorative way where they made a consistent pattern. Cezanne too as a young painter used brushstrokes in the way of Van Gogh (namely, they had the tendency already to make certain decorative patterns) but--and this certainly was significant of the great break that came with Cezanne--only so long as he was interested in individualistic impressions. Once he went away from that--and he did entirely--the great change came: the brushstroke started to become with Cezanne an entirely new thing and color, which Van Gogh used in such a way as to strike the eye, opposing bright sweeps of color to each other, became a gliding scale of all colors united in an invisible color, grey, giving the over-all impression that all the colors, which in reality were bright, rich colors, were united in one invisible color, grey--a color he never used (which was one of the strangest achievements of Cezanne).

So we have with Van Gogh the beginning of modern self-expressionism in painting which has corresponded to a similar development in music starting with Wagner, who disregarded the fact that music is a synthesis, so to speak, of a stream of feeling and a direct line of thought. With Wagner the line of thought was dropped as much as possible in order to overwhelm the senses and a self-expressionistic line of music also started which has had no more to do with music in the modern style of transformation than expressionism as found in Cezanne and Picasso has had to do with self-expressionism (and when Kankinsky [Kandinsky] thought that painting by color could do the same thing as music, it was music in the sense of Wagner that he was talking about). Picasso, for example, while very often an expressionist has never been a self-expressionist (with the exception only of a few early things). His art is real art of transformation and has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called modern art done either in the line of Van Gogh or in the line of so-called abstract art which developed since Cezanne. Self-expressionism in art in whatever form, but especially in so-called abstract art, has one very essential pre-condition: the artist must be an exceptional person of great sensitivity and intensity--an intensity so strong that it overwhelms one. But even so, even if the artist is able to do this successfully, it still has nothing to do with the art of transformation but belongs rather to what we could call the art of modernism.

Cezanne in his lonely position of being the first artist who was really aware of man’s changed position in the world had one great purpose: to put unity and order back into the chaos of nature he saw about him-- which was the thing about the Impressionists that troubled him so much. What really disturbed him in Impressionistic pictures (which had for him only pure optical value) was that he became aware of the feeling in them of the dissolution of nature into the mere process of energy. In this he saw chaos, as he saw chaos in nature itself, and that was precisely the thing he wanted to fight. He wanted to right the senseless chaos of impressions before him and in his paintings to bring, things back into unity. Out of this was born the entirely new vision of the world found in Cezanne-- a world with more motion than in the Impressionists’ but transformed now into something entirely different: transformed into a world where all qualitative differences between things and beings had been abolished, where everything seemed to be made of the same material and to be interchange-able--and a world where the quality of being itself could be given as the action of being. This same unification took place in the ornament created by Cezanne--where he was able on the one hand to create out of the brush-stroke the volume and on the other also to cross the volume by the brush-stroke and by that to unite the whole picture by means of the brushstroke, where he was able to give a mutual procedure in which volume dissolved constantly into the brushstroke (into the ornament) and constantly reunited again into volume, where everything was interrelated but also came out on its own too. That meant that Cezanne was able to transform the metaphysical idea of process into a visual idea of active procedure which had agents, and agents that were shown--bringing about a unification of a kind that was absolutely new in painting and in life.

Cezanne in the new vision of the world he painted seemed to have anti-coated, as we have seen, the scientists and new theories they advanced much later. Not only did the interrelation and interchangeability of things shown by Cezanne--where the quality of being itself could be given as the action of being--correspond to certain scientific theories concerning fields of action, but his new vision of space corresponded also to new space theories advanced by Einstein. Cezanne discovered the possibility to create in the smallest space, the space of a still-life, a universal space, to give an equation, so to speak, between a mountain and a table-cloth in a still-life, and to give an impression of universal space in full action in a still-life--which meant that Cezanne discovered in an artistic way, of course, what Einstein discovered in a scientific way: namely, that space, the scope of space, the vastness of space depends entirely on the observation point of the observer and his space and time and observations conditions, that even scientifically there is no possibility to consider space a value that can be grasped by disregarding the observer, that the observer must always be regarded in space (which also means, of course, that time as well as space is involved because the eye in taking in different spacialities moves and in moving loses time). Cezanne was able to change the observation conditions, so to speak, of the artistic beholder in such a way that the difference between mountains and table-cloths, a table and stellar space, a universe and an apple became absolutely irrelevant--giving the beholder for the first time the experience of space being influenced by the observation point of the observer.

But what could be the observation point, so to speak, of the artistic beholder in Cezanne’s paintings--a point of observation that corresponded to the beholder’s experience with the world--and how did Cezanne bring it about? Metaphysically and visually up to Cezanne, all painting had a conception of the human eye as if man looked with his eyes fixed only in one place--which was related, of course, to the experience of man towards the world, the relation of man to being, and whether it was the experience of being submerged by being, so to speak, as it was in mythical art, being side by side with being, as it was in Greek art, being beyond being, being in a hereafter, as it was in Byzantine art, or being beyond being as it was in Gothic art, or being before being, being near being, as it was in Renaissance art, or being superior to being and at the same time being carried along by being in motion as it was in Baroque art, the position of the beholder was always outside the picture, so to speak. But with Cezanne the beholder was given for the first time the experience of being amidst being, being in the middle of things; the beholder was given for the first time the visual experience of man in our time--the visual experience of man who has had to look around more than anyone else has ever had to except perhaps the cave man and the hunter, the experience of permanently being amidst things, the experience Cezanne himself felt of masses and people and nature crowding in on him.

