HOMO ,^?

ESTHETICUS
HOMO
THE INVENTION OF
TASTE IN THE
DEMOCRATIC AGE

LUC FERRY
TRANSLATED BY ROBERT DE LOAIZA

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO & LONDON

T)H \=3\ . F4irs

Luc Ferry is professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and the University of

Caen. His many books include the three-volume History of Philosophy and
(with Alain Renaut) Heidegger and Modernity, both published in English by
the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1993 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1993
Printed in the United States of America
02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 12345

isbn: 0-226-24459-8 (cloth)

Originally published in Paris as Homo Aestheticus: L’invention du gout a I’age

democratique, © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1990.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferry, Luc.
[Homo aestheticus. English]
Homo aestheticus : the invention of taste in the democratic age /
Luc Ferry ; translated by Robert de Loaiza.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Aesthetics, Modern—18th century. 2. Aesthetics, Modern—19th
century. 3. Aesthetics, Modern—20th century. 4. Kant, Immanuel,
1724-1804—Aesthetics. 5. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
1770—1831—Aesthetics. 6. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900—
Aesthetics. 7. Subjectivity. I. Title.,
BH151.F4713 1993
ll'.85'0903—dc20 93-4910
C1P

© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
 CONTENTS

Preface vii

Introduction 1

ONE The Revolution of Taste 7

TWO Between Heart and Reason 33

THREE The Kantian Moment: The Subject of Reflection 77

FOUR The Hegelian Moment: The Absolute Subject or the

Death of Art-T 14 3

FIVE The Nietzschean Moment: The Shattered Subject and

the Onset of Contemporary Aesthetics 148

SIX The Decline of the Avant-Gardes:

Postmodernity 192

SEVEN The Problem of Ethics in an Age of Aesthetics 246

Notes 263

Index 273

V
 PREFACE

T HIS WORK AIMS AT RETRACING the great conceptual moments

of a history of democratic individualism or modern subjectivity. For
reasons I go into in the first chapter, the field of aesthetics is the one in
which, even today, the sediments of such a history are most visible and
richest in meaning. I had to hold on to both ends of a somewhat fragile
chain: on the one hand I had to recapture the definitions of subjectivity
where they had been most strongly formulated—that is, in philoso¬
phy—without, on the other, giving up the interpretation of certain as¬
pects of a discipline, aesthetics, happily inseparable from art’s concrete
history. The problem lies in the fact that philosophy, unlike the histori¬
cal sciences, does not belong to what is usually called “general culture.”
Art lovers, even erudite ones, are not always familiar with the works of
Leibniz, Baumgarten, Kant, or Hegel. It would be pointless to believe
that this obstacle has to do with the form or, as is sometimes imagined,
with the “jargon” in which these paths of thinking are enmeshed. It goes
deeper: reflection on culture does not belong integrally within culture.
It supposes a distance always difficult to traverse and reduce.
I have tried to put forth this work’s theses in a nontechnical way
(chapter 1); the same with the main passages devoted to clarifying the
two chief moments of modern aesthetics: the initial quarrel between
heart and reason (beginning of chapter 2) and the—no doubt provi¬
sional—end of this history (chapter 6). These sections can be read rela¬
tively independently from the rest of the book. Their connection to a
systematic history of the subject is the only thing that cannot be per¬
ceived without an incursion into philosophy.
 INTRODUCTION

A SPECTER HAUNTS CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT: the spec-

ter of the subject.
Everyone knows or senses it today, even outside the limits of pro¬
fessional philosophy. “The death of man,” much talked about in the
1960s but already chronicled by Nietzsche, raises questions to which
no way of thinking has yet brought an answer. Following the trail of
various predecessors, including the author of Zarathustra, psychoanal¬
ysis, no doubt this century’s greatest intellectual acquisition, has brought
to a brutal end the idea that we could consider ourselves as masters and
possessors of ourselves. The subject was, as they say, “split” [brise], and
our states of consciousness, concepts or feelings, exposed to the infinite
determination of the unconscious.
In a paradox characteristic of our democratic culture, the an¬
nouncement of the death of man was accompanied by a demand for
autonomy probably unique in the history of humanity. Generally speak¬
ing, in our liberal-social-democratic societies, the requirement of free¬
dom—understood as the capacity to give oneself one’s own laws—has
never been stronger, whatever may be said here and there. Even those
who lead the prosecution in the case against global consumerism have
resigned themselves, sometimes grudgingly, to doing so in the name of
the ideal of human beings taking their destiny into their own hands.
Even though they may not always evoke great enthusiasm, the values of
republican democracy seem set to be our only acceptable political ho¬
rizon for quite a while.
A paradox, then, because the feeling of an irremediable loss of the
self—yet thematized by contemporary philosophy as the effect of a de¬
mystification as healthy as it is subversive—is accompanied by a con¬
stantly growing will to reappropriation: on an individual level, in the
attempt to recapture a lost past for oneself; on a collective level, in
the concern not to fall prey to the infinite traps the world of commerce
lays for us (at the same time that it provides us with various well-known
services).
And yet it is an inevitable paradox, which we might roughly for-

1
INTRODUCTION

mulate as follows: Can one be a democrat—that is, believe not only in

the virtues of pluralism but also in humanity’s capacity, limited though
it may be, to make its own history (the presupposition, like it or not, of
any critique of simple market laws)—and yet accept the thesis accord¬
ing to which the notion of will has been invalidated by the discovery of
the various aspects of the unconscious?
That, it seems to me, is the philosophical-political equation of the
end of the present century—an equation to which a response in the
form of a compromise would offer only a mediocre satisfaction, as
would be the case, if it must be repeated, with any pretention to “re¬
turn” to forms of subjectivity prior to the emergence of the “split
subject.”
In an earlier book, La Pensee 68 (translated as French Philosophy
of the Sixties), Alain Renaut and I undertook to question those who
were in our opinion the leading figures of “contemporary antihuman¬
ism,” the most significant moments in the critique of the subject under¬
stood classically as consciousness and will. The work being polemical,
it was with polemics that it was most often rebutted. Following the
principle of two negations being equal to an affirmation, since we were
criticizing the critiques of consciousness and will, we were accused of
trying to return to Descartes and, in the name of a rationalism equaled
only by its boorishness, to reaffirm the good old neo-Kantian values of
consciousness, will, and control of one’s self against Marx, Nietzsche,
Freud, Heidegger, and their French disciples. But this was of course to
miss our most explicit intention—not to return to the tradition of meta¬
physical humanism, but to ground, as we insist at every opportunity, a
nonmetaphysical humanism.” Polemic, however, has its reasons that
reason knows not of. After all, as kids say: “We started it.”
The time for polemics is over, I hope, and we should be able to take
up with serenity the question of man (of the subject). As we suggested
in La Pensee 68, the critique of the ideologies of the death of man is not
self-sufficient and, to become truly positive, the project of a “nonmeta¬
physical humanism” has to face up to two requirements:
Confronted with readings tending to make uniform a modernity
defined as the linear and univocal succession of phases in the constitu¬
tion of a metaphysical subject, closed in on and transparent to itself, we
need to restore in their conflictual plurality the various moments which
have actually marked the history of modern conceptions of subjectivity.
But, since right from the start we have set aside the hypothesis of
a simple “return to,” we also need to answer the question of which
2
 INTRODUCTION

representation of self retains a meaning after the various deconstruc¬

tions of subjectivity—a question the deconstructionists themselves must
now consent to address.
In a recent book, L Ere de I’individu, Alain Renaut undertook the
task of studying these two questions following a philosophical approach
to the history of philosophy. For my part, faithful to an approach I took
in my first studies, I tried to tackle them from a perspective external to
the history of pure philosophy: that of aesthetics.
That was not an arbitrary choice. The questions put by the thesis
of the death of man refer back to the status of the Author, of the subject
thought of as creator, a motif that has been developed especially in re¬
flection about art. For reasons about to be discussed, aesthetics is the
field par excellence in which the problems brought about by the subjec-
tivization of the world characteristic of modern times can be observed
in the chemically pure state.
From Tocqueville to Arendt and Heidegger, from Weber to Strauss
and Dumont, the most profound analyses of modernity have pointed
out what the emergence of individualism meant, negatively, in terms
of the erosion of the universe of traditions: the disappearance of the
orders and guilds of the ancien regime, the disenchantment or de-
magicalization of the world, the end of the politico-theological, the
transition from the organic community (Gemeinschaft) to the contrac¬
tual society (Gesellschaft), from the closed world to the infinite uni¬
verse, the obsolescence of the great cosmologies and of hierarchical,
objectivist visions of law and politics, the oblivion of Being and the
advent of techmcity, and so forth. Unless we sin through what Nietzsche
would have considered as a singular lack of “tragic sense,” we can’t
deny the force of those readings of modernity which, even when they
ultimately adhere to it, as does Tocqueville, measure without conces¬
sions the price paid for what the Aufklarer read quite plainly as “the
march of Progress.”
These analyses converge on at least one diagnosis to which we can
remain neither blind nor indifferent: modern times bring us into a circle
which, understandably, still seems to some today—today more than
ever—to be infernal. On the one hand, the progressive dissolution of
the signposts inherited almost naturally from the past leaves us with¬
out an answer when faced with the simplest and most profound vicis¬
situdes of daily existence. At the individual level, it is easier to accord a
meaning to our successes than to our failures, to our “active” instants
(as Nietzsche meant them) than to sickness and death, to which, how-

3
INTRODUCTION

ever, traditional communities succeeded in assigning a practical and

theoretical site. If one should write today, two centuries after Rousseau,
that philosophy of unhappiness Alexis Philonenko sees in him, it would
have to respond to an interrogation whose platitude might seem disarm¬
ing: since it can’t be placed within the perspective of a traditional com¬
munity or of one or another eschatology, does human finitude still allow
us to believe that our projects and objectives, necessarily limited, are
intrinsically meaningful or, if one prefers to put it the other way, that
meaning itself still has a meaning? Is the “innocence of becoming,” dear
to aristocrats according to Nietzsche, still accessible to us?
And if it’s true that the crumbling of traditions leads us to the era
of indefinite questioning, the latter in turn contributes mightily to their
erosion: the more that questions come up, the less comfortable are we
in answering them, bereft as we are of all preestablished criteria; the
more these criteria fade away, the more numerous are the aspects of
intellectual—but also daily—life which enter the field of individual
questioning.
But we can’t limit ourselves to confirming that today, for us mod¬
erns, the heaven of ideas is empty. And even less to mourning the fact
(though nothing forbids this attitude, either, to which we owe, after all,
from Kierkegaard to Cioran, a few works that are not inconsequential).
If we are secular humans—as the end of theological-political thought
constrains the immense majority of Christians to be, at least in the pub¬
lic sphere—we have to admit that in the next decades it will be in our¬
selves, therefore—in, by, and for humanity—that we shall have to find
the answers to the questions that the progress of science and technology
will certainly force us to raise. Biology, as we know, gives especial evi¬
dence of this. Before long the crucial problem of bioethics will be that
of the setting of limits. How, by whom, according to which criteria will
our democratic societies be led to setting limits to individual liberty?
Like it or not, that is one question we shall soon not be able to avoid,
if, that is, we do not accept that it be resolved by the simple play of
economic and ideological powers.
There is thus an advantage to understanding that the history of
modernity is not only (even if it is also) the history of the decline of
traditions, it is above all, positively, that of the multiple faces of sub-
jectivity, that is, of the constitution of the sole basis from which hence¬
forth we must, volens nolens, attack, and perhaps sometimes resolve,
the intimidating question of the limits that must be imposed on the
power of man over man. On this path the history of cosmologies or of
4
 INTRODUCTION

the great religions can no longer serve as guide; nor can that of modern
political philosophy, although, obviously, both must remain present
in the mind as the negative of another history, that of aesthetics, in
which are inscribed in a positive fashion not only the various concep¬
tions of subjectivity that constitute modern times, but also their sharp¬
est tension that with the question, repressed but always underlying, of
the individual’s relation to the collective.

5
 ONE

fYY’r////r// a-. &

B EFORE TURNING HIS INTEREST to the philosophy of his own

times, the young Hegel wondered about the conditions under which
a religion could be in tune with the requirements of a free people. The
first requisite he assigned a reform of theology was to rid it of its “pos¬
itivity,” meaning everything which, by its dogmatic and institutional
character, could contribute to making a religion something alien to
the community, an ideology exterior to a people made up of free
individuals.
In many ways Hegel’s question remains ours. We need only replace
the word religion with the word culture (which could be defended his¬
torically as well as philosophically) for it to find again an astonishing
pertinence and relevance: what could the culture of a democratic people
consist of—such is indeed the central problem of societies in which the
subjectivization of the world has as unavoidable corollary the progres¬
sive collapse of traditions, under the ceaseless demand that they be in
agreement with men’s freedom. Under the imperatives of individualism,
contemporary culture has had to reject exteriority and transcendence to
such an extent that the reference to an order in the world has gradually
withdrawn from its principal productions.

ANCIENT, MODERN, CONTEMPORARY:

THE WORLD'S WITHDRAWAL

I have elsewhere analyzed (in Political Philosophy, vol. 1) the sense in

which modern individualism effects a rupture, in the juridical and po¬
litical spheres, with antiquity’s representation of a cosmic order seen as
closed, hierarchical, and purposeful, and which the art of the judge or
politician should strive to imitate. The notion of individualism seems to
have lost its “scientific” credibility, caught up as it has been in the inter-

7
ONE

pretative quarrels about the meaning and significance of the social

movements of the 1960s and obscured by media usage. Besides, despite
many precisions, those who oppose the use of the concept often mis¬
understand its deepest meaning and willingly or unwillingly confuse it
with a form of egoism, just as they easily assimilate an interpretation
that uses the notion of individualism as an apologia for the liberal
universe.
Every time individualism is dealt with, therefore, it will have to be
recalled that it refers above all to a descriptive concept, which does not
a priori imply any value judgement; it does not blend into egoism but
designates first of all a certain antitraditional relation to the law—a
relation which may eventually take the form of movements of collective
dissidence (here I can only refer the reader further to the argument that
Renaut and I put forward in 68-86: Itineraries de I’individu [Paris:
Gallimard, 1987]).
We hear a lot of talk today, if not of the “decline of the West”
(unlike Heidegger, Spengler is still taboo) at least of a certain exhaustion
of contemporary creation. And in fact, whatever one’s opinion, many
aspects of postmodernity can bring forth such a feeling through their
rejection of the new, raised to the standing of a principle. If there is no
reason to suppose that individual talent or even genius is less than that
of past centuries, we have every reason to surmise that the individual’s
relation to the world is going through a profound dislocation, and
that the relation to the idea of an objective universe, simultaneously
transcending him and uniting him to others, has become singularly
problematic.
The thesis I will for the moment simply sketch out is as follows:
where among the ancients the work is conceived of as a micro¬
cosm—which permits them to think that outside of it, in the macro¬
cosm, an objective or, better, substantial criterion of the Beautiful
exists—it is given meaning among the moderns through reference to
subjectivity, to become, for the contemporaries, the pure and simple
expression of individuality: an absolutely singular style which does not
see itself in any way as a mirror of the world but the creation of a world,
a world in which the artist acts, a world to which we are no doubt
allowed entrance, but which doesn’t impose itself on us as an a priori
common universe.
Even in Plato, who is in many ways the most “modern” of the an¬
cients, the Beautiful is never defined purely and simply by the subjective
pleasure it procures. The idea of the Beautiful is generally associated
8
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

with the bringing into reality of an order where “measure” and “pro¬
portion” should rule (Philebus, passim). It’s along these lines that Soc¬
rates addresses Gorgias in the dialogue bearing the celebrated sophist’s
name: “Take, for example, painters, architects, shipwrights, any other
profession you like, and see how each of them arranges the different
elements of his work in a certain order, and makes one part fit and
harmonize with another until the whole thing emerges a consistent and
organized whole” (503e, Walter Hamilton trans.).
The opinion according to which the artist should seek out harmony
does not, no doubt, disappear—at least not immediately—in modern
aesthetics. But this harmony is no longer thought of, and this is the real
break with antiquity, as the reflection of an order external to man: it is
no longer because the object is intrinsically beautiful that it pleases but,
rather, we can go so far as to say that it is because it provides a certain
type of pleasure that we call it beautiful.
The texts marking the very particular history which is that of aes¬
thetics insist on this, as do, among many others, these lines I borrow
from Crousaz and from Montesquieu:

Crousaz, Traite du Beau [Treatise on the Beautiful], 1715: “When we ask what
is the Beautiful, we do not pretend to speak of an object existing outside of
ourselves and separate from every other one, as we do when we ask what is a
horse or what is a tree . . .”

Montesquieu, Essai sur le gout [An Essay on Taste]: “It is the various pleasures
of our soul which shape the objects of taste, such as the Beautiful . . . The
Ancients had not properly unraveled this. They saw as positive qualities those
which are relative to our soul . . . The sources of the Beautiful, of the Good, of
the Pleasant are thus in ourselves; and to look for the reason is to look for the
cause of the pleasures of our soul.”

The consciousness of having broken with antiquity is still perfectly

clear for the founding fathers of aesthetics. Nevertheless, until a rela¬
tively recent date—in philosophy until Nietzsche, and in the history of
art up to the flowering of the avant-gardes—this subjectivization did
not purely and simply mean disappearance of the world, Weltlosigkeit.
Unlike what happens in the contemporary era, the mam problem of
modern aesthetics from the seventeenth century to the end of the nine¬
teenth is still that of reconciling the subjectivization of the beautiful (the
fact that it’s no longer an “in itself” but a “for us”) with the demand
for “criteria,” thus with a relation to objectivity or, if preferred, to the

9
 ONE

world. This same cardinal tension constitutes the problematic of the

first aesthetic systems: a tension which makes them fundamentally dif¬
ferent from what precedes them as much as from what follows them,
and which I for the moment designate, following current usage, as the
contemporary. Modern aesthetics is certainly subjectivist in that it es¬
tablishes the beautiful on human faculties, reason, sentiment, or imagi¬
nation. It is nonetheless animated by the idea that the work of art is
inseparable from a certain form of objectivity.
This is clear, of course, in Cartesian classicism from Boileau to
Crousaz, where the dictum “imitate nature” suggests that the univer¬
sality of good taste is explained by its rapport with an objective world
unveiled in reason. The classical genius is not that which invents, but
that which discovers, the term here being conceived on the model of
scientific activity. But that is equally true of the radical subjectivism of
the sensualists, however paradoxical that may seem. Hume, to mention
only him, remains attached to the idea of the objectivity of the beautiful,
even if he “founds” this objectivity on the hypothesis of a psycho-
biological structure common to humanity. And in the Critique of Judg¬
ment, which some consider to be the zenith of modern subjectivism, it
is explicitly in its relation to what Kant calls the “idea of world” that
aesthetic activity can become concrete in the production of a work. It is
because he can unconsciously invoke, by a natural gift, the “cosmologi¬
cal Idea that the genius is genial—genialness (imaginative creative
power) being always thus in a way limited by the demands of a confor¬
mity to a certain cosmic order. To speak as Kant does, “Taste clips
genius s wings,’ and the baroque, though superior to classical regu¬
larity, itself has limits which are, precisely, the world’s.
It seems to me that it is this very reference that is fading today: there
is no longer an obvious univocal world, but rather a plurality of worlds
unique to each artist; no longer one art, but an almost infinite variety
of individual styles. The truism that beauty is a matter of taste has fi¬
nally become reality, or more exactly: to the extent that there is a dif¬
ference between a talented artist and one that Kant, in his inimitable
jargon, would have called a “botcher,” this difference tends today to
become purely individual; it no longer depends on the capacity to create
a world which would surpass the narrowly private sphere of the crea¬
tor’s lived experiences. It resides rather in the more or less elaborate
cultivation of an idiosyncrasy (here is where, in the last instance, the old
question about criteria still finds a niche).
To give an example not chosen at random: there is a romantic
1 0
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

world; I am not at all certain there is such a thing as a “postmodern”

world. I can, when considering romanticism, even if the movement is
quite diverse (its periodization is the object of endless discussions, as is
the question of the connections between the different national traditions
it points to), discern a romantic aesthetic, a political mentality (in gen¬
eral counterrevolutionary), a theory of history, even a metaphysics, in
short, a “representation of the world,” a Weltanschauung shared by
artists—painters, poets, musicians—, writers, or philosophers. There
one finds something like a universe extending beyond individuals, a uni¬
verse I may hate or love but whose supraindividual existence I cannot
deny. About what movement (let’s not even speak of “schools”: this
term which seems to abjure the idea of individual freedom has lost all
meaning in the field of art) could we say the same thing today?
To avoid a misunderstanding: politically suspect, the idea of “deca¬
dence” or “decline” is theoretically not very convincing—be it formu¬
lated in “reactionary” fashion and animated by nostalgia for a lost past,
as in Spengler but also among thinkers of the magnitude of Heidegger
or Leo Strauss, or uttered in the “revolutionary” mode, which is cer¬
tainly getting rare, once adopted by “left” critics of liberal consumer¬
ism. What characterizes contemporary art is certainly not that its works
attest to less talent than those of the past. It may simply be that art’s
ambitions have changed: for many artists today (we’ll return below to
the avant-gardes and their crisis, which will lead us to postmodernity)
the goal is no longer to discover the world, to use art as an instrument
of knowledge of a reality alien to oneself. On the contrary, it seems that
in many cases (we must here be wary of universal judgments, for there
are notable exceptions: the postmodern atmosphere which, precisely,
admits all genres, finds generalizations distasteful) the work is defined
by the artist himself as an extension of self, a sort of particularly elabo¬
rate calling card.
After Nietzsche it’s Schonberg who consecrated his best pages to
this: the artist is a “solitary” whose vocation it is, in the formula oft
repeated by Kandinsky, to turn away from the world the better to ex¬
press his “pure inner life.” One work would thus no longer be enough
to say the essential: only in the artist’s journey will he eventually be able
to unveil himself, through the ruptures and hesitations of tone and style
which pace his “interior life.” Withdrawal from the world is inseparable
from the cult of idiosyncracy, indeed of originality. We can measure here
how far the contemporary is separate from the modern even though it
is its continuity. Although he took humanity for his model and end,
 ONE

Moliere, who pretended, as we know, to “paint after nature,” speaks to

us of the essence of man. Contemporary language is that of “lived
experiences.”
It is possible to date the “end of the world” on a more philosophic
plane. It doubtless goes back to the Nietzschean critique of the “scien¬
tific prejudice” which holds that “our little thought” is capable of cap¬
turing something like a “real world.” One of the aphorisms of The Will
to Power states without ambiguity: “There are no states of fact as
such,” but “only interpretations,” not a world, but an “infinity of
worlds,” themselves only the perspectives of the living individual. “The
question ‘what is it’ is a way to create a meaning ... It is, at bottom,
always the question ‘what is it for me.' ”
We will of course have to ask ourselves about the meaning of the
“me” Nietzsche speaks of, and of the connections it might have with
modern individualism (with the “metaphysics of subjectivity”). It re¬
mains that, shattering the idea of an objective reality, Nietzsche makes
the bell toll for the culture of the Enlightenment and heralds the obso¬
lescence of the world, the Weltlosigkeit, which more and more reigns
over culture. For very basic reasons this reign tends today to orient itself
in three directions.
In the realm of art, we live in a way that becomes constantly more
visible, if not in a Nietzschean “universe”—a term which would be,
strictly speaking, incorrect—at least in an intellectual atmosphere
which strangely resembles Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Art works are like
little perspectival worlds” which no longer represent the world, but
rather the state of their creator s vital forces. Such and such an artist
may, of course, still intend, as in the classics, to maintain a rapport with
Truth, or to unveil in his work a relation to Being. He is still doing it
after his fashion, and he must coexist with myriads of other artists
whose intentions can be infinitely different. If regular visits to modern
art museums teach us anything, it’s that criteria are lacking, not, as is
foolishly said, because by essence art shuns all sorts of criteria—this is
far from always having been the case—but because today, cut off as it
is from the world, it can only refer back to pure intersubjectivity.
We have the opposite situation with the “exact sciences.” Not that
these don’t also provoke discussions and dissensions. An even super¬
ficial acquaintance with the debates within contemporary research
should be enough to rid us of the idea that the field of science is par
excellence that of consensus. The very special status of science teaching
when compared with that of other disciplines is therefore all the more
1 2
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

remarkable: where education has in general adopted more and more

“liberal” principles, notably through the effect of the extraordinary de¬
velopment of “interactive methods” which (justly) insist on the neces¬
sity of the students’ participation in the acquisition of knowledge, the
inculcation of science remains the only one in which the relativism of
personal opinion can be neither appreciated nor encouraged. Certainly
a lot of time is given over to the students’ learning activities, but this is
purely for pedagogic purposes. Like it or not, the solution to a math or
physics problem is not a matter of individual or majority opinion, and
the relativism appropriate to other domains disappears in science for
the good and simple reason that it represents the last remains of our
relation to objectivity. It’s in encountering science that the child comes
up—perhaps for the first and last time—against a theoretical universe
which resists his subjectivity, since it manifests itself to him in the shape
of norms that he, at least at his level of learning, cannot contest. It may
be the case that the natural sciences are the outcome of the “metaphys¬
ics of subjectivity.” Then we must admit, if we don’t want to stick with
cliches, that they defeat individual opinion as does no other sphere of
intellectual life.
Finally, the third partition of democratic culture is history. Here I
mean history in a wider sense, History itself as well as those disciplines
which, like sociology or psychoanalysis, imply an intrinsic relationship
to historicity (the history of the present in sociology, the history of the
individual in psychoanalysis). Publishing statistics give us eloquent wit¬
ness: besides fiction, it’s works of scientific popularization and historical
essays that nearly systematically receive the (cultured or uncultured)
public’s votes—a fact that finds its roots deep within the new require¬
ments of homo democraticus. History (but also, to repeat, sociology or
psychoanalysis as well) is supposed to deliver us to ourselves through
the appropriation of a past we ignore, but which makes us what we are
today and thus reveals itself constitutive of our present. Far from being
a mere recollection of events, it tends more and more to become a dis¬
cipline of self-reflection through which we constitute ourselves as au¬
tonomous individuals. There is nothing surprising, therefore, in its
seeming to be the queen of faculties in a universe in which human beings
are forever intent on augmenting the sphere of their self-consciousness.
Whether or not it’s considered a cause for rejoicing, it is probable that
the historico-political culture has gotten the upper hand over the hu¬
manities. Philosophy itself has witnessed the overturning of traditional
hierarchies: it’s becoming more and more historical and especially so,
ONE

paradoxically, when it leaves the domain of history of philosophy to

become, if not philosophy of history, at least historicizing philosophy
(Foucault could be an example here).
Microcosmic monads in the fields of art, scientific objectivity,
and history: these are now, I believe—and no doubt for a long time to
come—the three fundamental horizons of a contemporary culture
whose main trait could well be this subjectivization in which aesthetics
occupies a privileged place. Because the breakup of the world charac¬
teristic of postmodern art as well as the search for scientific objectivity
and the aim of a reappropriation of self through historical knowledge
are but three aspects of the same revolution: that in which man installs
himself as principle and telos of the universe. As has been suggested,
but we know we must sketch out its traits, this revolution is above all a
revolution of taste.

