by M H Abrams
In his Characteristics, Shaftesbury makes it entirely clear that his prototype for the concept of disinterested contemplation is Christian as well as Platonic, and also that in describing a love which terminates in such contemplation he is merely echoing a commonplace of “the Christian religion” and what he calls “its greatest principle, that of love” (II, 59). “True piety,” he says, is “to love God for his own sake,” not “as the cause of private good” or as an “instrument or means of pleasure.” He adds that this conception of God as the object “worthy of love and admiration for its own sake . . . is universally acknowledged”—“or at least” as, with his usual social snobbery, he qualifies this claim, “by the generality of civilised or refined worshippers” (I, 269). This love manifests itself in a delightful “contemplation” of the “impowering Deity” as “the source and principle of all beauty and perfection. . . . The peculiar dignity of my nature is to know and contemplate thee” (II, 98). And it is in discussing Christian caritas that Shaftesbury brings in the key term “disinterested.” The “principle of love” in Christianity aims “at what is called disinterestedness, or teaching the love of God or virtue for God or virtue’s sake” (II, 54–55). Such “disinterested love of God” he describes as “a love which is simple, pure, and unmixed, which has no other object than merely the excellency of that being itself, nor admits of any other thought of happiness than in its single fruition”—a term which, in Augustine’s Latin, had been fruitio.
In Shaftesbury’s dialectic by analogy, the loving and disinterested contemplation of the perfect beauty and goodness of God becomes what he calls “the pattern and examplar” both of the way we regard human virtue—the “contemplation . . . of a beautiful, proportioned, and becoming action” (II, 176; I, 296–97)—and of the way we regard beautiful objects in this world—“the contemplation of beauty as it appears imperfectly in the objects which strike the sense” (II, 126–27). But since the play of this analogy is within a hierarchy of levels, Shaftesbury’s dialectic entails the conclusion that the contemplation of sensible beauty is greatly inferior to the contemplation of the criterion-beauty of which it is “only the faint shadow.” For “how can the rational mind rest here, or be satisfied with the absurd enjoyment which reaches the senses alone?” (II, 126) Hence if in “pursuing beauty” we stop at “the virtuoso passion” which is the love of the “designing arts,” we sacrifice “all intrinsic and real beauty and worth for the sake of things which carry scarce a shadow of the kind” (II, 270–71, note).
III.
Shaftesbury’s Characteristics was the chief bridge by which the theological term “contemplation,” together with the ethical-religious term “disinterested,” crossed over into philosophical analysis of the way we apprehend beautiful objects, including works of fine art. (The English phrase “the fine arts” obscures the fact, evident in other languages, that in the four or five decades after the Characteristics, les beaux arts, die schönen Künste, le belle arti, came to be grouped together, in opposition to “the useful arts,” by predicating beauty as their defining feature, or their internal end.) Shaftesbury achieved this historical function, however, because he dealt with sensible beauties only as ancillary to his ethical and religious philosophy, and indeed by virtue of the fact that his dialectic permitted no essential distinction, yet enforced a distinction of levels, between religious, moral, and aesthetic contemplation. In Shaftesbury, therefore, the contemplation of sensible beauty remains related to morality, and is relegated to a distant reflex of the selfless contemplation of the divine, or “original,” goodness and beauty.
It remained for Shaftesbury’s successors, especially in Germany, where as Herder said he had “signally influenced the best heads,”21 to complete the process which he had unwittingly begun. They secularized and specialized the terms “contemplation,” “disinterested,” and “beauty” as well, not only by abstracting them from their earlier theological contexts, but by using them specifically to differentiate aesthetic experience from religious and moral, as well as practical, experience. As applied to the fine arts, the tendency of this process was to detach a work of art from all reference to an external reality or end, and from any relation to anything outside its sufficient self. In most of these philosophers, there nonetheless remain evidences that their views of art are derivative both from the eros doctrine of Plato and the Platonists and from the caritas doctrine of Augustine and other Christian theologians. Even in our own time, the ghost of its ancestral prototype in the philosophy and theology of love continues to haunt the discussion of the arts, in terms such as “an art lover,” or “an amateur of art.”
