No More Learning

Art's disavowal of magical practices-its antecedents-implies partici- pation in rationality. That art, something mimetic, is possible in the midst of rationality, and that it employs its means, is a response to the faulty irrationality of the rational world as an overadministered world . For the aim of all rationality -
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the quintessence of the means for dominating nature-would have to be some- thing other than means, hence something not rational. Capitalist society hides and disavows precisely this irrationality, and in contrast to this, art represents truth in a double sense: It maintains the image of its aim, which has been obscured by rationality, and it convicts the status quo of its irrationality and absurdity. The re- linquishment of the delusion of the unmediated intervention of spirit , which inter- mittently and insatiably recurs in the history of humanity, establishes a prohi- bition against recollection's employing art to tum unmediatedly toward nature. Only separation can countermand separation . This at once strengthens and excul- pates the rational element in art because it resists real domination, even though, as ideology, this element is ever and again bound up with domination. To speak of "the magic of art" is trite because art is allergic to any relapses into magic. Art is a stage in the process of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world, and it is entwined with rationalization; this is the source of all of art's means and methods of production; technique that disparages its ideology inheres in this ide- ology as much as it threatens it because art's magical heritage stubbornly per- sisted throughout art's transformations. Yet art mobilizes technique in an opposite direction than does domination. The sentimentality and debility of almost the whole tradition of aesthetic thought is that it has suppressed the dialectic of ratio- nality and mimesis immanent to art. This persists in the astonishment over the technical work of art as if it had fallen from heaven: The two points of view are actually complementary. Nevertheless, the cliche about the magic of art has something true about it. The survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as "rational. " For that to which the mimetic comportment responds is the telos of knowledge, which art simultaneously blocks with its own categories. Art completes knowledge with what is excluded from knowledge and thereby once again impairs its character as knowledge , its univocity . Art threatens to be pulled apart because magic, which art secularizes, actually refuses this process, while in the midst of secularization the essence of magic sinks to the level of a mythological vestige, to superstition. What today emerges as the crisis of art, as its new quality, is as old as art's concept. How an artwork deals with this antinomy determines its possibility and quality. Art cannot fulfill its concept. This strikes each and every one of its works, even the highest, with an ineluctable imperfectness that repudiates the idea of perfection toward which artworks must aspire . Unreflected, perfectly logical enlightenment would have to discard art just as the prosaic pragmatist in fact does. The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or surrender of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality, dic- tates its law of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated. The depth of the process, which every artwork is, is excavated by the unreconcilability of these elements; it must be imported into the idea of art as an image ofreconciliation. Only because no artwork can succeed emphatically are its forces set free; only as a result of this
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does art catch a glimpse of reconciliation. Art is rationality that criticizes rational- ity without withdrawing from it; art is not something prerational or irrational, which would peremptorily condemn it as untruth in the face of the entanglement of all human activity in the social totality. Rational and irrational theories of art are therefore equally faulty. If enlightenment principles are bluntly applied to art , the result is that philistine prosaism that made it easy for the Weimar classicists and their romantic contemporaries to drown in ridicule the meager sentiment of bourgeois revolutionary spirit in Germany; a philistinism that was admittedly sur- passed one hundred and fifty years later by that of a narrow bourgeois religion of art. That form of rationalism that argues powerlessly against artworks, by apply- ing extra-aesthetic logical and causal criteria to art, has not died off; it is provoked by the ideological misuse of art. If someone writing a realist novel after it had become outmoded objected about one of Eichendorff's verses that clouds cannot be equated with dreams but that at best dreams might perhaps be equated with clouds, the verse itself, "Clouds pass by like heavy dreams,"6 would in its own sphere, where nature is transformed into a premonitory metaphor of inner life, be immune to such homegrown correctness. Whoever denies the expressive power of this verse - a prototype of sentimental poetry in the best sense- blunders and trips in the twilight of the work instead of entering it and responsively working out the valeurs of the words and their constellations. Rationality in the artwork is the unity-founding, organizing element, not unrelated to the rationality that gov- erns externally, but it does not reflect its categorizing order. What empirical ratio- nality takes to be the irrational characteristics of artworks is not a symptom of an irrational mind, not even a symptom of an irrational opinion among its viewers; opinion generally produces opinionated artworks that are , in a certain sense, ratio- nalistic. Rather, the lyric poet's desinvolture, his dispensation from the strictures of logic-which enter his sphere only as shadows-grants him the possibility of following the immanent lawfulness of his works. Artworks do not repress; through expression they help to make present to consciousness the diffuse and elusive without, as psychoanalysis insists, "rationalization. "-To accuse irra- tional art of irrationalism for playing a trick on the praxis-oriented rules of reason
is in its own way no less ideological than the irrationality of official faith in art; it serves the needs of apparatchiks of every persuasion . Movements such as expres- sionism and surrealism, whose irrationality alienated, were an attack on violence, authority, and obscurantism. That various tributaries of German expressionism and French surrealism too converged in Fascism - for which spirit was merely the means to an end, which is why Fascism devoured everything-is insignificant with regard to the objective idea of those movements, and it has been deliberately blown out of proportion by Zhdanov and his followers for political purposes. It is one thing to manifest the irrationality of the psyche or the political order artistically, giving it form and thereby in a certain sense making it rational , but it is something else again to preach irrationality, as it has almost always been done under the