THE BIRTH OF TASTE

According to a thesis developed by the historian Karl Bonnski in his

fine book on the work of Baltasar Gracian, the latter must be credited
with the first use of the word “taste” in a metaphoric sense.1 For Bo-
rinski, this figurative usage indicates a veritable rupture in the history
of subjectivity: with the concept of taste, modern humanism makes its
entry at the same time that the universe of the Renaissance becomes
irremediably a part of the past.
It is always difficult, at times impossible to date the birth of a con¬
cept with certainty and Borinski’s thesis was, as could be expected, criti¬
cized every time someone discovered a writer in antiquity who used the
word gustus in an even slightly wider sense.2 But one thing is certain:
it’s around the middle of the seventeenth century that, first in Italy and
Spain, then in France and England and, finally, Germany,51 where there
was some difficulty finding in the word Geschmack an adequate trans¬
lation—the term acquires pertinence in the designation of a new faculty,
capable of distinguishing the beautiful from the ugly and of apprehend¬
ing through immediate sentiment (aistbesis) the rules of this separation,
of this Krisis which was soon to become the endowment of art criticism.
And it is beginning with the representation of such a faculty that we
enter definitively into the universe of “modern aesthetics” (the juxta-

* The history of the propagation of the concept of taste in Europe is briefly

dealt with in Croce’s aesthetics and taken up again by Baumler.
14
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

position of these two terms being, besides, practically a pleonasm). The

point deserves consideration.
We are not here looking to be original: we will admit (with Hegel,
Heidegger, and a few others) the thesis according to which modernity
is defined by a vast process of “subjectivization” of the world whose
model in philosophy is provided by the three great moments of the Car¬
tesian method. Without going here into detail in the interpretation of
Descartes, we may recall that the procedure of doubt he adopts in the
Discourse on Method as well as in the Meditations provides the arche¬
type for the subjectivization of all values that finds its most eloquent
political expression in the revolutionary ideology of 1789. At first, the
project is one of “abrogating through doubt” the received opinions and
all inherited prejudices, so as to make a blank slate of tradition. Mutatis
mutandis, Descartes carries out a divorce with antiquity (and especially
with Aristotle) whose equivalent, outside philosophy, is the break with
the ancien regime brought about by the Revolution. Second phase: a
fulcrum, a support is sought to rebuild the structure of scientific and
philosophical knowledge that has just been undermined. And since it is
the individual, the subject (the distinction between these two terms is
not, here, very important) who is carrying out the inquiry, he will arrive
or not at his goal thanks to his own certitudes. As we know, it is in the
cogito that, finally, Descartes finds the means to escape generalized
doubt. It is, therefore, third phase, on his own subjectivity, on the
absolute certainty the subject has of seizing himself through his own
thought, that the complete system of knowledge is built (the word is not
yet used but will soon be by Leibniz).
The blank slate, the subject’s capture by himself as the only ab¬
solutely certain principle, radical constructivism—these are the three
moments which define, in its principle, the advent of philosophical mo¬
dernity. To get immediately to the heart of the problem created by the
overturning of ways of thinking that Cartesianism instituted, or at least
thematized, we have to perceive this: where in the world of the “an¬
cients” (a term which may be understood here in its philosophical sense,
designating antiquity, or in its political sense, designating the ancien
regime) it was the cosmic order of tradition which established for men
the validity of values and thus set up between them a possible space of
communication, the problem, beginning with Descartes, becomes one
of knowing how it is possible to establish, starting out exclusively from
oneself, values equally valuable for the others (God’s intervention,
though not yet excluded, itself becomes mediated by the subject’s philo-
ONE

sophical reflection and is thus, in this sense, dependent on him). In a

word, the problem becomes one of knowing how it is possible to estab¬
lish, within the radical immanence of values to subjectivity, their tran¬
scendence, for ourselves as for others.
The problem will be even clearer if, before coming back to aesthet¬
ics, to see in what ways this field is quite simply foundational, we take
a small detour through politics. The counterrevolutionaries saw it even
more distinctly than the revolutionaries themselves; the essence of mod¬
ern politics, that which expresses itself in a particularly striking fashion
in Jacobin ideology, is the onset of what one could call political human¬
ism, meaning the (perhaps exorbitant, but it doesn’t matter here) pre¬
tention to establish all our political values beginning with the legitimacy
of power on man and no longer on tradition, whether the latter issues
forth from divinity or from nature.
In the discourse preliminary to his treatise on Primitive Legislation
[La Legislation primitive (Paris: Le Clere, 1802)], Bonald introduces, as
is his wont, the French Revolution as a “catastrophe.” As he asks him¬
self about the causes of this “bloody disaster,” he writes the following
lines which deserve our full attention: “Until this time Christians had
professed that power comes from God, and is therefore always to be
respected, whatever be the particular goodness of the man exercising
it ... : legitimate power, not in the sense that the man exercising it be
named by an order visibly issued from the Divinity, but because it is
constituted following the natural and fundamental laws of social order,
of which God is the author.” But beginning in the fifteenth century, and
anticipating Luther and Calvin, according to Bonald,

Wiclef saw in power only man, he maintained that power, even political power,
is good only when the man exercising it is good himself, and that any little
woman in the state of grace has more right to govern than a debauched
prince . . . From there on followed, like forced consequences, the doctrines of
conventional and conditional power of Thomas Hobbes and of Locke, the So¬
cial Contract of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jurieu’s popular sovereignty, etc. Power
came only from man: to be legitimate, it had to be constituted and exercised
following certain conditions imposed by human beings or certain conventions
made among men, to which power could be returned, in case of violation,
through men’s force.

One could hardly better describe the essence of political modernity

and more concisely highlight the parallelism that establishes itself at the
dawn of the modern era between pure thought, which in the seventeenth
1 6
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

century is incarnated by Cartesian metaphysics, and the political think-

mg that was educated at the school of natural law, and which was to be
illustrated by the Revolution.
The conventionalism which, Bonald is right, makes of man the
cornerstone of the social edifice presents to us, in its principle, the same
ternary structure as does Cartesianism:
1. To the blank slate made out of the prejudices of the past, which
Descartes obtains thanks to the method of ''hyperbolic” doubt, corre¬
sponds what the "jus naturae” theorists name the “state of nature,” a
veritable degree zero of politics through whose invention the idea of a
transmission of power (by which is first of all meant the notion of tra¬
dition) is, so to speak, shattered. The state of nature, an essentially pre-
political notion, is invented by philosophers with an exclusively critical
aim which forebodes the revolutionary gesture. It is above all, not some
kind of phantasmagoric historical reconstruction (as most sociologists,
beginning with Durkheim, believed), but a fictional hypothesis without
which the question of the legitimacy of power, obscured as it is by the
reign of tradition which declares it as always already settled, could not
even be raised. Under what conditions can a political power be consid¬
ered legitimate? That is the question which only the presupposition of a
stage of humanity prior to the appearance of a policed society permits
us to formulate in all its radicalness.
2. In Descartes it is the recourse to the individual, to the cogito,
that allows the moment of doubt and of the tabula rasa to be overcome.
Likewise with Hobbes or Rousseau, it is the invention of the people as
an entity capable of free self-determination which, through the inven¬
tion of a political subject, allows the problem of the legitimacy of power
to be positively solved. Political philosophy from then on, in the seven¬
teenth and eighteenth centuries, essentially takes the form of a philoso¬
phy of law. There are of course certain exceptions (we may think of
Montesquieu), but it isn’t too much to say that they confirm the rule.
The near totality of the great political thinkers of the Age of Reason set
out to elaborate “doctrines of law,” in which the concepts of state of
nature and of social contract are constantly discussed. The principal
theme of these doctrines is that of putting an end to the traditional
representations of political legitimacy, as most commentators have cor¬
rectly seen. Beyond the various modalities in which they may have been
apprehended, the concepts of state of nature and of social contract fun¬
damentally mean that, contrary to what was the case with the ancients,
and more generally with all the traditional theories of power, legitimate
ONE

political authority is not that which imitates a natural or divine order,

but that based on the will of individuals or, to use the fitting philosophi¬
cal term, on subjectivity. Together with the idea of a possible self-
determination of the people, it’s the democratic principle which thus
bursts into political philosophy.
3. After the invention of the state of nature and of the people as the
subject of law, the third phase of this modern vision of the world con¬
sists in the project of reconstructing the totality of the social edifice on
these atoms called individuals. Whether it be in Hobbes, where the fear
of death which haunts everyone in the state of nature leads each one to
associate himself with every other in the quest for security, or in Rous¬
seau, for whom the goal of civic association is not the quest for happi¬
ness but for liberty, political society appears to be through and through
the realization of individual wills, at least with respect to its legitimacy.
The Cartesian idea of a reconstruction of all values on what the subject
can accept as such finds here its most perfected expression, its greatest
extension, since the individualist model reaches without apparent diffi¬
culty into the collective sphere. In eliminating from the Declaration of
the Rights of Man the idea that individuals have duties toward society,
in affirming that they have nothing but rights and that the duties they
may have toward others are but the symmetrical inverse of the rights
others possess with the same justification as themselves, the French
revolutionaries closed the circle and gave the final touch to the political
logic born of the invention of man.
As has already been pointed out by Tocqueville with his usual pene¬
tration, although Descartes did not himself enlarge his radical proce¬
dure outside of pure philosophy, although he “declared that one must
judge by oneself the matters of philosophy and not of politics,” the
credit nevertheless goes entirely to him for having abolished “received
formulas,” destroyed “the empire of traditions,” and overthrown the
“authority of the master” in such a way that his method must in the
end, with the evolution of the social state, “come out of the schools to
penetrate into society and become the common norm of intelligence,”
the latter not only French but more generally “democratic.”3
The emergence of aesthetics must be placed in this context. Not¬
withstanding a certain received opinion, there is nothing timeless about
the aesthetic problematic: it is, on the contrary, the surest sign of the
onset of modern times. The term itself occurs initially in the title of a
philosophy book in 1750. It was at this time that a disciple of Leibniz

1 8
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

and Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, produced in Latin the six

hundred pages of his Aesthetica.
The birth of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline is permanently
linked to the radical mutation the representation of the beautiful under¬
goes when the latter is thought of in terms of taste and, therefore, using
as starting point that which in the human being soon comes to seem the
very essence of subjectivity, the most subjective within the subject. With
the concept of taste the beautiful is placed in a relation to human sub¬
jectivity so intimate that it may even be defined by the pleasure it pro¬
vides, by the sensations or sentiments it provokes in us.
One of the central problems of the philosophy of art is of course
that of the criteria which permit us to assert or not that a thing is beau¬
tiful. How is one to come up with an “objective” answer to this matter
once the foundations of the beautiful have been situated within the most
intimate subjectivity, that of taste? But how, then, give up this objec¬
tivity as a goal now that the beautiful, like all other modern values, is
supposed to address itself to all and please the greatest number? A for¬
midable problem, and one in which aesthetics inevitably—but a priori
and in their most essential form—comes up against the comparable
questions asked of individualism in the fields of theory of knowledge
(how to ground objectivity using the representations of the subject as
starting point?) and of politics (how to ground the collective on indi¬
vidual volition?). I say a priori and in their most essential form because
the history of aesthetics is the place par excellence where the subjectiv-
ization of the world occurs or, to put it better, where the withdrawal of
the world that characterizes, at the end of a long evolution, contempo¬
rary culture takes place.

THE THREE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF AESTHETICS

With the birth of taste, the philosophy of art of antiquity gives way to a
theory of sensibility. This mutation raises three questions that are deci¬
sive for the understanding of modern culture: that of the irrationality of
the beautiful which, by way of the search for an autonomy of the sen¬
sible in relation to the intelligible, engages in its very essence the new
bond between man and God that is increasingly characteristic of mo¬
dernity. Then comes the birth of criticism which, beginning with the
quarrel of the ancients and the moderns (therefore well before Diderot),
brings about a questioning attitude toward tradition and simultane-
ONE

ously renders possible a history of art, which in turn establishes a radi¬

cally new conception of the originality of the author. Finally, the
apparently classical, in reality typically modern, motif of the criteria of
the beautiful raises the question of communication, of the sensus com¬
munis, a question that appears within an individualist culture for which
the problem of mediation between humans has become central.

1. The Irrationality of the Beautiful: The Autonomy of the

Sensible as Rupture between Man and God

The beautiful, following a Platonistic tradition whose influence on

French classicism is still quite visible (although it already fully belongs,
as we shall soon see, to modern times), has long been defined as a “sen¬
sible presentation” (that is, an illustration) of the true, as the transposi¬
tion into the sphere of material (visible or acoustic) sensibility of a
moral or intellectual truth. Under such conditions the position of art
can naturally only be secondary in relation to philosophy. It is hard to
see in what way the apprehension of the true mediated by the sensible
could be preferable to a clear and distinct knowledge of the truth in
itself and for itself (except on a strictly pedagogical level, but even that
isn’t sure).
Besides, whether in Platonism, Christian theology, or Cartesiamsm,
the intelligible world is always superior to the sensible world. To adopt
the formulation that matters here: God’s point of view is characterized
by the fact that, intelligible through and through (God is omniscient,
everything is transparent for him, as far as these anthropomorphic for¬
mulas even have a meaning), he is not affected by the mark of imperfec¬
tion and human finitude that is expressed by sensibility.
It is therefore easy to understand to what point the project of con¬
secrating to the study of sensibility an autonomous science, that of aes¬
thetics, represents a decisive rupture with the classical point of view not
only of theology but also of all philosophy of Platonic inspiration. We
have to size it up correctly: the object of aesthetics, the sensible world,
has no existence except for man; it is, in the strictest sense, man’s own.
The birth of aesthetics, implying as a specific discipline a decision taken
about the autonomy of its object, expresses thus in concentrated form
the upheaval the eighteenth century inaugurates in all domains. It sym¬
bolizes better than metaphysics or religion the project of providing the
human point of view with a legitimacy which the development of the
finite knowledge of the positive sciences is beginning to require.
We shall see in the pages that follow the way that the conquest of

20
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

this autonomy of the sensible, as invention of a world in which the

divine gives way ceaselessly to the human, takes place in three phases.
With the Aesthetica of Baumgarten and the Phenomenology of Johann
Heinrich Lambert (1766, the first of a long line of “phenomenologies”)
the project of working out a logic applicable to sensible “phenomena”
is already embodied. Not only does the beautiful appear as man’s own,
as proper to man, but human sensibility is also presented as having a
specific structure that God’s point of view cannot totally relativize. But
the Critique of Pure Reason must come along before the radical au¬
tonomy of the sensible vis-a-vis the intelligible will be, for the first time
in the history of thought, philosophically established, thus opening up
the theoretical space of the Critique of judgment. It remained for Nietz¬
sche to eliminate the intelligible world, which for Kant still had the
status of an Idea necessary to reason. Abolishing in this fashion any
reference to God, even as simple idea, Nietzsche consecrates the sensible
world, the purely human world, in its status of one and only world (in
turn fragmented into an infinity of perspectives). Doing away with the
“truth-world” (Plato’s intelligible, the beyond of the Christians), Nietz¬
sche also does away with the pretentions of metaphysics in reducing the
sensible world to an appearance. And since the truth becomes a fable,
the philosopher must give way to the artist: Incipit aesthetica!
We shall of course have to establish the degree to which these var¬
ious moments of the constitution of aesthetics as prototype of modern
culture can be described, as we have just done (in the manner of Leo
Strauss, with all due respect), as stages in a linear process, or whether,
on the contrary, these progressive insinuations of subjectivity offer up
resistances and tensions that defy any description in terms of an irresis¬
tible “decline.” We must above all examine what conceptions of subjec¬
tivity are involved in each of these various moments in which the
withdrawal of the divine (of the intelligible world, if preferred) is indis-
sociably accompanied by the advent of the human, thought of as
subject.
What is on the other hand already clear is that, in the course of the
evolution through which it becomes autonomous, the beautiful object,
as sensible object, slips over to the nonrational. Declared radically non-
intelligible is ipso facto becomes irrational, and under this aspect aes¬
thetics begins to look like a veritable challenge to logic. As Baumler
correctly observed, from that point on rationalist philosophy no longer
is able to ignore the question of the status of what is “outside reason.”
From Leibniz to Hegel (and we could even add Freud) this is the central

2 1
ONE

problem of Germanic thought. But a new arrangement of the subject

corresponds to this “objective” irrationality of the beautiful: it no
longer is able to apprehend either the manifestations of the beautiful or
the rules defining the latter (as far as we even admit that such rules exist)
through reason but through a different kind of faculty. The reader will
have guessed that it is at this point that modern aesthetics encounters
the concept of taste, here understood as the subjective correlative of the
irrationality of the beautiful object as sensible object. Subjectivity is
thus no longer limited to the intelligible faculties, and humanity is no
longer separated from animality by the sole virtue of reason.
To this new status of the human corresponds the second problem
that aesthetics encounters.

2. The Birth of Criticism: History against Tradition

The conditions of possibility for criticism and art history are already
embryonic in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. The
principle of modernity is surreptitiously mobilized in the way in which
Nicolas Boileau himself takes part in the debate: the superiority of the
ancients in his eyes no longer consists, as it still does for the Renais¬
sance, in the fact that they are ancient and as such embody a tradition
in itself respectable and worthy of admiration."'
What renders the works of antiquity so valuable is their capacity to
conform themselves to a norm, and thus to a principle which is intrin¬
sically superior to them. If we add that, for the French classicists whose
aesthetics is inspired by Cartesianism, the norm is that of reason, and
thus of a faculty of the subject, we will understand the way in which
the world of tradition is already so shaken that the possibility of criti¬
cism and of history becomes a reality: of criticism, because there exists
a norm other than those of tradition, and therefore a criterion in whose
name works can be judged (a criterion de facto used by those who be¬
lieve themselves to be taking the side of a threatened tradition, in a
paradox beyond their ken); of history because, under these conditions,

*On the Renaissance, and on the fact that in this “intermediate” period
there was at least agreement in the judgement that “the artist’s purely subjective
and individual appreciation could never serve as criterion for a just propor¬
tion,” we must always refer back to Erwin Panofsky (see especially Idea: Ein
Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie [Leipzig, Berlin: B. G.
Teubner, 1924], chap. 3).

22
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

the idea of an evolution or even of a progress in the presentation of ideal

norms is no longer inconceivable.
Under these conditions originality also ceases to be an exemplary
non-value. It even begins to be one of the qualities we may expect of an
artist worthy of that name. Consequently, the true artist stops being
identical to the rhapsodist who merely translates into words, sounds, or
images the community’s values; he becomes, strictly speaking, an au¬
thor, that is to say, an individual gifted with the capacity for a creation
which is itself original.
It is at the beginning of the eighteenth century that these potentiali¬
ties, of criticism and of art history, which were revealed by the classicists
truly take form. But they were already present from the beginning in
the enthronement of the subject as the judge of tradition. To this will be
added the psychologism of the sensualists and the nationalism of Dubos
(and of Montesquieu) to forge the idea of a historicity of taste: not only
will Voltaire’s toadfind that it is his she-toad who embodies beauty,
but if he is Italian, French, or German, it will be as an Italian, French,
or German toad that she will incarnate the essence of the Beautiful, the
to kalon.
Originality itself changes meaning: the concept contains within it,
analytically so to speak, that of subjectivity (the originality of the work
of art is always referred back to the originality of the artist as individual
author). But historicity is added to this originary determination: it’s no
longer only a matter of being original when confronted with a syn¬
chronic structure—that of a salon, for example, in which wit and inven¬
tion would be of the essence—originality is now measured against the
yardstick of a history of art, within which one must innovate to win
one’s artistic spurs. The condition is not yet sufficient, as it will be at
the end of this history, among certain avant-garde groups of our twen¬
tieth century, but it is already quite necessary—as witnessed in the in¬
stitutional sphere by the cult of chronology, which will soon preside
over the organization of the museum, itself created under the sign of a
temporality tied in to the French Revolution.
The cult of the new, of rupture with tradition, characteristic of the
subversive pretenses of “modernism,” finds its deepest roots in the

* “Ask a toad what is beauty, the Beautiful, to kalon, and he will answer
that it’s his she-toad.” (Dictionnaire philosophique, article on Beau [the
Beautiful].)

23
ONE

emergence of subjectivity, so that contemporary art still belongs in part

to the orbit of modern aesthetics in a sense we will explain with more
precision later on.

3. Common Sense and Communication: Can One Argue

about the Beautiful?

If the beautiful object is conceived of as purely subjective—a paradox

we barely dare state, looking as it does like a logical contradiction—if
it is apprehended only by this elusive faculty called taste, how could
there ever be consensus on the beauty of a work of art or of nature?
And yet, those who love “beautiful landscapes,” the works of Homer
and of Shakespeare, and the Italian painters are numerous . . . decid¬
edly, the paradox is not simple. It may at first look trivial, but it isn’t.
Looked at one way, it would seem that aesthetics begins where con¬
temporary philosophy apparently culminates, with the problem of rela¬
tivism. As a consequence of the Marxian and Nietzschean critiques of
metaphysics, and also because of the influence of the social sciences, we
have become progressively used to the idea that there are no values in
and of themselves, atemporal and eternal. We look at every norm, every
intellectual, moral, or political institution as the result of a history
whose reconstruction supposedly fully explains its meaning. It is an un¬
derstatement to say that we live today in a “crisis of the universal.”
And yet this relativism took a long time to assert itself in philoso¬
phy. For a long time it described itself as subversive (this was still the
case with Michel Foucault) and therefore condemned to being marginal.
Could this have been real naivete or mere cuteness? In any case we have
to accept the obvious: historicism is in fact omnipresent. Far from being
a way of thinking repressed because of a revolutionary potential too
strong to be accepted by our liberal societies, it constitutes their most
solid, most manifest principle. Its alleged marginality has become so
central, as today anyone can verify for himself, that it constitutes the
new dominant ideology. The idea that a truth could be “absolute”
(which means only not relative, as we are forced to recall since the term
has become so pejorative) makes any high school student smile, if in¬
deed it doesn’t offend him. But in all probability it shocks his only
absolute conviction, that there are no absolute truths.
To repeat: this is the result of a long history, and modern philoso¬
phy begins neither with Nietzsche nor with Marx, but with Descartes,
although he firmly believed, as we can’t deny, in the intangibility of
eternal truths.

24
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

Aesthetics is entirely different. Establishing as it does the beautiful

on a faculty much too subjective for objectivity to be easily discernible
within it, its history, at least up to the end of the eighteenth century,
goes instead from relativism towards the search for criteria. Paradoxi¬
cally, the skeptical attitude becomes less easy to maintain in this sphere
than in those of pure philosophy or politics or ethics, and this for a very
simple reason: it immediately collapses under the weight of its own ba¬
nality. To the same degree that Nietzsche’s thesis that there is no scien¬
tific truth or, rather, that the truth of the positivistic sciences is itself
the apex of illusion—can provoke interest because of its frontal clash
with certain well-established certitudes, the idea that “taste is subjec¬
tive lacks attractiveness, shocking as it does nothing and no one. We
may say that, on the contrary, the opinion that would maintain that it
is possible to discuss matters of taste, and even to find criteria of the
beautiful, would seem untenable to the common sense.
The inquiry into the criteria of beauty (of taste) characteristic of
every modern aesthetic appears therefore to be all the more essential. It
is at this level that the key problem of modernity in general presents
itself in its most difficult and most decisive aspect: how to ground ob¬
jectivity on subjectivity, transcendence on immanence? In other words,
how to think of bonds (social ones, of course, but not exclusively) in a
society which pretends to begin with individuals in order to reconstruct
the collective? Let us state right away the thesis we shall be defending.
It is in the domain of aesthetics that this question can be read in its
purest form, for it is here that the tension between individual and col¬
lective, subjective and objective, is at its highest. The beautiful is that
which at the same time brings us together the most easily yet the most
mysteriously. Contrary to what we might expect, the consensus about
important works of art is as strong and as general as in any other do¬
main. Parodying one of Hume’s arguments, we could say there is less
disagreement on Bach’s or Shakespeare’s greatness than on the valid¬
ity of Einstein’s physics (to say nothing of Newton’s). And yet, we are
here at the very heart of the most intense and most acknowledged
subjectivity.

THE HISTORY OF AESTHETICS AS HISTORY OF SUBJECTIVITY

Whatever else may be the case, philosophy “from Descartes to Nietz¬

sche” (or, in a more Straussian vein, “from Machiavelli to Sartre”) does
not consist in the linear development of a metaphysical conception of

25
ONE

subjectivity which, imperfect at the outset, at the moment of the cogito,

supposedly finds its ultimate form in the technicist concept of “will to
power.” The tensions and oppositions among the different conceptions
of the subject—among Cartesians, empiricists, in Kant’s and Fichte’s
transcendental philosophy, with Hegel and Nietzsche finally—are in
truth so deep that it would be vain to attempt to “resolve” them in one
equation. To restore to a history of modern thought the diversity of
these various moments constitutes, even today, one of the principal
tasks of a philosophy that has as its aim the discernment of the status of
the subject after the death of man, after the various deconstructions of
metaphysical subjectivity.
It is for this project that the history of aesthetics provides a privi¬
leged access, for the reasons already stated. I have not, however, aimed
at the exhaustiveness a historical work would have required; the cus¬
tomary considerations on Shaftesbury and Burke, Goethe and Lessing,
Solger and German romanticism, and Benjamin’s or Adorno’s aesthetics
will not be found here. But I have aimed for a certain systematicity, the
goal being to track down the various singular moments of a history of
modern subjectivity in all their absolute irreducibility. Certain relatively
unknown authors—Bouhours for example, but also and above all
Baumgarten and Lambert—seemed to me, in the context of this inquiry,
to occupy an essential role in the correct analysis of these ruptures. For
reasons that will become clear in the course of the argument, I’ve settled
on five major moments corresponding each to a definite state in the
question of the subject.

1. Between Heart and Reason: The Prehistory of Aesthetics,

or the Dispute of the “Cogitos”

Contrary to an oft received opinion (a point [I’ll come back to it] on

which Cassirer went wrong), it is from the seventeenth century that we
encounter a hardened opposition between, on the one hand, a certain
classicism which conceives art by analogy with science and assigns it as
its goal “to paint after nature,” and thus to represent truth, and, on the
other, an aesthetics of “delicacy” or “sentiment,” seeing in the beautiful
work an expression of that which is ineffable in the transports of pas¬
sion. Behind these two conceptions of beauty—whose conflict goes on
throughout the eighteenth century—two visions of subjectivity are con¬
fronting each other: one, issued from Cartesianism, locates the essence
of the cogito in reason while the other, Pascalian or even sensualist,
places the essential elsewhere, in the heart or the feelings. Yet these two

26
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

apparently radically antinomic positions are fighting on common

ground: that of individualism. In both cases the subject is thought of as
a monad that cannot come into communication with other monads ex¬
cept through the intermediation of a third term. Since these monads
possess, as Leibniz put it, “neither doors nor windows,” the theory of
sensus communis, which attempts to answer the difficult question of the
criteria of the beautiful, rests on what could be called a “satellite”
model: in this first era of individualism, culminating with Leibnizian
rationalism and Berkeley’s and Hume’s empiricism, the intersubjectivity
brought about by the beautiful object (the fact that it produces a certain
consensus among the subjects) can only be thought of as starting with
the idea of a God, monad among monads, who guarantees agreement
among the individuals.
It’s against this very model that the first aesthetics, Baumgarten’s
Aesthetica, is conceived. The arrival of this new, resolutely modern dis¬
cipline presupposes the withdrawal of the divine perspective to the ad¬
vantage of the human one. It’s at such a price and only at such a price
that the autonomy of sensibility, and therefore of the sphere within
which beauty alone finds its proper expression, can be definitively
conquered.

