Table Of ContentThe Aesthetic State
A Quest
in Modern German Thought
Josef Chytry
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
· ·
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1989 by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chytry, Josef.
The aesthetic state.
Includes index.
1. Aesthetics, German—History. 2. Authors,
German—18th century—Aesthetics. I. Title.
BH221.G3C48 1989 lll'.85'0943 88-14354
ISBN 0-520-06390-2 (alk. paper)
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
To my mother and my father
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Abbreviations xvii
Overture xxxi
I. CLASSICISM 1
1. Winckelmann: The Myth of Aesthetic Hellas 11
2. Wieland, Herder, Goethe: Weimar Aesthetic
Humanism 38
3. Schiller: The Theory of the Aesthetic State 70
II. IDEALISM 107
4. The Early Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling:
Dialectics, Revolution, and the “Theocracy
of the Beautiful” 115
5. Hölderlin: Dialectic of Tragedy 148
6. Hegel: The Aufhebung of the Aesthetic State 178
vii
viii Contents
III. REALISM 219
7. Marx: Communism and the Laws of Beauty 231
8. Wagner: The Communal Artwork 274
9. Nietzsche: Aesthetic Morals 318
IV. POSTREALISM 359
10. Heidegger: Ontological Anarchy 371
11. Marcuse: Aesthetic Ethos 408
12. Spies: Theatre State 448
Coda: Eutopia 483
Index 499
Acknowledgments
My own quest for an aesthetic state began in 1972—1973 as a result of
pertinent criticisms by my Oxford D.Phil. supervisor, the late Dr. H. G.
Schenk of Wolfson College, and my D.Phil. examiners, Father F. C.
Copleston and the late Professor John Plamenatz, on my doctoral treat
ment of Rousseau and Nietzsche.
The theme grew, and thanks to generous support from the Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation 1 was able to lay firm foundations for my
project as a Humboldt Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Tubin
gen between 1973 and 1976. I am indebted to the Philosophy Seminar
of that university and to my Humboldt sponsor, Professor Emeritus Dr.
Walter Schulz, along with his then assistant Dr. Dieter Wandschneider,
for introducing me to the living tradition of German dialectical specula
tion. An unexpected bonus from the Humboldt Foundation further en
abled me to embark on an eighteen-month odyssey throughout South
and Southeast Asia in search of non-Western clues to my theme, with
substantial periods of study spent in Ubud, Bali, and Benares, India; my
last chapter is the product of that initial investigation. In addition, 1 am
deeply grateful to Professor Martin Jay, who sponsored me on and off
between 1977 and 1984 as a Research Associate in the Department of
History at the University of California, Berkeley. Residency as a Visiting
Member of Wolfson College, Oxford, in Michaelmas term 1978 pro
voked an important turn in my reflections, and 1 thank the Fellows of
that College for inviting me.
IX
X Acknowledgments
Help from various quarters has made the individual chapters of my
work somewhat more cogent than 1 might have had a right to expect. To
the following list of readers who looked over one or more chapters, in
many cases without the benefit of knowing the overall structure of the
work, 1 should here like to express thanks for their tolerance of my
scholarly idiosyncrasies: Stanley Antosik, Norman O. Brown, Father
F. C. Copleston, Brian Fay, Martin Jay, Stephen Kalberg, Barry Katz,
Douglas Kellner, H. G. Schenk, Charles Taylor, and Kenneth Weisinger.
Added thanks are due Barry Katz and Douglas Kellner for generously
sharing their material on Herbert Marcuse, Harold Sarf for his editorial
help, and Paul Rosenberg for suggestions on translating from the Ger
man. 1 owe a great deal to the interest and care shown my manuscript by
Alain Henon, Jane-Ellen Long, and Rose Vekony of the University of
California Press.
As a layman in Balinese studies, 1 must especially record appreciation
to those specialists who welcomed my interest in Bali: Clifford Geertz,
the late Christiaan Hooykaas, and Pak Oka; and to my dear friends
in Ubud, Pak and Ibu Masih, who initiated me into both quotidian and
ceremonial Balinese reality.