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auspices of a rationalism of aesthetic means , in crude , mathematically commensu- rable superficial connections. Benjamin's theory of the artwork in the age of its technical reproduction may have failed to do full justice to this. The simple an- tithesis between the auratic and the mass-reproduced work, which for the sake of simplicity neglected the dialectic of the two types, became the booty of a view of art that takes photography as its model and is no less barbaric than the view of the artist as creator. It is of interest that initially, in his "Small History of Photo- graphy," Benjamin in no way pronounced this antithesis as undialectically as he did five years later in his essay on reproduction. 7 Whereas the later work adopted the definition of aura word for word from the earlier one, the early study praises the aura of early photographs , which they lost only with the critique of their com- mercial exploitation by Atget. This may come much closer to the actual situation than does the simplification that made the essay on reproduction so popular. What slips through the wide mesh of this theory , which tends toward copyrealism, is the element opposed to cultic contexts that motivated Benjamin to introduce the con- cept of aura in the first place, that is, that which moves into the distance and is critical of the ideological superficies of life. The condemnation of aura easily be- comes the dismissal of qualitatively modem art that distances itself from the logic of familiar things; the critique of aura thereby cloaks the products of mass culture in which profit is hidden and whose trace they bear even in supposedly socialist countries. Brecht did in fact value Song-style above atonality and twelve-tone technique, which was for him suspiciously romantic in its expressiveness. From these perspectives the so-called irrational currents of spirit are summarily chalked up to Fascism, ignoring their voice of protest against bourgeois reification by which they nevertheless continue to provoke. In conformity with East-bloc poli- tics, a blind eye is turned toward the relation between enlightenment and mass deception. 8 Disenchanted technical procedures that dedicate themselves com- pletely to appearances, as what they claim to be, function only too well for the transfiguration of these appearances. The failure of Benjamin's grandly conceived theory of reproduction remains that its bipolar categories make it impossible to distinguish between a conception of art that is free of ideology to its core and the misuse of aesthetic rationality for mass exploitation and mass domination, a pos-
sibility he hardly touches upon. The single technique dealt with by Benjamin that goes beyond camera rationalism is montage , which reached its acme in surrealism and was quickly weakened in film. But montage disposes over the elements that make up the reality of an unchallenged common sense, either to transform their intention or, at best, to awaken their latent language. It is powerless, however, in- sofar as it is unable to explode the individual elements . It is precisely montage that is to be criticized for possessing the remains of a complaisant irrationalism, for adaptation to material that is delivered ready-made from outside the work. Following an internal logic whose stages will need to be described by an aesthetic historiography that does not yet exist, the principle of montage therefore became
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thatofconstruction. There is nodenyingthateven intheprincipleofconstruction, in the dissolution of materials and their subordination to an imposed unity, once again something smooth , harmonistic , a quality of pure logicality , is conjured up that seeks to establish itself as ideology. It is the fatality of all contemporary art that it is contaminated by the untruth of the ruling totality. Still, construction is currently the only possible form that the rational element in the artwork can take , just as at the outset, in the Renaissance, the emancipation of art from cultic het- eronomy was part of the discovery of construction , then called "composition . " In the artwork as monad, construction-its authority limited-is the plenipotentiary of logic and causality transferred to the artwork from the domain of objective knowledge . Construction is the synthesis of the diverse at the expense of the quali- tative elements that it masters , and at the expense of the subject, which intends to extinguish itself as it carir es out this synthesis. The affinity of construction with cognitive processes, or perhaps rather with their interpretation by the theory of knowledge, is no less evident than is their difference, which is that art does not make judgments and when it does, it shatters its own concept. What distinguishes construction from composition in the encompassing sense of pictorial composi- tion, is the ruthless subordination not only of everything that originated from out- side the artwork, but also of all partial elements immanent to the work. To this ex- tent construction is the extension of subjective domination, which conceals itself all the more profoundly the further it is driven. Construction tears the elements of reality out of their primary context and transforms them to the point where they are once again capable of forming a unity, one that is no less imposed on them in- ternally than was the heteronomous unity to which they were subjected externally . By means of construction, art desperately wants to escape from its nominalistic situation, to extricate itself by its own power from a sense of accidentalness and attain what is overarchingly binding or, if one will, universal. To this end art requires a reduction of its elements, which it threatens to enervate and degenerate into a victory over what is not present. The abstract transcendental and hidden sub- ject of Kant's theory of schematism becomes the aesthetic subject. Yet construc- tion at the same time critically reduces aesthetic subjectivity , just as constructivist approaches such as Mondrian's originally took a stand in opposition to those of expressionism. For if the synthesis of construction is to succeed , it must in spite of all aversion be read out of the elements themselves, and they never wholly accede
in themselves to what is imposed on them; with complete justice construction countermands the organic as illusory . The subject in its quasi-logical universality is the functionary of this act, whereas the self-expression of the subject in the re- sult becomes a matter of indifference. It counts among the most profound insights of Hegel's aesthetics that long before constructivism it recognized this truly di- alectical relation and located the SUbjective success of the artwork in the disap- pearance of the subject in the artwork. Only by way of this disappearance, not by cozying up to reality, does the artwork break through merely subjective reason.
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This is the utopia of construction; its fallibility, on the other hand, is that it nec- essarily has a penchant to destroy what it integrates and to arrest the process in which it exclusively has its life . The loss of tension in constructive art today is not only the product of subjective weakness but a consequence of the idea of con- struction itself, specifically with regard to its semblance . Pursuing its virtually irre- versible course, which tolerates nothing external to itself, construction wants to make itself into something real sui generis , even though it borrows the very purity of its principles from external technical functional forms. Functionless, however, construction remains trapped in art. The purely constructed, strictly objective art- work, which ever since Adolf Loos has been the sworn enemy of everything artisanal, reverses into the artisanal by virtue of its mimesis of functional forms: Purposelessness without purpose becomes irony. To date the only alternative to this has been the polemical intervention of the subject in subjective reason by a surplus of the subject ' s own manifestation beyond that in which it wants to negate itself. Only by carrying through this contradiction, and not by its false resolution, can art somehow still survive .