2. The Kantian Moment: Reflection and Intersubjectivity

The Aesthetica is not able to fully establish the autonomy of the sensible
in contrast to the intelligible, caught up as it still is in the framework of
Leibnizian rationalism. Despite their extraordinary innovative poten¬
tial, the first aesthetics are still touched by a certain Platonism; they
never can confer, in the final analysis, the same status to beauty that is
given by right to the true and the good.
The argument can be sketched out with ease although it is, as we
shall see throughout this history of aesthetics, absolutely decisive: if
beauty is only appearance, the manifestation in the realm of the sensible
of a true idea or of a moral evidence, then it is clear that its true value
is by its very essence located somewhere other than within itself—in the
true or the good it illustrates. It can at best lay claim to a certain talent
in the presentation of a content that does not belong to it, which is
always described and grounded outside of it, in speculative philosophy,
science, or ethics. That is, moreover, the crux of every classicism: if the
painting or the poem is above all valuable for the nobility of the subject
it represents, if truth must reign, as Boileau put it, even if it must “spoil
the rhythmic foot,” then isn’t art condemned from its very origins to a

27
ONE

subordinate position in the field of culture? And that is what is at stake

in the process of winning autonomy for the realm of the sensible in
relation to the two aspects, theoretical and practical, of the intelligible.
It is no doubt the affirmation of such an autonomy that will permit Kant
to break out of the framework of classicism and to work out the prin¬
ciples of an aesthetics within which, for the first time in the history of
thought, beauty acquires an independent existence and ceases being the
mere reflection of an essence furnishing it with its authentic meaning
from without.
It has to be noticed that this unprecedented reversal of Platonism
(of the primacy of the intelligible over the sensible) also upsets the heri¬
tage of the history of subjectivity. We must keep in mind the idea that
the realm of sense-perception (of the sensible) is the sign par excellence
of the human condition, of limited knowledge. It is exactly that by
which man, with a material body and limited intelligence, is distinct
from God with his pure spirit and omniscience. The affirmation of the
autonomy of the sensible means nothing less in this context than the
radical, perhaps definitive, separation of the human and the divine.
Even more: it implies the existence of a sphere, that of the properly
human, outside all divine legislation and yet not thereby a mere imper¬
fection, a flaw or a lack when compared to the divinity. It is a fatal blow
dealt to the ancient status of the divine, an act of pride of which it is
not too much to say that it is, within the realm of the intellect, compa¬
rable to the other act of lese-divinite constituted by the French Revolu¬
tion in the realm of politics.
The birth of aesthetics thus reveals itself to be strictly inseparable
from a certain withdrawal of the divine. A new figure of finite subjec¬
tivity, called by Kant reflection, appears in the wake of this withdrawal.
We shall see how—there is, of course, no chance in all this—it is with
the theory of the judgment of taste, understood as a “reflective” judg¬
ment that can come only from a finite subject, meaning a sensible one
living at some remove from God, that this new representation of the
subject will take shape. We shall also examine how with this new figure,
the contemplator of beauty, ceases to be a mirror-individual, a monad
communicating with the other monads only through the mediation of
the divine satellite. God’s withdrawal leaves aesthetics facing up to new
questions: it now has to theorize the “common sense” brought about
by the beautiful object, to think out, if we prefer, the harmony of “sen¬
sibilities” (when it takes place anyhow) and that in some manner other
than the theological (monadological) one. In other words, we now have

28
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

to make use of a certain representation of inter subjectivity to under¬

stand such a harmony. We have now fully entered the modern, secular
universe.
The mutation is just as decisive on the artist and creator’s side; he
ceases to be he who modestly limits himself to discovering and express¬
ing in agreeable fashion the truths created by God and becomes he who
invents. The genius appears and the imagination tends to become “the
queen of faculties,” the one that rivals the divine in the production of
radically unprecedented works.

3. The Hegelian Moment: The Absolute Subject

or the Death of Art

Hegel s reinterpretation of the theory of genius sets out to stop the gap
opened up within classical rationalism. No one can dispute that Hegel’s
aesthetics are imposing. Much more than Kant’s do, they take into ac¬
count, at times in a dazzling manner, the concrete history of art: the
interpretation of Antigone or the revelation of some of the deepest
meanings of Romantic poetry remain, whatever one thinks of them,
models for a philosophical critique of art. But it remains true that, from
the time of its ripening during the Jena period, Hegel’s system tends to
reinsert the human point of view as a simple moment within the his¬
torical unfolding of the divine: “reflection,” as the essence of finite
subjectivity, must be “subsumed” in what Hegel calls “the speculative
proposition.” Sensibility thus loses the autonomy it had acquired with
Kant, so that aesthetics becomes once again, in a very classical way, the
expression of an idea in the field of the sensible. Of course, Hegel gives
this alienation of the idea in an exterior sensible matter, unlike the clas¬
sicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the form of a history
of art. But it’s far from certain that the essential feature of classicism is
superseded. In Hegel’s eyes art remains, in the end, a manifestation of
the truth which, however attractive, is nevertheless by definition inferior
to that which takes place within philosophy. That is the meaning of the
famous observation according to which art belongs to the past. Reflec¬
tion and genius must give way to the absolute subject which only phi¬
losophy can make accessible to us.

4. The Nietzschean Moment: The Shattered Subject and the

Aesthetization of Culture

However paradoxical it may sound, Nietzsche’s aesthetics—perhaps the

most anti-Hegelian of all philosophies of art—link up in certain ways

29
ONE

with the Kantian project of granting the sensible autonomy in relation

to the intelligible; for similar reasons, this autonomization of the sen¬
sible leads, in a relationship which is the exact inverse of that which
Hegelianism has with Kantianism, to the reaffirmation of the legitimacy
of the human viewpoint over against that of the divine. In other words—
the words of a history of subjectivity—the “death of God” means also
that of the absolute subject, at the same time that it points to the coming
of the “shattered subject,” one radically open to the alterity of the un¬
conscious and therefore forever incapable of closing in on itself in the
illusion of some sort of self-transparency.
The famous thesis that “there are no facts” but “only interpreta¬
tions” draws to perfection the outline of this new age of individualism
that Nietzsche’s thinking inaugurates in the sphere of philosophy.
On the one hand, the proposition can be understood in the sense of a
total subjectivism or, as it were, of an absolute relativism: there is
no single truth, only truths, perfectly singular points of view, that
is, if we understand ourselves correctly, no truth at all in the sense
in which the expression has been known up to then in the philoso¬
phical tradition (identity, adequateness). Yet on the other hand it would
seem we are escaping the philosophies of the subject inherited from
Cartesianism and empiricism, precisely because there is no longer
either a monad in closure on itself (the viewing points can no longer
be reassembled in the unity of a subject/substance as if they were its
attributes) or a monad of monads which would guarantee, as in Leibniz,
the agreement or harmony of the multiple perspectives within a world
system. As Heidegger very well put it, Nietzscheanism is a “monadol-
ogy without God.”
If truth is no longer defined as either identity (the noncontradiction
of propositions) or adequacy (of the judgement to the thing), it’s per¬
haps because, in the name of a truth deeper than that of philosophy,
Nietzsche conceives the real as multiplicity, fracture—as difference that
only art can adequately capture.

5. The Death of the Avant-Gardes and the Coming

of Postmodernity

It is, in my eyes, the double movement of Nietzschean aesthetics—

hyperrelativism (or hyperindividualism) on the one hand, according to
which there exists no truth “in itself” but only an infinity of irreconcil¬
able points of view, and on the other hand the “hyperrealism” of an art

30
 THE REVOLUTION OF TASTE

which should aim at a “fractured,” deeper, more secret truth, one more
real in the end than that which metaphysics and platonically inspired
science arrive at—which constitutes the philosophical equation under¬
lying, if not the totality of contemporary art, then at least those of its
expressions which are most manifestly connected to “avant-gardism.”
If Nietzsche is no doubt not—or anyway not only—the philoso¬
pher of the world of the technique,” as Heidegger believed, he is with¬
out a doubt the thinker of the aesthetic avant-garde in so far as it is
indissolubly connected to the figure of the fractured subject. In its hy-
perindividualist aspect the avant-garde encounters the most extreme,
the most “subjective” revolutionary ideology. It then glorifies the values
of innovation, originality, rupture with tradition, the, in a word, neo-
Cartesian values of the tabula rasa which Nietzsche paradoxically exalts
at the very moment he thinks he is destroying them “with a hammer.”
But in its “hyperrealist” (the expression is not, of course, used here in
the meaning it has taken in recent art history) aspect avant-gardism
reveals itself to be a “hyperclassicism,” the contrary of any kind of ba¬
roque. From cubism to Suprematism or surrealism, the goal is to render
the realest reality—therefore the fascination these avant-gardes felt for
the new geometries which give an inkling of as yet unexplored plastic
spaces, nonetheless “more true” than the well-known ones of Eucled-
ian perspective. “More true,” meaning, as with Nietzsche (whose fas¬
cination for the “new” biology is well known), different, multiple,
fractured.
The avant-gardes in politics have disappeared at the end of this
twentieth century, as have those in art. The diagnosis is all the less
doubtful when we keep in mind that it’s most often pronounced by the
very protagonists of this strange history of aesthetic “elites” since
the 1880s. We are resolutely, if not joyously, entering into the era of
the post-avant-garde or, as the architects say, of “postmodernity.” In¬
novation ceases to be the golden rule, and the return to lost traditions,
or “revivalism,” acquires a certain legitimacy. The real is at the same
time no longer systematically defined as chaos, fracture, difference, dis¬
harmony, or dissonance. Literature links up again with the taste for
narrative and for “real” characters, painting no longer excludes figura¬
tion, proscribed until the end of the sixties, and learned music abandons
the most extreme forms of 1950s serialism. The reasons for this new
shift (art history is made of paradoxes) run deep, they no doubt imply
a new figure of the subject and of its relation with the world—with this

31
ONE

world whose withdrawal, as we have suggested, could well be its most

important characteristic today.
At the end of such a history of subjectivity, we will inevitably be led
back to the problem of the status of culture in a democratic society, in
a society of individuals liberated from the world of tradition.

32
 TWO

.^sy//'/a/u/.

Tastes and colors are not to be argued about . . .

Yet we do nothing else but!
—F. Nietzsche

W HEN REFLECTION UPON THE BEAUTIFUL adopts the form

of an aesthetics, as values begin to be thought about using sub¬
jectivity as a starting point, the question of what should be held to be
the principle of this judgment of taste within this subjectivity remains
to be answered. Is it a question of reason, as the Cartesians and the
theorists of French classicism think, or of sentiment or feeling, of “deli¬
cacy” of heart, as a school of thought that draws from both Pascal and
English empiricism will state more and more clearly throughout the
eighteenth century? * If reason is chosen, one will conceive of the judg¬
ment of taste on the model of a logico-mathematical judgment. By anal¬
ogy with science, its objectivity will be guaranteed, classicism’s risk
being the loss of the specificity of the aesthetic judgment, the reduction
of beauty to a mere sense representation of truth. If on the contrary we
opt for sentiment as the principle of aesthetic evaluation, if taste is more
a matter of heart than of reason, we will certainly obtain an autono¬
mous aesthetic sphere but, apparently, at the price of so radical a sub-
jectivization of the Beautiful that the problem of the objectivity of
criteria will see itself disqualified in favor of a complete relativism.
The conflict which, from Boileau to Batteux, from Bouhours to Du-

* Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, last chapter. Al¬
though he makes certain historical errors (Cassirer is especially mistaken when
he takes Bouhours to be a man of the eighteenth century, when he was in fact a
contemporary of Boileau), Cassirer’s general thesis about the difference between
a Cartesian, rationalist, and deductive seventeenth century and a Newtonian
eighteenth century which has discovered observation remains, on the whole,
correct.

33
TWO

bos, goes on at the very center of the reflection on the nature of the
Beautiful during the French classical period, constitutes in turn the
veritable prehistory of modern aesthetics. The two questions it ex¬
plores—that of the autonomy of aesthetics as a new discipline, different
from logic, and that of the criteria of taste—direct us in the final analy¬
sis to a sole problem: that of the communicability of aesthetic experi¬
ence in so far as it is subjective experience, purely individual yet
accessible to others in the mode of a “common sense,” of a sharing
which nothing, apparently, guarantees a priori.

CLASSICISM AND DELICACY: THE DIALOGUES

OF EUDOXE AND PHILANTHE

This dispute has been often analyzed (by Cassirer and Baumler, of
course, but before them also, and excellently, by K. Heinrich von
Stein),1 and we don’t need to recapitulate its history here. I would like,
rather, to direct our attention to a little known work, particularly in¬
teresting in this context, since it has the originality of presenting the
quarrel in the form of a dialogue between two characters of which one,
Eudoxe, incarnates Boileau’s classicism while the other, Philanthe, does
so for the aesthetics of delicacy. The book, by Dominique Bouhours, is
called On the Ways of Thinking Properly in Works of the Intellect [Des
manieres de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit]. Published in
1687, this dialogue, which followed the Conversations of Ariste and
Eugene [Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugene, 1671], was to know a great
success. No doubt for the first time in the history of what was to be
known as aesthetics, the opposition of classicism to delicacy was put
forth as the opposition of two ideal types, or even of two types of men.
Here is how this Jesuit, professor of humanities and of rhetoric, whom
Menage castigated for being a ridiculous, affected pedant and for exces¬
sively frequenting “the ladies and the minor artists,” but of whom Ma¬
dame de Sevigne used to say that “wit oozes out of his every pore,”
introduces his two characters: they are “two men of letters, whose
science has not spoiled them and who have no less politeness than they
do erudition . . . Although they have had the same education and they
know more or less the same things, the character of their minds is quite
different.” It is their psychologies—or, as we would say nowadays, their
“sensibilities”—that most of all distinguish the two men. Eudoxe’s
tastes, as his name indicates, follow classical orthodoxy: “Nothing
pleases him among works of invention that be not reasonable and natu-

34
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

ral. (Des munieres, p. 2.) He admires the ancients. As for Philanthe,

‘whatever is flowery, whatever shines, charms him. To his liking, the
Greeks and the Romans are not worth the Spaniards and Italians”
(ibid.). He loves the baroque.
We sense in the preface to the dialogue that Bouhours has chosen
his camp. The point is not, he declares, “to prescribe rules, nor to give
laws which may bother someone.” The author, he adds, “says what he
thinks and leaves to each the liberty of judging otherwise,” his work
desiring to be but a “short and easy Rhetoric, instructing by examples
more than by precepts, and which has no other rules than the lively and
brilliant good sense the conversations of Ariste and Eugene make men¬
tion of” (p. 4). Through the character of Eudoxe, it’s clearly Boileau’s
Art poetique which is being aimed at, as it is summed up in these justly
famous verses:

Rien n’est beau que le vrai, le vrai seul est aimable,

II doit regner partout, et meme dans la fable;
De toute fiction l’adroite faussete
Ne tend qu’a faire aux yeux briller la verite.
Sais-tu pourquoi mes vers sont lus dans les provinces
Sont recherches du peuple et re<;us chez les princes?
Ce n’est pas que leurs sons, agreables, nombreux
Soient toujours a l’oreille egalement heureux
Qu’en plus d’un lieu le sens n’y gene la mesure
Et qu’un mot quelquefois n’y brave la cesure:
Mais c’est qu’en eux le vrai du mensonge vainqueur,
Partout se montre aux yeux et va saisir les coeurs

Ma pensee au grand jour partout s’offre et s’expose

Et mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque chose.

Nothing is beautiful but the true, the true only is worthy of love,
It must reign everywhere, even in the fable;
Every fiction’s adroit falseness
Serves only to make truth’s shine apparent.
Know you why my verses are read in the provinces,
demanded by the people and welcomed by princes?
It isn’t that their sounds, though pleasant and numerous,
be always to the ear of equal success;
That there is never a place where the sense upsets the meter,
or that a word never defies the caesura:

35
TWO

It is that in them the truth, over mendacity triumphant,

everywhere shows itself and goes right to the heart

In broad daylight my thoughts put themselves forward,

And, good or bad, something is said by my verses.

This passage from Epistle 9 contains the principal themes of classi¬

cal aesthetics which Philanthe will try—against Eudoxe—if not to re¬
fute, then at least to put into doubt:
1. The art/science equivalency indicated by the reduction of the
Beautiful to the truth and, through the same reduction, the equation of
the judgment of taste to a theoretical judgment on the perfection of a
certain work, on its adequacy to a “concept,” to determined rules.
2. The rejection of “fiction” and, with it, of the imagination, the
“madwoman of the household” as Malebranche prettily put it, the lim¬
ited faculty Descartes had already declared incompatible with science
in a letter to Mersenne in July 1641.!;'
3. The idea that the artist’s activity consists not in invention but in
discovery, as Boileau reminds us in the important 1701 Preface to his
last new edition of the Satires: “What is a new, brilliant, extraordinary
thought? It is not, as the ignorant come to hold, a thought no one must
have had before; it is, on the contrary, something everyone must have
thought of and which someone decides to express for the first time.”
Thus, properly speaking, dis-covery, bringing to light. For “man’s mind
is naturally full of an infinite number of confused ideas of the true,
which he often sees but partially, and nothing is more pleasant to him
than to see one of these ideas offered to him well lit, as in the light of
day.” The artist’s task, like that of the scientist and of the scholar, lies
halfway between imitation, as theorized in Plato’s Republic, and genius,
the unconscious creation of the new which will be the central concept
of the romantic movement’s aesthetics.
4. If art is discovery, the bringing to light of a truth still concealed
in the depths of the human heart, the beautiful object, following the
example of the scientific object, is that which in nature reveals itself to
be fully congruent with the laws of reason. As Charles Batteux, one of

* Spinoza has put the Cartesian contempt for the imagination very well:
“False, counterfeit ideas . . . have their origin in the imagination, that is, in
certain fortuitous sensations ... If one so wishes, one may understand by imagi¬
nation here whatever one likes, provided it be something different from the
understanding.” (Treatise on the Reform of the Understanding, § 45.)

36
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

Boileau’s main disciples in the eighteenth century, put it: “The arts do
not create their own laws: these are independent of the former’s whim
and are invariably patterned after the example of nature.”2 But the
point is not to indifferently “imitate” everything “natural.” It is rather
to unveil that which in a luxuriantly variegated nature is essential, con¬
gruent with reason, thus “nature not as it is in itself, but as it can be,
and as it can be conceived by the mind” or, as Batteux also puts it, the
veri-similar [vrai-semblable] rather than the true [vrai] (p. 24).
Batteux uses The Misanthrope as an example: “When Moliere set
out to depict misanthropy, he did not look around Paris for an original
of which the play could have been the exact copy: he would have made
but a history, a portrait, he would have given half a lesson. Instead he
gathered the traces of bile he had observed among men; he added all his
genius could provide in the same genre; and out of all these compared
and selected traits he molded a unique character, the representation not
of the true but of the verisimilar” (p. 25).
5. The true artist will thus reject anything that may evoke the Span¬
ish or Italian baroque. The word’s etymology is well known, appearing
in the first edition of the French Academy’s dictionary in 1694: “Ba¬
roque, adj. Said only of pearls of a very imperfect roundness. A baroque
pearl necklace.” The figurative meaning will be accepted by the 1740
edition of the same dictionary: “Baroque is said also in a figurative sense
for what is irregular, bizarre, uneven. A baroque spirit, a baroque ex¬
pression, a baroque figure.” The baroque is then the shapeless, that
which, when compared to the circle, the perfect symbol of the principle
of reason, can only look like an excess, like an inelegance—in the sense
in which a mathematical proof is said to be inelegant when instead of
taking the simplest approach it loses itself in useless detours, even if it
obtains the right answer. From the standpoint of the standards of clas¬
sicism the Italian baroque looks, strictly speaking, monstrous, as in
Boileau’s formulation:

La plupart emportes d’une fougue insensee

Toujours loin du droit sens vont chercher leur pensee.
Ils croiraient s’abaisser dans leurs vers monstrueux
S’ils pensaient ce qu’un autre a pu penser comme eux.
Evitons ces exces: laissons a l’ltalie
De tous ses faux brillants l’eclatante folie.3

Carried away by nonsensical ardour

They go search their thoughts far from clear sense.

37
TWO

They would think it beneath their monstrous verses

To think what someone else has thought.
Let us avoid such excess: let us leave to the Italians
Of all these false gems, the mad radiance.

6. Since art is, like science, moved by a will toward parousia [pres-
encing], toward a bringing to light of that which remains hidden even
though shared by an eternal, because rational, human nature, it must
avoid any obscurity in expression. Not only does the ineffable have no
place in poetry,"' the figures of rhetoric must be ceaselessly tracked
down when they lead to the “equivocation” stigmatized by Boileau in
verses of admirable clarity:

Du langage Franqais bizarre hemaphrodite

De quel genre te faire equivoque maudite?
Ou maudit: car sans peine aux rimeurs hasardeux
L’usage encor, je crois, laisse le choix des deux.
Tu ne me repons rien. Sors d’ici fourbe indigne,
Male aussi dangereux que femelle maligne
Qui croit rendre innocents des discours imposteurs;
Tourment des Ecrivains, juste effroi des Lecteurs;
Par qui de mots confus sans cesse embarrassee
Ma plume en ecrivant cherche en vain ma pensee.4

Bizarre hermaphrodite of the French tongue

What gender should I make you, cursed {Fern) equivocation?

* II est certains esprits dont les sombres pensees

Sont d’un nuage epais toujours embarrassees
Le jour de la raison ne le saurait percer
Avant done que d’ecrire apprenez a penser.
Selon que notre idee est plus ou moins obscure
L’expression la suit, ou moins nette ou plus pure.
Ce que l’on conqoit bien s’enonce clairement
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisement. (Ibid.)

Certain spirits exist whose dark thoughts

Are forever embarrassed by a thick cloud
Reason’s light cannot penetrate it:
Learn to think, then, before you write.
As your idea is or more or less obscure,
The expression does follow, or more or less pure.
What is well thought out can be uttered with clarity
The words to say it come with facility.

38
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

Or cursed (Masc): for to adventurous rhymers

Usage still, I believe, of either one leaves the choice.
You answer nothing. Leave this place, rogue,
Dangerous male and treacherous female
Who thinks to render false discourse innocent;
Torture of Writers, just fear of Readers;
Thanks to whom, embarrassed by confusing words
My pen in its course vainly seeks out my thoughts.

7. Although the essential goal remains that of “pleasing the people

as much as the Prince’’* and of “capturing the hearts,” it has to be
made clear that the heart, here, has nothing Pascalian about it, it fuses
rather into the Cartesian concept of mind, and the pleasure brought
about in it by the poem should come more from the meaning it contains
than from its richness of sonorities.” Thus when Boileau borrows the
vocabulary of the aesthetics of delicacy, he twists its authentic meaning
and immediately gives it a rationalist connotation: “If you were to ask
me in what consists this pleasure and this piquancy [cet agrement et ce
sel], I would answer it is a je-ne-sais-quoi easier to feel than to put into
words: it is my opinion, nevertheless, that it consists in never offering
the reader anything other than true thoughts and exact expressions.” * *
That is the very position Bouhours is trying to refute, point by
point, by way of Philanthe’s discourses. Against Eudoxe’s rationalism,
against his praise of the poetic virtues of the clear and distinct idea,

*Cf. Art poetique, canto 1: “N’offrez rien au lecteur que ce qui pent lui
plaire” [Offer the reader but that which may please him].
** Cf. also:
Quelque sujet qu’on traite, ou plaisant, ou sublime,
Que toujours le bon sens s’accorde avec la rime:
L’un l’autre vainement ils semblent se hair;
La rime est une esclave et ne doit qu’obeir.

Aimez done la raison: que toujours vos ecrits

Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix. (Ibid.)

Whatever is dealt with, pleasant or sublime,

Clear good sense must ever agree with the rhyme:
Vainly do they seem to hate each other;
Rhyme is a slave and must but obey.

Therefore love reason: may from it alone

Your writings borrow their brilliance and worth.

39
TWO

Philanthe tries to demonstrate the part irrationality plays in any artistic

expression of Beauty. In any poem, if it’s any good, there is “a content
of obscurity nothing can clear up.”5 Contrary to the tenets of classical
doctrine, the ineffable character of the Beautiful must be affirmed:
“When you ask me what a delicate thought is, I do not know where to
borrow the terms to explain myself: these are things difficult to see at
once and which, through their subtlety, escape you the moment you
think you grasp them” (ibid., p. 194). And yet this unsayable is not
illegitimate, simple indication of a weakness in the artist’s capacities for
expression; it is rather the most intimate essence of “delicate thinking”:
“The sense it contains is neither as visible nor as much in relief” as
Eudoxe thinks, and “the little mystery is like the soul of the delicacy of
thoughts, such that those which have nothing mysterious about them,
neither at bottom nor all around and which show themselves all to¬
gether at first glance, are not properly speaking delicate, however spiri¬
tual they may otherwise be” (p. 195).6
We perceive here all that separates the aesthetics of sentiment from
those of classicism: if the judgment of taste’s principle is not reason, if,
as Philanthe puts it in a very Pascalian formula, “the heart is more in¬
genious"' than the mind” (p. 81), then we must exalt the irrational and
sensitive element of subjectivity. Bouhours’s aesthetics rehabilitate, in
opposition to the Art poetique, the rhetorical procedures which allow
for the irrational in man, beginning with the use of equivocal metaphors
which are “like those transparent veils which show what they cover, or
like masks under which we recognize the disguised person” (p. 20). The
pleasant thing about equivocation is precisely that in it there is a “re¬
mainder,” forever ungraspable by the understanding (pp. 20ff.). And if
“thoughts, through being true, are betimes trivial,” then we must push
the logic of sentiment to its conclusion and praise falseness. In fact, and
Boileau is still the target here, isn’t it “fiction, or something somewhat
poetic, which renders ideas very pleasant in prose”? (Pp. 225—26).
Thus, “a princess we once knew, of an infinitely delicate spirit, used to
say that the sun brings happy days only to the common people . . . The
proposition seems false, and only because of that does it have beauty”
(ibid.). In a word, Philanthe might be tempted to say: Nothing beautiful
like the false, only the false is praiseworthy!
In The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer correctly

* Note, in passing, that with the notion of ingenuity the idea of genius is
already evoked.

