Kant ran out of road trying to critique aesthetics. His Critique of Judgement followed the more well-known Critiques of pure reason and practical reason (i.e., ethics). The half of the Critique of Judgement dealing with aesthetics is not exactly the watertight freighter you might expect from the author of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant expends a lot of effort distinguishing between “free beauty,” that is, beauty that is perceived without any intermediary concepts, and “dependent beauty,” beauty based on comparison with some preexisting concept in the subject’s mind. Only a perception of free beauty qualifies as a true aesthetic judgment; if there’s an intervening concept, then the subject is merely judging what is agreeable or functionally good. In Kant’s definition: “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally.”3
But, of course, only the perceiving subject could know whether their judgment is concept free and therefore aesthetically valid, and Kant admits that the perceiving subject is an unreliable witness, often unaware that a perception of beauty is based on a concept. That makes it difficult to tell whether an aesthetic judgment can be universally valid, which is Kant’s ultimate goal. We can all too easily fool ourselves into mistakenly believing that dependent beauty is free, as when Kant takes in a seemingly spontaneous concert:
Even a bird’s song, which we can reduce to no musical rule, seems to have more freedom in it, and thus to be richer for taste, than the human voice singing in accordance with all the rules that the art of music prescribes.… Yet here most likely our sympathy with the mirth of a dear little creature is confused with the beauty of its song, for if exactly imitated by man (as has been sometimes done with the notes of the nightingale) it would strike our ear as wholly destitute of taste.4
In other words, we could consider what one thought to be a yellowhammer’s song and consider it free beauty, only to have to backpedal furiously to dependent beauty once we realized it was only the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In Kant’s opinion, we were simply misleading ourselves from the get-go (“our sympathy” confused with the song’s beauty). Nonetheless, Kant goes on to claim that aesthetic judgments can, actually, be universally valid, basically by engaging in a little rhetorical second-dealing and hoping his sleight of hand is good enough that you don’t really notice. And it is pretty good:
The judgement of taste exacts agreement from every one; and a person who describes something as beautiful insists that every one ought to give the object in question his approval and follow suit in describing it as beautiful.…We are suitors for agreement from every one else, because we are fortified with a ground common to all. Further, we would be able to count on this agreement, provided we were always assured of the correct subsumption of the case under that ground as the rule of approval.5
To wit: whenever anybody makes an aesthetic judgment, they are also asserting that their judgment should be accepted by everybody. So the fact that we all make aesthetic judgments means we all believe that such judgments should be universal. Which means (and here’s where you need to keep an eye on those cards) such judgments can be universal, even if the judging individual can never be sure if a given judgment is even valid. Kant may not be able to pinpoint it, but, like fifty million Beethoven fans that can’t be wrong, if we all assume the possibility of a universally valid aesthetic judgment, it must be out there somewhere.
For Kant, an aesthetic judgment is not something you do, it’s something that happens to you, and the philosophical circle to be squared is in knowing that such a judgment is, in fact, happening.6 And that’s because Kant needs to preserve the human ability to judge even if it goes against one’s emotions or senses. At its heart, Kant’s philosophy is all about freedom, the freedom of the individual to decide his own path. For Kant, the ultimate expression of freedom was in choosing duty over desire, in acting against mere stimulus in favor of rectitude. From the Romantic point of view, he may have been a killjoy, but he was at least right to emphasize the freedom that allows joy to be killed.
As much as Kant ingeniously dresses it up, however, his analysis of beauty is still a weak logical link: it’s no wonder that aesthetics was a primary front along which the Romantics would assault the Enlightenment. Kant’s basic aesthetic insight hints at a path the Romantics would practically pave. Aesthetics, for Kant, doesn’t originate with the subject, but it isn’t anything intrinsic in the object perceived, either—it is, instead, the mind’s reaction to an influx of sense-data that’s too much to think about all at once. Therein lies the difference between the Enlightenment and the Romantics: Kant pools that sublime excess into the concept-stocked pond of dependent beauty, but the Romantics let it overflow all the way to the mind’s horizon, where, if you look hard enough, you might catch a glimpse of the Divine.