The need for objective art was not fulfilled in functional means and therefore encroached on autonomous means. It disavows art as the product of human labor, one that nevertheless does not want to be an object, a thing among other things. Art that is simply a thing is an oxymoron. Yet the development of this oxymoron is nevertheless the inner direction of contemporary art. Art is motivated by a con- flict: Its enchantment, a vestige of its magical phase, is constantly repudiated as unmediated sensual immediacy by the progressive disenchantment of the world, yet without its ever being possible finally to obliterate this magical element. Only in it is art's mimetic character preserved, and its truth is the critique that, by its sheer existence, it levels at a rationality that has become absolute. Emancipated from its claim to reality , the enchantment is itself part of enlightenment: Its sem- blance disenchants the disenchanted world. This is the dialectical ether in which art today takes place . The renunciation of any claim to truth by the preserved magi- cal element marks out the terrain of aesthetic semblance and aesthetic truth. Art inherits a comportment of spirit once directed toward essence, and with it the chance of perceiving mediately that which is essential yet otherwise tabooed by the progress ofrational knowledge. Though it will not acknowledge it, for the dis- enchanted world the fact ofart is an outrage, an afterimage of enchantment, which it does not tolerate. If, however, art unflinchingly acquiesces in this and posits it- self blindly as sorcery , it degrades itself to an act of illusion in opposition to its own claim to truth and undermines itself with a vengeance . In the midst of the dis- enchanted world even the most austere idea of art, divested of every consolation , sounds romantic. Hegel's philosophical history of art, which construes romantic art as art's final phase, is confirmed even by antiromantic art, though indeed it is only through its darkness that this art can outmaneuver the demystified world and cancel the spell that this world casts by the overwhelming force of its appearance,
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the fetish character of the commodity. By their very existence artworks postulate the existence of what does not exist and thereby come into conflict with the lat- ter's actual nonexistence. Yet this conflict is not to be conceived in the manner of jazz fans for whom what does not appeal to them is out of date because of its in- congruity with the disenchanted world. For only what does not fit into this world is true . What is requisite of the artistic act no longer converges with the historical situation, which is not to say that they ever harmonized. This incongruity is not to be eliminated by adaptation: The truth, rather, is in carrying through their conflict. Conversely, the deaestheticization of art is immanent to art- whether it be art that unflinchingly pursues its autonomous order or art that sells itself off cheap - in ac- cordance with the technological tendency of art, which is not to be halted by any appeal to a purportedly pure and unmediated inwardness. The concept of artistic technique emerged late: Even after the French Revolution, when the aesthetic domination of nature was becoming self-conscious, the concept was still lacking , though not its reality . Artistic technique is no cozy adaptation to an age that with foolish zeal labels itself technological, as if productive forces alone determined its structure, regardless of the relations of production that hold the former in check. As was not infrequently the case in modem movements after World War II, when- ever aesthetic technology strove for the scientization of art rather than technical innovation, art was dazzled and went astray. Scientists, especially physicists, had no trouble pointing out many misunderstandings to artists who had become enrap- tured with the nomenclature, reminding them that the scientific terminology they used to name their technical procedures was being misattributed. The technolo- gization ofart is no less provoked by the subject-by the disillusioned conscious- ness and the mistrust of magic as a veil- than by the object: by the problem of how artworks may be bindingly organized. The possibility of the latter became problematic with the collapse of traditional procedures , however much their influ- ence has extended into the current epoch. Only technology provided a solution; it
promised to organize art completely in terms of that means-end relation that Kant had in general equated with the aesthetic. It is not that technique sprang out of the blue as a stopgap, although it is true that the history of art has known moments that are reminiscent of the technical revolution of material production. With the progressive subjectivization of artworks , free control over them ripened within the traditional procedures. Technologization established free control over the mater- ial as a principle. For its legitimation the development of technique can appeal to the fact that traditional masterworks since Palladio, though they relied only desul- torily on knowledge of technical procedures , nevertheless gained their authentic- ity from their level of technical integration, until finally technology exploded the traditional procedures. In retrospect, even as a constituent element of the art of the past, technique can be recognized with incomparable clarity compared with what is conceded by cultural ideology, which portrays what it calls the technical age of art as the decline of a previous age of human spontaneity. Certainly it is possible
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in the case of Bach to show the gaps between the structure of his music and the technical means that were available for its completely adequate performance ; for the critique of aesthetic historicism this is relevant. Yet insights of this sort do not suffice for the entire complex of issues. Bach's experience led him to a highly de- veloped compositional technique. On the other hand, in works that can be called archaic , expression is amalgamated with technique as well as with its absence or with what technique could not yet accomplish. It is in vain to try to decide what effects of preperspectival painting are due to expressive profundity or to some degree of technical insufficiency that itself becomes expression. Precisely for this reason archaic works, which are generally limited in their range of possibilities, always seem to have just enough available technique and no more than is required for the realization of the project. This imbues them with that deceptive authority that is misleading with regard to the technical aspect that is a condition of such authority. In the face of such works the effort to distinguish between what was wanted and what was still out of reach falls mute; in truth, this question is always misleading with regard to what is objectivated. Yet abandoning the question also has an element of obscurantism. Alois Riegl ' s concept of artistic volition [Kunst- wollen], much as it helped to free aesthetic experience from abstract timeless norms, can scarcely be maintained; it is hardly ever the case that what is decisive in a work is what the artist intended. The fierce rigidity of the Etruscan Apollo at the Villa Giulia is a constituent of the content, regardless whether it was intended or not. And yet at critical points in the history of art the function of technique has been fundamentally transformed. When fully developed, technique establishes the primacy in art of making, in contradistinction to a receptivity of production, however that is conceived . Technique is able to become the opponent of art inso- far as art represents - at changing levels - the repressed unmakable. However, the technologization of art is not synonymous with feasibility either, as the super- ficiality of cultural conservatism would prefer. Technologization, the extended arm of the nature-dominating subject, purges artworks of their immediate lan- guage. Technological requirements drive out the contingency of the individual who produces the work. The same process that traditionalists scorn as the loss of soul is what makes the artwork in its greatest achievements eloquent rather than merely the testimony of something psychological or human, as the contemporary prattle goes. Radicalized, what is called reification probes for the language of things. It narrows the distance to the idea of that nature that extirpates the primacy of human meaning . Emphatically modern art breaks out of the sphere of the por- trayal of emotions and is transformed into the expression of what no significative language can achieve. Paul Klee's work is probably the best evidence ofthis from the recent past, and he was a member of the technologically minded Bauhaus.
If one teaches - as Adolf Loos did implicitly and technocrats since have happily reiterated-that real technical objects are beautiful. one predicates of them pre- cisely that against which artistic Sachlichkeit, as an aesthetic innervation, is di-
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rected . Incidental beauty , measured in terms of opaque traditional categories such as formal harmony or even imposing grandeur, impinges on the real functionality in which functional works like bridges or industrial plants seek their law of form. It is apologetic to claim that functional works , by virtue of their fidelity to this law of form, are always beautiful; the aim is evidently to give consolation for what these works lack and assuage Sachlichkeit's bad conscience. By contrast, the au- tonomous work, functionally exclusive in itself, wants to achieve through its own immanent teleology what was once called beauty . If in spite of their division , pur- poseful and purposeless art nevertheless share the innervation of Sachlichkeit, the beauty of the autonomous technological artwork becomes problematic, a beauty that its model-the functional work-renounces. The beauty of the work suffers from functionless functioning. Because its external terminus ad quem atrophies, its internal telos wastes away; functioning-as a for-something-else-becomes superfluous, an ornamental end in itself. This sabotages an element of functional- ity, that necessity that arises from the partial elements of the artwork in accord with what these elements want and with regard to their own self-direction. The equalization of tension that the objective artwork borrowed from the functional arts is profoundly impeded. What becomes obvious is the disparity between the functionally thoroughly formed artwork and its actual functionlessness. Still, aesthetic mimesis of functionality cannot be revoked through recourse to the sub- jectively unmediated: This would only mask how much the individual and his psychology have become ideological with regard to the supremacy of social ob- jectivity , a supremacy of which Sachlichkeit is correctly conscious . The crisis of Sachlichkeit is not a signal to replace it with something humane, which would immediately degenerate into consolation, the correlative of the actual rise of in- humanity. Thought through to the bitter end, Sachlichkeit itself regresses to a preartistic barbarism. Even the highly cultivated aesthetic allergy to kitsch, orna- ment, the superfluous, and everything reminiscent of luxury has an aspect of bar- barism, an aspect-according to Freud-ofthe destructive discontent with culture. The antinomies of Sachlichkeit confirm the dialectic of enlightenment: That pro- gress and regression are entwined. The literal is barbaric. Totally objectified, by virtue of its rigorous legality, the artwork becomes a mere fact and is annulled as art. The alternative that opens up in this crisis is: Either to leave art behind or to transform its very concept.