40
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

perceived, at least in principle, that which separates the aesthetics of the

eighteenth from that of the seventeenth century: “The inner transition
by which the domination of classical theory in the realm of aesthetics
is broken corresponds exactly from the point of view of method with
the change which takes place in the theory of natural science between
Descartes and Newton . . . The purpose of both transitions is to
free the mind from the absolute predominance of deduction; it is to
make way for the facts, for the phenomena, for direct observation”7
and to thus make more room for sensibility. The diagnosis, generally
correct, has some traits of caricature about it. In truth, the conflict op¬
posing classical to sentimental aesthetics is entirely rooted in the seven¬
teenth century. Although it goes on in the eighteenth century in a
somewhat different form—and here Cassirer is right, the eighteenth
century favors observation over deduction—it is not modified in its es¬
sentials, witness the work of Boileau’s disciple, Charles Batteux, Les
Beaux-Arts reduits a un meme principe [The Fine Arts Reduced to a
Single Principle, 1746]. It proposes to bring into the reflection on the
Beautiful the observation of concrete experience, rather than trust the
sole virtues of Cartesian deduction: “Let us imitate the true physicists,
who accumulate observations and found upon them a system which
then reduces them to a principle” (p. 2). The model is of course pro¬
vided by Newton’s physics. Just as the latter reduces the multiplicity
of celestial phenomena to a single principle, universal gravitation,
aesthetics must seek to reduce the diversity of rules at play within art
works to a single, unique rule, for “all rules are branches from the same
trunk” (ibid.). But although the method is no longer Cartesian, the re¬
sults of Batteux’s research conform to Boileau’s teaching; the rule of
rules is still the imitation of nature or, more precisely, the imitation of
that which reason unveils as the essence of nature. And if the principle
of taste is reason, then it’s clear that the true genius does not invent, he
discovers: “The human mind can only create incorrectly: all of its
productions bear the mark of a model . . . The genius who works to
please should not, and cannot, leave the limits of nature itself. His func¬
tion consists not in imagining what may be, but in finding what is.
Invention in the arts is not a matter of conferring being to an object,
it is one of recognizing it as it is where it is” (p. 11). The artist’s only
originality lies in the choice of a subject, and in its composition (p. 89),
not in his creative faculties. His essential work consists in presenting
the natural idea he wishes to express in a perceptible form—marble,
colors, sounds, etc.:

41
TWO

What could this genius do, bound by his fecundity and his outlook, which
he cannot take beyond nature? . . . All his efforts had to limit themselves per¬
force to making a selection out of the most beautiful parts of nature, to make
of them an exquisite whole which should be more perfect than nature itself
without however ceasing to be natural. This is the principle on which the fun¬
damental plan of the arts had to be erected, and which the great artists have
followed in every century . . .
What is the function of the arts? It is to transpose the traits of nature and
present them in objects in which they are not natural. Thus it is that the sculp¬
tor’s chisel shows us a hero in a block of marble. The painter, with his colors,
makes every visible object come out of the canvas. The musician, with his arti¬
ficial sounds, makes the storm grumble whilst everything is calm, and, finally,
the poet, with his invention and the harmony of his verses, fills our mind with
make-believe images and our heart with factitious sentiments, often more
charming than if they were real and natural. (Ibid., pp. 13-14)

The difference with the seventeenth century’s classical outlook is thus

smaller than Cassirer thinks.
On the other side of the conflict, the abbe Dubos, the greatest eigh¬
teenth century theoretician of the aesthetics of feeling, aligns himself
without hesitation in continuity with Bouhours. His Critical Reflections
on Poetry and Painting (1719)—of which Voltaire said it was “the most
useful book anyone had ever written on these subjects in any country
in Europe”—is resolutely situated on the side of a critique of classicism
in its affirmation of the incontestable primacy of emotion over intelli¬
gence. If the purpose of the work of art is to please—something the
classicists also admit—it still has to be remarked that “of all the talents
that give dominion over other men, the most powerful is not superiority
of intellect or of enlightenment, it is the talent of swaying these to one’s
will.”8 Dubos’s Reflections thus present themselves as a theory of the
effects of art on the human heart; they leave the domain of law or rules
and find themselves placed within the sphere of fact, of psychology and
anthropology. Here is the book’s project as formulated in its Introduc¬
tion: “A book which could, as it were, display the human heart at the
very instant it is rendered soft by a poem or is touched by a picture,
would provide our artisans with very enlarged views and exact insights
on the general effect of their works, an effect most of them seem to have
so much trouble foreseeing.”
It is thus clear that, within aesthetic reflection itself, more impor¬
tance should be given to observation than to deduction—what Dubos,
42
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

in order to display his loyalty to his own method, illustrates with

examples such as this one, particularly representative of his style of
argumentation: “Monsieur de Leibniz would never attempt to travel in
his carriage through a spot which his driver assured him could not be
gone through without the carriage keeling over, even if they had both
eaten nothing, and this even if it were demonstrated to this learned man,
in a geometrical analysis of the road’s inclination and of the carriage’s
height and weight, that it should not keel over. We believe the man
before we do the philosopher because the philosopher is mistaken even
more easily than the man” (ibid., p. 361). Empiricism has of course
come to the aid of this anti-Cartesian Pascalianism, already noticeable
in Bouhours, but, essentially, the aesthetics of feeling only develops and
enriches the aesthetics of delicacy: “If there is any realm in which rea¬
soning should be quiet when confronted with experience, then surely it
is in the questions one may raise concerning the merits of a poem”
(ibid., p. 367).
Thus the principal aspects of the conflict remain in place through¬
out the eighteenth century, until the emergence of the first attempts at
synthesis, of which the Critique of judgment will be the ultimate
achievement within speculative philosophy. The staying power of the
conflict is attested by the fact that the antinomy’s central problem—that
of the discussibility of taste—is evaded by both Batteux and Dubos. The
former does so in the name of a rationalist dogmatism, since “there can
in general be but one good taste, that which approves of the beautiful
nature: those who do not approve it necessarily have bad taste;”9 the
latter for precisely the opposite reason: in matters of taste, “the path of
argument is not as proper for knowing the merits of verses and pictures
as is that of sentiment.” According to Dubos, “feeling instructs us better
if the work touches us and if it makes the impression on us it should
make than all the dissertations critics compose to explain merit and to
calculate imperfections and flaws. The path of discussion and analysis
... is, in truth, fitting when we must find the causes why a work pleases
or does not; but it is not as proper as feeling when it comes to deciding
the question: does the work please or does it not please? Is the work, in
general, good or bad? It comes down to the same thing.”
If the “path of argument” is rejected by the aesthetics of feeling, it’s
for a double reason, very explicitly stated in the Reflections. On the one
hand, since all references to concepts or rules have disappeared—the
consequence of a radical critique that incorporates nothing from classi¬
cal rationalism—there remain no criteria around which discussion

43
TWO

could begin: “If the most important virtue of poems and pictures were
to conform to written rules, we could say that the best way of judging
of their excellence as of their ranking in the esteem of men should be
that of discussion and analysis. But the most important virtue of poems
and pictures is that of pleasing us,” at which point we must rely on
feelings to judge. On the other hand, it is because Dubos does not en¬
vision, as Kant will, the possibility of a critique of dogmatic rationalism
which does not prohibit all reference to indeterminate criteria—to
“Ideas,” if not to rules—that he is led to compare the impossibility of
aesthetic discussion to that of culinary discussion: “Would one ever set
out, having posited the geometrical principles of taste and defined the
qualities of every ingredient that enters into the composition of the dish,
to discuss the proportions maintained in their admixture to decide if
the stew is good? One does nothing of the kind . . . one tastes the stew
and, without even knowing these rules, one knows if it’s good. It is, in
a way, the same thing with works of the mind and with pictures made
for pleasing us by affecting us.”10 Discussion is therefore useless, “tire¬
some for the writer and disgusting for the reader” (ibid., p. 369).

THE END OF TRADITIONS: A DISPUTE

WITHIN MODERN INDIVIDUALISM

Between the various instances of the conflict opposing the aesthetics of

feeling and dogmatic classicism there is not only opposition but also, as
with any truly antinomic structure, connection. If both aesthetics lead
to a shared rejection of intersubjectivity following inverse arguments, it
is because they are both rooted in a monadic conception of subjectivity:
the quarrel does not touch on the question of whether it is fitting to
establish the beautiful on the judgment of the individual or on tradition,
the way a quarrel between the ancients and the moderns would, but
only on the notion of individuality to which each side would refer. To
the aesthetics of feeling, the Reason of the classicists appears, no doubt,
as a dogmatic authority, as that which is the least subjective within the
subject. But we should not misinterpret this: even Boileau’s aesthetics
are truly modern in that they in no way question the grounding of the
Beautiful on subjectivity, Reason being conceived of here as a faculty of
the subject.
Of course, in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, Boileau
took the side of the ancients, but we need to understand the exact na¬
ture of this choice. If, in his eyes, the ancients are preferable to the

44
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

moderns, it isn t because they are ancient, as was commonly admitted

up to the Renaissance, following a traditional pattern of thought which
situated archetypes in the past;11 it is because they incarnate ah ideal
defined by reference to Reason, understood as one of the faculties of the
cogito. The ancients are thus no longer archetypes but illustrations,
mere examples of a model residing in the subject and which, remaining
above them, permits criticism to function. The emergence of criticism,
inseparably tied to that of aesthetics, puts an end to the ancient, objec¬
tive representation of the beautiful. Even though imitation remains a
central concept in the Art of Poetry, we have seen that it should be
understood as an activity of discovery comparable to that of science.
The subjectivization of taste is thus found again in the sphere of artistic
creation, where the individual has a certain room for action, a possibil¬
ity of distinguishing himself from others in his capacity to bring to light
or express the laws of nature. This bit of liberty is already manifest
among the French classicists, the least modern of the moderns, through
their expectation of originality, as witness this portrait which Boileau
draws of himself, in all modesty:

Au joug de la raison asservissant la rime

Et meme en imitant toujours original
J’ai su dans mes ecrits, docte, enjoue, sublime
Rassembler en moi Perse, Horace et Juvenal.

In the yoke of reason I have rhyme subjected

And, though imitating, always original
I have in my books, sublime, gay, elevated
Gathered in me Persius, Horace, and Juvenal.

If we situate ourselves at the point of view of a traditional, nonsub¬

jectivist, way of thinking about art, we see clearly that there is more
agreement than opposition between classical aesthetics and those of
sentiment. In their displacement of the principle of judgment of taste
from reason to feeling the latter merely fulfill the movement toward a
subjectivization of the Beautiful begun by the classicists in the wake of
Cartesianism—the reason why, strictly speaking, only the aesthetics of
feeling deserve the name of aesthetics; also the reason why they will
explore the central problem of originality by criticizing imitation and
denouncing the practice of plagiarism to which Dubos, significantly,
consecrates an entire section of the Reflections. Cannot an artisan, Du¬
bos asks, “supplement the paltry elevation and the sterility of his genius

45
TWO

by transplanting into his works the beauties found in the works of the
great masters? ... I respond . . . that it always was permissible to help
oneself through the wit of others provided it is not done as a plagiarist.
Plagiarism consists in presenting someone else’s work as one’s own.”
The supreme fault but also the supreme weakness in a world dominated
by individualism, in which subjectivity has imposed itself as the foun¬
dation of all values and the originality that engenders the author as the
real sign of geniality.
If opposition there is between the reason of the classicists and the
aesthetics of feeling, it is, after all, set on the basis of a shared rejection
of traditional visions of art, as we can observe in the transition from the
classicist to the sentimentalist conception of the public.
The beautiful is of course defined by Boileau, in the modern fash¬
ion, as that which pleases the taste of a public, such that the 1701 Pref¬
ace can declare that a “work which is not at all to the taste of the public
is a very bad [mechant] work.” Yet this public remains in some sense
atemporal, since its taste consists in the capacity—by right common to
all human beings—to perceive the one and eternal truth. “A thought is
only as beautiful as it is true,” and “the infallible effect of the true, when
it is well put, is to seem striking to men,” such is the deep conviction
animating the classicist conception of art’s relation to a public whose
errors of judgment can, at that point, only be considered as transitory.
“The majority may, for a while, take the false for the true and admire
bad things, but it is impossible that in the long run a good thing will
not be pleasant to it.” Within such a perspective a history of art cannot
truly exist, variations in taste being but transitory, accidental deviations
from a norm which always finds its predominance once again and im¬
poses itself on all.
It is by complicating the idea that the goal of the work is to please
that Dubos arrives at a conception of the public that is opposed, in the
end, to that of the classicists, one that introduces both the historicism
and the nationalism that will dominate the nineteenth century. Whereas
for Boileau the public is a de jure, ideal one, incarnating the rules of
reason from which it could not for long deviate, with Dubos the public
becomes concrete, historically and nationally determined; the parterre
does not incarnate rules for the judgment of taste existing outside and
independently of itself.12 It is those rules, which is why the variations it
is subject to derive from a radical historicity. Psychologism here gives
way to historicism, and the second part of the Reflections purports to
seek “the cause which could have rendered some centuries so fertile and

46
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

some others so sterile in celebrated artisans.” Presaging Montesquieu,

Dubos applies this type of analysis to the “character of nations,” whose
deepest origins he thinks he sees in “the power of air on the human
body . . . From everything I have just expostulated I conclude,” he
writes after a long inquiry on the historical and geographical variations
of taste, that just as we attribute the difference in the characters of
nations to the different lands, so must we attribute to the changes that
take place in the qualities of the air of a certain country the variations
that take place in the mores and in the genius of its inhabitants. Just as
we impute the observable difference between Frenchmen and Italians to
the difference between the air of France and the air of Italy, so must we
attribute to the alterations in the quality of the air in France the sensible
difference we observe between the mores and the genius of Frenchmen
of a given century and Frenchmen of some other century” (§ 19).
The interest we may find in such an “explanation”—at times quite
precise, as in this passage, typical of the Reflections, “And that is why,
for example, Italians will always be more apt to succeed in painting and
poetry than the people surrounding the Baltic”—quite obviously does
not line in its “scientific” content. What matters is the legitimation it
gives to the connection it establishes between an historical and a geo¬
graphical relativism, in the end situating the principle of taste within a
sentiment no longer merely individual but also national. This relativism
is a direct consequence of the subjectivization of the judgment of taste:
where the reason of the classicists still represented a universal and in¬
variable criterion, feeling is of its essence given to change. Variations in
art are from that point on no longer thinkable as the diverse possible
aspects of the illustration of a principle which is, in truth, unique, nor
even as deviations from a norm: they become the norm. Dubos thus
opens the way for art history, which will soon come into being with
Winckelmann and Diderot. Furthermore, the subjectivization of the
Beautiful—evidenced in his Reflections—contains, in embryo, and no¬
tably through the critique of plagiarism it calls forth, the typically mod¬
ern and antitraditional imperative of originality at any price; originality
moreover which no longer refers exclusively to eternal rules as Boileau
does, but whose magnitude is to be looked for in a history of the beau¬
tiful. What here commences is nothing less than the requirement put on
the artist to innovate for the sake of innovation, which will find its
eventual fulfilment in the avant-gardes of the twentieth century.
Flowever irreducible, the conflict between classicism and the aes¬
thetics of feeling plays itself out against a certain shared antitradition-

47
TWO

alist background. Therefore the need, for he who would seek a synthesis
within modernity—in a framework, that is, in which subjectivity, how¬
ever defined, must be the principle of the judgment of taste—to ask
himself about the conditions under which aesthetics could differentiate
itself from logic (unlike what happened with the classicists) without
thereby slipping into nationalist and historicist relativism (as was finally
the case with Dubos). That is the main question in the Critique of
judgment.

THE ANTINOMY OF TASTE

In his third Critique, Kant raised the quarrel which, for over a century,
opposed classicism and the aesthetics of delicacy to the status of an
antinomy. Behind the manifest problems—is Beauty the imitation of a
truth uncovered by reason or the subjective manifestation of the inef¬
fable movements of the heart?—he discerned, within the representa¬
tions of subjectivity underlying the two moments of the antinomy, the
deeper reasons why the emerging aesthetics should in the end supersede
the two terms of the “dispute” and try to solve the problem of the com¬
mon sense, of the objectivity of criteria, without reducing the taste judg¬
ment to a scientific judgment and thus negating its specificity. Kant’s
analysis is so fundamental that we should have it in mind even this early
into the subject.
Following a for him familiar approach, Kant reveals the antinomy
by beginning with a “topic,” with an analysis of three common sayings
concerning the judgment of taste. The first, “to each his own taste,”
presents us with no particular difficulty, it simply means that the Beau¬
tiful blends into the pleasant, that the judgment of taste is a strictly
subjective matter, that it could not therefore claim someone else’s nec¬
essary adhesion. The second common saying, “taste should not be ar¬
gued about” [Uber den Geschmack liifit sich nicht disputieren], is more
subtle, it supposes that the judgment of taste, even though it may con¬
tain a pretension to universality, cannot be demonstrated with proofs,
with arguments relying on determinate scientific concepts.
To grasp the antinomy of classicism and sensualism, to these two
common sayings we must add a maxim every one can find within him¬
self through simple reflection: “taste can be discussed” [Uber den
Geschmack la fit sich streiten]. Contrary to appearances this maxim
does not contradict the second common saying since there is a dif¬
ference between a disputatio—a scientific argument which proceeds
48
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

through conceptual demonstration—and a discussion [Streit} aiming

only at a hypothetical and very fragile agreement regarding the beautiful
object. But the idea of discussion is opposed to the first common saying:
taste can be discussed (although it cannot be argued about) . . . This
proposition contains the opposite of the above proposition (“to each
his own taste”). For about that which it is permissible to discuss, there
must be hope of coming to an agreement,13 and therefore of transcend¬
ing the monadic sphere of the cogito, of individual subjectivity.
The method of setting forth the antinomy is thus a phenomenologi¬
cal one, it consists in describing the contradictions actually experienced
by the aesthetics consciousness in order to encourage reflection. As long
as we agree to reflect, we will discover in ourselves—such is Kant’s pro¬
found conviction—the intimate sentiment that it is at the same time
impossible to demonstrate the validity of our aesthetic judgments and
yet, in a way, legitimate to discuss them, in the hope, however often
rebuffed, of sharing an experience about which we spontaneously be¬
lieve that, however individual it may be, it cannot be alien to another in
so far as the other is another human being. Kant invites us to the idea
that the taste judgment by itself indicates an intersubjective communi-
cational aim, an “enlarged relation of the notion of object (as of sub¬
ject)” (ibid., § 57); if we set out to discuss taste, and if disagreement
in this instance—unlike what happens within the culinary domain,
wrongly subsumed under art when it is in fact a skill—brings about a
real dialogue, then these are certainly indications of the fact that we
judge aesthetic experience to be communicable even though it could not
be grounded on scientific concepts, even though the communication it
leads to can never be empirically guaranteed.
And that is exactly what the thesis and the antithesis making up the
antinomy of taste tend to negate, each in its own way:

1. Thesis. The judgment of taste is not founded on concepts; otherwise it

could be argued about (decided through proofs).
2. Antithesis. The judgment of taste is founded on concepts; otherwise it
could not, despite its different aspects, even be discussed (a claim could not be
made to the necessary accord of others with this judgment). (Ibid., § 56)

The antinomy pivots on the question of the communicability of

the aesthetic judgment, of its capacity to transcend or not the cogito’s
particular subjectivity. Only from this angle is the problem of the ra¬
tionality or irrationality (conceptuality or nonconceptuality) of taste
approached.

49
TWO

In a sense, the thesis and antithesis, correctly understood, both con¬

tain some sort of truth, so that we may admit—the principle of the
Kantian solution—that they are opposed only in appearance. It is true
(thesis) that the judgment of taste is not based on scientific concepts and
that it cannot be demonstrated, as classical rationalism believes; it is no
less true that this judgment refers nonetheless to “indeterminate con¬
cepts,” that is, to Ideas of reason which establish the possibility, if not
of a disputatio, at least of a discussion which may lead to a “common
sense.” The opposition is thus merely apparent—“dialectical”—since
the term “concept” “is not taken in the same sense in both maxims of
the faculty of aesthetic judgment” (ibid.). Either, in the thesis, by “con¬
cept” is understood a scientific rule of the understanding; or, in the
antithesis, only an indeterminate Idea of reason is aimed at. To resolve
the antinomy, then, “the thesis should say: the judgment of taste is not
founded on determinate concepts; the antithesis, on the other hand: the
judgment of taste is founded on a concept although an indeterminate
one (namely, the suprasensible substratum of phenomena); then there
would be no opposition between them” (ibid., § 57).
The concrete meaning of the Kantian solution begins to emerge.
Though the object of a private and intimate feeling, beauty awakens the
Ideas of reason present in every man—which is why it can transcend
private subjectivity and bring forth a common sense (the Ideas “awak¬
ened” by the beautiful object being in principle common to humanity).
The beautiful object is simultaneously purely sensible yet intellectual; it
is a reconciliation of nature and of the mind but a contingent reconcilia¬
tion, the fruit of nature itself (of man’s nature in the case of the genius)
and not of a conscious will following determinate rules, as the classicists
would have it.
Beyond their truth content, thesis and antithesis in the antinomy
can also be interpreted dogmatically:
—The thesis then comes to mean that taste, being in the domain of
feelings, is a purely subjective affair; that it is thus, at least de jure,
incommunicable, ineffable. Empiricism leads to solipsism in aesthetics
much as it did in speculative philosophy: “to each his own taste,” * the

* Cf. Alexis Philonenko: “Empiricism de facto denies the possibility of com¬

munication (for otherwise we could argue about it). Actual man cannot com¬
municate with others. The simplest words, like “I love this thing,” are devoid of
sense. We are taught that every man dies alone. Leaning on the old maxim of
scholastic metaphysics—Individuum est inefabile—empiricism also teaches us

50
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

subject is nothing but a monad-individual, incapable of coming out of

itself—whereby empiricism will prove incapable of solving the problem
of mtersubjectivity except, as with every monadology, through recourse
to the in the last instance theological—idea of a preestablished har¬
mony. And if it happens that the judgment of taste, despite its subjective
character, occasions a common sense, then it is only for de facto reasons
which, being such, require no discussion. The ultimate consequence of
empiricism is thus that “a taste judgment merits to be taken as correct
only in so far as it happens that many come to agree with each other
about it, and even this in fact not because one supposes an a priori
principle behind this accord, but because (as in the palate’s taste) the
subjects are by chance organized uniformly.”14 The Beautiful is reduced
to the pleasant and art to the kitchen. And, besides, the variety of tastes
deserves no more discussion than their agreement: it is merely a fact to
be established, and the common sense cannot be either the object nor
the effect of an intersubjective dialogue. The thesis thus indicates the
arrival of a psychologism soon relayed by a historicism, and later by
a sociologism which will also reduce taste to some sort of material
receptacle.
—If taken dogmatically, the antithesis certainly establishes the com¬
mon sense but at the cost of a double error: it reduces the taste judg¬
ment to a logical judgment and art to a science. The central concept
of classical rationalist aesthetics thus becomes that of perfection. The
beautiful work is that which, in conformity to rules (to concepts) deter¬
mined by a “poetic art” perfectly realizes an end itself also conceptually
determined. Art’s essence lies in the concept: it’s thanks to it that one
can determine an edifying end, thanks to it again that one can bring it
to reality using the methods of technique (of which perspective in paint¬
ing is one of the models). But dogmatic classicism contains a second
error (in Kant’s eyes, no doubt, a failing): in reducing the beautiful to a
mere technical representation of an end posited by reason and taste to
this very reason, it ends up losing the very subjectivity that the aesthetics
of sentiment, although conceiving it incorrectly, quite rightly claimed
for itself. Classicism grounds the common sense in such a way that it
no longer brings together private subjects animated by feelings, but
monad-individuals communicating with each other only indirectly, only

that one lives alone. Freedom is denied by empiricism, men being but monads.”
(L’Oeuvre de Kant, vol. 2 [1972], p. 204.)

51
TWO

through the concept, therefore through that in themselves which is least

subjective. For classical rationalism, “the taste judgment is a hidden
judgment of reason on the unveiled perfection of a thing and the rela¬
tion of the diversity within it to a goal (ibid.). The important thing is
whether or not the work of art is “well made,” whether it conforms or
not to the “rules of art” (to perspective, to three unities, etc.), sensibility
being but the confused way in which the finite beings that are men per¬
ceive a reality in itself completely intelligible.
Despite their opposition, the dogmatic thesis and antithesis agree
on the essential: the cogito; the individual is a monad (whether sensitive
or rational mattering little in the final analysis) that can enter into com¬
munication with the other monads only indirectly, not through discus¬
sion but by the intermediary of a preestablished harmony (harmony of
sensory organs in empiricism, harmony of the individual reasons within
rationalism). In each case the subject is reduced to the individual and
deprived of its essential dimension—intersubjectivity. In both cases dis¬
cussion seems devoid of sense, among the empiricists because every¬
thing is brought down to questions of fact, with the rationalists because
the concept and the rules soon put an end to all possible discussion by
peremptorily decreeing where good and bad taste are to be found.
The Kantian presentation of the antinomy is no doubt abstract con¬
cerning the history of art. Racine’s or Poussin’s work cannot be reduced
to being the effect of a flatly rationalist classicism—no more so than
Picasso’s or Malevitch’s could be to treatises of four-dimensional ge¬
ometry. But it is not without connection to concrete history if we put
back into place the intermediate link aesthetics consists of as a specific
discipline, halfway between speculative philosophy and artistic cre¬
ation. In the conflict which, in the seventeenth century, opposes the
theoreticians of classicism to the partisans of an aesthetics of “delicacy,”
it is most certainly the question of the common sense, of intersubjectiv¬
ity, which is at the same time at the center of and seems inseparable
from a well-determined philosophical representation of subjectivity.
Although it is obviously perfectly abstract (in the sense I’ve just
indicated), the way in which Kant puts together what seems to him to
be the antinomy inscribed in the very heart of taste is perhaps suggestive
in clarifying the positions historically in place at the time of the emer¬
gence of modern aesthetics. What the Kantian antinomy illuminates
particularly well is the way in which, in fact, the aesthetic theories prior
to his own critical philosophy, beyond what opposes them to each
other, sometimes come to reciprocally borrow certain of their argu-
52
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

ments. As in every veritable antinomy, the positions in place—and this

is Kant’s irreplaceable contribution—are in fact less opposed than they
seem or, more exactly, each one transposes itself with ease into the
other, so much does each position reveal itself to be intrinsically unten¬
able. A Kantian lesson illustrated in a particularly demonstrative way
by Hume’s essays on aesthetics, in their attempt to fully expound—even
unto its most formidable aporias—a conception of the beautiful which
seeks to plant its roots exclusively in an empiricist philosophy.

THE PARADOXES OF HUME'S AESTHETICS:

FROM (SKEPTICAL) RELATIVISM
TO CLASSICAL UNIVERSALISM

What is interesting about Hume’s essays on aesthetics is the tension that

animates and runs through them: beginning from a radical empiricist
position—thus from a principled relativism—he tries to arrive at the
idea of universal norms of taste.15 These norms he accords a sensualist
substructure, a substructure which, in the area of method, manifests
itself through an explicit rejection of deduction in favor of observation.
The former, “where a general abstract principle is first established, and
is afterwards branched out into a variety of inferences and conclusions,
may be more perfect in itself, but suits less the imperfection of human
nature, and is a common source of illusion and mistake in this as well
as in other subjects.”16 There where, because of this substructure, we
should expect them to establish an aesthetics of feeling, these writings
attempt rather to legitimate the most rigorous of classicisms, thus seem¬
ing to be one of the first attempts to solve what Kant had anticipatorily
named “the antinomy of taste.” The whole problem, as we shall see,
comes from the fact that the Humean solution uses one of the moments
that compose this antinomy, the relativist/sensualist one, as its point of
departure.
This tension deserves our notice. Negatively, through the aporias it
ineluctably leads Hume into, it sketches the outline of the philosophical
requirements an attempt to go beyond the antinomy imposes. More
profoundly, the dead ends Hume’s aesthetics arrive at are highly symp¬
tomatic of the difficulties modern reflection on the beautiful encounters
when, giving in to the most radical sort of immanentism and subjectiv¬
ism, it cannot satisfactorily take into account the requirement of tran¬
scendence that the idea of a norm of taste, the idea of a common sense
realized around the work of art, contains.

53
TWO

“The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in

the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observa¬
tion.”17 This remark constitutes the minimal starting point for Hume’s
reflections regarding the standard of taste. Hume is not thinking of de¬
nying this de facto relativism. On the contrary, his entire theoretical
philosophy permits it to be grounded without the least difficulty. With
Hume, Cassirer writes apropos, “Feeling no longer needs to justify itself
before the tribunal of reason; on the contrary, reason is summoned be¬
fore the forum of sensation, of pure ‘impression,’ and questioned re¬
garding its claims”18—claims to speak of the one and only Beauty or,
more generally, to speak sub specie aeternitatis on value, both of which
ideas are thus referred back to their ultimate truth: the sense impres¬
sions at the source of all ideas.
The result of this genealogical procedure is clear. In an essay titled
“The Sceptic,” Hume calmly asserts that a Scot could not appreciate
Italian music (a no doubt reciprocal proposition) because “beauty and
worth are merely of a relative nature, and consist in an agreeable senti¬
ment, produced by an object in a particular mind, according to the
peculiar structure and constitution of that mind”19—a structure and
constitution about which we know, since Dubos and Montesquieu, the
extent to which they are shaped by national traditions. “Each mind
perceives a different beauty ... To seek the real beauty, or real defor¬
mity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet
or real bitter.”20
The relativity of the aesthetic judgment thus reveals itself to be two¬
fold: it is simultaneously dependent on the particularity of the object
(the notion of Beauty is but a “word” overlying impressions that are
different according to the object that brings them about) and on the
particularity of the subject (the notion of Beauty being, from this aspect,
but a convenient term to designate a psychic, then a sociological reality
differentiated according to the different judging minds).
Hume’s nominalism and psychologism are well known; it is still
important to point out that they are not a simple matter of opinion but
the expression of a fundamental philosophical choice. They are the di¬
rect effect of the reduction of Being to presence within representation
through which Hume joins Berkeley’s philosophy. Esse est percipi aut
percipere, Being is to perceive or be perceived. If transcendence—the
idea of a norm external to the individual—retains a psychological
meaning, it has lost all transcendental truth; it exists only as a belief,
Hume’s entire effort then consisting in analyzing the process of forma-

54
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

tion of this type of belief, setting out from representations immanent to

the empirical consciousness. (The model of this analysis remains, of
course, the Humean genealogy of the concept of causality.)
We can begin to understand how the perspective adopted by em¬
piricism within theoretical philosophy clears the way, when it becomes
a question of values, and especially aesthetic values, for a veritable “cul¬
ture of authenticity. If Being is reduced to mere presence within my
representations, if truth resides in the final analysis in what I experience
within my consciousness, then sentiment is the most authentic state of
the subject, since it does not refer or send us back to anything other
than itself, and points towards no exteriority. “All sentiment is right;
because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is al¬
ways real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of
the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to some¬
thing beyond themselves” (ibid., p. 268), such as the idea of causality
which makes us expect the appearance of the effect when we see the
cause, thus inciting us to go beyond the order of pure presence.
But, paradoxically,—and it’s at this point that Hume’s line of ar¬
gument reverses itself—it is this very immanentism that will establish
art’s superiority over science, the possibility the beautiful work has to
escape relativism to achieve, if not absolute universality, then at least a
much more general and more durable consensus than that to which the
highest manifestations of scientific or philosophical thought can pre¬
tend. For art belongs entirely to the sphere of sentiment, of presence. It
does not pretend to supersede the states of consciousness that repre¬
sentations are in order to tell truths about the reality external to its
representations. It only aims at the expression of passions common to
humanity, and its cardinal virtue is none other than dramaturgical
authenticity.
Skeptical irony here upsets the opinion best received by common
sense, which willingly accepts scientific objectivity as established but
spontaneously concedes the idea that beauty cannot have the dignity of
a universal reference. And yet, “Theories of abstract philosophy, sys¬
tems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: In a succes¬
sive period, these have been universally exploded . . . And nothing has
been experienced more liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion
that these pretended decisions of science. The case is not the same with
the beauties of eloquence and poetry. Just expressions of passion and
nature are sure, after a little time, to gain public applause, which they
maintain for ever.” In a word, Descartes’s physics may well replace Ar-

55
TWO

istotle’s: their victory remains fragile and temporary, “but Terence and
Virgil maintain an universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men”
(ibid., pp. 279—80).
Where one would have expected that radical immanentism, the re¬
duction of beauty to pure sentiment, led to an absolute relativism, the
inverse happens: it is because the expression of sentiment, if it be au¬
thentic, cannot mislead, that the Beautiful can be the object of a com¬
mon sense to which science can not reasonably lay claim. (Cf. Dubos:
“That the reputation of a system of philosophy may be destroyed; that
of a poem cannot be.”)21 The sensualist relativism that Hume, quite
logically, seemed to choose as the starting point for his aesthetic reflec¬
tions here gives way to a universalism seeking to rejoin—setting out
from sentiment and not reason—the major theses of French classicism,
the problem being, of course, arriving at whatever will permit, in the
last instance, establishing the quasi-universality of the Beautiful.
Though it is true that there exist great variations in taste, since
“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind
which contemplates them . . . ,”22 we cannot thereby conclude that “all
tastes are equivalent”: “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and
elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would
be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained
a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the
ocean” (ibid., p. 269). Strangely, then, the idea of a transcendence of
the standard of taste over against the individual consciousness reclaims
its rights: “. . . the taste of all individuals is not upon an equal footing,
and . .. some men in general, however difficult to be particularly pitched
upon, will be acknowledged by universal sentiment to have a preference
above others” (ibid., p. 279). Besides, it seems clear to Hume—and here
he takes up again the idea of a poetic art dear to the classicists—that
rules of art exist, and that those rules translate an agreement “concern¬
ing what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all
ages” (ibid., p. 269). We are here very far from the “each mind perceives
a different beauty” of which Hume spoke as if it were obvious.
At the same time as the idea of a transcendence of the criteria of
beauty returns, universalism becomes more peremptory: “The same
Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is
still admired at Paris and at London. All the changes of climate, govern¬
ment, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory”
(ibid., p. 271). How then to reconcile the two instances of such a theory
of taste: its rootedness in feeling, which is by essence given to change,

56
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

and the reemergence of a universalism that concedes nothing to the

most rigorous classicism?
The answer can be stated very simply at its most general level: the
standard of taste is nothing other than human nature. Human nature
being, if we may put it this way, relatively invariable, it will provide the
foundation, if not for an absolute universality of taste, at least for its
empirical generality within space and time. “It appears then, that,
amidst all the variety and caprice of taste, there are certain general prin¬
ciples of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace
in all operations of the mind. Some particular forms or qualities, from
the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and
others to displease” (ibid., p. 271). If one postulates, with Hume, that
men’s nature, their “internal fabric,” is fundamentally homogeneous—
therefore that the container for sense impressions is in principle identi¬
cal for all men—then variations in taste can only emerge from the fact
that this container may be more or less pure. (Cf. Dubos: “The senti¬
ment of which I speak is found among all men, but just as they have not
all equally good ears and eyes, so have they not all an equally perfect
sentiment. Some have it better than others, either because their or¬
gans are naturally better made up, or because they have better perfected
them through the frequent use they make of them, and through experi¬
ence.”) 23 It’s in the criteria that permit evaluation of the greater or lesser
purity of human nature that we will have to look not only for the reason
for differences of taste but also—the same question seen from a differ¬
ent angle—for the factors which permit us to judge that tastes are not
equivalent. * Hume cites five:
1. Aesthetic objectivity requires first of all that the nature in ques¬
tion be sane, the most general principle of variations being the fact that
the instruments of judgment, that is the senses, can be more or less well
calibrated, or even disorganized, by illness. If the spirit is not serene, if
illness makes us incapable of fixing our attention on the object or “con¬
founds the operation of the whole machine” that the sensory organs
are, then “our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to
judge of the catholic and universal beauty ... A man in a fever would
not insist on his palate as able to decide concerning flavours; nor would

“'“But though all the general rules of art are founded only on experience,
and on the observation of the common sentiment of human nature, we must not
imagine, that on every occasion, the feelings of men will be conformable to these
rules.” (Hume, “Standard of Taste,” p. 270.)

57
TWO

one, affected with the jaundice, pretend to give a verdict with regard to
colours.”24
2. Besides healthy organs, guaranteeing a relative identity of the
instruments the aesthetic judgment is based on, delicate and refined or¬
gans are called for. To support his thesis, Hume cites a famous anecdote
from Don Quixote which is worth quoting in full here, since in meta¬
phoric form it contains the ultimate principle of his aesthetic essays:

It is with good reason, says SANCHO to the squire with the great nose,
that I pretend to have a judgment in wine: This is a quality hereditary in our
family. Two of my kinsmen were once called to give their opinion of a hogshead,
which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of
them tastes it; considers it; and after mature reflection pronounces the wine to
be good, were it not for a small taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The
other, after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favour of the
wine; but with the reserve of a taste of iron, which he could easily distinguish.
You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But
who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the
bottom, an old key with a leathern thong tied to it. (Ibid., p. 272)

The anecdote’s meaning is twofold: it indicates first of all that

Hume’s aesthetic model is found, in conformity with the original mean¬
ing of the word “taste,” in the culinary arts, and that the Beautiful is
here reduced to the pleasant. But on the other hand, if the Beautiful
is only that which pleases, that which suits the internal, quasi-biological
structure of men, its criterion will be provided by the most essentially
human constitution, that is by that of the best experts, which will pos¬
sess, de jure anyway, a certain universality (in the sense that, in so far
as it is essential, it should be that of all men).
3. Hence the third criterion, found in the reference to the experts’
culture. Besides a talented nature, he who pretends to judge what is
beautiful and what is ugly must have cultivated it through the frequen-
tation of works of art, for “though there be naturally a wide difference
in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends
further to encrease and improve this talent, then practice in a particular
art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of
beauty” (ibid., p. 274). Here, the idea that the principle that permits us
to theorize the universality of taste at the same time as its relativity is
one and the same principle becomes more precise: if there is a univer¬
sality of taste—as attested by the permanence of Homer’s, Terence’s, or
Virgil’s works—it is because the container of impressions that human

58
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

nature is is basically the same in all men in all the historical periods. Yet
it’s undeniable that the human machine, like any machine, is from the
beginning more or less perfect, more or less well calibrated and, with
the passage of time, it refines, perfects, and adjusts itself, or on the con¬
trary it deteriorates: Thus, though the principles of taste be universal,
and, nearly if not entirely the same in all men; yet few are qualified to
give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as
the standard of beauty” (ibid., p. 278).
4. Thus, to avoid any misunderstanding, a fourth criterion will be
added. Though the ultimate foundation of the judgment of taste is hu¬
man nature, and though this nature and therefore this judgment can be
refined and cultivated, we should not thereby confuse culture and preju¬
dice. If it aspires to objectivity, the aesthetic judgment must stay true to
its ultimate principle and remain a natural judgment, cultivated of
course, but not affected or mannered: “It is well known, that in all
questions, submitted to the understanding, prejudice is destructive of
sound judgment ... It is no less contrary to good taste; nor has it less
influence to corrupt our sentiment of beauty. It belongs to good sense
to check its influence in both cases” (ibid., p. 277). To good sense or, as
they said in Hume’s time, to “common understanding,” meaning the
capacity to judge as a cultured but nevertheless natural man, substitut¬
ing for any other human being, outside of the prejudices attendant to
such and such specific individual.
5. Consequently, a “sound understanding” (ibid., p. 278) is called
for—and with this last criterion Hume once again confirms his attach¬
ment to classicism—that is an intelligence acute enough to perceive the
sense of the work of art, for “every work of art has also a certain end
or purpose, for which it is calculated; and is to be deemed more or less
perfect, as it is more or less fitted to attain this end” (ibid., p. 277).
Thus is the most classic of aesthetics, the aesthetics of perfection,
legitimized.
Hume’s reflection, far from falling into relativism, leads him to
posit, within the realm of law (de jure), the universal value of a “good
taste” which in the final analysis tends to be concentrated within an
aesthetic aristocracy. We of course still have to examine the problems
opened up by this strange conversion by the most skeptical of empiri¬
cisms to values—universality, the normative distinction between fact
and law—we had expected to see more solidly grounded within a
framework of a rationalist philosophy.
In truth, the difficulties come from the fact that the standards of

59
TWO

taste are not properly speaking in the mind of the elite made up of the
men of taste, but that they are, strictu sensu, the men of taste them¬
selves. The experts are the standard, they don’t possess it. Outside of
these experts’ concrete empirical existence—and the five criteria that
distinguish them from ordinary mortals—standards have no reality and
nothing permits establishing them by right. Meaning that in aesthetics
as in theory Hume’s philosophy, in Kant’s formula, “rests entirely on
purposiveness.” Why should there be one human nature (represented in
its pure form by experts yet still further cultivated by them) and not a
variety of natures (which would of course permit the granting of an
entirely different status to variations in taste)? For Hume’s answer to
the problem of standards to have any sort of relevance, we have, in
fact, to admit that a happy purposiveness has organized human nature
following a unifying principle, so that we may think that beyond essen¬
tially inessential dissensions, a natural consensus is by right possible.
We have therefore to postulate that, through a mysterious preestab¬
lished harmony, sense impressions come to agreement within the realm
of taste. And even supposing such a harmony to be philosophically
admissible—although it remains an entirely gratuitous postulate there
where aesthetics is located, that is, at the level of sentiment—we would
still have to account for the fact that, after all, Hume doesn’t grant the
same importance or the same significance to culinary disagreements as
he does to artistic ones. But if it’s all a matter of sense impressions and
more or less well-calibrated containers, why should there be two sets of
standards?
An even bigger difficulty adds itself to this first line of questioning.
If the standard of taste, and we have seen why, is literally confused
with the experts’ physical existence in so far as they have a happily
suited nature, then it becomes clear that it in fact has no transcendence,
or, if you will: the standard’s transcendence is purely and simply
reduced to the de facto difference existing between the experts and
hoi polloi. The de jure question, the question of criteria, thus has
a tendency to be integrally reduced to a question of fact, such that in
the end the very question about norms or standards disappears. Within
Hume’s perspective, we should limit ourselves to observing that, the
vulgarian having—let’s admit it for the sake of argument—a coarse
nature and unrefined sensory organs, he has such and such tastes, and
the elite, possessing a more elaborate internal constitution, has on the
other hand such other tastes. But by what right can we, from what is
(at best) a simple observation, strictly empirical and factual, deduce the

60
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

least embryo of normativity, the most tentative idea of a criterion of

taste?
Moreover, in carrying on this way, does not Hume risk—precisely
because he can’t truly posit the question of right and has to stick to the
sphere of fact—constantly mixing up his supposed “human nature”
with the rather banal reality of an eighteenth-century bourgeois Scots¬
man? Unfortunately, Hume rather obviously cannot always avoid this
criticism: not only does he denounce Homer and the Greek tragedians
for their “want of humanity and of decency” (ibid., p. 282), and two of
the most beautiful French tragedies for the “bigotry” which “has disfig¬
ured’ Polyeucte and Athalie (ibid.), but he really takes the cake when,
out of hatred for the barbarians by the Thames, he does not hesitate to
greatly downgrade Shakespeare in favor of the Scottish John Home, an
obscure dramatic author whose principal merit seems to have been, be¬
sides that of not being English, that of being Hume’s friend and cousin,
and for that reason to “possess the true theatric genius of ShakeSpear
and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one, and licen¬
tiousness of the other.”25
Is this a regrettable symptom of Hume’s fanatical patriotism? No
doubt, but a symptom particularly troublesome for the solution he tries
to apply to the problem of the standard of taste: since if this standard
simply is the men of taste, and if it happens that these men of taste
disagree (for example, Hume may think Home great and Shakespeare
and Racine rather lousy, but there are doubtlessly “men of taste” who
do not share this view), then who is to decide on the discord, and in the
name of what? Since within a Humean perspective there is no term
external to the experts’ judgment, we can’t even make out by what right
someone could decide that this or that judgment is or is not tainted by
prejudice. With every question of right disappearing, the discussability
of the beautiful reveals itself to be impossible or at least devoid of
meaning and significance in its very principle, every one being in the
end reinstituted in the untransgressable particularism of his monadic
individuality.
Paradoxically, empiricism proves to be no better than the most dog¬
matic of rationalisms at avoiding the narrow frames of philosophical
individualism. The idea of true aesthetic communication, suggested, all
the same, by the fact of discussion, can’t seem to be able to obtain a
legitimate status from world visions within which, in the final analysis,
it’s up to God—or to a secret “harmony” among beings, anyway, to
some term external to humanity—to secure the “common sense.”

61
TWO

TURNING POINT: THE FIRST "AESTHETICS"

AND THE FIRST "PHENOMENOLOGY"

Philosophy’s history teaches us that the appearance of new terminol¬

ogy is most often, not to say always, the sign of a mutation in the realm
of thought. From 1750 to 1764: only fourteen years separate the
emergence of two notions whose importance has not stopped being con¬
firmed since. About Baumgarten’s Aesthetics and Lambert’s Phenome¬
nology it could be said that, in so far as they both represent specific
theories of sensibility—of the sensible or phenomenal world—they
are the surest sign of the arrival within philosophy of Enlightenment
humanism. No doubt for the first time, the point of view of finite knowl¬
edge—stricitly human, therefore sense-based—is taken into account for
its own sake. It is in this direction that Lambert assigns a twofold task
to the discipline for which he has created a new name. Like optics,
whose intentions it must generalize, phenomenology must “save the
appearances,” that is, it must search for the truth behind the often
misleading phenomena our senses reveal to us. For example, we must,
thanks to astronomy, learn to deduce the real movement of planets from
their apparent movement, or to not be taken in by the refraction of rays
of sunlight in a liquid. But when the distance from the sense-bound to
the true, from the phenomenon to the reality, has been traveled, phe¬
nomenology can also go in reverse. Like perspective, it can allow us to
go from truth to appearance and create, especially in art, the illusion
of reality.
The Phenomenology invites its reader to understand these ambigu¬
ous relationships between the sensible phenomenon and its truth.
Strangely enough, like the Aesthetics, it draws its inspiration essentially
from Leibniz’s philosophy. How could the first two autonomous theo¬
ries of sensibility have issued out of a form of thought which apparently
reduced the sensible world to a form of non-being? It’s a question worth
going over, otherwise the profound significance of these projects risks
going right by us.

LEIBNIZ AND WOLFF: THE EXHAUSTION

OF THE SENSIBLE WORLD

The paradox can be described briefly: Leibniz’s and Wolff’s metaphys¬

ics, to which the Aesthetics explicitly adheres, is without a doubt that

62
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

which takes the Platonic devaluation of the sensible as against the intel¬
ligible world the farthest. The sensible, defined as the mere “phenome¬
nal manifestation of what are in fact entirely intelligible relations
between immaterial beings, does not at first sight seem capable of pro¬
viding the object for a new discipline. Strictly speaking, it has in Leib¬
niz s universe no existence outside the human imagination: The body
has no real unity. Its unity proceeds from our perception; it is a being
of reason, or rather imagination, a phenomenon.
The meaning of the formula according to which the sensible is
but a “confused intelligible”—thus nothing is truly real outside the
limited point of view which is man’s—can only be correctly inter¬
preted in relation to the Leibnizian theory of objectivity. For reasons
we don’t need to go into here, Leibniz refused to define a representa¬
tion’s objectivity by way of the link it might have with a material exter¬
nal thing-in-itself. As it will later for Kant, his problem consists in
finding within the subject’s representations a criterion permitting him
to distinguish scientific objectivity from purely subjective fugitive per¬
ceptions. As often within the Cartesian tradition, the old problem of the
distinction between dream and reality will provide the very example of
the general question.
Now, what does Leibniz say about this? His position has the merit
of being at the same time quite clear and invariable in the various pas¬
sages of his works where it is the most strongly expressed: the sensible
world—the material world perceived by the senses, within space and
time, as being, apparently, exterior to men—has a veritable reality in so
far as and only in so far as it translates, though confusedly, a systematic
order which can, though at another level, that of the intelligible, be
grasped by reason. The truth of sensible things thus resides exclusively
in their rational connection—the only type of connection, moreover,
perceptible from the viewpoint of the rational being that is God. “The
true criterion in the matter of the objects of the sciences is the liaison of
phenomena, that is to say the connection of what takes place in different
places and times.”26
Under such conditions, it’s understandable that the principal task
of reason be fundamentally opposed to that of aesthetic creation. If art
creates a sensible world and plays upon illusion, science, on the con¬
trary, seeks to unveil the intelligible, that is rational, relations the ob¬
jects of the senses manifest in confused fashion. Only this way can we
attain objectivity since, to cite Leibniz again, “the liaison of phenomena

63
TWO

which guarantees the truths of fact about sensible things outside of us

is verified by means of the truths of reason, as the appearances of optics
become clear through geometry” (ibid.). The meaning of this text,
which contains in embryo the project of Lambert’s Phenomenology, is
clear: if appearance is not grounded on reason, if, in other words, it
turns out that the objects of the senses are not “well linked,” it’s because
we are dealing with a pure illusion, as is for example the case with
dreams. If on the other hand we can find a rational law for the linking
of sensible representations, then the latter are “well grounded,” they are
not pure illusions but “phenomena,” that is, etymologically speaking,
manifestations of a reality which, though confusedly perceived as sen¬
sible, is nonetheless, in itself or from God’s viewpoint, intelligible
through and through.
Here lies the criterion of distinction between dream and reality.
As Wolff’s Ontology puts it, in its Latin (§ 97-98) as in its German
(§ 142) version: “Since such an order cannot be found in dreams in
which one cannot, basing oneself on experience, indicate any reason
why things should be together and would remain next to each other
and why their modification should follow, it appears clearly that it is
because of order that truth is different from dreams. Truth is thus noth¬
ing else than the order of the modifications of things.”
A new paradox: this logistic theory of objectivity in which the sen¬
sible is granted a status close to that of non-being is never far from the
themes dearest to an aesthetics whose object, however, it reduces to
nothingness—indeed, in many ways the artwork is but a well-regulated
dream. Besides, Leibniz is perfectly aware of the fact that his criterion
of objectivity does not permit the tracing of an absolute separation line
between an ordered reality, grasped by reason, and the productions of
the imagination. After all, the author of the Monadology did not wait
for Freud to postulate, together with the existence of an unconscious
psychic life (that of “small perceptions”), the fact that it’s possible to
“account for dreams themselves, and for the little linkage with other
phenomena.” Let’s go further: nothing prevents us from presuming, as
a hypothesis, the existence of dreams with the particular characteristic
of being entirely coherent and well ordered. The demonstration, if dem¬
onstration were still needed, of the degree to which the criterion of ob¬
jectivity is dissociated in Leibniz from the notion of a sensible world
external to the subject, is his argument that, under such conditions, we
would have to say that those dreams are reality itself: “It is true also

64
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

that, as long as the phenomena are well linked, it matters not that one
call them dreams or not.”
If we consider the abyss that separates the point of view of man
from that of God, this radical dissociation of sensibility from being be¬
comes more pronounced and even a veritable opposition. To say that
human knowledge is limited compared to God’s (who “sees every¬
thing”) is also to affirm that it can never completely liberate itself from
sensibility so as to arrive at a clear and distinct cognition of the rational
order our senses always hide from us. It is because we are beings en¬
dowed with sensibility that we cannot raise ourselves up to the point of
view from which it would be possible to contemplate the totality of
what is, the sine qua non condition for another perception of the
world s intelligible order. It is surely not without importance in this re¬
spect that Leibniz often chooses, in order to express this human finitude
and imperfection, aesthetic metaphors like this one, whose every ele¬
ment is meaningful: “Let us consider a very beautiful painting. Let us
hide it completely except for a tiny portion: what shall we see there . . .
except a confusing swirl of colors without choice, without art? Yet . . .
when we consider the entire picture from a proper center of perspective,
we will understand that what seemed to be applied to the canvas by
happenstance was for the artist the work of a supreme art” {Of the
Radical Origin of Things, § 13).
The text depends of course on an analogy: before the world, man
is similar to a spectator who only sees a minuscule aspect of the work
he’s contemplating; the point of view of the totality, the only one from
which it’s possible to arrive at an adequate perspective, is reserved to
God. There where we see a multiplicity of the sensible, confused and
chaotic, he “sees” only order and reason; there where we think we per¬
ceive a succession of events in time, he only sees an atemporal logical
connection (God is the only being who places himself at the viewpoint
of the end of history); there where the world seems to us to be extended
in space and, in that sense, “external” to us, God sees but an intelligible
order of the reciprocal situation of beings who are in truth immaterial.
As he was in Plato’s cave, Leibniz’s man is constantly misled by the
manifoldness of the sensible world: “And just as the same city, seen
from different sides, seems entirely different and is as it were perspec¬
tive^ multiplied, it happens in the same way that, through the infinite
multitude of simple substances, there are just as many different uni¬
verses which are but the perspectives upon a single one according to the

65
TWO

different points of view of each monad” (Monadology, § 57). God is

precisely he of whom we know, not only that he perceives this multi¬
plicity of sensible perspectives for what it is (an intelligible difference
between beings), but also that he integrates it (in the mathematical as in
the ordinary sense) within an ordered systematic totality; and, once
again as in Plato, only this totality, in so far as it is the intelligible world,
can be said to be truly being [etante], the sensible world’s diversity pro¬
viding at best its distorted reflection in the human imagination.
We can, under such conditions, very well understand why the proj¬
ect which aims to take an interest in the sensible world as such in order
to produce, as an “aesthetics” or a “phenomenology,” a specific theory,
would seem to be particularly badly grounded in a Leibnizian intellec¬
tual framework. It is for this reason that the Aesthetica invited many
misunderstandings which Baumgarten tried, with very relative success,
to dissipate in the first paragraphs of his book. However, and as contra¬
dictory as that may sound, Leibniz’s philosophy, as Baumler subtly un¬
derstood, could also open the way to this new preoccupation.
Leibniz’s theodicy turns out to be susceptible to, if not two inter¬
pretations, at least to two radically opposed research directions. We can
first of all, together with Wolff’s orthodoxy, consider that it founds a
philosophy that takes us away from sensibility. If truth resides within
an intelligible order that only God’s point of view can grasp, then we
have to, as far as we are capable of doing so, raise ourselves towards
this truth, following an inexorable movement from the sensible to the
intelligible. Ontology and Theology must be the essential disciplines
under these conditions. But on the other hand, if we follow a certain
conception of continuity which fundamentally opposes Leibniz to Des¬
cartes, we cannot turn away definitively from the sensible world. On the
contrary, we may even hold that it is there, and not in God, who is
inaccessible, that we must seek to discover this rational order which is
its objective substructure. At that point it is the scientific disciplines, in
so far as they correspond to man’s finite viewpoint, which become cen¬
tral. Thanks to astronomy, optics, to the different branches of geometry,
etc., we learn to discover the intelligible connections there where they
are visible for us, that is, at the heart of the sensible world. From God’s
point of view we go over to man’s and, following a logic we have already
invoked, it’s with this turnabout that the problem of the status of sen¬
sibility becomes so crucial that philosophy can no longer evade it even
if it were inclined to do so. Witness Lambert’s Phenomenology and,
especially, the Aesthetica.