This he was able to achieve by a unification of perspectives (which explains why his so-called distortions were necessary) and by creating for the beholder a feeling of space that was finite and full--by creating a space where air became a solid substance, where atmosphere as solid and finite became the new space of man, where if the feeling of being within space was given, it was given as limited space, where still-life’s had almost wider space than landscapes. Instead of the feeling of lines of perspective meeting in infinity found in Baroque painting, Cezanne was able to give instead a unified perspective, so to speak, where the background and fore-ground met and were united in the middle ground--where the foreground moved to the middle ground and stopped there, where the background moved forward to the middle ground and stopped there. The roundness of an apple in a Cezanne still-life, for example, was given that quality of roundness in order to bring the apple into a motion inwards toward the middle ground where it was met by a counter motion from the background outwards toward the middle ground--where by an entirely new composition and juxtaposition of planes a movement inwards from the foreground and a movement outwards from the background met and were bound in an invisible middle ground. No feeling of depths behind the picture was given, no feeling of going on into infinity as in Baroque painting, but rather by making the background move in toward the middle ground the impression was given of being amidst, of being surrounded and taken into the world with no power of transcendence.

So Cezanne with his new vision of the world laid the foundations for a new style in art--in architecture as well as in painting. Cezanne by his use of the brushstroke and the ornament he created out of it (which had already the cubist structure for unification of the picture) and by his new concept of structure and space made it possible for the cubists (who were after the possibility of breaking up visible forms, so to speak, into an infinity of meeting planes, of uniting forms not united in natural vision) to take over those elements and to develop out of then a new ornament that had the indications of three-dimensional depth (accomplishing thereby the space of Cezanne)--and that contained in it not only further possibilities for the development of painting in the new style but contained also the possibility of a new ornamental design for architecture. Mondrian forced this discovery of the cubists to its conclusion by only giving the vision of space itself, by using space as his subject matter. Mondrian by going through cubism and leaving three-dimensionality discovered the possibility of giving three dimensions in infinitely small depths--of giving that small space by the opposing of pure color planes and by giving movement only by intensity of color--which means that here with Mondrian architecture and painting intersect for Mondrian was able to give the same thing that underlies the whole style of transformation in architecture: namely, “empty” space that is not empty at all but rather space that is in constant motion with filled space--“empty” space that in architecture can be used as a building substance, so to speak, as visually substantial as steel and concrete.

Now Picasso (once he went away from en early period of expressionism in the sense of Van Gogh--expression of inner feeling), like Cezanne, became concerned only with showing as to nature what things really did and what they really were inside, in their essence, but Picasso, since he saw in reality the real unreality (as Kafka also did) wanted now to break away from reality itself, so to speak, to overthrow the whole scheme of given natural shapes, and to transform them by the new means of the style of transformation not into the process but into the real procedure going on. And he has been able not only to do this, but to discover out of Cezanne’s style and in modern life and metaphysical thinking a new element that is one of the wonders of the style of transformation itself: the possibility of transforming everything into everything else. Out of the possibility not only to transform shapes given to the eye but also to inter-transform artistic forms and shapes already given, Picasso has been able to bring about such an interchangeability of forms that he has become the most multi-metaphorical painter of our time--being able to give in his paintings the vision of everything changing into something else and re-changing again, yet keeping all the while the same basic ornamental form. It is the discovery of this possibility to give through an interchangeability of forms controlled by one basic ornament a multitude of metaphors crowding in that has enabled Picasso to give simultaneously in one picture, as he has done in the “Girl in the Mirror,” for example, a young woman and an old one, full face and profile, a feeling of growing and expanding life, a feeling of withering away, the sun and the moon, the day and the night (to mention only some of them).

So with this only too brief glimpse of Picasso and with our inquiry into Cezanne we have had a chance to see at least a few of the wonders of the style of transformation and of the changed position of man in the world it shows, a chance to see some of the implications of what Cezanne really did when he laid the foundations for a new style, and what painters since him--painters like Picasso--have been able to do in the new style-- which is so very different from the continuing self-expressionism which is so often taken to be the modern style and which in reality must be so sharply distinguished from it.

5/25/51

Ladies and gentlemen: We come to the end of this course that was intended to be an introduction into the philosophy of the arts. And an introduction into the philosophy of the arts that is a very curious one, because it has been designed for purposes and wider conditions that no philosophy of the arts up to now has ever been designed under.

All the philosophies of the arts have been de-signed from the armchair of contemplation of the arts and could be designed so. Not this one. This one was under the compulsion of an absolute philosophical necessity. What is that - an absolute philosophical necessity? Philosophy, teaching life and nothing but life, and concerned therefore primarily, always, and first, with matters then when matters have become matters of life and death. Most matters of philosophy - even in the philosophy up to now - like love, death, life, God, freedom, moral behavior, the human soul - have in all situations always been matters of life and death. Matters to be decided upon at once, and to take decisions and live according to the decisions.

The only exception has been art, or, philosophically speaking, the problem of beauty. Because beauty has never been in a position to be a matter of life and death. Art itself was never threatened. Art itself was never in danger of being abolished It was never problematical. Beauty has been done, delivered by the artist, all the time. So, the philosophers always could afford here to sit back (with) that question into the armchair, the easy chair, and say: Let’s look at works of art, this or that, - what may it be. My situation was a quite different one. When I started to think about the arts, in early youth already, I knew that for the first time in history art itself has become threatened. Attacked. That there are forces at work in our time to destroy art (at all).