To illustrate the result of this evolution I shall cite Karl Philipp Moritz, a remarkable thinker who, at the age of twenty-nine, published a six-page essay which is the first complete and unqualified statement of art-as-such. This “Essay on the Unification of All the Fine Arts and Sciences of the Arts under the Concept of the Complete-in-Itself [des in sich selbst vollendeten]” appeared in 1785, five years earlier than Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. It is directed expressly against the two reigning principles of the construction theory of art—that the “chief aim” of the fine arts is an “imitation of nature,” and that the purpose of the imitation is to give pleasure to an audience. Only the mechanical or useful arts, Moritz insists, have an “outer end,” or an end “outside themselves in something other.” In opposition to such views he poses a contemplation model for the fine arts:
In the contemplation [Betrachtung] of the beautiful object, however, I roll its end back from me into the object itself; I contemplate it as something which is completed, not in me, but in its own self, which therefore constitutes a whole in itself, and affords me pleasure for its own sake [um sein selbst willen].22
Moritz dedicated his essay to Moses Mendelssohn, who had proposed that the fine arts achieve their pleasurable aim by the “sensuous expression of perfection [Vollkommenheit],” in which the artist exceeds the nature he represents by making “beauty his final and unique goal.”23 As Martha Woodmansee has shown, Moritz severs this view of art from its remaining references to the nature which art represents and to the pleasures at which it aims, by detailed recourse to a specific theological prototype.24 He had been brought up within a strict Quietist sect, in accordance with the doctrines of Madame de Guyon, which proposed as the highest mode of Christian life a still contemplation in a selfless love of God. Woodmansee cites a passage in which Moritz himself summarized the Quietist creed in his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser (1785–90): it stresses “the total annihilation of all so-called selfhood or self-love, and a totally disinterested [uninteressierte] love of God, in which not one little spark of self-love must intrude, if it is to be pure.”25
In treating the fine arts, Moritz salvaged features of his rejected religious creed of a pure and disinterested love—much as James Joyce later salvaged elements of the Catholic creed of his youth—by translating them into the categories of a secular theory of art. The process is patent in this passage, in which Moritz describes “the sweet astonishment, the pleasant forgetfulness of ourselves, in the contemplation of a beautiful work of art.”
While the beautiful draws our attention exclusively to itself, it draws us for a time away from ourselves, so that we seem to lose ourselves in the beautiful object; and precisely this loss, this forgetfulness of self, is the highest degree of pure and disinterested [uneigennützigen] pleasure which beauty grants us. In that moment we sacrifice our individual confined being to a kind of higher being. Pleasure in the beautiful must therefore ever approximate to disinterested love, if it is to be genuine. . . . Beauty in a work of art is not pure and unmixed for me until . . . I contemplate it as something which has been brought forth entirely for its own sake, in order that it should be something complete in itself.
Moritz adds that in a work of art an “outer use or end” is replaced by “its inner purposefulness [innere Zweckmässigk
eit]”; any pleasure that the work may afford its spectator is “fortuitous” or only “by the way.” And in a final step, he attributes to the artist the specific intention of producing a self-enclosed object for disinterested contemplation. “The true artist will seek to bring into his work the highest inner purposefulness or perfection [Vollkommenheit]; and if it then finds approval [by its audience] he will be happy; but he has already achieved his real end with the completion of the work.”26
Three years later, after his association with Goethe in Rome, and still two years before Kant’s third Critique, Moritz published his essay “On the Formative Imitation of the Beautiful.” This is a longer and more complex presentation of his views, focusing now on “the question . . . how a thing must be made, in order not to need to be useful”; but he repeats his earlier theory that a work of art is made to be contemplated disinterestedly, for its own sake, as an object whose end and value is internal to its own coherent being. To this deployment of what became the standard vocabulary of art-as-such Moritz now adds, and stresses, the criterion of self-sufficiency: A work of art “must strike our senses, or be graspable by our imagination, as a self-sufficient whole [ein für sich bestehendes Ganze].” Moritz thus transfers to the sensible beauty and perfection of a work of human art the Platonic and Christian concept of the self-sufficiency, or autarkeia, which had hitherto been an attribute of the divine perfection, and of that alone. Only rapt attention to such a work of art, Moritz adds, can give us peace. “The beautiful object is contemplated and felt, just as it is produced, entirely for its own sake. . . . We contemplate it because it simply is there . . . in those moments in which our restless activity makes place for a still contemplation [Beschauung].” Thus the beauty of a sensible work of art, “in which destruction itself is resolved” in calm, “seems . . . to imitate that eternal Beauty which is exalted over destruction and formation itself.” Moritz ends his second essay: “And from mortal lips no sublimer word can be uttered about the beautiful object than: It is!”27 We can put it another way: What God was, the beautiful work of art is.
It is by now evident that Kant’s model of the essential aesthetic experience—of a “pure judgment of taste,” whether in response to a beautiful object in nature or to a work of beautiful art—is in the direct lineage of traditional definitions of the summum bonum as a “pure” love which culminates in the disinterested contemplation of absolute beauty for its own sake, without reference to personal profit or to external relations or ends. In his own statements of aesthetic contemplation, Kant gives no indication that he had in mind its classical and Christian antecedents. We can be certain, however, that he had thorough knowledge of these prototypes, and in their theological as well as Platonic formulations. He had been brought up in a household strictly committed to the evangelical mode of Lutheranism known as Pietism, had attended a gymnasium devoted to Pietist indoctrination, and had studied theology at Königsberg with the intention of becoming a minister.28 Kant in his maturity was not a creedal Christian. Nonetheless, he regarded Christian revelation as an imaginative vehicle of truths which can be appropriated and rendered into conceptual terms by philosophic rationality. It is notable that in the decade between the mid-1780s and -1790s, just before and after the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant wrote a series of essays on human history, past, present, and future, which explicitly set out to translate the truths embodied in biblical myths and prophecy into conceptual and empirical accounts of the origin of evil, as well as of the ultimate triumph over evil which we may anticipate in a perfected community of mankind—as Kant put it, “one sees that philosophy too can have its chiliasm.”29 And this much at least is clear: Kant did not invent the conception of the disinterested contemplation of a beautiful object for its own sake, but found its features and vocabulary in earlier theorists, from Shaftesbury through Moritz, in whose writings its provenance in doctrines of Christian love is unmistakable.