Since Schelling , whose aesthetics is entitled the Philosophy ofArt, aesthetic inter- est has centered on artworks. Natural beauty, which was still the occasion of the most penetrating insights in the Critique ofJudgment, is now scarcely even a topic of theory. The reason for this is not that natural beauty was dialectically tran- scended, both negated and maintained on a higher plane, as Hegel's theory had propounded, but, rather, that it was repressed. The concept of natural beauty rubs
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on a wound, and little is needed to prompt one to associate this wound with the violence that the artwork-a pure artifact-inflicts on nature. Wholly artifactual, the artwork seems to be the opposite of what is not made , nature . As pure antithe- ses, however, each refers to the other: nature to the experience of a mediated and objectified world, the artwork to nature as the mediated plenipotentiary of imme- diacy . Therefore reflection on natural beauty is irrevocably requisite to the theory of art. Whereas thoughts on it, virtually the topic itself, have, paradoxically, a pedantic , dull, antiquarian quality , great art and the interpretation of it have , by in- corporating what the older aesthetics attributed to nature, blocked out reflection on what is located beyond aesthetic immanence and yet is nevertheless its premise. The price of this repression was the transition to the ideological art reli- gion (a name coined by Hegel) of the nineteenth century-the satisfaction in a reconciliation symbolically achieved in the artwork. Natural beauty vanished from aesthetics as a result of the burgeoning domination of the concept of free- dom and human dignity, which was inaugurated by Kant and then rigorously transplanted into aesthetics by Schiller and Hegel; in accord with this concept nothing in the world is worthy of attention except that for which the autonomous subject has itself to thank. The truth of such freedom for the subject, however, is at the same time unfreedom: unfreedom for the other. For this reason the turn against natural beauty , in spite of the immeasurable progress it made possible in the com- prehending of art as spiritual , does not lack an element of destructiveness, just as the concept of dignity does not lack it in its turn against nature. Schiller's vari- ously interpreted treatise On Grace and Dignity marks the new development. The devastation that idealism sowed is glaringly evident in its victims-Johann Peter Hebel , for example - who were vanquished by the verdict passed by aesthetic dig- nity yet survived it by exposing through their own existence the finitude of the idealists who had judged their existence to be all too finite. Perhaps nowhere else is the desiccation of everything not totally ruled by the subject more apparent, nowhere else is the dark shadow of idealism more obvious, than in aesthetics. If the case of natural beauty were pending , dignity would be found culpable for hav- ing raised the human animal above the animal . In the experience of nature , dignity reveals itself as subjective usurpation that degrades what is not subordinate to the subject-the qualities-to mere material and expulses it from art as a totally in- determinate potential, even though art requires it according to its own concept. Human beings are not equipped positively with dignity; rather, dignity would be exclusively what they have yet to achieve . This is why Kant situated it in the intel- ligible character rather than consigning it to the empirical sphere. Under the sign of the dignity that was tacked on to human beings as they are - a dignity that was rapidly transformed into that official dignity that Schiller nevertheless mistrusted in the spirit of the eighteenth century - art became the tumbling mat of the true, the beautiful , and the good, which in aesthetic reflection forced valuable art out of the way of what the broad , polluted mainstream of spirit drew in its current .
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The artwork, through and through t1ECJn, something human, is the plenipoten- tiary of <j)'uCJn, of what is not merely for the subject, of what, in Kantian terms, would be the thing itself. The identity of the artwork with the subject is as com- plete as the identity of nature with itself should some day be. The liberation of art from the heteronomy of the material, especially of natural objects, as well as the right to take every possible object as an object of art, first made art master of itself and expunged from it the rawness of what is unmediated by spirit. However, the course of this progress, which plowed under everything that did not accommodate to identity with spirit, was also a course of devastation. This has been well docu- mented in the twentieth century by the effort to recover authentic artworks that succumbed to the terror of idealism's scorn. Karl Kraus sought to rescue linguistic objects as a part of his vindication of what capitalism has oppressed: animal , land- scape, woman. The reorientation of aesthetic theory toward natural beauty is al- lied with Kraus's effort. Hegel obviously lacked the sensibility needed to recog- nize that genuine experience of art is not possible without the experience of that elusive dimension whose name-natural beauty-had faded. The substantiality of the experience of natural beauty, however, reaches deep into modem art: In Proust, whose Recherche is an artwork and a metaphysics of art, the experience of a hawthorne hedge figures as a fundamental phenomenon of aesthetic comport- ment. Authentic artworks, which hold fast to the idea of reconciliation with nature by making themselves completely a second nature, have consistently felt the urge, as if in need of a breath of fresh air, to step outside of themselves. Since identity is not to be their last word , they have sought consolation in first nature: Thus the last act of Figaro is played out of doors, and in Freischutz Agathe, standing on the balcony , suddenly becomes aware of the starry night. The extent to which this tak- ing a breath depends on what is mediated , on the world of conventions , is unmis- takable. Over long periods the feeling of natural beauty intensified with the suffer- ing of the subject thrown back on himself in a mangled and administered world; the experience bears the mark of Weltschmerz . Even Kant had misgivings about art made by human beings and conventionally opposed to nature. "The superiority ofnatural beauty over that of art, namely, that-even ifart were to excel nature in form-it is the only beauty that arouses a direct interest, agrees with the refined and solid way of thinking of all people who have cultivated their moral feeling. "! Here it is Rousseau who speaks, and no less in the following sentence: "A man who has taste enough to judge the products of fine art with the greatest correctness and refinement may still be glad to leave a room in which he finds those beauties that minister to vanity and perhaps to social joys , and to tum instead to the beauti- ful in nature, in order to find there, as it were, a voluptuousness for the mind in a train of thought that he can never fully umavel . If that is how he chooses, we shall ourselves regard this choice of his with esteem and assume that he has a beautiful soul, such as no connoisseur and lover of art can claim to have because of the in- terest he takes in his objects. "2 The gesture of stepping out into the open is shared
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by these theoretical sentences with the artworks of their time. Kant lodged the sublime-and probably along with it all beauty that rises above the mere play of form-in nature. By contrast, Hegel and his generation achieved a concept of art that did not-as any child of the eighteenth century took for granted-"minister to vanity and social joys. " But they thereby missed the experience that is still expressed unreservedly by Kant in the bourgeois revolutionary spirit that held the humanly made for fallible and that, because the humanly made was never thought fully to become second nature , guarded the image of first nature .
The degree to which the concept of natural beauty has been historically trans- formed is made most strikingly evident by the fact that it was probably only in the course of the nineteenth century that the concept was enlarged by a new domain: the cultural landscape, an artifactitious domain that must at first seem totally op- posed to natural beauty . Historical works are often considered beautiful that have some relation to their geographical setting , as for instance hillside towns that are related to their setting by the use of its stone . A law of form does not, as in art , pre- dominate in them; they are seldom planned, although sometimes the effect of a plan is produced by the arrangement of the town around a church or marketplace, just as economic-material conditions at times spawn artistic forms . Certainly these cultural landscapes do not bear the character of inviolability that the accepted view associates with natural beauty.
Engraved as their expression is history, and engraved as their form is historical continuity, which integrates the landscapes dynamically as in artworks. The discovery of this aesthetic dimension and its ap- propriation through the collective sensorium dates back to romanticism, probably initially to the cult of the ruin. With the collapse of romanticism, that hybrid do- main, cultural landscape, deteriorated into an advertising gimmick for organ festi- vals and phony security; the prevailing urbanism absorbs as its ideological com- plement whatever fulfills the desiderata of urban life without bearing the stigmata of market society on its forehead. But if a bad conscience is therefore admixed with the joy of each old wall and each group of medieval house s , the pleasure sur- vives the insight that makes it suspicious. So long as progress, deformed by utili- tarianism, does violence to the surface of the earth, it will be impossible-in spite of all proof to the contrary-completely to counter the perception that what ante- dates the trend is in its backwardness better and more humane. Rationalization is not yet rational; the universality of mediation has yet to be transformed into living life; and this endows the traces of immediacy, however dubious and antiquated, with an element of corrective justice. The longing that is assuaged and betrayed by them and made pernicious through spurious fulfillment is nevertheless legiti- mated by the denial of gratification continually imposed by the status quo. But perhaps the most profound force of resistance stored in the cultural landscape is the expression of history that is compelling, aesthetically, because it is etched by the real suffering of the past. The figure of the constrained gives happiness be- cause the force of constraint must not be forgotten; its images are a memento . The
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cultural landscape, which resembles a ruin even when the houses still stand, em- bodies a wailful lament that has since fallen mute. If today the aesthetic relation to the past is poisoned by a reactionary tendency with which this relation is in league, an ahistorical aesthetic consciousness that sweeps aside the dimension of the past as rubbish is no better. Without historical remembrance there would be no beauty. The past, and with it the cultural landscape, would be accorded guiltlessly to a liberated humanity, free especially of nationalism. What appears untamed in nature and remote from history, belongs-polemically speaking-to a historical phase in which the social web is so densely woven that the living fear death by suffocation. Times in which nature confronts man overpoweringly allow no room for natural beauty; as is well known, agricultural occupations, in which nature as it appears is an immediate object of action , allow little appreciation for landscape . Natural beauty, purportedly ahistorical, is at its core historical; this legitimates at the same time that it relativizes the concept. Wherever nature was not actually mastered, the image of its untamed condition terrified. This explains the strange predilection of earlier centuries for symmetrical arrangements of nature. In sym- pathy with the spirit of nominalism, the sentimental experience of nature delighted in the irregular and unschematic. The progress of civilization, however, easily deceives human beings as to how vulnerable they remain even now. Delight in nature was bound up with the conception of the subject as being-for-itself and virtually infinite in itself; as such the subject projected itself onto nature and in its isolation felt close to it; the subject's powerlessness in a society petrified into a second nature becomes the motor of the flight into a purportedly first nature. In Kant, as a result of the subject's consciousness of freedom, the fear of nature's force began to become anachronistic; this consciousness of freedom, however, gave way to the subject ' s anxiety in the face of perennial unfreedom. In the expe- rience of natural beauty, consciousness of freedom and anxiety fuse. The less se- cure the experience of natural beauty, the more it is predicated on art. Verlaine's "la mer est plus belle que les cathedrales" i s intoned from the vantage point of a high civilization and creates-as is the case whenever nature is invoked to throw light on the world human l? eings have made-a salutary fear.
Just how bound up natural beauty is with art beauty is confirmed by the experi- ence of the former. For it, nature is exclusively appearance, never the stuff of labor and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science. Like the experience of art, the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images. Nature, as appearing beauty , is not perceived as an object of action. The sloughing off of the aims of self-preservation-which is emphatic in art-is carried out to the same degree in aesthetic experience of nature . To this extent the difference between the two forms of beauty is hardly evident. Mediation is no less to be inferred from the relation of art to nature than from the inverse relation. Art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate, but art does want to keep nature's promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise; by taking it back into itself. This
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much is true in Hegel's theorem that art is inspired by negativity, specifically by the deficiency of natural beauty , in the sense that so long as nature is defined only through its antithesis to society, it is not yet what it appears to be. What nature strives for in vain, artworks fulfill: They open their eyes. Once it no longer serves as an object of action, appearing nature itself imparts expression, whether that of melancholy, peace, or something else. Art stands in for nature through its aboli- tion in effigy; all naturalistic art is only deceptively close to nature because, analo- gous to industry, it relegates nature to raw material. The resistance to empirical reality that the subject marshals in the autonomous work is at the same time resis- tance to the immediate appearance of nature. For what becomes perceptible in nature no more coincides with empirical reality than does-according to Kant's grandly paradoxical conception -th e thing itself with the world of "phenomena," the categorially constituted objects . Just as in early bourgeois times natural beauty originated from the historical progress of art, this progress has since gnawed away at natural beauty; something of this may have been distortedly anticipated in Hegel's depreciation of natural beauty. Rationality that has become aesthetic, a disposition over materials that fits them together according to their own immanent tendencies , is ultimately similar to the natural element in aesthetic comportment. Quasi-rational tendencies in art-the outcome of subjectivization-such as the critical rejection of topoi , the complete internal organization of individual works progressively approximate, though not by imitation, something natural that has been veiled by the mastery of the omnipotent subject; if anywhere , then it is in art that "origin is the goal . "3 That the experience of natural beauty , at least according to its subjective consciousness, is entirely distinct from the domination of nature, as if the experience were at one with the primordial origin, marks out both the strength and the weakness of the experience: its strength, because it recollects a world without domination, one that probably never existed; its weakness, because through this recollection it dissolves back into that amorphousness out of which genius once arose and for the first time became conscious of the idea of freedom that could be realized in a world free from domination. The anamnesis of freedom in natural beauty deceives because it seeks freedom in the old unfreedom. Natural beauty is myth transposed into the imagination and thus, perhaps, requited. The song of birds is found beautiful by everyone; no feeling person in whom some- thing of the European tradition survives fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rain shower. Yet something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed. The fright ap- pears as well in the threat of migratory flocks, which bespeak ancient divinations , forever presaging ill fortune. With regard to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in mythical ambiguity. This is why genius, once it has be- come aware of itself, is no longer satisfied with natural beauty . As its prose char- acter intensifies , art extricates itself completely from myth and thus from the spell of nature, which nevertheless continues in the SUbjective domination of nature.