ONE OF THE first to catch that glimpse, the intellectual progenitor of the Sturm und Drang movement, and in turn, the Romantics, was a combative, baby-faced zealot named Johann Georg Hamann. Born in 1730, Hamann started out as a loyal Aufklärer, but in 1757, sent on a diplomatic mission to London that ultimately failed, he proceeded to indulge in a round of debauchery and dissipation. The discovery that a friend and companion was also the boy toy of a rich Englishman shocked Hamann to the core, although it is unclear whether Hamann’s shock was sparked by revulsion or jealousy.7 In any event, the experience drove Hamann to a spiritual crisis. He claimed to have had a vision, he converted to a mystical Christianity, and he spent the rest of his life attacking the prevailing rationalist philosophy for having the presumptive gall to analyze religious faith. (Hamann’s rationalist employer, Christoph Berens, tried to reconvert him to the Enlightenment cause with the assistance of a forty-five-year-old, still-largely-unknown Immanuel Kant. Hamann and Kant managed to remain at least casual friends, even as they mocked each other in print.)
Hamann’s writings sometimes seem to be testing the surfeit-of-sense-data model of aesthetics by example, in a torrent of dense polemic. His most focused statement on creativity and genius comes in a 1762 essay, Aesthetica in nuce (“Aesthetics in a Nutshell”). Hamann called the essay a “rhapsody in cabbalistic prose,” a fair warning of his style: bouncing from idea to idea, dotted with allusions both obvious and obscure as they bob to the surface of Hamann’s consciousness, the text peppered with footnotes both explanatory and tangentially digressive. Like a weirdly compelling cross between a haranguing street preacher and David Foster Wallace, Hamann’s prose makes a bid to break free of normal discourse and take flight on pure linguistic power. “What for others is style,” he once wrote, “for me is soul.”8
And that is, in a nutshell, Hamann’s aesthetics. To analyze art is to emasculate it; to separate sense from understanding is to put asunder what God has joined. “Oh for a muse like a refiner’s fire, and like a fuller’s soap!” Hamann proclaims (in a Hamann-esque mash-up of Shakespeare and the Old Testament). “She will dare to purify the natural use of the senses from the unnatural use of abstractions, which distorts our concept of things, even as it suppresses the name of the Creator and blasphemes against Him.”9
Hamann’s essay is concerned with poetry, mainly, but within the cabalism is the seed of Romanticism’s elevation of instrumental music to the summit of art. Beneath Hamann’s baroque ramblings is a kernel of linguistic insight. “To speak is to translate,” he writes, “from the tongue of angels into the tongue of men, that is, to translate thoughts into words—things into names—images into signs; which can be poetic or cyriological, historic or symbolic or hieroglyphic—and philosophical or characteristic.”10 This was one of Hamann’s main objections to the rationalist philosophy of Kant and his ilk—a failure to realize that the mere act of formulating a philosophical system in words dimmed the divine spark, a generational loss as action was recorded into language. The idea that music expresses what language can’t—and the idea of holding that up as a virtue—follows directly from Hamann’s gist.
For Hamann, the more that art is codified under rules and concepts, the more it
corrupts itself by separating it from a Nature that puts such artifice to shame. In Leser und Kunstrichter (Reader and Critic), written the same year as Aesthetica in nuce, Hamann calls Nature a beloved old grandmother. “[T]o commit incest with this grandmother is the most important commandment the Koran of the Arts preaches,” he insists, “and it is not obeyed.”11 In a reversal that the Romantics would take to the extreme, the audience is excluded from this loving artist-nature family circle like a third wheel.