It is revealing, in this context, to glance at Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Confessions from the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar, written seven years after Kant’s Critique. Wackenroder had attended Moritz’s lectures on aesthetic theory and criticism, which were a notable event in the cultural life of Berlin in 1789–90, and was influenced by his writings.30 A passage in Wackenroder demonstrates the tendency of the contemplation model, once it has been applied to works of secular art, to draw with it supplementary aspects of religious devotion—and in this instance, the effusive sentiments of German Pietism. “Art galleries,” Wackenroder laments, “are regarded as annual fairs, where we evaluate, praise, and scorn new wares in passing.” On the contrary,
they ought to be temples where, in still and silent humility and in heart-lifting solitude, we may admire great artists as the highest among mortals . . . with long, steadfast contemplation [Betrachtung] of their works. . . .
I compare the enjoyment of nobler works of art to prayer. . . . We would, in my opinion, have to deal in this way with the masterpieces of art in order to employ them properly for the salvation of our soul. . . .
Works of art, in their way, no more fit into the common flow of life than does the thought of God; they transcend the ordinary and the commonplace, and we must elevate ourselves to them wholeheartedly in order to make them . . . in our eyes what, in their exalted being, they are. . . . That day is for me a sacred holiday which, with seriousness and a prepared spirit, I devote to the contemplation of noble works of art. . . . So long as I shall walk the earth, I shall bear them in my imagination . . . for the consolation and revival of my soul.31
IV.
One of the most important vehicles for the transmission of the contemplation theory of art was the treatment of aesthetics in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (1819), in which Schopenhauer reverts from the formulation of Kant to its antecedents in Platonic metaphysics. The artistic genius possesses a capacity for “pure contemplation [Kontemplation]” which “plucks the object of its contemplation from the world’s course” of phenomenal time, space, and causal and other relations, and so yields a “knowledge of the object not as individual thing, but as Platonic idea.” By embodying this idea in a sensuous material, the artist provides the percipient of a work of art with a “pure knowing” of the idea which manifests itself as an “aesthetic pleasure” in its beauty, free from all personal concerns, all considerations of utility, and all external relations. It is patent that Schopenhauer’s prototype is not only Plato’s Idea of “beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting,” but even more specifically Plotinus’ description—already echoed by Moritz, by way of its derivatives in Quietist theology—of the contemplation of Absolute Beauty as an act of “perfect surrender” which alone provides the soul a “peace” without movement, passion, or desire, in a “perfect stillness . . . utterly resting.” In Schopenhauer’s rendering, contemplation of the idea as embodied in a work of art allows us momentarily to break free from the remorseless compulsion of the will so as to become a “pure, will-less, timeless subject of knowing that is independent of all relations.” In such contemplation, as nowhere in our driven life of practical acting and knowing, we achieve “fulfillment,” “peace and calm,” “the blessedness of will-less perception.” “The wheel of Ixion stands still.”32
Later in the nineteenth century the application to art of the Platonic—and often the specifically Christian—model of the contemplation of an ultimate and self-sufficient beauty was exploited by artists and critics of art to justify their enterprise against the indifference or open hostility of a bourgeois public whose concern was for the conventional, the moral, and the useful. In America of the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Edgar Allan Poe, contemptuous of his middle-class audience, attacked what he called the “heresy of The Didactic”; that is, the demand that a poem, or any work of art, be useful, moral, or true, rather than simply beautiful. There cannot, he asserts,
exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than
this very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.
For “that pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful.” But Poe reveals that the contemplation of a beautiful poem for its own sake is merely an earthly surrogate for the contemplation of its heavenly archetype:
It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us—but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle . . . to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. . . . We weep . . . at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth . . . those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.33
The amorphous French movement whose catchword was “art for art’s sake” derived, through Baudelaire as intermediary, from these doctrines of Poe, but to a greater extent from the dominant French philosopher of the era, Victor Cousin. Cousin’s lectures on The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, delivered in 1817–18, were published twenty years later by his former students, working from Cousin’s notebooks under the master’s supervision, and went through more than a score of editions.34 Cousin acknowledged that he had “borrowed” a great deal from the analytic sections of those “monuments of philosophical genius,” Kant’s three Critiques;35 although he conducted a running battle against Kant’s “skepticism,” and especially his refusal to base his critical and aesthetic philosophy on God as the first principle. “The ideal,” Cousin said, “is the object of the artist’s passionate contemplation.” “The arts are called les beaux arts because their sole end is to produce the disinterested [désintéressée] emotion of beauty, without regard to utility, either in the spectator or in the artist.” A beautiful object, whether in nature or art, evokes “a sentiment of love for the object which has evoked it,” but a love “free from all desire,” for “the sentiment of beauty is to itself its own satisfaction.” And throughout the lectures, it is clear that for Cousin the conceptual model for the disinterested contemplation of the work of art is the Christian doctrine of selfless love, for the sake of his beauty and perfection, of a self-sufficient God: