27. The Beautiful and Art

A book that brings back fond memories lies before me. Robert Vischer, the son of the famous aesthete Friedrich Theodor Vischer, has begun publishing his father's works. He calls the book "Beauty and Art", which he has compiled with great effort and care from the papers left behind by the deceased and from the transcripts of his students.

As I read the book, all the ideas I once had about the nature of the arts come back to me. The "once" means eighteen to twenty years ago. At that time, people my age were reading works on aesthetics by Vischer, Weiße, Carriere, Schasler, Lotze and Zimmermann to find out more about the nature of the arts.

These men came from the philosophy that dominated education in the first half of our century. Some relied on Hegel, others on Herbart.

And for these men, art was a philosophical matter.

Goethe, Schiller and Jean Paul also formed their own ideas about the nature of art. They took art itself as their starting point. They expressed what people are forced to think when they allow art to have an effect on them. Their concepts of art were born out of art.

Vischer, Carriere, Weiße, Zimmermann and Schasler did not originally start out from directly living nature. They thought about the totality of world phenomena. And these world phenomena also include the products of artistic creation. Just as they asked about the nature of light, warmth and animal development, they also asked about the nature of art. Their starting points were those of cognitive people, not those of artistically sensitive natures.

Of course, I do not mean that a man like Fr. Th. Vischer should be denied artistic feeling in the highest and purest sense of the word. On the contrary: his relationship to art is the most lively and personal imaginable. But when he speaks about art, he speaks as a philosopher.

For Vischer, the world was a realization of the divine spirit. A representation of the divine spirit in marble, in lines and colors, in words is therefore art for him. How does the artist realize the divine spirit in the sensual material? That was the fundamental question for Vischer. A high, mature philosophical training underlies all his explanations. The language he speaks is only understood by a few today. It could only be understood by those who had the philosophical thoughts of Schelling and Hegel as part of their education. Only they could be interested in the questions that Vischer asked, in the thoughts that he communicated.

Today, few people can read a book by Vischer in the way his contemporaries read it. For contemporary people, it discusses things that are none of their business.

For Vischer, art was ultimately an impersonal matter. It was one of the tasks assigned to people by higher powers. Vischer did not believe in a personal God. But he does believe in a God. In a basic spiritual being that lives itself out in nature, in history, in art. This fundamental being is above man. Our best have given up this belief. For them, the spirit is nothing independent. For them, the spirit is only there insofar as nature has the ability to produce spiritual things from itself. For them, the highest spirit is produced by man, who gives birth to it out of his nature. Only when man creates the spiritual is it there. Vischer believes that the spiritual is there in itself and that man must seize it. Today's people believe that only the natural exists without man, and that the spiritual is only created by man. Therefore, for Vischer, the artist is a person who is filled with the divine spirit and embodies it in his works. For today's artists, the artist is a person who feels the need to do violence to things and give them the imprint of his personality. They do not believe that they should embody a spirit, they want to create things that correspond to their ideas, their imagination.

Vischer says: the sculptor imprints a human form on the marble that does not resemble a real human being because he unconsciously carries within him the image, the idea of all humanity, the archetype of man and wants to embody it. This archetype is the divine in man. The moderns know nothing of such an archetype. They only know that a figure appears before their souls when they look at man, and that they want to realize this figure. They want to give birth to an artificial world alongside the natural one, which their temperament, their imagination gives them. This is a humanly willed world, not one that has sprung from the divine spirit.

Today's people no longer understand it when one speaks of art as a realization of the divine, they can only understand that man has the need to shape things according to his temperament, according to his inspiration.

Modernists want to talk about art in human terms; they no longer want to go into the religious trait that underlies Vischer's explanations.