With good reasons. Because, in mass society, for the first time, as it comes out - slowly - of the decay of modern society - more formlessness and more formlessness every day, in every life matter, breaking up into atoms and massing together into masses of atoms without relations to each other, without forms - formless life more and more - in political things too. And finally the consequence, totalitarianism, where those formless masses are taken into a terror system, not in order to form them. (They don’t form anything ever). In order to manipulate them at will from day to day every way they want to. That means formlessness as a principle. They had to break art - that was clear to me - because art means, in a way, form. As long as there is art, people know that things cannot be lived formless.

So this philosophy of the arts had to be designed from a folding chair in the middle of the battlefield, and taking into consideration all - the whole situation - of man in our time, in order to get at the root of the question: What is art? And then it couldn’t be done. It couldn’t be done for years and years and years. And I didn’t know why, knowing so much of art, I couldn’t go into the heart of the matter. Because I couldn’t do it until I had changed the equipment of philosophy itself. That means, as I’ve explained many tines to you, getting away from universals, making fundamentals no more universals but making them essentials, no longer analyzing nouns but analyzing verbs, going into activities. And after I found that equipment I was ready for the philosophy of the arts.

And then I discovered why I had not been ready. I had not been ready for the simple cause - and that’s why the others had not been ready - even if they had been in a life and death situation for art - because art is nothing but pure activity itself. It is the only human creative activity where intellect does not constantly interfere, where therefore it is the hardest to get at it with universals. As soon as you get at it with essentials, taken as fundamentals, you can put the question we put here: What is artistic activity? We found out what artistic activity is. We see that according to this method we found how beholder, work of art and artist are united by this thing: artistic activity. We found out that art is a guarantor of human freedom, that art is the most pure activity, free activity, of man, and therefore the source of all free activities of man; that if art is stopped, if this source dries up, we will not even be able any more to make technical inventions because the ability to invent, the ability to make something new and to find something new for man, depends entirely on his ability to make pure invention, to make things out of pure invention or pure imagination, to make art. So once more it has become a life and death matter for the whole of society and for the whole of human life - to defend art. And at least we found out - and the totalitarians know, why they attack art. Because they want to dry out that source; they smell that they have to dry it out, in order to get at their aims. So that we found out here why we have to defend it, and what it is - this kind of activity that makes possible the process of self-realization of man, that proves - the only activity that proves to man that he can do everything absolutely new under the sun - a work of art! - that he can invent things as he wants to invent things. And keep this source flowing.

We found how, intertwined with myth and mythical activity of man, art has come up in history - in this one history that counts: the history of the human mind. And finally, from those basic definitions we went into looking at art and works of art themselves.
Now, for the end. It all boils down to the central question: What is form? Art works by form. All art works by form. In order to get at this final question, we are making three great steps. The first step we make by analyzing architecture in order to find that and how style is, in art, the manifestation of the style of life in a given time, that style of art is impossible without style of life, and that style of life is shaped by and impossible without style in art. And in architecture we could see it immediately by analyzing how the thing makes us work, that it puts us into a certain composure, into a certain kind of behavior, that it helps us to get style, to become men of style for ourselves, that it gives us a certain framework. Every art does that. This is the working of form on the beholder.

Second step: We went into an analysis of modern art in order to find what this new style coming to birth right now in our time means, and unfolding from it some forms that have been created within that style, and how they are interrelated among themselves - where we could see how form is inherent in the work of art.

Now we have to make the third step: to find how form - before we get at form directly from these three points - how form is given birth to in the artistic process. We’ve all heard that art can be done only by inspiration. It is the only human activity that permanently seems to need inspiration. What is that - inspiration? And is that whole thing true?

If you ask an artist, and he is sincere, he might tell you funny stories. He might make the mistake of telling a layman not what Dali tells him - and people who know how to handle them. - He might tell him: Oh, you see that picture? Well, yesterday I had that around that way, you know, and I wanted to make a row of mountains there, and then I finally put it around that way and made a clown out of it - it comes out better that way - - Then the layman thinks: that damn shoemaker! He thinks he is an artist! No inspiration whatsoever. Nothing that I can rely upon. No higher powers coming in. What a technician!.

Well, that’s one side. These things happen to the artist, and he does them. If he’s sincere, he tells them. And then other things - very strange - happen to him. As I told you before, a painter once said to me: “Oh I don’t know here - I think that red wants to come through here - that red wants something (of me ?). I never know how I got at that damn thing at all,” he says to me, “I really don’t know what the devil .. it’s just that one thing, you see..” “Oh” I said “it’s just that one thing? Let’s see. Let’s analyze that thing”.

How does it all start? In the poems that have been published now, of Rilke, since his death - his latest poems - he wanted to make a choice of them, and sent those poems to a girl-friend of his, and wrote her: “Please help me select the good ones and take out the bad ones. Keep only one thing in mind always: See if the first two God-given lines have been held through the whole poem - if the whole poem is built on those first two God-given lines. If not, reject it!” That gives a good indication how the thing starts. All artists who sometimes feel themselves working under something that, if they are romantically minded, they will call ”inspiration,” and something that, if they are realistically minded they will call ”craziness”, know one thing - that it always starts with a flash. What the flash is, they don’t know. Here, in Rilke’s case, it is the two God-given lines. And then he tries to make the thing up: what is that now? The two God-given lines were what we formerly found out to be the secret of Apollo, that something like truth is given to the senses, a unity between the senses and the mind is accomplished. This is the germ of form.