66
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

THE AMBIGUITIES OF THE AESTHETICA: TOWARDS

THE AUTONOMY OF THE SENSIBLE

Upon first reading, Baumgarten’s aesthetics seem to place themselves

within the tradition of Wolffian intellectualism. This is borne out no¬
tably by the definition of beauty as “perfection perceived by the senses”
or pet fectio phenomenon (§ 662 of the Aietaphysica)—a very classical
definition within the Wolffian school27 and one Leibniz had already sug¬
gested in a passage of his essay on wisdom28 and which Meier, Baum¬
garten’s main disciple, makes explicit in these terms in section 23 of his
First Principles of All Sciences of the Beautiful [Anfangsgriinde aller
schonen Wissenschaften], text written in 1748, before the publication
of the Aesthetica, but in awareness of it since Meier had followed Baum-
garten s courses: That beauty in general is a perfection in as much as
this perfection is known in confused or sensible fashion, is today a thing
agreed upon by all serious connoisseurs of the beautiful.”
The danger of such a conception of the beautiful, based entirely on
an assimilation of the sensible to the vague or confused, is obvious, as
Mendelssohn, as a good Leibnizian, remarks in his “Essay on Sensa¬
tions, a confused or sensible” knowledge of perfection remains in
every way inferior to a clear and distinct knowledge of this same perfec¬
tion,29 so that one could be led to see in paragraph 662 of the Meta-
physica an obstacle to the very idea of an autonomous discipline
entitled “aesthetica.”
Baumgarten tries to point out another way with his notion of
analogon rationis, to which I will return. But this alternative is not
without ambiguity on this decisive question of the nature of the beauti¬
ful. The title of one of the main chapters, “Aesthetic Truth” [Veritas
aesthetica], seems to imply a subsumption of aesthetics to logic, of the
sensible world to the intelligible world, an impression reinforced when
reading the paragraphs consecrated to the definition of this truth which
Baumgarten still calls “aesthetico-logical,” as if to underline the paral¬
lels between the two competing disciplines. The criteria which permit
the determination of aesthetic truth are thus strictly borrowed from
theoretical philosophy. We can distinguish three: possibility or noncon¬
tradiction, conformity to the principle of reason, and unity.
Aesthetic truth requires in effect “the possibility of objects of ele¬
gant thought,” meaning that in them there should not be “characteristic
traits which are mutually contradictory” (§ 431)—where we recognize
the Leibnizian definition of absolute possibility to which Baumgarten,

67
TWO

in quite orthodox fashion, adds hypothetical (§ 432) and moral (§ 433)

possibilities.
To this first requirement, which takes care of the principle of con¬
tradiction, is added that which emanates from the principle of suffi¬
cient reason and which demands of the beautiful object that it be
well grounded and well linked, “according to reasons and conse¬
quences” (§ 437). If it is, for example, a narrative, for it to be beau¬
tiful its sequences will have to follow the order of reasons, so that
nothing in it will appear incoherent; the model in Baumgarten’s eyes
being Livy’s Coriolanus: “His very name and the origin of his authority
are explained; therefrom his excessive pride before the tribune’s power;
hence the rabble’s anger; the result being Coriolanus’s exile . . .” etc.
In a word, the reasons that explain the action should be completely
perceptible.
The third and last requirement, of unity, is deduced from the first
two: the objects of the beautiful thought must possess unity since the
characteristics reflection discerns in them are simultaneously noncon¬
tradictory and well linked, through which Baumgarten brings together
not only the Leibnizian saying that that which is not one being is not a
Being, but also the hallowed classical rule of the three unities: “This
unity of objects, which is an aesthetic unity to the extent to which it is
found at the level of phenomena, will be unity of internal determina¬
tions, and thereby unity of ACTION, if the object of the meditation on
the beautiful is an action, or else unity of external determinations and
of relations, of circumstances, and thereby unity of place and of time”
(§ 439).
Reading these texts, one could get the feeling of moving about in a
classical framework in which the beautiful is defined as a function of
the same criteria which permit picking out the true, beauty being in the
end but the sensible presentation of a logical perfection. That Baumgar¬
ten’s philosophical model is, unlike what was the case with the French
classicists, Leibnizian rather than Cartesian does not seem to alter this
diagnosis in any way; on the contrary, it’s as if Leibniz’s rationalism,
more radical and more complete than that of Descartes, comes into
aesthetics only the more to lengthen the list of claims to rationality the
beautiful object must make to deserve its name.
Let s say it right off: such a reading of the Aesthetica, however ac¬
cepted it may have been even among Baumgarten’s disciples, is not only
mistaken, it quite simply misses the general direction of Baumgarten’s
project, which can be put thus: How, while starting out from Leibniz’s
68
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

and Wolff s philosophy, to nevertheless grant a consistency all its own

to the phenomenal sphere of the sensible, and grant therefore to aes¬
thetics its autonomy in relation to its “elder sister,” logic (§ 13), and
thereby affirm the pertinence of an effective incorporation of the view¬
point of this finite being that is man? Baumgarten’s basic idea is that, in
so far as man could not perceive the world otherwise than through the
categories of sensibility, there exists within him an analogon rationis, a
faculty or collection of faculties that is the analogue for the sensible
world of what reason is for the intelligible world. Correlatively, if we
situate ourselves on the side of the object and no longer on that of the
faculties of the subject, there must be, on the plane of the sensible world,
forms and sequences or relations between these forms which are, not
identical, but analogous to the rational forms (ideas) and the relations
between these forms as reason perceives them on the plane of the intel¬
ligible world. It’s because of the creation of this notion of analogon
rationis, at times very difficult to follow through the winding paths of
the Aesthetica, that Baumgarten eventually distances himself from the
orthodox theses of the Wolffian school and even comes to oppose them
on certain essential points.
Let’s begin at the beginning, the definition of aesthetics given in
section 1 of the Aesthetica. We cannot understand it correctly if we read
it through the Wolff school’s glasses: “Aesthetics (theory of the liberal
arts, doctrine of inferior knowledge, art of the beautiful thought, art of
the analogue of reason) is the science of sensible knowledge.” The im¬
portant thing about this definition—if what we are looking for is its
originality—is not the fact that it continues, in Leibniz’s and Wolff’s
wake, to hold that a theory of sensible knowledge is inferior and there¬
fore qualifies aesthetics as gnoseologia inferior, but that, by putting in
place the concept of analogon rationis, the project of a science of the
sensible as such becomes possible, thus legitimating the idea that man’s
point of view as a limited being is also worthy of a particular consid¬
eration. This new perspective, inverted in relation to the seventeenth
century’s, will leave an important inheritance, not only among Baum¬
garten’s immediate disciples—such as Meier, who in 1755 writes his
Observations on the Limits of Human Knowledge [Betrachtungen iiber
die Schranken der menschlichen Erkenntnis]—but also and especially
in Lambert’s Phenomenology, whose project seemed to Kant to be so
important that for a while he too thought of giving the Critique of Pure
Reason the title of “phenomenology.”
Baumgarten’s aesthetics constitutes in this sense a real paradox,

69
TWO

and we can understand how it could have so often lent itself to reduc¬
tive readings: how, indeed, to interpret an itinerary that begins from
a Leibnizian philosophical position that holds the highest theoretical
viewpoint, God’s, to be by essence above the sensible world, finally to
legitimate an interest in knowledge of a sphere, that of sensibility, which
everything, it seems, should lead the philosopher to neglect?
Baumgarten is quite aware of the difficulty since the main part of
the “prolegomena” to the Aesthetica is consecrated to answering the
objections an orthodox Wolffian could raise against it. These objections
bear upon the subject studying this new discipline as on its object: “To
our science, one could object that the impressions of the senses, the
products of the imagination, the fables, the disturbances of the passions,
etc., are unworthy of philosophers ... I answer: the philosopher is a
man among men,” (§ 6) which means that, rather than to try for an
impossible coincidence with God’s point of view, he ought to take an
interest in what constitutes the object or in any case the uncircumvent-
able medium of all his knowledge: the sensible. “One could still object
that confusion is the mother of error. My answer is that it is the sine
qua non condition of the discovery of truth” (§ 7). The Aestbetica’s
paradoxical situation becomes clearer; the philosopher can, no doubt,
neglect the knowledge of the senses and turn exclusively towards intel¬
lectual, clear and distinct knowledge of the universal; that way he comes
closer to God. But if he wishes to remain “among men”—what he can’t
avoid anyway (§ 557)—he must plunge into the sensible particular and
try to seize the individual. That is another consequence of the same
principle of continuity: as section 7 of the Aesthetica insists upon, con¬
fused knowledge is an integral part of true knowledge for “nature does
not jump from darkness to clarity. It is thus through dawn that we travel
from night to noon.”
Throughout these responses to possible objections coming from the
Wolffian school we make out, from the very first lines of the Aesthetica,
the will to grant the sensible an autonomy for which the idea of analo-
gon rationis quite exactly defines the nature and limits. The notion of
“aesthetico-logical” truth refers back to this idea and not, as one might
have thought on first reading, to the confusion of the two domains, even
less to a reduction of the first, aesthetics, to the second.
To better grasp what Baumgarten understands by analogon rationis
we must discern how he distinguishes the inferior faculties that make
up this analogon rationis from the superior faculties, understanding and
reason. Baumgarten in many ways takes up again and extends the do-
70
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

main Wolff, in his Empirical Psychology (part 1, § 2), had already des¬
ignated as that of thinking “similar to reason.” But from “similar”
to analogous is a considerable step, one determined precisely in sec¬
tion 640 of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica. The inferior faculties—the ana-
logon rationis—comprehend “(1) the inferior faculty of knowing what
is identical between things; (2) the inferior faculty of knowing what is
different between things; (3) the sensitive memory; (4) the poetic faculty
[facultas fgendi, Vermogen zu dichten]; (5) the evaluative faculty [fa-
cultas di judicandi, Beurteilungsvermogen); (6) the expectation of simi¬
lar cases; (7) the sensual faculty of designation [facultas characteristica
sensitiva, das sinnliche Bezeichnungsvermogen].”
These faculties have in common that they apprehend the relations
among the things of the sensible world. Taken together as such they
constitute the analogon rationis: like reason (and unlike the under¬
standing) they work to produce objectivity by interlinking representa¬
tions. Here again we need to go back to Wolff’s Empirical Psychology
(§ 29 and § 233), which distinguishes three levels:
that, first of all, of the inferior faculties (of which Baumgarten
would eventually make, as we have seen, through various modifica¬
tions,3" the analogon rationis): the senses, the imagination, the poetic
faculty [facultas fgendi], memory;
—that of the understanding [intellectus, Verstand], which compre¬
hends attention, reflection, the faculty of abstraction and of compari¬
son. The understanding is by nature part of the superior faculties since
its representations are distinct (the concept of distinction [clarity] thus
traces the dividing line between inferior and superior faculties);
—that, finally, of reason [ratio, Vernunft], which is the faculty of
connection or linkage [nexus, Zusammenhang\ between representations
and which, as such, engenders objectivity properly speaking—which is
why, while the understanding arrives at logical truth, reason introduces
us into the sphere of transcendental or metaphysical truths.
The Aesthetica works out an original philosophy by taking up this
Wolffian classification with the aim of forging its concept of analogon
rationis. The beautiful will first of all be defined—and it’s in this that it
corresponds to the faculty, the analogon rationis, which will grasp
it—as a sensual linkage of representations or, to use the future Kantian
vocabulary, as a “legality without concept.” Hence the formula that
comes back again and again under Baumgarten’s pen: aesthetics cer¬
tainly deals with truth, but with truth quatenus sensitive cognoscendae
est, “in so far as it is known sensually”; which means that there exists

71
TWO

a legality proper to the sensible or an “aesthetico-logical” objectivity.

The expression enjoys here its full meaning: “The truth of true things
in its strictest sense is aesthetic in so far as these things are sensually
perceived as true through sensations, images, or even anticipations
connected to forebodings, and there ends its domain” (§ 444). Such
linkages or representations can only be grasped by a faculty close to
reason. But since the linkages are sensual, therefore confused and not
intelligible, it cannot be reason itself, and we must here have recourse
to an analogon rationis as defined by the inferior faculties evoked in
section 640 of the Metaphysica.
Therefrom a third thesis which also singularly anticipates the main
themes of the Critique of Judgment and initiates a true synthesis be¬
tween classicism and the aesthetics of sentiment: the beautiful is half¬
way between the rational and the ordinary sensible. In its confused
aspect it is of course the opposite of reason, but to the extent it is a
linkage of representations it nears “metaphysical” truths. Analogon
veritatis, it can only be grasped by an analogon rationis. Beauty is per-
fectio cognitionis sensitivae [perfection of sensual knowledge], a for¬
mula perfectly commented on by Baumler: “cognitio refers to unity,
sensitivus to plenitude (diversity, material richness) and perfectio means
nothing other than the elevation of these two moments of sensual
knowledge as such: this does not at all mean a rationalist/metaphysical
theory but simply the fact that sensual knowledge possesses its own
perfection. The representations of the imagination and of the senses are
capable of having their own unity and their own connections” (ibid.,
p. 229).*
The beautiful object can thus belong to the domain unknown to
Cartesianism for the same reason it ignores the principle of continu¬
ity—the domain of the verisimilar:

I think it has already become clear that much of what is represented in the
beautiful thought-act is neither completely certain nor can it be perceived as to

*Cf. also: “Baumgarten had two great ideas: first, that the aesthetic object
is individual (as is “taste”). Thereby the specific task of art in relation to (gen¬
eralizing) science is acknowledged . . . The aesthetic object, so may we clarify
the idea, is not a scientific object, but it is all the same an object. It is not
surrendered to the subject’s arbitrariness but to a determination analogous to
that of reason. If we bind these two ideas together: the aesthetic object combines
individuality with legality. That is the meaning of the formula: beauty is the
perfection of sensual knowledge.” (Ibid., p. 231.)

72
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

its truth under full illumination. Yet from a sensible point of view nothing false
can be discovered without repugnance. That in which we cannot arrive at a
perfect certainty without for all that discovering falseness there is the verisimi¬
lar. In its essential signification, aesthetic truth can thus be said to be verisimilar:
it has that degree of truth which, if it does not imply a complete certainty, does
not however permit us to discern any type of falseness.” (§ 483)

We can therefore better understand that the goal of aesthetics, in so

far as its object is sensual perfection, is not so much truth (§ 428),
which is necessarily abstract and general (§ 557), as the quest of the in¬
dividual in its specific diversity and richness. What the aesthetician aims
for, as Baumgarten puts it in one of his favorite formulas, is the “most
possible determined determination of the individual” or, as expressed
in his Meditations: he seeks the extensive clarity of representations,
meaning the most complete possible enumeration of a representation’s
characteristics,31 while the scientist aims for intensive clarity, obtained
by considering only one characteristic and decomposing it into simple
elements (the search for truth requiring, according to Leibniz, that we
go from composites to simples).
That is one of the decisive aspects through which the Aestbetica
distances itself from the tasks traditionally assigned to philosophy by
Wolff’s school of thought. To better grasp its importance, we need to
keep in mind the distinction Leibniz makes, in his Meditationes de
veritate, cognitione et ideia, between clear representations and distinct
representations.
Clarity ensues from the enumeration of characteristics: a table may
be red, square, big, etc. This type of clarity, called extensive by Baum¬
garten, is not at all specific to scientific activity. It is on the contrary,
intrinsic to ordinary knowledge and permits it to grasp the individual
to the extent to which one individual stands out from the others the
moment we have enumerated, be it at an entirely empirical level, its
principal characteristics. The more we elaborate extensive clarity the
better do we reach the individual in all its sensual richness and diverse¬
ness. This type of clarity will interest the aesthetician for it gives life to
the beautiful object.
Distinct knowledge, the intensive clarity intrinsic to scientific
knowledge, refers to an inverse procedure that does not aim at enumer¬
ating external sensible properties: after having separated out the var¬
ious characteristics (using attention), it abstracts out inessential traits,
singles out shared points and main differences with the intention of

73
TWO

hammering out general concepts (species and genera). This faculty per¬
mitting us to grasp identities and differences will be named “reflection”
by Wolff—reflection being “the mode through which we arrive at dis¬
tinct knowledge.”
This simple classification, apparently quite scholastic, actually has
great philosophical importance for aesthetics. It raises first of all a prob¬
lem whose solution allows us to better understand the exact nature of
the analogon rationis. In the quest for distinct knowledge, the under¬
standing, which is more or less a formal faculty of classification, quickly
becomes reason, a transcendental faculty generating objectivity. Why
this happens in Leibniz’s system is easily understood. Once the simple
elements have been sorted out and the general concepts have been cre¬
ated, all the work of the understanding, we discover the intelligible
foundation of characteristics and the reason for their concatenation (for
this interlinking which actually constitutes them as objects). Now—and
this is the problem 1 was talking about—if aesthetics is interested in
extensive clarity, if therefore it stays with the mere empirical analysis of
representations, one fails to see what in it could play the role of an
analogon rationis or indeed what the need could be for such a faculty.
The solution is as follows: The beautiful is no doubt found in the
wealth, the variety, the vivacity of characteristic traits; but this wealth
is organized, those traits are bound to one another following a legality
which is not that of reason but is—or that at least is the fundamental
postulate of the Aesthetica—intrinsic to the sensible sphere. For ex¬
ample, in a poetical description we certainly come across an enumera¬
tion of traits, but the rhetorical modalities of this enumeration are as
important as its richness. Or again, when a metaphor substitutes certain
characteristics with others, it most certainly creates a symbolic link
whose “logic,” if we can say that, is not that of reason but that of
aesthetics.
The definition of the poem—oratio sensitiva perfecta est poema31—
as the “sensual perfection of discourse” indicates a conception of beauty
that integrates two elements: diversity (or, vivacity, the richness of the
concrete particular brought to a high degree of extensive clarity) and
the interlinkings of this diversity in their quality of sensual linkages
(which is why they are cognized by the analogon rationis and not by
reason).
In certain ways the Aesthetica will take the opposite direction from
that of philosophy; it cannot and should not abstract out the sensible
particular; as the Meditations put it, “What is poetical in the poem is
74
 BETWEEN HEART AND REASON

the fact of determining the things to be represented as much as possible”

(§ 18). And individual [things and persons] are determined in every
way, therefore the particular representations are always poetic” (§ 19).
One passage of the Aestbetica expresses in striking fashion this
opposition between the theoretical research method leading to the gen¬
eral and the path of aesthetics which, on the contrary, aims at absolute
determination, at individuality. Describing how logic arrives at general
concepts activity he judges, of course, excellent as far as it goes—
Baumgarten adds:

Yet the question arises as to whether metaphysical truth is equivalent to univer¬

sal concept in so far as it corresponds to the individual object contained in such
a concept. In what concerns myself, I think it should be perfectly clear to a
philosopher that all that is contained in formal specific perfection in knowledge
and in logical truth has only been obtained at the price of a considerable loss in
material perfection. To take a comparison: one can transform an irregular block
of marble into a ball only at the price of a loss of material substance correspond¬
ing at least to the high value of the regular round form. (§ 560; “high value”
here meaning as seen from a logical, not an aesthetic, point of view).

A clear-cut consequence comes out of this comparison: “We begin

then with the presupposition that efforts to attain aesthetico-logical
truth direct themselves especially towards metaphysical material truth
and that they thus seek to grasp the objects of a determinate metaphysi¬
cal truth, as much as is possible, up to the individual” (§ 561).33 “As
much as is possible” because, as Baumgarten well knows, it is impos¬
sible to arrive distinctly at the individual for the same reasons that we
cannot, as finite beings, grasp the highest logical truths.34 But the quest
for individuality in the sphere of aesthetics does not mean that “every¬
thing” need be put into a picture or a poem and that a microscopic
realism could be the guarantee of beauty. The Aestbetica is not the
French New Novel’s forerunner. As he reads the Aeneid, the aestheti-
cian will “neither think about nor care about the question of knowing
with which foot Aeneas first touched Italy; and yet, it is very true, he
did touch it with either the left or the right foot, unless he did it with
both feet, which is less convenient” (§ 30).35
Worth is laid upon the individual, upon that which escapes the con¬
cept—for example on the first name, which the Meditations affirm as
poetic for the sole reason that it refers back to a unique representation
(§ 89; a theme often reconsidered in German thought up to and includ¬
ing Walter Benjamin)—but the artist should not for all that renounce

75
TWO

the aesthetic unity of the various without which the beautiful object
would not even be an object. This aspect of the Aesthetica opens up to
another dimension, the one that is Kant’s main concern in the Critique
of judgment: the beautiful object, although nonconceptual, must have
the potential of being the object of a communication, and interest in the
individual must not lead, as is too often the case in the aesthetics of
sentiment, to a monadic withdrawal of subjectivity into itself. It’s be¬
cause the beautiful object has its own laws and epistemological status
[une legalite propre] as well as a unity of the diversity of its character¬
istic traits that it can be communicated. It ceases thereby to be strictly
subjective and acquires, if not conceptual objectivity, at least a sensual
objectivity which is its exact analogue.
The Aesthetica gave a philosophical formulation to the themes al¬
ready encountered, in a more literary form, in the French debates be¬
tween classicism and the aesthetics of sentiment. With the artist’s search
for the individual or particular, we enter a realm Cartesian reason can¬
not grasp, which we may call the realm of the irrational or, borrowing
from the vocabulary of aesthetics, the realm of “mystery,” of delicacy,
or of the “I-know-not-what.” But with Baumgarten, the mediation be¬
tween reason and unreason, between the universal and the individual
begins to work itself out, thanks not only to the effects of the continuity
principle but mainly to the idea of analogy, which as we have seen per¬
mits us to build a bridge between the sensible and the intelligible
worlds. (This is the thesis at the heart of Baumler’s book.) For such a
bridge to become a real necessity, however, the separation of the two
worlds must also be truly secure. That is a task which Baumgarten,
despite his project’s boldness and originality, could not accomplish
within the framework of a Leibnizian philosophy.
 THREE

U NTIL KANT, modern philosophy remained, despite Baumgarten’s

and Lambert’s efforts, dominated by a Cartesian conception of
the inherent limits of human knowledge. Finitude is thought of in rela¬
tion to an absolute reference: the idea of an omniscience supposedly
entirely entrusted to the divinity. It’s by reference to this supposed di¬
vine omniscience that human knowledge is said to be limited and that
the mark of this limit, sensibility, is relativized so that aesthetics can
never truly free itself and become autonomous from logic and meta¬
physics. The Kantian moment is, seen from this angle, a veritable revo¬
lution, a switching around of perspectives unprecedented in the history
of thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, and especially in its first
part, the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” Kant invites us to reverse the re¬
lation that existed between finiteness and the Absolute since the dawn
of modern metaphysics. Instead of first positing the Absolute in order
to then situate the human condition within the order of lesser Being, of
limitation, Kant begins with finitude to then go up, but only as a second
step, toward the Absolute. In other words, the simple fact that our con¬
sciousness is always already sensually limited by a world exterior to it,
a world it did not create, is the first fact, the one from which we must
set out to envisage anew all of metaphysics’ traditional questions. Man
is a radically finite being, and without this finitude he would not be
endowed with representations and consciousness, if it is true, as Husserl
puts it later, that “all consciousness is consciousness of something”
which limits it. The ultimate consequence of this reversal: the meta¬
physical pretention to know the absolute, to grasp the ultimate essence
of the cogito or to demonstrate God’s existence, is relativized in relation
to the initial affirmation of the limited or sensible condition which is
necessarily that of human consciousness. It will no longer be possible to
relativize sensual knowledge and define it as lesser being, as confusion,

77
THREE

in the name of the divine figure of an entirely intelligible Absolute; on

the contrary, in the name of the unsurpassable finitude which is the sign
of all real, nonillusory knowledge, the divine figure of the Absolute is
in turn relativized and brought down to the rank of a simple “Idea” of
reason whose objective reality is forever indemonstrable by theory.
In this reversal there are two implications for the status of the divine
and for that of the sensible, whose intimate connection we must grasp
in order to understand the philosophical foundations of Kant’s aesthetic
theory.

THE IDEALITY OF THE DIVINE AND THE ARRIVAL OF MAN

The first implication concerns God’s status to the extent that his ex¬
istence as the site of omniscience and eternal truths is, in modern
metaphysics, the object of a demonstration. What Kant denounces in
rationalist metaphysics is not the definition of God as the holder of an
unlimited knowledge. Nothing, indeed, prevents us from thinking out
negatively, in opposition to our finite understanding, the idea of an in¬
finite understanding for whom being and thought, real and rational,
would be but one. What is questioned is “merely” the pretension of
demonstrating the existence of such a being through ontological argu¬
ment. Here we must bring to mind, be it only briefly, the critique that
the “Transcendental Dialectic” develops on this topic.
In its most rationalist formulation, the ontological argument, in
Kant’s presentation of it, takes the following form: the concept of God
as perfect and necessary being contains all reality. “Now, in all reality
existence [das Dasein] is also included: thus existence is contained
within the concept of a possible being. If this thing is abolished, abol¬
ished as well is the inner possibility of this thing, which is contradic¬
tory.” 1 According to the ontological argument, we could thus conclude,
from the simple analysis of the concept of God, his real existence. Kant’s
objection is well known. It consists in stating that the logical possibility,
that is, a concept’s noncontradictory character, does not in any way
guarantee its objectivity since, in one of the Critique's celebrated propo¬
sitions, “Being is evidently no real predicate, meaning a concept of
something which could join itself to the concept of a thing” (ibid.,
p. 400). In other words, admitting the Idea of God as a necessary Idea
of human reason, admitting even that the idea of his existence necessar¬
ily joins the Idea of God, it is nonetheless the case that this existence
remains an ideal existence, an existence only in thought, not a real ex-

78
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

istence. The fact that I have the idea of a necessarily existing being
proves nothing about the real existence of that being. Hence the new
meaning accorded to the idea of God by the Critique of Pure Reason:

So, the transcendental and only determinate concept of God that speculative
reason gives us is, in the strictest sense, deistic: reason never even provides us
with the objective validity of such a concept . . . from which it becomes clear
that the idea [of such a being], like all speculative ideas, says nothing more than
that Reason commands us to regard all connections in the world following
principles of a systematic unity, even as if they had all been engendered from
one sole all-encompassing Being [Wesen] as highest and all-sufficient cause.
Hence it is clear that Reason could not have as its goal anything other than its
own formal rule in the extension of its empirical use, never an extension beyond
all limits of empirical usage. (Ibid., pp. 445, 451-52)

The idea of God thus has, from a theoretical point of view, no ob¬
jectivity. (It would of course be a different matter if we adoped the
practical standpoint, that of morality.) But such an idea still invites
us, as scientists (and no longer as metaphysicians), to look at the uni¬
verse as if it were a systematic, coherent all, created by an intelligent
author. The idea of an omniscient understanding, of an achieved knowl¬
edge of the universe, maintains a regulating function for our finite
knowledge. It’s in relation to that idea that scientific progress makes
sense, for example. As Kant puts it in an essential text we must quote
and comment on: *

I maintain that: transcendental Ideas are never of constitutive usage, so that

the concepts of certain things might be given through them, and should they be
understood this way they are but sophistical [dialectical] concepts. [According
to the critique of the ontological argument, although it is the necessary idea of
a being to which we attribute existence, the idea of God is nonetheless a mere
Idea of reason, whose objectivity is rigorously proven by nothing. The onto¬
logical argument that would have us believe we can go on from the concept of
God to the affirmation of his existence is only a sophism.] They have on the
other hand an outstanding regulative use, which is indispensably necessary for
directing the understanding toward a certain aim. With that aim in prospect,
the directional lines of all rules of the understanding meet in one point, which
serves to give them the greatest unity together with their greatest spread, al¬
though that point is only an idea [focus imaginarius\ from which concepts of

*My commentary is in italics, bracketed.

79
THREE

the understanding do not actually emanate, as it lies completely outside the

boundaries of possible experience. (Ibid., pp. 426-27)

In a word, in order to progress, the understanding’s activity—the

activity of science—needs to refer to the idea of God, to the idea of
omniscience, even though we have admitted the nonobjective character
of this idea. It does, after all, bestir and direct knowledge by continu¬
ously demanding of it, not only that it should seek to render the world
more and more intelligible, but also to organize itself, as far as possible,
into a more and more coherent and systematic totality. The withdrawal
of the divine thus manifests itself by a secularization of the idea of God
in the realm of the theory of knowledge. Against the background of this
secularization we can situate the revalorization of sensibility which will
lead Kant to make plain the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere in relation
to the intelligible world.

THE AUTONOMY OF AESTHETICS

In the Platonic philosophical tradition, but also within Christianity, sen¬

sibility has been systematically denigrated in favor of the intelligible.
That is, in any case, the thesis defended, sometimes humorously, by
Nietzsche, as in this passage from The Twilight of the Idols: “These
senses, which are so immoral in other ways too, deceive us concerning
the true world. Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the
senses, from becoming, from history, from lies; history is nothing but
faith in the senses, faith in lies. Moral: let us say ‘No!’ to all who have
faith in the senses.” Nietzsche speaks here from Socrates’ and Christ’s
point of view in order to mock them both. His argument against phi¬
losophy is a “genealogical” one. It suggests, as the section I’ve put in
italics indicates, that in reality it was because they feared sensuality that
philosophers and moralists condemned sensibility in the name of the
primacy of the intelligible. Without following the path of genealogy, the
Critique of Pure Reason leads, in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” chap¬
ter, to a critique of Leibnizian rationalism which in many ways foresees
Nietzsche’s position.
We have seen how, for Leibniz, from God’s point of view, thus from
the point of view of an omniscient being, the relations which seem
spatio-temporal to us are in truth purely logical and intelligible. From
God’s viewpoint the sensible has no real existence and space is but a
conceptual order, that of the simultaneous coexistence of beings. Simi-

80
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

larly, time has for God no real existence. It is only a system of logical,
not chronological, relations: the system of the succession of beings—if
the term succession still makes any sense here (anthropomorphism is
difficult to get rid of). For Kant, on the contrary, the point of view of
finitude should not be relativized in relation to an infinite divine under¬
standing, for the simple reason that that understanding is only a point
of view of human reason, an Idea. Therefore, the principal characteris¬
tic of human knowledge, the fact that it is always bound to sensibility,
to intuition, should not be relativized and, as such, devalorized, either.
Human, sensible reason, is not lesser than that of God; it is the only
possible knowledge, which is exactly why divine knowledge, the infinite
understanding, is reduced to the status of an Idea of reason. We could
say that the withdrawal of the divine and the revalorization of sensibility
express each other”; we begin with the one to arrive at the other and
reciprocally. It is because knowledge is always tied to sensible intuition
that the notion of omniscience is expelled to the realm of metaphysical
illusion, and it’s because this latter notion is expelled to the realm of
illusion that sense-based knowledge must finally acquire its full entitle¬
ment to legitimacy.
As Kant stresses, the Critique of Pure Reason can be read both
ways, going from the “Aesthetic” to the “Dialectic” or from the “Dia¬
lectic” to the “Aesthetic.” We therefore have to be very attentive to the
way in which Kant, in the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” seeks to dem¬
onstrate the nonconceptual—sensible and intuitive—character of the
notions of space and of time. His argument, aimed directly at Leibniz
and at his reduction of sensibility to a “confused intelligible,” might
seem purely formal, but in fact it touches upon one of the profoundest
questions in the history of philosophy, that of the status of the irrational,
of the nonconceptual. They divide up into two moments whose mean¬
ing and significance we can briefly indicate.
“Space is no discursive or, as it is said, general concept of the rela¬
tions of things, but a pure intuition. For first of all one can only repre¬
sent a single space to oneself, and when one speaks of many spaces one
understands by that only parts of one and the same space. Furthermore
these parts cannot precede this one all-encompassing space as their
component parts (so that their aggregate could be possible) but are only
thinkable as existing in it” (ibid., p. 53). This first aspect of the argu¬
ment has to do with the nature of both the totality and the continuity
which characterize space (and time). It can be interpreted in the follow¬
ing way. Every concept is, always, a synthesis of preexisting properties

81
THREE

or elements; in the concept, totalization and continuity are obtained

through the aggregation of parts. For space and for time, on the con¬
trary, it is totality and continuity that precede the parts since, to borrow
Husserl’s vocabulary, the parts of space are thought of against the ho¬
rizon of an ungraspable totality, as limitations coming after this totality.
The argument’s second moment is, so to speak, complementary. It
is contained in one formula: “Space is represented as an infinite given
magnitude” (ibid.), which sufficiently proves its nonconceptual charac¬
ter: no concept encompasses in its very signification the measure of
its extension. The definition of the concept “table” does not inform us
of the number of tables existing in the world. But the representation of
space is connected to the idea of the infinity of its parts. More than that,
the infinity of space is antecedent, coming before the parts “cut out”
of it.
This line of argument, which brings Kant to challenge Leibniz’s for¬
mulation of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, leads him to
introduce irrationality (nonconceptuality) into the heart of human
knowledge. What is outside the concept, what radically evades all at¬
tempt at rationalization, or even explanation, is the fact that things are
given us hie et nunc, in space and time. This thesis will find its way into
Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology. By affirming the sensible’s
autonomy from the concept, it challenges the most basic presupposi¬
tions of traditional metaphysics.

CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGY

The connection that unites the phenomenological tradition to critical

philosophy can be made still more useful and exact. It will enable us to
better appreciate the importance of Kant’s aesthetics within the general
history of the link between the autonomization of the sensible and the
eclipse of the metaphysical figure of the divine.
In What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger distinguishes and opposes two
different notions of the totality of beings or of the existent [seiend,
etant]. As he asks himself about the meaning of nothingness, under¬
stood as the “radical negation of the totality of the existent,”2 Heideg¬
ger remarks that the notion of the “totality of the existent” brings up a
special problem: “how should we, who are essentially finite, make the
whole of beings penetrable in themselves and especially for us? We can
of course conjure up the whole of beings in an ‘idea.’”
The totality of beings thus appears to be accessible only in the mode

82
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

of the imaginary, only in the mode of the “Idea.” Heidegger uses the
term “Idea” here in its Kantian sense: a “thought” or “thinking” of the
totality which can never become “knowledge,” which can never be
presented. Thus, the negation of such an ideal totality does not put
us in the presence of Nothingness or the nothing, but only in the pres¬
ence of a nothing itself imagined or ideal: “In this way do we attain the
formal concept of the imagined nothing but never the nothing itself”
(ibid.).
Heidegger does not here develop the reasons why the totality of
beings is only accessible in the mode of the Idea. He only indicates that
that is how it is for us “finite beings.” He does however specify that
there is another way of grasping the totality, it consists in “finding one¬
self in the midst of beings as a whole”: “In the end an essential dis¬
tinction prevails between comprehending the ensemble of beings in
themselves and finding oneself in the midst of beings as a whole.” This
is an allusion to the notion of “Being-in-the-world” that was developed
in Being and Time. We feel ourselves to be in the midst of the ensemble
of beings when we see that each thing “gives” or unveils itself against a
background, and this background is in turn unveiled against another
background, so that from background to background and from horizon
to horizon it is impossible to ever arrive at an ultimate, final foundation.
It is in this process that we experience the nothing, the experience of
anxiety, this nonpsychological feeling of the radical contingency of be¬
ings: “In the slipping away of beings only this ‘no hold on things’ comes
over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing” (ibid.). Thus, it is by
virtue of a certain grasp of the totality that we experience the feeling of
anxiety, of fimtude, of the nothing, of non-being, that is to say, of Being.
But at the same time we understand why we “finite beings” can only
grasp the ensemble of beings in themselves through an Idea. It is in fact
the second way of grasping the totality of beings (the “finding oneself
in the midst of beings as a whole”) which prevents the first way from
being anything other than an Idea (in the Kantian sense).
We can convince ourselves easily that these two notions of totality
are borrowed from Kant if we recall, first of all what Kant understands
by Idea, then the definitions he gives of “infinite given magnitudes.”
Kant stated with great clarity in the Prolegomena to All Future Meta¬
physics (1783) the thesis that “the totality of all possible experience is
not itself an experience,” yet remains for reason “a necessary task [Auf-
gabe\ whose mere representation requires concepts entirely different
from the pure concepts of the understanding.” What the Idea represents

83
THREE

can never be given in intuition; it is thus negatively defined as a “nec¬

essary concept of reason to which no adequate object can be given
through the senses.” Positively considered, Ideas only point to a “prob¬
lem,” a task; it’s in this that they have a regulative usage aimed at set¬
ting up a system defined as the “unity of various fields of knowledge
under one Idea.”3 Transcendental ideas thus aim at constituting a sys¬
tem of experience to which they invite the understanding. This system¬
atic totality, which would be made up of the successive accretion of the
beings constructed by science itself, always remains an Idea, meaning a
“task” to accomplish or, as the third Critique puts it, a “principle of
reflection.”
But there is yet another way of grasping the totality, the one aimed
for in the definition of space and time as “infinite given magnitudes.” In
a chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason entitled “On the Amphiboly
of the Concepts of Reflection,” space and time are categorized as forms
of “nothing” [ens imaginarium]. They are indeed, for a simple reason,
nothing in consciousness. For there to be consciousness there has to be
synthesis and therefore application of the categories, and that can only
happen if there is already a content in the intuitions. Pure time and pure
space are thus never perceived in themselves, but only when there is a
content already situated in time. Space and time, as horizons beyond
the bounds of any representation, are thus nothings which nevertheless,
says Kant, are “something”: pure space and time are “certainly some¬
thing as forms of intuition, but are not themselves intuited objects.”
This definition of empty space as nothingness enables us to better
understand the notion of infinite given magnitude. It does not at all
mean that space is given in totality, in its infinity, in a representation.
Kant is definitive on this point when he writes in a text against Eber-
hard that it is impossible “to survey the whole of infinite given space, to
ever gather in our representation what never ceases, as if it were some
thing which ends somewhere . . . The understanding can encompass the
infinite no more than sensibility can.” That space is an infinite given
magnitude means only that it always already oversteps any representa¬
tion and, as such, as an overstepping, it is this nothing which is yet
“something.” This comes down to saying that our finitude is itself un¬
limited, that we are infinitely finite. If space is an infinite given totality
(meaning not constituted by the accretion of parts), it never falls within
a representation but rather oversteps all representation. This “over¬
stepping” is called “nothing” by Kant, and this nothing is itself the
unlimited sign of our finitude. The totality that the Idea aims for, on the

84
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

other hand, truly is a representation, but not one that is ever “given.” It
is only thought, not known, since in the final analysis it only rep¬
resents a task, an invitation to add up indefinitely the beings that science
constructs.
These two conceptions of the totality are not unconnected, and we
could even say that one forces the other to be only an idea. If it is indeed
impossible to survey space, to enclose it in a representation which it
always precedes, then the actualization of an achieved system of expe¬
rience is, also, forever impossible. These “nothings” that are the a priori
forms of sensibility always guarantee an exteriority irreducible to rep¬
resentation and, as such, they resist any attempt at a closure of the sys¬
tem of experience.

THE SOLUTION TO THE ANTINOMY OF TASTE:

FROM THE INDIVIDUAL TO THE SUBJECT

This relation of finitude to the rational Idea of system makes especially

clear what type of solution Kant wishes to put forth, concerning the
antinomy of taste, in his Critique of the Faculty of judgment [or Cri¬
tique of judgment in the English tradition]. For opposing reasons, both
classical rationalism and sensualist empiricism share the same failing:
they lead to founding the “common sense” that emerges around the
beautiful object in such a fashion that subjectivity becomes, so to speak,
reified and thereby negated. Among the classicists, the personality spe¬
cific to the author of a judgment of taste is dissolved in a universal
reason that behaves quite dogmatically toward the particular. Among
empiricists, the subject’s particularity does seem, at first, to be pre¬
served; but in the end intersubjectivity is reduced to a purely material
principle, to the idea of a psychic and organic structure common to a
species of individuals. From that point on, the aesthetic experience
needs nothing further that is specifically human, the Beautiful is but a
variety of the pleasant, and the art of cooking, the model for aesthetics
in general.
This is the question raised by the antinomy of taste: how to keep
the idea of a possible universality of taste, without the principle of this
common sense negating a subjectivity conceived of in a nonmetaphy¬
sical, non-“anthropological” way, as man’s humanity? (I shall come
back to the non-“anthropological” character of man’s humanity later
in this chapter.) In other words, how to think aesthetic intersubjectivity
without grounding it either on a dogmatic reason or on a psycho-

85
THREE

physiological empirical structure? Inversely, how to maintain the ab¬

solute particularity of taste without giving in to the formula, “to each
his own taste,” thus destroying the claim to universality without which
mere aesthetic discussion would lose all significance? “Where one can
argue, one should also have some hope of agreeing.”
Rationalism and empiricism are both built upon a reifying concep¬
tion of subjectivity; both think the cogito monadically, as a thing with¬
drawn into itself—whereby they both lead, at first, to solipsism, and, in
the end, have recourse to the idea of a preestablished harmony (whether
harmony of spirits or of bodies) in order to solve the problem of inter¬
subjectivity. The logic behind this solution has to be abolished through
the elaboration of a novel way of thinking about the subject which Kant
calls Reflection, and which is already implicit in the distinction between
determinant and reflective judgments on which the entire aesthetic
theory developed in the third Critique is based:4

Judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained

under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, or law) is given, then
the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determinant. (This is so
even where such a judgment is transcendental and thereby provides the condi¬
tions a priori in conformity with which alone subsumption under that universal
can be carried out.) If, however, only the particular is given and the universal
has to be found for it, then the judgment is simply reflective.5

It is in these terms that Kant works out the division between the
judgment of cognition, a determinant judgment, and the judgment of
taste, a reflective judgment. With this simple distinction Kant shows
himself already diametrically opposed to rationalist classicism, which
saw aesthetic judgment and cognitive judgment as a confluence. Kant
considers it possible to set up a “poetic art,” which would be a veritable
science of the production of the Beautiful. The originality of the Kantian
position is located in the notion of reflection, which therefore has to be
made more precise.
The word “reflection”—univocal in Kant, in the Critique of Pure
Reason as much as in the Critique of Judgment—very generally desig¬
nates an intellectual activity characterized by five sequences or mo¬
ments. A brief example can serve as illustration as well as prepare for
the analysis of the aesthetic judgment.6 To create the empirical concept
of a collection of objects unknown to us—for example, of a kind of tree
never before identified—we have to begin with a classification. By com¬
paring likenesses, by abstracting out differences we judge unessential,
86
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

we can bring together the objects under consideration into a common

class, and thus create an empirical concept to which we can attach a
name. In this simple operation, the five constitutive moments of reflec¬
tion of the reflective judgment—are already present:
1. First of all, the activity of reflection clearly proceeds from the
particular to the universal (from the individuals to the general class).
2. The general (or the universal) is not given before the activity of
reflection but only through it and after it—wherein the reflective judg¬
ment is the opposite of the determinant judgment, which goes from a
universal we already have to the particular, and thus constitutes only an
application of the universal.
3. Although the general is not given as a concept or as determined
laws at the beginning of the reflective operation, there is all the same an
indeterminate horizon of expectations serving as clue or, in Kant’s ex¬
pression, principle to reflection. In our example this principle comes
from the logic of classes. It consists in the expectation or the require¬
ment that the real will let itself be classified and thus conform to logic.
The universal then exists, not as a concept, but in the status of Idea, of
a regulative principle of reflection.
4. This operation implicitly supposes that it is perfectly contingent
whether the real does or does not correspond to the imperatives of logi¬
cal rationality that we do not impose on it, but to which we submit it;
nothing stops us from thinking that the real could very well not satisfy
our subjective requirement of logical systematicity, so that finally we
could constitute neither genera nor species. To deny this proposition
would be to postulate the rationality of the real a priori and, in the final
analysis, to once again grant objectivity to the idea of a divine point of
view from which the world would be wholly intelligible.
5. The activity of reflection thus turns out to be at the origin of a
satisfaction Kant calls aesthetic, and which refers to the notion of fi¬
nality. Because the real, after the deconstruction of metaphysics and the
ontological argument, appears radically contingent when compared to
our requirement for rationality, the reflecting subject can experience
pleasure when, having had no guarantee of it, he observes an agreement
between the real and his requirements.
These five moments of the reflecting activity make up the intimate
structure of the judgment of taste. As in the operation which presides
over the creation of empirical concepts, it is the Idea of system, the Idea
of an entirely intelligible world—the very one God would see—which
is the principle of the aesthetic reflection. And that’s the reason why the

87
THREE

Kantian definition of the beautiful object as one that reconciles nature

and spirit looks forward to the theories of romanticism. The connection
between the idea of system as principle of reflection and the definition
of the beautiful as the reconciliation of sensibility and intelligence can
be stated succinctly: despite the demonstration of the illusoriness of the
Idea of God, this Idea continues to play a regulatory role for all intellec¬
tual activity. It points to the unsatisfiable but forever present demand
for a perfect rationalization of the real, and therefore for a complete
subsumption of the sensual matter of knowledge under an intelligible
form (the categorial structure). Stated more clearly: in conformity with
Leibniz’s philosophy, if we could situate ourselves at God’s point of
view, there would no longer be any distinction for us between the sen¬
sible and the intelligible, intuition and concept, particular and universal,
nature and spirit, etc. That such a point of view can never be ours, that
it cannot, furthermore, relativize man’s finite point of view, is the end
result of this purely ideal status. It remains nevertheless true that, as a
mere requirement of reason, the Idea of God or of system can at times
be, if not entirely “fulfilled” (Kant says “presented”), at least partially
or “symbolically” evoked by certain objects. The Beautiful is, precisely,
one of these objects; as a partial reconciliation of nature and spirit, of
sensibility and concepts, it functions as a contingent trace—dependent
on the real itself—of this necessary Idea of reason. Reflection’s five con¬
stitutive moments will thus be present in the judgment of taste, which
proceeds (1) from the particular (the beautiful object) to the universal
(the requirement of a perfect union of the sensible and the intelligible);
(2) without a determined concept (this requirement points to nothing
which could furnish the substance of a “poetic art”); (3) and this since
only the Idea of God or of system can here provide the principle for
reflection; (4) the existence of the beautiful object being contingent in
relation to this idea; (5) the similarly contingent agreement between a
particular real and the universal requirement for systematicity bringing
about aesthetic pleasure.
The solution to the antinomy of taste here finds its explanation and
its meaning. Unlike what classical rationalism maintains, the judgment
of taste is not based on determinate concepts (or rules); it is thus im¬
possible to “argue” about it as if it were a judgment of scientific knowl¬
edge. Yet it is not thereby confined to the pure empirical subjectivity of
feeling, since it rests on the presence of an object which, if it is beautiful
(we shall accept that for the sake of argument), will awaken a necessary
idea of reason, as such common to humanity. It is through referring to

88
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

this indeterminate idea (it merely calls for the reconciliation of the sen¬
sible and the intelligible without stating what precisely this reconcilia¬
tion could consist in) that it becomes possible to “argue” about taste
and to expand the sphere of subjectivity in order to envision a nondog-
matic sharing of the aesthetic experience with an other, in so far as this
other is another human.

SCIENCE AND BEAUTY: THE END OF THE CLASSICAL IDEAL

OF AN OBJECTIVITY OF TASTE

The exact difference between the judgment of knowledge (the determi¬

nant judgment) and the judgment of taste (reflective judgment) should
be made more precise in order to bring to light the ultimate ground for
the distinction that the solution to the antinomy of taste effects between
a disputatio, in which subjective particularity is canceled within an im¬
perious rationality, and discussion, in which the same particularity,
while remaining particular, aims nonetheless to expand, up to the point
of claiming, without demonstration, without the mediation of a con¬
cept, universality.
Let us first of all consider the case of a judgment aiming at scientific
objectivity. In precritical philosophy, and especially in Cartesianism, the
problem of objectivity is, according to Kant, put in the following terms:
to ask if our representations of objects are “true” is to try to know if
they are adequate to the object as it exists in itself, outside my represen¬
tation. If we reflect on this carefully we will realize that, put that way,
the problem of objectivity is insoluble a priori: by definition I can never
know what the object is in itself, without my observation of it. By defi¬
nition, the object I’m considering is always an object for me, an object
of my representation and, to know what this object is in itself, I would
have, so to speak, to leave my consciousness—which is, of course, im¬
possible. In the precritical philosophies, in the philosophies which con¬
ceive of the cogito as a subject closed in upon its consciousness, as a
monad prisoner of its own representations, the very positioning of the
problem of objectivity can only, following Kant, lead to false solutions.
One of them consists in having God intervene (the divine guarantee or
the preestablished harmony) to assure the connection between the “ob¬
ject for us” and the “thing in itself” (or whatever is designated as such).
The other is the skepticism of which Berkeley’s philosophy is the most
spectacular example. Thus, either we ground intersubjectivity on the
dogmatic intervention of a deus ex machina, or we renounce objectivity

89
THREE

and accept complete relativism or, as they called it in Kant’s day, philo¬
sophical “egoism.”
As we have seen, the antinomy of taste reproduces this structure in
many ways. The Critique of Pure Reason argues that we have to carry
out a “refutation of idealism,” to go beyond the viewpoints of dogmatic
or skeptic cogitos and define objectivity independently of the notions of
interiority and exteriority to which the monadic conceptions of the sub¬
ject implicitly refer. Objectivity, in critical philosophy, will no longer
designate what is external to representation but rather the universally
valid character of propositions which effectuate an association or syn¬
thesis of representations."' Subjective and objective will then be opposed
as an association of representations valid only for me, and an associa¬
tion of universally valid representations (and here intersubjectivity is
definitively placed at the heart of objectivity). We shall have to distin¬
guish between representations valid only for me (subjective) and those
which are universally valid (objective) by going to the representations
themselves or, rather, to their various syntheses, and no longer through
reference to an external “thing-in-itself.”
The task is thus, to borrow again Husserl’s formula, that of ground¬
ing “transcendence” (objectivity, intersubjectivity) within “immanence”
(without “exiting from” representations). The determinant scientific
judgment aims at such a transcendence. Let us look at the example of
a judgment stating there is a causal relation between two phenomena.
Two elements come into play which allow us, according to Kant, to
claim objectivity in the link of the effect to the cause:
—We first have to have a universal rule (the determinant judgment
proceeds from the universal to the particular). In this case it is the
principle of causality, according to which every effect necessarily has a
cause.
—But for it to be truly scientific, and not merely metaphysical, this
law must also provide a criterion of application to phenomena. Since
phenomena all take place in time, the principle of causality will apply
to any succession of which it can be experimentally shown, by isolating
variables, that it is irreversible.
If I follow this criterion in applying this law, I cannot “freely” as¬
sociate just any phenomenon to just any other. Or, more exactly, if I

" Apparently, one could trace such a definition of objectivity back to Leibniz.
But that would be to forget that the demonstration of God’s existence requires,
in a sense, a leap outside representation, a belief in the in-itself.

90
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

associate my representations without taking into account the law and

its criterion, the associations I produce will have no objectivity and will
remain purely subjective.
We must therefore distinguish, within the sphere of theoretical phi¬
losophy, between two types of association: the purely empirical type
which has but a subjective meaning, and the objective, which presup¬
poses the intervention of a concept, that is, of a rule of synthesis at the
same time determinate and determinant. If, for instance, I’m looking at
the wall in front of me while twisting my head from left to right, I could
feel, at the purely subjective level of perception, that the wall “exists
from left to right.” But it is clear that a proposition founded on such a
feeling has no objectivity and that, in truth, the parts of the wall exist
“simultaneously,” that I therefore have to “posit them together,” to
“synthesize” them, to supersede my particular perception and arrive at
objectivity.
The way the judgment of taste functions should be described in re¬
lation to these two types of associations (empirical subjective associa¬
tion, conceptual objective association). It in fact participates in both
without thereby becoming identical with either. The feeling of beauty—
according to the analysis developed in the third Critique—and the aes¬
thetic pleasure that accompanies it are born of a “free” association of
the imagination: when there is a perception of a beautiful object, the
imagination, “the most powerful sensible faculty,” associated images
without this linking up being in any way regulated by a concept. From
this point of view, this imaginary interplay is closer to an empirical sub¬
jective association than to a regulated synthesis aimed at producing a
scientific judgment. But although this interplay is quite free in that it
obeys no rule, everything nevertheless takes place as if it followed a
certain “logic,” as if there were, in Kant’s own formulation, a “legality
of the contingent,” a legality without concept. In music, the art seem¬
ingly the most distant from the theoretical sphere (because it offers no
analogies with vision), the sounds and the associations of images they
bring forth in us seem to be organized, seem to be structured as if they
had some sense, as if they wanted to say something (which is why mu¬
sic can so easily, without our understanding how, “express feelings”).
From this point of view the play of the imagination, although it remains
purely within the order of sensibility and has recourse to no concept to
regulate its organization, all the same structures itself as if it could, of
itself, satisfy the requirements of the rules for a judgment of knowledge.
There is thus a free and contingent agreement between the imagi-

91
THREE

nation and the understanding, an agreement completely unforeseeable

and ungovernable—which is why there can be neither a poetic crafts¬
manship (ars poetique) nor any science of the Beautiful however de¬
fined. And this agreement of the sensual and the intellectual faculties in
turn functions as a symbolic trace, as a beginning for the bringing into
reality of those Ideas of reason which, as we have seen, to be “pre¬
sented,” need to actualize a perfect reconciliation of the sensible and the
intelligible corresponding to the point of view a divine understanding
would have upon the world—which can be represented by the accom¬
panying diagram.

92
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

In reflection s ascension from the particular to the indeterminate

Idea, the two extreme moments are the essential ones. If the particular
beautiful object did not contingently bring about the agreement of the
faculties demanded by the Idea of system, if this agreement were pro¬
duced in some artificial and voluntarist fashion, the requirement of
systematicity included in the Idea of God, understood as regulative prin¬
ciple of reflection, would not at all be fulfilled. Fulfillment comes from
the feeling of finality or end-purposiveness called forth in us by the
beautiful object in as much as it is exterior to us and contingent in
relation to our principles, everything happening as if the object only
existed to satisfy of itself our requirement for rationality (for reconcili¬
ation of the sensible and the intelligible). What is pleasing here is that
the real should, without our intervention, come to satisfy our entirely
subjective demands. Natural Beauty will thus be held to be the model
for artistic beauty (which explains the deep significance of the Kantian
theory of genius, a subject I’ll come back to). On the other hand, if the
Ideas of reason, although indeterminate, were not presumed to be com¬
mon to humanity, the beautiful object, when stirring up these ideas,
would summon up no common sense, not even the project, in case of
discord, of discussing taste, since, to discuss, “one must at least have the
hope of coming to an agreement.”

A NEW WAY OF THINKING THE SUBJECT:

REFLECTION AND THE COMMON SENSE

Contingency of beauty and universality of the horizon of expectations

on which the judgment of taste is based are the two terms between
which reflection oscillates. We have already seen how, from a logical
point of view, the reflective activity consists first of all in the compari¬
son, following the concepts of identity and difference, of the elements
which make up species and genera. This usage of the word, which goes
back to Wolff’s psychology,7 has an appendix in a theory of the Witz,
of the “mind” or “spirit,” understood as the capacity to establish
unforeseen relations between apparently distant or quite different ele¬
ments.8 But to this “expansion of the object,” as Kant puts it, corre¬
sponds also an “expansion of the subject” through which the latter
ceases to be contained within the narrow frontiers of monadical egoism
and arrives at the sphere of “the common sense”:

93
THREE

Under the sensus communis we must understand the Idea of a sense com¬
mon to all, that is, a faculty of judgment, that in its reflection takes into account
in thoughts (a priori) everyone else’s mode of representation, in order simulta¬
neously to maintain its judgment within the whole of human reason, and
thereby to escape the illusion that, stemming from subjective private conditions
which could easily be taken to be objective, would have a disadvantageous in¬
fluence on the judgment.9

Therefrom the fundamental maxim of the reflective faculty of judg¬

ment, the maxim of “expanded thinking”: “Think in every other one’s
place” [An der Stelle jedes anderen denken].10
It’s at this point of the Kantian argumentation that the solution to
the antinomy of taste is reached, and we must here delineate the exact
nature of that which at the same time brings Kant near but also sepa¬
rates him radically from the two points of view which make up the
antinomy. Neither dogmatic rationalism nor empiricism aim, strictly
speaking, at this common sense. In the former the work of art seeks a
universality founded on reason, while in the latter, despite its relativism
in principle, the work can achieve, as is the case in Hume, an empiri¬
cally founded generality, an agreement resulting from sympathy under¬
stood in its strict sense, as the fact of sharing the same feeling. Kant’s
position might seem near to that of rationalism and empiricism in cer¬
tain ways: isn’t the common sense established, in the very passage we
have just read, through a very classical reference to “the whole of hu¬
man reason”? And besides, doesn’t this common sense, as the expres¬
sion indicates, have to do with sensibility, with sentiment? But despite
appearances, the difference between the Kantian and the classical ratio¬
nalist positions is fundamental. If the expansion of reflection that gen¬
erates a common sense is in fact conceived of in reference to reason, this
reason is no longer the Cartesians’ determining reason, but the indeter¬
minate Idea of an agreement of the sensible imagination and of the un¬
derstanding—an Idea itself only contingently and unforeseeably evoked
by the emergence of natural or genial beauty. The beautiful thus truly
remains a matter of feeling and sensibility. But there again, in contrast
with what takes place in empiricism, we must carefully avoid confusing
feeling and sympathy, as one of Kant’s important Reflections points out:
“The property man possesses of being able to judge the particular only
in the universal is sentiment. Sympathy is entirely different: it has to do
only with the particular, although the particular in others [Sie geht blofi
aufdes Particulare, obgleicb an anderen]”; in sympathy “we do not at all
94
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

put ourselves in the Idea, but in the place of others”11 as simply empiri¬
cal beings and not as humanity in general. Within empiricist aesthetics,
the common sense remains a simple factual generality and its rightful
status is, therefore, merely particular (meaning linked to the psycho¬
logical and physiological particularities of this animal species, itself par¬
ticular, that is humanity).
We must therefore reject sympathy as much as dogmatic reason
when we turn to a reflection on the transcendental conditions of pos¬
sibility of a truly inter-subjective aesthetic common sense. In rational¬
ism as in empiricism the foundation of the “common sense” is not truly
an intersubjective foundation since it nullifies the very idea of subjec¬
tivity, in the first case absorbed by an impersonal universal, and in the
second by a simple material structure, both of them excluding the very
possibility of discussion. For discussion, and all criticism with it (includ¬
ing of course art criticism), presumes both admitting a common point
of view, and the fact that this point of view is not conceptual but in¬
determinate. In other words, the linking up of a particular sentiment
and a universal Idea as operated by reflection, with the aim of establish¬
ing a direct communication between individuals, a non—conceptually-
grounded common sense.