Finally, of course, my fervent gratitude goes to my wife Assunta and
those “angels,” Gabriel and Sophia, for allowing this centaur to dwell in
their midst. In the end, 1 alone am guilty.
Preface
δει μεν ονν ύποτίθεσθοα κατ' εύχην, μτηδέν μέντοι
αδύνατον.
In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should
avoid impossibilities.
Aristotle, Politica 1265a
Starting shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of
original thinkers from the German-speaking lands created a paradigm
drawn from their impressions of a distant historical reality, ancient
Athens, added to it a new mode of thought, modern dialectics, and at
times even gave a new obeisance to the£ncient Greek deity Dionysos, to
materialize their longings for an ideal. The influence of these forces, ex
tending over the next two centuries, came to permeate modern German
consciousness, deifying the concept and activity of art, reviving the Pla^
tonic (and Sanskrit) vision of the cosmos as play and aesthetic <£eation,
and projecting a way of life and labor that wouli Honor not the com;
modity but the aesthetic product. It was an ideal that gave birth to clas
sical Weimar culture; commanded the loyalty of the most powerful and
influential line of formal German speculation, from Hegel through Marx
to Heidegger; inspired that most German of artists, Richard Wagner, to
give birth to the major European project in the religion of art, Bayreuth;
triggered the boldly experimental thinking of the founder of modernism,
Friedrich Nietzsche; and, finally, inspired the contemporary Marxist
radicalism of Herbert Marcuse.
To thisjdeal we propose to attach the name “aesthetic state.” The
term is not necessarily comTnon to the thinkers whose development we
both review and critique. Strictly speaking, in the form “der asthetische
Staat des schonen Scheins” it briefly makes an appearance in the criti
cally important Aesthetic Letters of Friedrich Schiller (1794—1795) and
then, much later, plays a modest role for Marcuse in Eros and Civiliza-
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xii Preface
tion (1955). More commonly the ideal is detected through a litany of
phrases; among them, to pick almost at random: “religion of art,” “aes
thetic church,” “beautiful [schörte] democracy,” “aesthetic morals,”
“aesthetic ethos.”
In our study, jth ere fore, “aesthetic state” will stand for asocial and
political community that accords_primacy, although not exclusiveness,
tothe aesthetic dimension in human consciousness and activity, and our
theme wilFbe the uTeaToi that community as it was developed by Ger
man thinkers from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth century.
Moreover, the connection between the aesthetic and the political will be
treated in the variety of ways that it was brought up by these thinkers.
For example, the aesthetic dimension as such may be essential to the
actual political machinery. Or it may become the politics, the “the-
atrocracy” as it were, of that machinery. Or it may permeate, through
“aesthetic education,” the minds and bodies of the individuals who will
do the political decision making. Then again, it may supply the model
for the material labor upholding political life. It may generate the ulti
mate public celebrations that mold an authentic people. Finally, it may
form values, “aesthetic morals,” through which such a people sustain
and elaborate their social and cultural unity. It may do one or all of
these things, and the thinkers whose work forms the object of our study
were interested in one or all of these possibilities. The consequence
is that we have to do with universal sensibilities who gave equal impor
tance to ontological foundations, communal manifestations, and aes
thetic transcendentality; and any critical narrative of this tradition will
have to engage in a dialogue that operates along a spectrum extending
from the telos of the aesthetic dimension (“beauty”) to the socio
economic category of the product as (potentially) artwork.
The basic structure of the work is relatively direct. A quaternal order
ing—classicism, idealism, realism, and postrealism—carries the nar
rative from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth century and increas
ingly clarifies its object in the tradition of dialectical historiography.
The first stage, classicism, begins with the original paradigm,
Winckelmann’s vision of the Hellenic world, which inaugurates the
quest. Winckelmann in turn inspires the first explicit theory of an aes
thetic state, by Schiller, in a milieu, the Weimar of the aesthetic human
ists led by Wieland, Herder, and Goethe, that was particularly congenial
to its reception. The conceptual integrity of our theme thus takes form
through three related advances: a basic gestalt (Winckelmann’s Athens);