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Only what had escaped nature as fate would help nature to its restitution. The more that art is thoroughly organized as an object by the subject and divested of the subject' s intentions , the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a nonconceptual, nonrigidified significative language; this would perhaps be the same language that is inscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful if threadbare name, "The Book of Nature. " Along the trajectory of its rationality and through it, humanity becomes aware in art of what rationality has erased from memory and of what its second reflection serves to remind us. The vanishing point of this development- admittedly an aspect only of modem art-is the insight that nature, as something beautiful, cannot be copied. For natural beauty as something that appears is itself image. Its portrayal is a tautology that, by objectifying what appears, eliminates it. The hardly esoteric judgment that paintings of the Matter- horn and purple heather are kitsch has a scope reaching far beyond the displayed subject matter: What is innervated in the response is, unequivocally, that natural beauty cannot be copied. The uneasiness this causes flares up only in the face of extreme crudeness, leaving the tasteful zone of nature imitations all the more se- cure. The green forest ofGerman impressionism is ofno higher dignity than those views of the Konigssee painted for hotel lobbies. French impressionists, by con- trast, knew very well why they so seldom chose pure nature as a subject; why, when they did not tum to artificial subjects like ballerinas and racing jockeys or the dead nature of Sisley's winter scenes, they interspersed their landscapes with emblems of civilization that contributed to the constructive skeletonization of form, as Pissarro did, for example. It is hard to determine the extent to which the intensifying taboo on the replication of nature affects its image. Proust's insight that Renoir transformed the perception of nature not only offers the consolation that the writer imbibed from impressionism, it also implies horror: that the reifica- tion of relations between humans would contaminate all experience and literally become absolute. The face of the most beautiful girl becomes ugly by a striking resemblance to the face of a film star on whom it was carefully modeled: Even when nature is experienced as spontaneously individuated, as if it were protected from administration, the deception is predictable. Natural beauty, in the age of its total mediatedness, is transformed into a caricature of itself; not the least of the causes for this is the awe felt for natural beauty, which imposes asceticism on its contemplation for as long as it is overlaid with images of being a commodity. Even in the past the portrayal of nature was probably only authentic as nature morte: when painting knew to read nature as the cipher of the historical, if not as that of the transience of everything historical. The Old Testament prohibition on images has an aesthetic as well as a theological dimension . That one should make no image, which means no image ofanything whatsoever, expresses at the same time that it is impossible to make such an image. Through its duplication in art, what appears in nature is robbed of its being-in-itself, in which the experience of nature is fulfilled. Art holds true to appearing nature only where it makes land-
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scape present in the expression of its own negativity; Borchardt's "Verse bei Be- trachtung von Landschaft-Zeichnungen geschrieben" [verses written while con- templating landscape drawings]4 expressed this inimitably and shockingly. Where painting and nature seem happily reconciled-as in Corot-this reconciliation is keyed to the momentary: An everlasting fragrance is a paradox.
Natural beauty, such as it is perceived unmediated in appearing nature, is compro- mised by the Rousseauian retoumons. The mistakenness of the crude antithesis of technique and nature is obvious in the fact that precisely nature that has not been pacified by human cultivation, nature over which no human hand has passed- alpine moraines and taluses -resembles those industrial mountains of debris from which the socially lauded aesthetic need for nature flees. Just how industrial it looks in inorganic outer space will someday be clear. Even in its telluric expan- sion, as the imprint of total technique, the concept of idyllic nature would retain the provincialism of a minuscule island. In schema borrowed from bourgeois sexual morality, technique is said to have ravished nature, yet under transformed relations of production it would just as easily be able to assist nature and on this sad earth help it to attain what perhaps it wants . Consciousness does justice to the experience of nature only when, like impressionist art, it incorporates nature's wounds. The rigid concept of natural beauty thereby becomes dynamic. It is broadened by what is already no longer nature. Otherwise nature is degraded to a deceptive phantasm. The relation of appearing nature to what is inert and thing- like in its deadness is accessible to its aesthetic experience. For in every particular aesthetic experience of nature the social whole is lodged. Society not only pro- vides the schemata of perception but peremptorily determines what nature means through contrast and similarity. Experience of nature is coconstituted by the ca- pacity of determinate negation. With the expansion of technique and, even more important, the total expansion of the exchange principle, natural beauty increas- ingly fulfills a contrasting function and is thus integrated into the reified world it opposes. Coined in opposition to absolutism's wigs and formal gardens, the con- cept of natural beauty forfeited its power, because bourgeois emancipation under the sign of the alleged natural rights of human beings made the world of experi- ence not less but more reified than it was in the eighteenth century. The unmedi- ated experience of nature , its critical edge blunted and subsumed to the exchange relation such as is represented in the phrase "tourist industry," became insignifi- cantly neutral and apologetic, and nature became a nature reserve and an alibi. Natural beauty is ideology where it serves to disguise mediatedness as immedi- acy. Even adequate experience of natural beauty obeys the complementary ideol- ogy of the unconscious . If in keeping with bourgeois standards it is chalked up as a special merit that someone has feeling for nature-which is for the most part a moralistic-narcissistic posturing as if to say: What a fine person I must be to enjoy myself with such gratitude-then the very next step is a ready response to such testimonies of impoverished experience as appear in ads in the personal column
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that claim "sensitivity to everything beautiful. " Here the essence of the experience of nature is deformed. There is hardly anything left of it in organized tourism. To feel nature, and most of all its silence, has become a rare privilege and has in turn become commercially exploitable. This, however, does not amount to the con- demnation of the category of natural beauty tout court. The disinclination to talk about it is strongest where love of it survives. The "How beautiful! " at the sight of a landscape insults its mute language and reduces its beauty; appearing nature wants silence at the same time that anyone capable of its experience feels com- pelled to speak: in order to find a momentary liberation from monadological con- finement. The image of nature survives because its complete negation in the arti- fact - negation that rescues this image - is necessarily blind to what exists beyond bourgeois society, its labor, and its commodities. Natural beauty remains the alle- gory of this beyond in spite of its mediation through social immanence. If, how- ever, this allegory were substituted as the achieved state of reconciliation, it would be degraded as an aid for cloaking and legitimating the unreconciled world as one in which-as the claim goes-beauty is indeed possible.