Beethoven may not have read Hamann, but he certainly ascribed to Hamann’s idea of an unassailable individual creative genius. Ferdinand Ries recalled that Beethoven rebuffed Haydn’s request for him to include “Pupil of Haydn” on the title page of his earliest published works: “This Beethoven refused to do because, as he said, though he had taken a few lessons from Haydn, he never had learned anything from him.”12 For a young composer who had arrived in Vienna to “receive the spirit of Mozart from Haydn’s hands,” as Count Waldstein famously put it, such a declaration of artistic independence was both an astute response to a shift in the aesthetic winds and a foreshadowing of the stubborn self-regard that would result in many an irascible-Beethoven anecdote.
But as much as he adopted the new Romantic attitudes in public, to judge by the quotations in his 1812–16 journal, Beethoven perhaps remained privately skeptical of post-Kantian metaphysics. Kant charted human existence along dualistic longitudes: reason and faith, thought and sensation; the agenda of the irrationalists that followed Kant was to collapse those dualities into underlying union. Maybe the deaf Beethoven, so confident in his imagination but so cruelly betrayed by his own senses, took stubborn comfort in their continued separation.
SUCH WAS the atmosphere in which E. T. A. Hoffmann decisively appropriated the Fifth and its first four notes for the Romantic cause. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm in 1776, but adopted “Amadeus” in his thirties as a tribute to Mozart. He was, for much of his life, a refugee, pushed around by the political and military forces of the Napoleonic era. His career as a civil servant and jurist began in his late teens, when his unseemly attentions toward a married woman caused him to be spirited away to clerk for an uncle in Prussian Silesia. Another relocation resulted from Hoffmann’s circulating his malicious caricatures of the local military brass. A two-year sojourn in Warsaw, where Hoffmann enjoyed the company of literary society, abruptly ended when Napoléon’s liberation of the city put Prussian officials out of work. Hoffmann found himself stuck in Berlin, separated from his wife and family. His young daughter died; a job managing a theater was unraveled by the intrigues of the leading actor. All the while, Hoffmann continued writing—both musical and literary efforts.
The temptation to conflate Hoffmann’s biography with his art is omnipresent. A number of his stories feature lost or dying daughters, for example; in “Das öde Haus,” an infant daughter is mysteriously kidnapped by gypsies; in “Rath Krespel,” the councillor Krespel’s daughter Antonia fatally exercises her talent for singing; in “Der Sandmann,” the physics professor Spalanzani’s daughter, Olimpia, turns out to be a lifeless clockwork automaton. Hoffmann’s greatest success as a composer, his 1814 operatic adaptation of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine, tells the story of a fisherman and his wife adopting a water-sprite after their own daughter accidentally drowns.
More interesting is Hoffmann’s lifelong fascination with doubles and mirrors. Far from reinforcing the old Kantian dualities, Hoffmann’s doubles instead are constantly hinting at hidden, underlying unity. His fiction teems with doppelgängern—seeming twins, uncanny resemblances, echoing actions—but the doubles are explained away as either coincidences or parallel, rather than contradictory, phenomena. In Hoffmann’s masterpiece, Lebens-Ansichten des Katers-Murr (The Life and Opinions of Tom-Cat Murr), torn-out pages of a printed biography of the musician Johannes Kreisler (one of Hoffmann’s more famous characters, and the inspiration for Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana) have purportedly been used by Murr to write his own feline memoirs. The book—aptly described by one scholar as “a confluence with constant linkages, with none of the contrasts that we might expect”13—is out to undermine its own duality: the narratives of Kreisler and Murr are tangled to the point that separating the threads comes to seem a pedantic waste of time.
Hoffmann’s tales remained yet to be written in 1810, when the impoverished writer embarked on some freelance music reviewing. But his choice of Beethoven’s Fifth for his first critical exploration foreshadows his later obsessions. The ability to trace the opening through the entire piece, a musical web of seeming doubles, was enticing bait, a glimpse of Hoffmann’s own future style—a style not just founded on an ideal of philosophical unity, but narratively revealing the unity beneath a seemingly dualistic surface. The first four notes resemble one of Hoffmann’s future protagonists, confronted with a series of mirror images on the path to a realization of wholeness:
There is no simpler idea than that which the master laid as the foundation of this entire Allegro [here Hoffmann inserts the first four notes as an illustration] and one realizes with wonder how he was able to align all the secondary ideas, all the transitional passages with the rhythmic content of this simple theme in such a way that they served continually to unfold the character of the whole, which that theme could only suggest.