As to the specific kind, the specific work of art, there is only one comparison that can be used for the process of artistic production and those are terms taken out of the philosophy of erotics, and extremely out of the physiological part of it. What happened here was that flash, the self-engendering of the mind. The mind has conceived at this moment. All that comes now is to bear the child, and is exactly parallel to that process. It is not entirely subconscious, and it is sometimes so conscious that the painter said: “Well, if I take that line out here and just take a line that Matisse did yesterday”..(that conscious!).. “it might help me here”. The same as if a pregnant woman says: “I have to go to bed at 8 o’clock because I am pregnant.” This is conscious. This is decision. This is technicality. But there is a very funny thing about the pregnant woman: She cannot eat just that - she hates just that that she formerly wanted to eat. Her body knows that there is something in this body that wants this - she translates for it. She does not even know that she translates it. She just reacts.

So it is in that state. Millions of associations come into the mind as soon as the creative process has started - as the engendering has taken place. They have to be rejected, related, shown. They have to be fitted in, reformulated, transformed. All that matters - there’s only one thing - that you can keep yourself in that state. That you had a vision. The vision started. Now it is not so, that, in the old sense, the artist saw a topic, then he started to do it: there’s a content, there’s a form. He saw form. At once. He experienced form. But still, it is not now so that he experienced form as a vision and now he just has to put it down. No. The form has to be developed into the work of art. This is only a germ of form he conceived. And in order to develop it, he has to sustain the vision - not to fall out of the vision. Now there are giants who can do that with one work of art or by genius (?) as Leonardo could - every day go back to the vision, into the pro-creative process again.

There are artists like de Kooning who are absolutely afraid that if they don’t do that thing in twenty minutes they will fall out of the vision and the whole thing will be gone. That’s the whole scale between different art (?). One thing is always the same. You have to sustain the vision. You have to sustain that process. And now it comes, that you cannot distinguish any more: are you doing it or is that thing doing you? Is that thing doing itself? Why? This germ of form sets those millions of associations and indefinite possibilities. Between those, you are in the middle. You have to take in what suits the development of this germ of form. As soon as you have to start to bring intellect in, cold calculation into that, you fail. You are out of the vision. As soon as you take something that is strange to it, the thing falls apart. You have to shape it around again.
So, from the pure technicality, to see that this red has to fit this other red - that they don’t kill each other, or from the technicality that I am looking in a poem for a thing that is just a rhyme, just a rhyme, for heaven’s sake - nothing else. And underneath the process that this rhyme is the exact choice that is necessary for the development of this single germ of form. Otherwise it will not come out.

Now, as soon as you bring other forms - I will call them shapes - into it, we model them to this germ of form, want to have them penetrated by this germ of form you have in hand, Then suddenly you find that that germ, that form, makes its own requirements, on you. That you have not really a free choice. That the infinite view of possibilities you were in, of associations, is very rich still, but centers more and more into a certain framework, demanded and required by this basic form you have set yourself. And that is the moment when form starts to work with you! With you. That is the moment when the red requires from you to come through here. That is the moment when this line in the poem requires from you: “Blonde”, as Petrarch said when his friends said to him about one of his sonnets on his beloved Laura: “But Petrarch, Petrarch, she’s black-haired. You have blonde in your line.” He said: “Well, here, let’s take it out.” And ....”How beautiful this ‘blonde’ was in my line!” This “blonde” was required by the germ of form that had been set and that had to be developed in that sonnet. And he had to take it back. He would have destroyed the unity of form, in that sonnet.

Now I told you once that in distinction to science, where only quantitative things count, and therefore only exactitude and not truth, that there it is so, that if a little man, a small mind, says something right, it is better than if a great mind says something wrong. It might be and is, in science, if science is taken into life, as it has been by Marxism, for instance - it is even very dangerous if a great man in science says something wrong. In the arts, and in philosophy as well, quality is involved. And there a strange thing happens. If a great man says something wrong, it is infinitely more worthwhile than if a small mind says something right. Why? Quality counts. The depth counts, of the approach. And, in philosophy especially, you can always be sure that men had something in hand. He didn’t know what it was. He was wrong. But what was it? What did he have?

So Goethe once wrote a poem, where he made a statement about human life, the human being, how a human life runs, and everything in the cosmos. And he said the formula: “Getraegte (?) Form die Lebend sich entwickelt” - “Coined form that develops organically”, or more than that - “lively” - “in life” - “by the life process”. Now this is unfortunately - or, as I think fortunately - wrong about being, in general. As we have found out here in philosophy there is only one thing that is capable of development, in all the world, and that is the human mind. And this is self-development. This thing also creates another thing, namely art, and this art, this process of creating art, has exactly what Goethe said, in it. So Goethe being a great artist and a great mind could not be entirely wrong. He had something else in hand. What he had in hand was his tremendous experience of the inner process of art production, and there it is the absolute formula: Coined form (the germ of form) that develops in life. And this is the process of art creation. That is why it is so terribly hard to get at it by analysis, as long as the analysis is an analysis of notes. That is why you can get at it only if you start in that perhaps very tedious way we did it, and very heavy way, if you start by analyzing the activity itself. Then you might gain that insight into the artistic process. So from there, form. This process of self-engendering of the mind and bearing the child (out), in sustained vision, till the work of art is finished, is the secret of what has always been called “inspiration”. This is, of course, not inspiration, because if we want to say, to assume, that this germ of form, this flash in which the beginning of the vision comes, has been given immediately by any higher power, God - or other -, directly, we are welcome to do that, because we cannot contradict that. We cannot prove that this is not so. But neither are we able to prove that this is so. And so we have to disregard that question and find how far we can go with the things that we know. With the things we can experience. How near we can get to this phenomenon of inspiration. And I think this is the nearest we can get at it, to find “coined form that develops in life”, to find that the artist is up, after having gone into .. by the flash .. into the vision itself, into the state of vision, his work is to sustain the vision, his work is to bear the child (out). And to give birth to it.

As soon as he falls out of it, he might be able to go back to it later, and to repair the job. It has rarely been done. But it can be done. And it can be done only, not by intention, not by any force of will, only -you can only after a year get back into an unfinished work - by letting the thing as it stands now do the same thing to you again as that flash, that started it first, did to you. And you come back into the creative state. Then you might be able to start the process again, because, after all, it is not a child-birth process. And it is not a natural process. It’s a process of the mind, and it takes other ways. And so you might be able to go back into it and finish the work then.
Now we have, from all the points we always considered in order to approach and to get into our grasp that thing, artistic activity, namely from the point of view of the artist, the work of art and the beholder, made our approach to that center of art which is form. We have seen it working, in all those three instances. Seeing it at work - form in the work of art, in the beholder, and in the artist during the creative process.

Now this form - problem of form - has been approached by the science of esthetics, modern esthetic science. They have come that far, finally, that they have stated: A work of art is expressive form, or significant form, or meaningful form. Let’s take significant form because in our approach we found, by analyzing the saying of Heraclitus, what the god Apollo does: he gives truth to the senses, and he does not say anything, does not hide anything; he indicates. And he signifies. But then, this is the end - as far as the science of esthetics can go, to say: What they use in art is significant form. And I ask again: What - significant of what - how does significance come into the form? That we found out. We found out that they never were separated, that the unity of mind and matter is just the secret of form, and that form is conceived in the beginning as this germ of form.

But now we have to ask further: What is this form, related to the general problem of art that has always been called the problem of beauty? I said - let me first make a few distinctions. I said, we can best call this artistic activity “Gestaltung” - making Gestalt, not making form. Not to form, but to “gestalten”. That I did because we have three different states of what has always in philosophy been considered as “form”, and we had to make distinctions here. Unfortunately one distinction cannot be made in the English language - that is why I brought in the German word “Gestaltung” and “Gestalt” which is known to you, and which I analyzed - and why I brought it. Fortunately, on the other hand, the English language has the possibility of making the other distinction, namely the distinction between form and shape, which the German language does not have.

Now this thing here, much as I like it, I cannot do more than like it - I cannot love it. Why? Because this thing has been shaped; this thing has meaning; it is not meaning. It has the meaning to be smoked from, etc., etc. - the whole thing has been formed - you can say in English “shaped” - accordingly. So it has shape - it has not form. It can be liked; it cannot be loved. It has no beauty. It can have attractiveness; it cannot have beauty.

What is beauty? The term “beauty” has been given up entirely by modern esthetic science, and by modern artists. And rightly so. Because this term has been filled with the content of an old concept of beauty that runs strictly against the modern style in art. That is why they took in preference the term “form”. Now form, Gestalt, and beauty are all the same. Form relates to Gestalt in such a way that Gestalt is rather what I described to you, for instance, in the work of art, in the whole work of Kafka or Faulkner, those basic structures that make the whole thing great - the whole form, the over-all form - that form that relates already to style, and to style-setting in an age, is great form. This form we will call Gestalt. All forms that are invented by this germ of form that has been developed into the Gestalt - and now, all forms in the work that have been invented in order to sustain and to bring out this great Gestalt, we will call “forms”. They still contain, though only secondarily, beauty. Shape alone does not contain beauty.

So what is beauty? Why has modern art rejected the term? The term has been rejected because they did not want to be representative any more - to be representative assumes (?) - and one could be representative in art - only as long as one thought that things in nature, forms in nature - whatever, including the human form, - are beautiful. We do not believe that any longer. Why? And why were those forms considered as beautiful? As long as one thought they give truth to the senses. As long as we had a philosophy where we thought God had created the cosmos for us, and all forms in this cosmos - they were all related to each other - they all either had a soul, which is decisive for art - they were intentional - they made sense. There was meaning in them, meaning, that through their form, their shape, call it then form, could be given to the senses. And we found out: this is not true. They are merely functional. They are not intentional. And therefore there is not possibility of beauty’s being in them. The beauty we saw in them, we saw into them.
Because we believed that those things could speak to us, of God’s all-power, of God’s purpose, of the purpose of the cosmos, of the harmony of the cosmos inherent in all things - that meaning was given to us through them. And we found out this is not true. They have to do only with exactitude. They are functional. They have nothing whatsoever to do with truth. So, if they do not have truth, they cannot give truth. And their forms cannot give truth to the senses. Their forms can only inform the senses about facts.

Cezanne was the first who discovered that, and he discovered it by fear. He must have felt - he was a very devout man - he must have felt shocked at the discovery: God is no artist. Natural forms are functional and don’t give anything of truth to the senses. There is no beauty in nature. God has been no artist. In his despair, and being a painter and not a philosopher, he was not ready enough to say: If God. has been no artist, perhaps he intended not to be that, in order that I might be-- which a theologian could answer. He was just in despair, and he tried to give form to natural things, to bring them into significant form, into form that signifies meaning. And that is how all modern art started. By this shock - behind this, that we have no beauty in natural things.