The "Oh how beautiful," which according to a verse of Friedrich Hebbel disturbs the "celebration ofnature,"5 is appropriate to the tense concentration vis-a-vis art- works, not nature. Its beauty is better known through unconscious apperception; in the continuity of such perception natural beauty unfolds, sometimes suddenly. The more intensively one observes nature, the less one is aware of its beauty, unless it was already involuntarily recognized. Planned visits to famous views, to the landmarks ofnatural beauty, are mostly futile. Nature's eloquence is damaged by the objectivation that is the result of studied observation, and ultimately some- thing of this holds true as well for artworks, which are only completely percep- tible in temps duree, the conception of which Bergson probably derived from artistic experience. If nature can in a sense only be seen blindly, the aesthetic imperatives of unconscious apperception and remembrance are at the same time archaic vestiges incompatible with the increasing maturation of reason. Pure immediacy does not suffice for aesthetic experience . Along with the involuntary it requires volition, concentrating consciousness; the contradiction is ineluctable. All beauty reveals itselfto persistent analysis, which in turn enriches the element of involuntariness; indeed, analysis would be in vain if the involuntary did not reside hidden within it. In the face of beauty , analytical reflection reconstitutes the temps duree through its antithesis. Analysis terminates in beauty just as it ought to appear to complete and self-forgetting unconscious perception. Thus analysis subjectively redescribes the course that the artwork objectively describes within itself: Adequate knowledge of the aesthetic is the spontaneous completion of the objective processes that, by virtue of the tensions of this completion, transpire within it. Genetically, aesthetic comportment may require familiarity with natural beauty in childhood and the later abandonment of its ideological aspect in order to transform it into a relation to artifacts.
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As the antithesis of immediacy and convention became more acute and the hori- zon of aesthetic experience widened to include what Kant called the sublime , nat- ural phenomena overwhelming in their grandeur began to be consciously perceived as beautiful. Historically this attitude of consciousness was ephemeral . Thus Karl Kraus's polemical genius-perhaps in concurrence with the modem style of a Peter Altenberg-spurned the cult of grandiose landscapes and certainly took no pleasure in high mountain ranges, which probably prompt undiminished joy only in tourists, whom the culture critic rightly scorned. This skepticism toward natural grandeur clearly originates in the artistic sensorium . As its powers of dif- ferentiation develop, it begins to react against the practice in idealist philosophy of equating grand designs and categories with the content of artworks . The confu- sion of the two has in the meantime become the index of art-alien comportment. Even the abstract magnitude of nature, which Kant still venerated and compared to moral law , is recognized as a reflex of bourgeois megalomania, a preoccupation with setting new records, quantification, and bourgeois hero worship. This cri- tique , however , fails to perceive that natural grandeur reveals another aspect to its beholder: that aspect in which human domination has its limits and that calls to mind the powerlessness of human bustle. This is why Nietzsche in Sils Maria felt himself to be "two thousand meters above sea level, but even higher than that above all things human. " These vicissitudes in the experience of natural beauty prohibit the establishment of any apriority of its theory as completely as art does. Whoever wishes to define the conceptual invariants of natural beauty would make himself as ridiculous as Husserl did when he reports that while ambulating he perceived the green freshness of the lawn. Whoever declaims on natural beauty verges on poetastery. Only the pedant presumes to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly in nature, but without such distinction the concept of natural beauty would be empty. Neither categories such as formal magnitude-which is contra- dicted by the micrological perception of the beautiful in nature, probably its most authentic form-nor the mathematical, symmetrical proportions favored by older aesthetics furnish criteria of natural beauty. According to the canon of universal concepts it is undefinable precisely because its own concept has its substance in what withdraws from universal conceptuality. Its essential indeterminateness is manifest in the fact that every part of nature, as well as everything made by man that has congealed into nature, is able to become beautiful, luminous from within. Such expression has little or nothing to do with formal proportions. At the same time, however, every individual object of nature that is experienced as beautiful presents itself as if it were the only beautiful thing on earth; this is passed on to every artwork . Although what is beautiful and what is not cannot be categorically distinguished in nature, the consciousness that immerses itself lovingly in some- thing beautiful is compelled to make this distinction. A qualitative distinction in natural beauty can be sought, if at all, in the degree to which something not made by human beings is eloquent: in its expression. What is beautiful in nature is what
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appears to b e more than what i s literally there. Without receptivity there would be no such objective expression, but it is not reducible to the subject; natural beauty points to the primacy of the object in subjective experience. Natural beauty is per- ceived both as authoritatively binding and as something incomprehensible that questioningly awaits its solution. Above all else it is this double character of nat- ural beauty that has been conferred on art. Under its optic, art is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty. It develops in tandem with the alle- gorical intention that manifests it without deciphering it; in tandem with meanings that are not objectified as in significative language. The quality of these meanings may be thoroughly historical as in HOlderlin's "Winkel von Hardt" [the shelter at Hardt]. 6 In this poem, a stand of trees becomes perceived as beautiful, as more beautiful than the others, because it bears, however vaguely, the mark of a past event; a rock appears for an instant as a primeval animal, while in the next instant the similarity slips away. This is the locus of one dimension of romantic experi- ence that has outlasted romantic philosophy and its mentality. In natural beauty, natural and historical elements interact in a musical and kaleidoscopically chang- ing fashion. Each can step in for the other, and it is in this constant fluctuation, not in any unequivocal order of relationships, that natural beauty lives. It is spectacle in the way that clouds present Shakespearian dramas, or the way the illuminated edges of clouds seem to give duration to lightning flashes. While art does not reproduce those clouds, dramas nonetheless attempt to enact the dramas staged by clouds; in Shakespeare this is touched on in the scene with Hamlet and the courtiers. Natural beauty is suspended history, a moment of becoming at a stand- still. Artworks that resonate with this moment of suspension are those that are justly said to have a feeling for nature. Yet this feeling is-in spite of every affin- ity to allegorical interpretation-fleeting to the point of deja vu and is no doubt all the more compelling for its ephemeralness.