The symphony becomes a very Hoffmann-like tale. The music narrates what is nonetheless completely encapsulated in the brief, startling opening, a glimpse that our finite understanding can’t quite circumnavigate, but that pulls us toward the infinite: a frame of reference in which we might finally see that the opening and the entire work, seeming doubles, are in fact one and the same.
Such doubling does not refashion the world so that the world itself makes more sense, but rather so that its contradictions and irrationalities are more stark, and the necessity of some higher, unseen unity is more obvious. Hoffmann’s Romantic aesthetic espouses not an art that resolves the world, but one that shows how the world’s emotional messiness is a door into a deeper understanding, past logic and reason. The music of the Fifth—unencumbered by plot or text—bumps the listener to the doorstep. “Every passion—love—hate—anger—despair etc., such as we encounter in opera, is clothed by music in the purple shimmer of romanticism, and even that which we experience in life leads us out beyond life into the kingdom of the infinite.”
Hoffmann shoots the moon with his description, the prose taking on a purple shimmer of its own:
Glowing beams shoot through this kingdom’s deep night, and we become aware of gigantic shadows that surge up and down, enclosing us more and more narrowly and annihilating everything within us, leaving only the pain of that interminable longing, in which every pleasure that had quickly arisen with sounds of rejoicing sinks away and founders, and we live on, rapturously beholding the spirits themselves, only in this pain, which, consuming love, hope, and joy within itself, seeks to burst our breast asunder with a full-voiced consonance of all the passions.
It is fair to say that the readers of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung had never seen anything quite like this before. Hoffmann was tossing them out into the deepest part of the Romantic wilderness; those who found the surroundings congenial could count themselves among the aesthetic elite. “Romantic taste is rare, Romantic talent even rarer,” Hoffmann noted; “this is probably why there are so few who can strike that lyre that opens up the wonderful kingdom of the infinite.” The criteria for greatness are being deliberately expanded beyond good and bad. Hoffmann reminds us that “Orpheus’s lyre opened the gates of the underworld,” and that the door swings both ways. “[T]he soul of every sensitive listener will certainly be deeply and closely gripped by a lingering feeling, which is precisely that unnameable, foreboding longing.”
Hoffmann is at pains to demonstrate that the Fifth, as an exemplar of Romantic music (“this should always be understood to refer only to instrumental music”), tells no specific programmatic story,
nor acts as an allegory for anything other than itself; nothing even as vague as knocking Fate is mentioned. And yet Hoffmann’s review is strongly, almost obsessively narrative. His description of the opening gives a taste of the whole:
The first Allegro, 2/4 time in C minor, begins with a principal idea that consists of only two measures, and that, in the course of what follows, continually reappears in many different forms. In the second measure a fermata, then a repetition of this idea a tone lower, and again a fermata; both times only string instruments and clarinets. Even the key cannot yet be determined; the listener surmises E-flat major. The second violin begins the principal idea once again, and in the second measure the fundamental note of C, struck by the violoncello and bassoon, delineates the key of C minor, in which viola and violin enter in imitation, until these finally juxtapose two measures with the principal idea, which, thrice repeated (the final time with the entry of the full orchestra), and dying out in a fermata on the dominant, give to the listener’s soul a presentiment of the unknown and mysterious …
… and so forth. We might chalk up this fanatical play-by-play—which he continues for all four movements—to the fact that most of Hoffmann’s readers, like Hoffmann himself, would not have heard the Fifth, nor would have had much prospect to hear it anytime soon. (Hoffmann was reviewing the published score.) Except that Hoffmann then reprints, in full score, the entire excerpt he has just walked us through (“the reviewer inserts it here for his readers to examine”).
The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Page 10