Now, there is one exception. The human being. And there we have to distinguish again - more exactly than we did before -. When we thought that all natural forms are not merely functional, but are all intentional, and therefore could convey beauty, then of course we thought that the human body is just the center of all that - natural given beauty. That we believed from the Greeks to the end of the 19th century, in art. And we will see later why. Now, we have to ask the question, since we found out that in all merely natural things, in all things ( I will say now) in all things given, in all things that just happen, there is nothing intentional, everything is only functional, - how about the human body? After all, we find that the human body is something a human being, which is a mind, has, just as it has spirit or intellect. So, is there any beauty in the human body? And most people will still answer Yes. For after all, who would say to a girl she isn’t beautiful? In a way, we have to. Because there is in the human body, for our feelings, the same attractiveness that is to us in trees, to a lesser degree, and so on in nature, We get friendly with it. Or there is to it even, if we can use those things technically, always a certain attraction. Here the attraction comes to the top. So, the human body in its bloom, promising - the body of a young woman promising happiness for a male is something utterly attractive. Is it therefore beautiful then? Let’s try to find out the limit of attractiveness, as of the human body. In “Anna Karenina” is a very sad thing. The lover sits with the woman he seduced, for a long time now, and looks at her as she undresses. And Tolstoy remarks: “He liked everything, everything. But how often had he liked it already?” The whole sadness of boredom, in which all human drives that have not been transformed into great passion have to end, is here, in this scene. This woman has not become less attractive. She hasn’t rotted yet. She is not old. The only argument is that this attractiveness he had. experienced too often, and there is boredom already. And there the lover sits, thinking himself to have been a passionate lover. He has only been a vehement one. He hasn’t been a classical lover; he has been a romantic lover. He wasn’t able to transform a drive into a passion. He never saw beauty in her. Was there beauty? Yes, there was. He could have seen it. Because the mind has a body, the body is forced to show beauty. To show the reflex of that unity of mind and matter, which is form, and which is inherent in the human being. And when does it show? It shows when the mind lightens the matter up. It shows in the smile, it shows in the look, it shows in the walk, it shows in the voice. And it shows in gesture. It does not show physiologically. What can be seen physiologically can be the most wonderful thing - it still is functional. It is functional and attractive.

But what can be seen physiognomically is beauty. Physiognomic is beauty. And that is why acting is possible, why mimics are possible, why an artist - an actor - can convey feelings of art, can convey form, by his mimics, because here he uses as an instrument that capability of the human being with which it is born - the capability to show, to give to the senses of another one his own unity of mind and matter, his being form.

And this beauty never dies - as love for this beauty, If one has seen it, never dies. Faulkner said once very beautifully: “Love never dies; we die.” We are not able to sustain it. So love, not in the sense that he means it there, because he means the holding up of attractiveness, which does not hold - but beauty seen, even in a human being, - strong beauty, beauty coming through, beauty of the mind, shown in the body, shown in the behavior - and we will never forget it! That is why you don’t forget great moments in the theater. That’s why I will never forget how Chaplin walked at a certain moment - never forget how he was broken - just so - when he came out as an old man in Monsieur Verdeau. Why? Because he was able to convey truth to the senses, because his own senses, his own body, his own whole being was form at that moment, was a work of art, as - as a sketch - we all are.

For this beauty, once seen, never dies, and has much to do with beauty in the work of art, where we have it from another end: form. Again. And this form that we have enables us by the help of art to become Gestalt ourselves in the end - makes the process of entire self-realization possible. Art helps to that too, and it helps to it by this means. So form and beauty in that sense are one. And the magic of form and Gestalt is beauty.

Seen from another end, beauty, as I previously said, is just this thing that is truth — but truth as being felt by the senses only, not truth given to the mind. So beauty is, in a way, a substitute for truth.

It is much more. In all religions - the redeeming religions at least, the hopeful religions - human beings have always conceived the state of felicity the state in the hereafter and the other world, as a state of beauty. That means, considered by suffering men, by men who don’t like themselves and therefore don’t like the world and don’t like others and want to be redeemed and saved - it means beauty as salvation. To the other ones, who like themselves and like other people and like the world, because they are strong enough for it however the world might be, - beauty is synonymous with fulfillment.

Why? We found that this thing - truth given to the senses in a work of art - brings us into a state of felicity because something has happened. The world, contradictory in itself - we, in contradiction to the world, as we are, or always having to work in order to find meaning in things, to put meaning into them, to make them work, to bring meaning, to bring truth into the world, to cheer our life, the life of other people, in order to make better - has suddenly ceased. Here everything seems to be done. Peace. No contradiction between mind and matter. No contradiction between the will of the subject and the resistance of the object. The perfect marriage. Something that is not to be worked on any more. Peace. Beauty. Fulfillment. That is the other twin (?) of symbols leading to that concept of beauty. We will have to see how this stands up as the modern art.

And therefore we will finally now have a look backward into the center of the matter. Art is always non-realistic. “Non” is a negative affirmation. The question arises: How is art non-realistic? Let us first say: Art is always non-realistic because it cannot be realistic. Why can it not be realistic? Not because we are unable - or the painter is unable - to do the same job as color photography does, on one single object. He might not be unable. He might be able to do a work that resembles that thing as exactly as color photography does.