Wilhelm von Humboldt occupies a position between Kant and Hegel in that he holds fast to natural beauty yet in contrast to Kantian formalism endeavors to con- cretize it. Thus in his writing on the Vasks, which was unfairly overshadowed by Goethe's Italian Journey, he presents a critique of nature that, contrary to what would be expected one hundred and fifty years later, has not become ridiculous in spite of its earnestness. Humboldt reproaches a magnificent craggy landscape for the lack of trees. His comment that "the city is well situated, yet it lacks a moun- tain" makes a mockery of such judgments: Fifty years later the same landscape would probably have seemed delightful. Yet this naiVete, which does not delimit the use of human taste at the boundary of extrahuman nature, attests to a relation to nature that is incomparably deeper than admiration that is content with what- ever it beholds. The application of reason to landscape not only presupposes, as is obvious to anyone, the rationalistic-harmonistic taste of an epoch that assumes the attunement of even the extrahuman to the human. Beyond that, this attitude of reason to nature is animated throughout by a philosophy of nature that interprets
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nature as being meaningful in itself, a view Goethe shared with Schelling. This concept of nature, along with the experience of nature that inspired it , is irretriev- able. But the critique of nature is not only the hubris of a spirit that has exalted it- self as an absolute. It has some basis in the object. As true as the fact that every object in nature can be considered beautiful is the judgment that the landscape of Tuscany is more beautiful than the surroundings of Gelsenkirchen. Surely the waning of natural beauty accompanied the collapse of the philosophy of nature. The latter, however, perished not only as an ingredient of cultural history; the experience that was its substance, as well as the source of happiness in nature, was fundamentally transformed. Natural beauty suffers the same fate as does educa- tion: It is vitiated as the inevitable consequence of its expansion. Humboldt's de- scriptions of nature hold their own in any comparison; his depictions of the wildly turbulent Bay of Biscay occupy a position between Kant's most powerful pas- sages on the sublime and Poe's portrayal of the maelstrom, but they are irretriev- ably bound up with their historical moment. Solger's and Hegel's judgment, which derived the inferiority of natural beauty from its emerging indeterminacy, missed the mark. Goethe still wanted to distinguish between objects that were worthy of being painted and those that were not; this lured him into glorifying the hunt for motifs as well as veduta painting, a predilection that discomfited even the pompous taste of the editor of the jubilee edition of Goethe's works. Yet because of its concreteness, the classifying narrowness of Goethe's judgments on nature is nevertheless superior to the sophisticated leveling maxim that everything is equally beautiful. Obviously, under the pressure of developments in painting the definition of natural beauty has been transformed. It has been too often remarked with facile cleverness that kitsch paintings have even infected sunsets. Guilt for the evil star that hangs over the theory of natural beauty is borne neither by the corrigible weakness of thought about it nor by the impoverished aim of such thought. It is determined, rather, by the indeterminateness of natural beauty, that of the object no less than that of the concept. As indeterminate, as antithetical to definitions, natural beauty is indefinable, and in this it is related to music, which drew the deepest effects in Schubert from such nonobjective similarity with nature. Just as in music what is beautiful flashes up in nature only to disappear in the instant one tries to grasp it. Art does not imitate nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty, but natural beauty as such. This denominates not only the aporia of natural beauty but the aporia of aesthetics as a whole. Its object is determined negatively, as indeterminable. It is for this reason that art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it. The paradoxes of aesthetics are dictated to it by its object: "Beauty demands, perhaps, the slavish imitation of what is indeter- minable in things. "7 If it is barbaric to say of something in nature that it is more beautiful than something else, the concept of beauty in nature as the concept of something that can be distinguished as such nevertheless bears that barbarism
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teleologically in itself, whereas the figure of the philistine remains prototypically that of a person who is blind to beauty . The origin of this paradox is the enigmatic characterofnature's language. This insufficiency ofnatural beauty may in fact- in accord with Hegel's theory of aesthetic stages-have played a role in motivat- ing emphatic art. For in art the evanescent is objectified and summoned to dura- tion: To this extent art is concept, though not like a concept in discursive logic. The weakness of thought in the face of natural beauty , a weakness of the subject, together with the objective intensity of natural beauty demand that the enigmatic character of natural beauty be reflected in art and thereby be determined by the concept, although again not as something conceptual in itself. Goethe's "Wan- derer's Night Song" is incomparable not because here the subject speaks-as in all authentic works, it is, rather, that the subject wants to fall silent by way of the work-but because through its language the poem imitates what is unutterable in the language of nature . No more should be meant by the ideal of form and content coinciding in a poem, if the ideal itself is to be more than a hollow phrase .
Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity. As long as this spell prevails, the nonidentical has no positive existence. Therefore natural beauty remains as dispersed and uncertain as what it prom- ises, that which surpasses all human immanence. The pain in the face of beauty, nowhere more visceral than in the experience of nature, is as much the longing for what beauty promises but never unveils as it is suffering at the inadequacy of the appearance, which fails beauty while wanting to make itself like it. This pain reappears in the relation to artworks. Involuntarily and unconsciously, the ob- server enters into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak. In the pledged receptivity of the observer, pure self-abandonment- that moment of free exhalation in nature-survives. Natural beauty shares the weakness of every promise with that promise's inextinguishability. However words may glance off nature and betray its language to one that is qualitatively different from its own, still no critique of natural teleology can dismiss those cloudless days of southern lands that seem to be waiting to be noticed. As they draw to a close with the same radiance and peacefulness with which they began, they emanate that everything is not lost, that things may yet tum out: "Death, sit down on the bed, and you hearts, listen carefully: / An old man points into the glimmering light / Under the fringe of dawn ' s first blue: / In the name of God and the unborn, / I promise you: / World, never mind your woes, / All is still yours, for the day starts anew! "8 The image of what is oldest in nature reverses dialectically into the cipher of the not-yet-existing, the possible: As its appearance this cipher is more than the existing; but already in reflecting on it this almost does it an in- justice. Any claim that this is how nature speaks cannot be judged with assurance , for its language does not make judgments; but neither is nature ' s language merely the deceptive consolation that longing reflects back to itself. In its uncertainty, natural beauty inherits the ambiguity of myth, while at the same time its echo-
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consolation-distances itself from myth in appearing nature. Contrary to that philosopher of identity, Hegel, natural beauty is close to the truth but veils itself at the moment of greatest proximity.