Why couldn’t he consider this a work of art then? And here the problem lies. He wouldn’t be interested. What he wants is beauty. What he wants is to give meaning to the senses. He wants in a work of art - at least - he wants human feelings in it. And he wants new things in it - not things already seen. He wants experience in it, if he is an artist. If he has to put experience into it by conceiving form - the experience is already in it, and experience itself makes the form, - he will be absolutely unable to copy that thing. That means, to make it realistically. That is why art has to be realistic - it has no choice. But now, how - this is a negative - non-realistically? How is art non-realistically? If it wants to be art - that means if it wants to be positive. Not positive in the sense of positivism - that’s a nice thing in which everything has ended what-ever was thought in Western philosophy - sophisticated stupidity - but in the sense of positive as giving something, doing ..… And there we find, up to now, three ways of art. And crossing all styles now - that means, giving an over-all impression of the development of art as to this single central matter, there have been three ways in which art realized to be (succeeded in being?) non-realistic. The first way was to be “other”-realistic. Other-realistic means to be so related to myth - and myth, as well as religion, is that strange human activity where facts are invented - facts, -- so related to myth and religion, art first wanted to get away from reality and the reality of forms in nature in order to create another reality. Those artists really believed - the whole Indian culture up to the Egyptian culture, beginning with the fetishes -they really believed that there was a realistic relation between the things they made that gave expression to forms, and forms that existed, either in this world unseen, as the Negro plastic, or beyond this world unseen – in the empire of the ? in Egyptian art there was always something like that to it. This does not mean that art was unfree for that. That whole talk about art becoming free only in our time isn’t worth a dime as long as people always think that this freedom is a freedom from outside interferences. Artists have coped very well with outside interference, and doing in art, and doing art nevertheless. This is not the freedom that has come. It’s another kind of
freedom that has come, that is much deeper.

So that was not the interference. It didn’t prevent the Egyptians from making great art. But what it did, it set a style, a style that was other-realistic, supposed to be a copy of another existing reality. And in order to do that, all those forms from the primitive to Egyptian art distorted. This was deformation. Deformation - because every artist can only handle given natural forms - they always resemble, they will always have a resemblance - here they were taken and distorted. In order to make them resemble another reality they were made into forms that were deformed, as to forms we know. This is the reason why those forms later, in modern art, could be used - we will see why.

Second state was the state of reformation, not deformation. Reformation. It started with the Greeks, and has been held through from the Greeks mainly, through all Christian arts, with a few deviations, up to the 19th century. That style - I’m calling it a style now, I mean an over-all style that comprises many styles in itself, but they always have one basic thing in common, and that is that the forms used in them - may I say “shapes” now - used in them in order to give form have been form that because it was believed then that man can be like the world, because the world is a cosmos, or is ruled by one thing: a God who means well toward man, that things therefore contain beauty and that this beauty has only to be brought out - that those forms can be taken and just enhanced, in order to bring out their inner beauty that they are endowed with, - by reformation of those forms given.

This reformation, in later tines, from the Renaissance on - in all this time - has been done either -- in two ways -- either by violence - and this is the Hellenistic style, the Roman style, the Baroque style - or by, not violence, by going into these forms, like the Greek style - measured, classical - Greek style, Renaissance style and some later 19th century painting. Both those ways - but it has always been the same - reformation of forms. Because we believed there is beauty in them, we have only to bring it out.-It was not an other-worldly style ever (always?). The Christian sty1e, the Gothic style, for instance, was an other-worldly style too. And here you see how little it means in art - to bring those forms in from other fields, like religion, as Malraux always does. This whole distinction - the artist as a religious artist or not - doesn’t make any difference. In the Gothic style - that is, a style of the humanities that believed in another world, you will not find a single example where artists have tried to make, what has made up to Egyptian art, an other-realistic style, that is, a style that resembles another reality. This was only one stride in Western art, in art that is only half-Western art, that is Byzantine art. Byzantine art again approaches this possibility of making a style by deforming - by giving similarity to supposed other-worldly reality. For the artist is only the size of how he behaves toward reality in art (?). And so the Gothic artist is a Western artist, and Gothic art, strange as it might be, shows only transcendence. It shows another world, but it shows this other world being here, embodied in the being of this world. That might strain the body - give certain forms, but those forms are not deformations. They are not forms that resemble another reality. They do not have to be reformations. They are the utmost of reformation of those human and natural forms that were believed to have a beauty in them also. And that makes a unity of Western art. This reformation, this .. philosophically, was done first by Heraclitus when the Greek thinkers started to think and philosophy was born and for the first time the question arose: what is being? Up to then, humanity had built a wall - this other-reality was a wall to shield itself from the not-bearable reality of this world they lived in. When this world seemed to be bearable to the Greeks, the question was asked directly: What is this world? What is being?

And together with this thinking, this style of the arts started. So we are not only in a position today to the Renaissance art - don’t make any mistake about this - we are in a position toward all the Western art in the modern style. Because something absolutely decisive has happened or is beginning to happen.

The next of the three steps, of the development of the human mind, as far as the arts are concerned, as it shows in the arts. And that is always an over-all question. It shows elsewhere too. The third step is about to be taken: our relation to natural forms. And this style we are developing here -- make no mistakes about it, as Malraux does, who is asking himself: Isn’t that again, as I would say, an other-reality style? Isn’t it again that forms are coming up that want to enslave man, that want to bring him back under the rule of absolute natural things, or absolute forms, or whatever that thing may be? Oh no! That is no other-worldly style whatsoever. It is also not a style .... It is a worldly style. It is a style of this world. And that is the reason why it is not connected with religion and can nevertheless be a style.

This inventing - of the model of Kafka, of the precedent of Faulkner, of the moving space in Cezanne, of the absolute interchangeability of all forms whatsoever in Picasso ...
I said modern artists do not believe any more that things are as they look. It goes deeper: They know, because they feel, that there is no beauty in things, in those forms. What is the next possibility of art being non-realistic, as it always is? It is a possibility of being transrealistic - possibility of the action of transformation.

So we go from deformation to reformation to transformation. Those three steps in the arts are also the steps taken by the human mind in all other fields. This transformation is what we have to do, because of what we are threatened with - and not only the artists, who are threatened with becoming realistic by force - Socialist realistic - in totalitarianism, - and therefore forced to give up form, order, the thing by which we live - to make them utterly formless, as all human life. And here it hangs together, made formless in totalitarianism - mass reactions that are manipulated - the human personality absolutely formless, beginning with manners and ending with the impossibility of love.

Those forms have to be inculcated again into the human being by art. If you destroy it, you destroy the form-giving ability of human beings, which means you destroy life. Human life. It depends on that.

Now, faced with that, with absolute formlessness, and seeing that they don’t believe any more in the significance and relevance of forms given, an seeing the decay of this society -into mass society, becoming ready for totalitarian rule by itself, one of the main means to stop that process is to know what we have to do. Here in the arts, what are the artists doing? What are those first steps? They try to transform those forms, which is form-giving again - invention of new form relations, invention of a new form world This transcendence, this transformation, is the name I would give to the modern style.

And using this criterion of transformation, you will be able - and now you see why deformations - without understanding them - they are related to another reality - have been taken by modern artists in order to get away from all forms that have been developed by reformation. But have made them transformed forms, modern forms. Now, this modern style, if we call it what it is, the style of transformation, then you will have a criterion at once to see which contemporary art is contemporary and which is not. And we will be out of that embarrassment of the so-called “modern style” - they called themselves modern already in the Renaissance - and later we knew that it was a renaissance - they called themselves partly the Renaissance, in certain matters - and later we had the name, we had to have the name, because the name is an activity. Transformation here is our task in general, against the threatening formlessness of life and going down of humanity, and in face of the daily growing more and more worthless of forms that have been believed up to now - that have been brought (up) by reforming - we have to do transformation. Transformation of man, transformation of humanity, transformation of the world, of society, of nature. This transformation that starts as an indication, out of the bitter necessity of not knowing any more what to paint, that looks true to the experience, in artists, that transformation modern scientists stumble upon every day when they suddenly find out we don’t know what matter is any more - we don’t know what energy is any more - we don’t know what things are any more - we need an absolutely transformed vocabulary in order to live up to the things we find. And finally philosophy, that has to find it all out, and find a way to gather all those first steps together, to show how they hang together, that we again are caught upon a great thing, and go to a great task, and this is a matter of life and death. We have to choose only between complete formlessness, however that may end, and it will not end with now fresh barbarian people coming onto the scene and saying something new! There aren’t any of those peoples any more. We have to bring it out of ourselves, out of our own society, out of each single individual. There were nice dreamers in the 19th century, who thought they could do this by a social revolution, or something like that, or by just changing economies around, and they found out that they got into states that are even worse than the one they tried to leave.

It’s a much deeper task. The task that starts with rethinking through things, with thinking anew about the human being and his capabilities, and make the choice. And before this choice, among other things, modern art - the style of transformation puts us all. And that is the reason why it is attacked. This complete change that it indicates, that it shows something new that might help against the anarchy of complete formlessness, this makes us hate it. By people who want to be complacent, who want to see that everything is wonderful and all right, that all the things we have believed to be beautiful formerly that were done by reforming are still beautiful, that every-thing has meaning because father told them so, and because they want to tell their children so. But that is not living up to the crisis. And this crisis is one of the greatest humanity ever faced! It is really a crisis of life and death. The outcome of it will be: humanity, really - or it will be a mass of formless apes!

And that is the significance of art in our time. And in that way, art not being symbolical, or using symbols only on the side(lines), art itself is a symbol. Art itself is a symbol always for the world human beings want and had to want. Style in art coming up is an indication that man is making a new evaluation of the world, is taking a new position towards the world, is developing In himself a new attitude towards the world, and all this is style of life. The changing of this style of life, as indicated by the changing of the style in the arts, was my main purpose in this introduction to the philosophy of the arts, in order to make you aware what we are fighting for, and what we are in for, and why art has become a matter of life and death for the existence of man.

Footnotes:

1. A polis giving political refuge to a man from another polis had been asked by that polis to return the refugee. Before doing anything about it the sheltering polis sent a messenger to Delphi to ask the oracle whether or not to return the man and the oracle answered, “Yes.” The refugee when he heard this asked that he be allowed to go and ask the oracle for himself and the polis agreed. When he came to the temple the first thing he did was to start pulling down the swallow nests (which were sacred to Apollon)-- whereupon Apollon himself appeared asking: “Why do you defile my temple?” “Well,” replied the refugee, “you agreed with my enemies to send me back-- breaking the law of hospitality of the polis that is sheltering me.” “That is true,” Apollon answered, “but you see I would have had an excuse then to destroy that polls--and I have wanted to do that for a long time.”

2. (Note: Lectures VI, VII, and VIII are missing.)

3. Plato as a philosopher, had to fight Greek mythology which had given the basis of ethics and which had become then because of its very freedom a nuisance and danger to the community. In order to get at the roots of a new way of philosophy Plato had to attack myth and he saw that this could not be done if Greek myth were not questioned in its truth. But in order to do this, he had to attack art and the artist. The Greeks did not have priests--it was through art and myth that theology was carried. In a discussion of art and form, for example, a theological discussion could come about concerning Apollon’s morals as put forth by the artist. So it was not through a hatred of art that Plato tried to rule out art for a time or why he attacked myth so bitterly. It was simply in order to kill this theological approach which he as a philosopher felt had to be destroyed.