"SENSUS COMMUNIS" OR "DIFFERENCE"

It has sometimes been objected against such an interpretation of the

Critique of Judgment that, “far from permitting a ‘direct communica¬
tion,’ the exercise of the reflective judgment gives rise rather to the sen¬
timent of a promised and ever differed community”; that the reflective
judgment, unable to achieve a philosophy of the “common sense” and
of intersubjectivity, on the contrary sketches out an “inventive proce¬
dure which, upon the trace of the unknown, of the unacceptable, breaks
the constituted norms, explodes the consensus, reanimates the sense of
difference [du differend].”12
This objection, which claims phenomenological inspiration and re¬
fers willingly back to Heidegger’s reading of Kant, in fact rests upon a
misunderstanding, which can be easily cleared up, and on an error,
which jeopardizes in its very principles any interpretation of the third
Critique aiming to find in it a mere philosophy of “difference.”
The misunderstanding has to do with the notion of “direct com¬
munication.” The expression does not at all mean, as the objection sug¬
gests, that the taste judgment could be the object of an instant and easy

95
THREE

consensus among individuals. Must we cite Hume once again? “The

great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world,
is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observation.” We
could not put it better: insistence on “difference of opinion” in general
is banal, but in matters of taste it becomes so trivial we could hardly
understand how it could be the object of a philosophical passion. When
1 evoke the idea of a direct or immediate communication it is obviously
not to deny the effectively “uncircumventable” existence of a difference
without which there would not even be aesthetic discussion, but to in¬
dicate that, unlike what happens in the realms of ethics and science,
aesthetic intersubjectivity does not go through the mediation of a deter¬
minate law or concept, as Kant himself never ceases to remind us in the
most explicit way: “he who judges with taste . . . may take his sentiment
to be generally communicable, and this without the mediation of con¬
cepts'" (§ 39); there is also in the judgment of taste a “general commu¬
nicability of sensation (pleasure or displeasure), and such a one that
takes place without a concept” (§ 17); and also, “one could even define
taste as the faculty of judgment that makes our feeling about a given
representation universally communicable without the mediation of a
concept” (§ 40), etc. Short of denying the existence of these texts—and
with them the central thesis of Kantian aesthetics—I don’t see how one
could consider the fact of talking about “immediate” or “direct” com¬
munication, when referring to aesthetic communication, to be “the
most serious misinterpretation committed by the Neo-Kantians (ibid.).
We can go even further: Kant takes up here, in the aesthetic do¬
main, the famous opposition Rousseau worked out in his Letter to
d’Alembert on Spectacles between the theater, symbol of the monarchy,
of the indirect communication which goes through the intermediary of
the stage, and the festival, symbol of democracy, of the direct commu¬
nication where the spectators’ eyes are not directed toward an external
object but rather themselves provide the show, among themselves. “Let
us not adopt,” as Rousseau wrote,

these exclusive spectacles that lugubriously enclose a small number of persons

in an obscure den, that hold them, timorous and immobile, in silence and
inaction . . . No, happy peoples, those are not your festivals! It is in the open
air, it is under the sky that you must gather together and give yourselves over to
the sweet feeling of your happiness ... But what will be in the end the objects
of these spectacles? What will be shown there? Nothing, if you so will. Under
liberty, everywhere affluence reigns well-being will reign also. Plant a stake

96
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

crowned with flowers in the middle of a square, gather the people there, and
you will have a feast. Do more: make the spectators the spectacle, give the
actors: themselves; make every one see and love himself in the others, so that
they will all be more united.

That’s exactly the theme Kant, mutatis mutandis, transposes into the
third Critique and which grounds an aesthetic conception of the public
sphere as an intersubjective space of free discussion not mediated by a
concept or a rule—which in no way means, as we can see, some sort of
“abolition of difference” but on the contrary, the articulation of differ¬
ence with the idea of the common sense.
When thinking about this articulation, the element that makes the
third Critique so interesting and which radically distinguishes it from a
trivial philosophy of difference, we have to be careful and not make a
mistake often thought of as something obvious: although the idea of an
“ideal community,” of a perfect reconciliation of individuals within an
undistorted communication, is obviously just that, an Idea, it would be
against both the letter and the spirit of the Kantian aesthetic to think
that the common sense is nothing but a thoroughly ideal horizon. The
problem of the status of the common sense is infinitely more compli¬
cated than is suggested by the argument that it is only a “fragile and
ever differed community.”
If by that is meant that aesthetic discussion aims at a highly hypo¬
thetical agreement, that our tastes are not necessarily shared, etc., we
fall back on commonplaces that cannot be denied. But if one means by
it that the common sense has no other status than an ideal one, a serious
mistake would be made concerning the nature of the bond uniting rea¬
son and the empirical realm. The Idea of perfect intersubjectivity is a
common sense which de facto arrives at a sometimes impressive level of
generality, to which the Critique of judgment intends to also accord a
philosophical, and not merely ideological, status. This is a crucial point,
bringing into play as it does the difference in status the universal enjoys
vis-a-vis the particular within theoretical philosophy and in aesthetics.
In theoretical philosophy the universal can only behave imperiously
toward the particular. Either a law is scientific or it isn’t a law, and if
Newton had been the only one to think he was right, he would have
been right to think so. That is a consequence of the essential nature of
the determinant judgment. In the sphere of taste on the other hand, the
relation between universal and particular, between idea and empirical
realm, is infinitely more nuanced. It is of course always possible that an

97
THREE

empirical consensus is in fact ideological; that it is, as they say, a mere

fashion. But as critic I have to acknowledge that I have at my disposal
no absolute universal criterion in the order of the reflective judgment
that would allow me to decide in complete certainty and I have to ad¬
mit, at least by way of hypothesis, that the empirical consensus I observe
around those works of art said to be “great” could also, for the same
reason, be the sign of a symbolical evocation of the Ideas of reason.
Which is why, as mentioned before, only the path of discussion is open
to me. In other words, it is of the essence of the reflective judgment that
in it the claim to universality behave in an a priori “friendly” way to¬
wards the particular, including—and perhaps especially—when the lat¬
ter spontaneously takes the form of empirical common sense. Not to
admit this proposition, and I don’t see in what way it implies some sort
of “surrender to the ideologies of consensus,” is quite simply to forbid
oneself to understand what differentiates the Critique of Pure Reason
from the Critique of Judgment.
Kant is quite explicit on this crucial point. On the one hand, it is
clear that an empirical consensus is never, all alone, the proof of the
apodictic quality of the judgments of taste it is based on, and that from
it we can never deduce the necessity of our adherence. Because if the
necessity of the aesthetic judgment “is not a theoretical objective neces¬
sity, where it can be known a priori that everyone will feel pleasure from
the object called beautiful by me . . . much less can [necessity] be con¬
cluded from the universality of experience (from a thoroughgoing una¬
nimity of judgments on the beauty of a certain object). It is not just that
experience would hardly furnish very many examples; no concept of the
necessity of these judgments can be grounded on empirical judgments”
(§ 18). Yet an empirical consensus—and we can note in passing that
Kant does not absolutely exclude the possibility of aesthetic unanim¬
ity—is to be neither held in contempt nor neglected; nor can it be in the
framework of the reflective judgment in which it constitutes, if not an
absolute a priori criterion, an empirical one, creating, so to speak, a
presumption in favor of authenticity which must be criticized as such.
Although “there can be no objective rule of taste which would deter¬
mine through concepts what is beautiful,” there remains nonetheless
“the general communicability of sensation (of pleasure or displeasure),
and such a one that takes place without a concept. It produces the una¬
nimity, as far as is possible, of all epochs and peoples in respect of [the
subject’s] feelings towards the representations of certain objects. This is

98
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

the empirical criterion—however weak and, for its presumption, barely

sufficient—for the provenance of such a taste, conserved throughout
many occasions, from a principle that is deeply hidden and, common to
all, of unanimity in the evaluation of the forms in which objects are
given them” (§ 17).
Such a text would make no sense in the Critique of Pure Reason,
since it means, contrary to what the objections we talked about suggest,
that the common sense, even though empirical and particular, must at
least be taken into consideration in the reflective judgment, since it
could be the case that it is itself the symbolic trace of an Idea. That is
the reason why Kant can calmly maintain that “beautiful nature con¬
tains innumerable things about which we readily admit the harmony of
everyone’s judgment with our own, and we may even expect it without
much risk of being misled”—a text that would be completely unintelli¬
gible if it were true that in his eyes the reflective judgment always re¬
ferred back to the mere Idea of a “fragile and ever differed community.”
Things are more complicated than that, as we can see, and the com¬
mon sense cannot be reduced to either a de facto consensus nor to a
pure idea. In its empirical generality it constitutes, as it were, a mixture,
a symbolic trace of Ideas—at least if it is not ideological. At this point
criticism must come in, the discussion must start which can no more be
abolished in the name of difference than in that of the universal. For, in
the judgment of taste, “one sollicits everyone else’s adherence because
one possesses a principle common to all; one could always count on
this adherence if one could always be sure that the case at hand were
correctly subsumed under the principl e” (§ 19).

THE SUBLIME AND THE BAROQUE: THE ARTICULATION

OF "DIFFERENCE" AND OF THE UNIVERSAL IDEA

It may be objected that the interpretation put forward here is valid in

the case of the reflective judgment concerning the beautiful, but that,
with the sublime, Kant orients himself resolutely towards thought of the
“excess,” of the “formless,” of “difference” [differend], which no longer
has any consensual or universalist pretensions. Does he not say explic¬
itly that if, in matters concerning the beautiful, we can often ascribe
assent to others, “with our judgments on sublimity in nature we cannot
so easily promise ourselves access to others”? (§ 29). And, unlike what
happens with the beautiful, do we not have with the sublime a case of

99
THREE

“presentation that there is an unpresentable,” since the aesthetic feeling

of pleasure or pain is not brought about by the agreement of faculties
but by their disorder and chaos?
I believe on the contrary that with sublimity, just because there
is indeed a problem of the “unpresentable,” of that which “surpasses”
all representation, Kant carries the project through to its ultimate
consequences—not of sketching out a philosophy of difference, but of
articulating this difference (that which escapes representation) with
Ideas, understood as principles of reflection. We must dwell on this be¬
cause, if my hypothesis is correct, it’s with the philosophy of the sublime
that the Kantian aesthetic, and above all the conception of the reflective
subject it puts into action, reaches its summit.
Let us begin by examining the Kantian definition of the sublime.
Certain passages of the third Critique seem to place sublimity either in
nature or in the Ideas of reason, or yet again in the very activity of the
imagination. The global definition (valid for the “mathematically” as
for the “dynamically” sublime) given in the “General Remark on the
Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgements” has it that the sublime
is “an object (of nature) whose representation [Vorstellung] prepares
the mind to conceive of the unattainability of nature as a presentation
[Darstellung] of Ideas (§ 29). The sublime thus calls upon the three
terms we have evoked: the object of nature, the mind (imagination), and
the Ideas of reason. Through the contemplation of a natural object (for
instance the ocean), the imagination is led to the temptation of present¬
ing the Idea of a whole in one single intuition. It fails, and according to
Kant this failure functions as a “negative presentation” of an Idea
whose adequate presentation is by definition impossible: “the authentic
sublime cannot be contained in any sensual form but has to do only
with Ideas of reason. Although no adequate presentation of the latter is
possible, they can be aroused and brought to mind through this very
inadequacy, which allows itself to be sensually presented ” (S 23).
What is presented in the sublime has nothing “objective” about it.
Ideas are not evoked here by any intuition, not even a “symbolic” and
partial one. It is the very failure of the imagination, in so far as it bears
witness that there is that which is nonpresentable, that is called upon
and which, as such, evokes the Ideas. “The disposition of the mind upon
feeling sublimity encourages its receptivity for Ideas; it is in nature’s
very unsuitability to them, and thereby in their presupposition and in
the imagination’s endeavors to treat nature as a scheme for them, that
lies that which is at once forbidding yet attractive for sensibility” (§ 29).
1 00
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

What is sublime is thus in truth neither the object (it is only the
opportunity for a movement of the mind—which is why there will be
no “deduction” of the sublime) nor even the Ideas of reason (although
they are presupposed), but the movement of the imagination to try and
present the Ideas, with all its ambiguity (attempt-failure). “Nothing that
may be an object for the senses . . . can be called sublime. But precisely
because there is in our imagination an effort towards progression into
infinity, and in our reason a demand for an absolute totality as to a real
Idea, the very inadequacy of our faculty for evaluating the greatness of
the things in the sensible world is for this Idea an arousal of the feeling
of a suprasensual faculty in us” (§ 25).
It is the imagination’s failure which, as a negative presentation of
the Ideas, has a finality and brings about the feeling of the sublime. In
short, the sublime “presupposes” or, as Kant puts it, “involves” the
Ideas, but it is not reducible to them, if we understand by sublime that
which has finality (although, taken in another sense, one could argue
that the Ideas of reason are sublime only in so far as they can measure
up to the infinitely great. But then the sublime is defined by its content,
the absolutely great, and not from the point of view of finality, the point
of view the reflective faculty of judgment is interested in).
What is the reason for the imagination’s failure in its attempt to
present the Idea of a rational All? Kant’s answer is explicit: “We are
rapidly convinced that neither the unconditioned nor, consequently,
absolute magnitude belongs to nature within space and time.” In other
words, space and time, sensibility, are the limits we cannot transgress,
and we discover again, at the center of the theory of the sublime, and
especially of the mathematical sublime, the conception of radical, tran¬
scendental finitude with which the Critique of Pure Reason overturned
the general perspective of Cartesian philosophy. Reciprocally, it is time
and space that we would have to move beyond, “survey as from above,”
to be able to present an Idea; this is exactly what the imagination tries
to do in the case of mathematical sublimity. But Kant does not limit
himself to recalling what has been worked out in the first Critique; he
adds a description of the experience brought about by the attempt to
integrate into a representation this Nothing that is space (“Nothing”
because it is, in fact, nothing, as the chapter on “The Amphiboly of the
Concepts of Reflection” in the first Critique points out). The problem
consists in understanding the equivocal nature of this experience, of this
“sentiment of the powerlessness of the imagination to present the idea
of a whole” (§ 26).

1 01
THREE

Let us now reconsider the two moments of the sublime: “Our

imagination proves, in its greatest effort in view of the comprehension
demanded of it, of a given object in a totality of intuition (and thus in
view of a presentation of an Idea of reason), its limits and its inade¬
quacy, yet simultaneously its disposition to the actualization of the same
(the Idea) as to a law” (§ 27). The two moments are here clearly posited
in their difference and their relationship: first of all failure, the feeling
of limits, of impotence; this naturally produces a displeasure (whose
nature is yet to be determined). But this failure hides an attempt which,
as such, reveals our destination—displeasure is immediately trans¬
formed into pleasure (whose nature is also yet to be determined). Plea¬
sure and displeasure thus succeed each other or, as section 27 puts it,
“The feeling of sublimity is then a feeling of displeasure due to the in¬
adequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic evaluation of magnitude to
evaluation through reason, and of pleasure aroused thereby, due to the
concordance of this very judgment, about the inadequacy of this great¬
est of sensual faculties, with Ideas of reason.” To the “negative presen¬
tation” corresponds thus a “negative pleasure.”
The nature of such a feeling must be made precise. The failure of
the imagination comes from the fact that (§ 27) “what nature, as an
object of the senses, contains that is for us great, is to be valued as little
in comparison with the Ideas of reason.” Why? Because nature is con¬
tained within the limits of time and space, limits within which there is
no absolutely great. Space (along with time), in other words, is here the
reason why nature never corresponds to the Ideas, or, put yet another
way, that which makes it so that the Ideas remain always only Ideas. To
try to climb to an “overhang” over space is, in a way, to experience the
“infinite given greatness,” an obviously negative experience or, more
exactly, a frightening experience of Nothing: “The Overflowing [trans¬
lating Das Uberschwengliche literally, to avoid confusion with Das
Transzendent—L.F.] is for the imagination (driven as it is to it in its
attempt to grasp intuition) an abyss in which it fears to lose itself; but
for the Idea of Reason of the suprasensible it is not overflowing, but
legitimate, to bring about such an effort of the imagination—attractive
thereby to the same degree as it was repulsive to the sole sensibility”
(§ 27). If the experience of the always “overflowing,” that is, of space
as nothingness, is frightening, it is because in the effort toward “the aes¬
thetic comprehension towards a greater unity . . . we feel in our minds
as though aesthetically enclosed within limits” (§ 27). In its attempt to
present the Ideas, the imagination experiences aesthetic limitation, tran-
1 02
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

scendental finitude, and, as it were, overflowing space (= Nothing); it

is then plunged into what Kant calls a “frightening abyss.” Thus we
understand the nature of the pleasure and displeasure making up the
two moments of the mathematically sublime: they consist of anguish
and its relief, each of those sentiments corresponding to a glance at one
of the two types of totality we dealt with earlier on: space (Nothing), in
the first case, and system (Idea) in the second.
We can now compare this analysis with the concrete examples
evoked by Kant in section 26. The sublime is defined in section 25 as
the absolutely great, as that in comparison to which everything else is
small. Section 26 then tries to make the notion of absolutely great ex¬
plicit by showing what type of evaluation of greatness it refers to. Nu¬
merical (mathematical) evaluation is thereby immediately eliminated:
any number can be greater or lesser than another; a number cannot, as
such, pretend to evaluate the absolutely great.
But mathematical evaluation itself presupposes, in order to deter¬
mine greatness or magnitude, the evaluation Kant calls “aesthetic,”
meaning the evaluation grounded on a unity of measure grasped “by
the eye’s judgment.” Whereas numerical evaluation can continue indefi¬
nitely, aesthetic evaluation soon reaches a limit beyond which I cannot
represent anything to myself that is not obscure and confused. This
maximum is reached when the imagination, in its work of apprehension
or seizure of intuitions, adds up the partial representations and can no
longer understand, can no longer simultaneously grasp at an aesthetic
level all of these partial representations. What it gains from one side it
loses at the other. This limit of aesthetic comprehension is then the “aes¬
thetically greatest fundamental measure of the evaluation of magni¬
tude.” It represents a maximum, a subjective (aesthetic) absolutely
great, “where it is considered an absolute measure beyond which no
greater is possible subjectively ... it then conveys the idea of the sublime
and calls forth that emotion which no mathematical estimation of mag¬
nitudes by numbers can evoke” (§ 26).
The connection Kant establishes between the feeling of the sublime
and the limits of aesthetic comprehension (the subjective absolutely
great) creates certain difficulties. It had seemed that the sublime lay in
the attempt the imagination makes to “soar above” space in order to
present the Ideas of reason. Indeed, in this attempt the mind experiences
both a transcendental finitude (an anguishing experience of the nothing¬
ness that is space) and its destination (the presentation of Ideas). But if
we believe section 26 of the third Critique, the mathematically sublime

1 03
THREE

has nothing to do with a transcendental finitude; space itself is not the

uncrossable border between the empirical sensible and the intelligible
(the limit that hinders the presentation of Ideas). It would, on the con¬
trary, be a matter of entirely “subjective,” “psychological” finitude and
limit. Otherwise put, the limit of “aesthetic comprehension” is one
within the sensible itself, a limit which, in a sense, separates a clear and
distinct sensible from a sensible that becomes obscure and confused (the
beyond of the limit, which escapes comprehension, is in fact still the
sensible). But then we have the right to ask what is so sublime about
this subjective absolutely great. What can evoke the Ideas of reason if,
in a way, everything takes place inside the sensible itself?
The difficulty is at its greatest in the example Kant chooses in this
very same section 26, the cathedral of St. Peter’s in Rome. “On first
entering” there, says Kant, the visitor is seized by a “sort of perplex¬
ity .. . For here a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his
imagination for presenting the idea of a whole within which that imagi¬
nation attains its maximum, and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this
limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional de¬
light.” The problems this example raises are many. The structure of the
mathematically sublime does seem to be present. There is, on the one
hand, “the Idea of a whole” that one tries to make present, on the other
a vain effort of the imagination. But if we look at the example more
closely, we shall see (as we might have expected, given the link Kant
establishes between the sublime and the subjective limit to aesthetic
comprehension) that the whole one is trying to make present, far from
being a rational Idea, is a sensible whole, a totality already situated in
nature: the church of St. Peter in Rome. De jure, then, this totality is
presentable, even if de facto it is not presented at one glance; besides, it
is not at all inconceivable that this church might be presented in one
single intuition (it might just be necessary to find the right viewpoint,
to use one’s memory, etc.). And furthermore, Kant himself notes that
bewilderment seizes the spectator penetrating into this place for the first
time. Which leads us to suppose that the second, or perhaps the third
time, the feeling would disappear as the (entirely sensual) church would
be made present.
In the other example Kant mentions at the beginning of section 26,
the pyramids, the whole is, as a matter of fact, presented, as long as we
stand neither too close nor too far away. If, to sum up, the limits of
aesthetic comprehension are drawn at the interior of the sensible, what¬
ever goes beyond this comprehension is still part of the “presentable”
1 04
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

(even if not of the in fact presented), a way of saying that the finitude
experienced in the mathematical sublime (if we believe the example)
could be qualified as “psychological,” in contrast to the transcendental
finitude. We could no longer understand what would be so forbidding
about it nor how, from such an example, we could again find the sub¬
lime that concerns only the Ideas of reason.” If it is true that the sub¬
lime “arisjes] from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic
estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason(§ 27)
the bond uniting aesthetic with rational estimation here seems to be
lost. Instead of observing a transcendental finitude (limit of pure space
= nothingness) and a rational totality (Idea), we seem to come across
an entirely “subjective,” “psychological” finitude (the limits of aesthetic
comprehension) and a sensible totality (the church).
But we would be mistaken in concluding that Kant either chose his
examples lightly or contradicted himself. One phrase, affirming the
linkage between aesthetic and rational estimations, allows us perhaps
to solve the difficulty: “the greatest effort of the imagination in the pre¬
sentation of the unit for the estimation of magnitude involves in itself a
reference to something absolutely great . . .” (§ 27). What is the nature
of this reference? That is the question Kant invites us to answer in order
to understand the meaning of his examples. The following remark from
section 26 situates the problem more precisely:

We get examples of the mathematically sublime of nature in mere intuition

in all those instances where our imagination is afforded, not so much a greater
numerical concept as a large unit as measure (for shortening the numerical se¬
ries). A tree judged by the height of man gives, at all events, a standard for the
mountain; and, supposing this is, say, a mile high, it can serve as a unit for the
number expressing the earth’s diameter, so as to make it intuitable; similarly
the earth’s diameter for the known planetary system; this again for the system
of the Milky Way; and the immeasurable host of such systems, which go by the
name of nebulae, and most likely in turn themselves form such a system, holds
out no prospect of a limit. Now in the aesthetic estimate of such an immeasur¬
able whole, the sublime does not lie so much in the greatness of the number, as
in the fact that in our onward advance we always arrive at proportionately
greater units.

This kind of example is quite different from the preceding one.

Here, space itself explicitly constitutes the unsurpassable limit one
would nevertheless have to surpass to present the Ideas. This confirms
the first interpretation: the mathematically sublime is indeed an experi-
THREE

ence of transcendental finitude and not a psychological one. It is even

rather surprising that the limit to aesthetic comprehension should not
be alluded to here. On the contrary, the progression from a smaller to
a larger unit seems to go on indefinitely. What is stressed is the charac¬
ter—itself unlimited, infinite—of our finitude, what could once again
be expressed in the proposition: space is an “infinite given magnitude.”
Let us get back now to our question: what relation is there between
the subjective absolutely great of aesthetic estimation or evaluation and
the absolutely great of rational evaluation? The answer is, at first, ob¬
vious: between them there is a negative relation, a relation of failure.
The first does not come up to the second, it fails in its attempt to
be adequate to it. But why? Is it only, as the example of the cathedral
might lead us to think, because beyond a certain limit everything
would become confused and obscure? That amounts, in the final analy¬
sis, to asking another question: why is it that “everything that nature,
as an object of the senses, contains that is great” is “to be valued as little
in comparison with the Ideas of reason” (§ 27)? Why is “every measure
of sensibility . . . insufficient for the Ideas of reason” (§ 27)? This cannot
be guaranteed only by experiencing the limits of aesthetic compre¬
hension (since those limits are located within the sensible). We must
add to it the conceptual gain of the “Transcendental Aesthetic” chapter
of the Critique of Pure Reason: space is an “infinite given magnitude,”
and nature is in space. Then and only then can the limits of aesthetic
comprehension make sense. They are a sort of inferior, psychologi¬
cal way of experiencing spatial aesthetic limitation. The examples
in section 26 of the third Critique must then be understood as ana¬
logues of the true sublime, since the relation between the church and
the limit to aesthetic comprehension that brings about the failure of
imagination is identical to the relation between the rational Idea and
the transcendental limit that space is, in a way that could be represented
like this:

CATHEDRAL (sensible whole) = IDEA (rational whole)

limit of aesthetic comprehension spatial limit

(psychological finitude) (transcendental finitude)

Thus, only in so far as the limit of aesthetic comprehension refers

back to the—transcendental—limits of space can it evoke the Ideas and
bring about the sublime.

1 06
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

REASON, SENTIMENT, AND THE BAROQUE:

AESTHETIC HUMANISM

The few pages Kant consecrates to the sublime in the third Critique are
rich in what they teach us. They show quite precisely how, within Kan¬
tian aesthetics, a deconstruction of the system of metaphysics coexists
with a radical thinking about finitude, about what forever escapes rep¬
resentation and which in contemporary philosophy goes by the name of
“difference.” Which explains why Kant’s aesthetic, while giving up nei¬
ther reason nor sentiment, both granted an essential status in the judg¬
ment of taste, decidedly orients itself toward the baroque, for as long
anyway as this art of excess manages to maintain itself within the
bounds of “good taste” and thus conserve a (for sentiment) satisfactory
relation with the Ideas (of reason):

But where all that is intended is the maintenance of a free play of the powers of
representation (subject, however, to the condition that there is to be nothing for
understanding to take exception to), in ornamental gardens, in the decoration
of rooms, in all kinds of furniture that shows good taste, etc., regularity in the
shape of constraint is to be avoided as far as possible. Thus English taste in
gardens, and baroque taste in furniture, push the freedom of imagination to the
verge of what is grotesque—the idea being that in this divorce from all con¬
straint of rules the precise instance is being afforded where taste can exhibit its
perfection in projects of the imagination to the fullest extent.13

It is the task of reflection (or of the reflective judgment) to articulate

these three moments—deconstructed reason, sentiment, and the excess
that is the nonpresentable—which is what makes it the defining char¬
acteristic of the human being as finite being but one nonetheless capable
of thinking the infinite. This point has been vigorously disputed.
According to a thesis put forward by Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard—
faithful, or so he thinks, to Heidegger’s interpretation and to his po¬
lemic against Ernst Cassirer—“Kant’s thinking is not a humanism,” as
the neo-Kantians would have it, and moreover the issues at stake within
it are “too important to be left to the Neo-Kantians.”14 Lyotard’s ar¬
gument bases itself essentially on a classic reading of the Critique of
Practical Reason, and especially of the distinction it establishes between
man and reasoning finite beings in general: “Kant comes back to this
point again and again; man is not the recipient of the categorical im¬
perative: the latter addresses itself to ‘all reasoning finite beings.’ As
THREE

pure principle of practical reason, the moral law is, in the strictest sense,
inhuman” (ibid.). Let us overlook the formula. Why not simply say
nonhuman or suprahuman to designate the sphere of transcendence
which—no argument here—rises above empirical man? Let us also
overlook the banality of a remark serving merely to remind us that tran¬
scendental philosophy is not reducible to psychology or anthropology.
We are left with the problem of determining the meaning of the distinc¬
tion between man and reasoning finite being and of clarifying the extent
to which it still authorizes us to speak of a “Kantian humanism” when
we evoke the conception of “the subject” dealt with in the theory of the
reflective judgment.
No doubt about it, at the level of the Critique of Judgement, at the
level therefore of aesthetics, it is well and truly man and exclusively man
that is under consideration. “The pleasant,” Kant writes, “is a signifi¬
cant factor even with irrational animals; beauty has purport and signifi¬
cance only for human beings [nur fiir Menschen], i.e., for beings at once
animal and rational but not merely for them as rational—intelligent
beings—but only for them as at once animal and rational; whereas the
good is good for every rational being in general” (§ 5). This proposi¬
tion, drawn out at length in section 83 of the third Critique, would by
itself be enough to legitimize the use of the term “humanism” to qualify
Kant’s aesthetics.
But we need to go further. The strange thing is that, apropos the
Critique of Practical Reason, Lyotard attributes to Heidegger a thesis
that, in fact, was not only a long-standing position of the neo-Kantians
but also the main criticism Cassirer made of the Heideggerian interpre¬
tation of Kant. The point merits discussion. Not only does it have philo¬
logical importance, it also brings us to the crucial question of the status
of Kantian aesthetics in relation to the second Critique.
The interpretation Heidegger develops in his Kantbuch [translated
as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics] sets out from the—quite cor¬
rect—principle that Kant’s thought is a thinking out, and the first in
modern philosophy, of radical fimtude. At whatever level one locates
oneself within critical philosophy (sensibility, understanding, theoreti¬
cal reason, practical reason), the link to an originary receptivity must
not be broken—the imagination, as faculty at once receptive and spon¬
taneous, being the milieu where this link to receptivity, and therefore to
finiteness, is thematized as such. In section 30 of his Kantbuch, there¬
fore, Heidegger tries to provide an interpretation of the Critique of
Practical Reason compatible with the project he discerns in the first

1 08
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

Critique. The goal for him is one of harmonizing a thinking out of radi¬
cal finitude, tied to the transcendental imagination, with the “practical”
thought of the dignity of the self,” of the “fundamental and total pos¬
sibility of authentic existence.” He must thus find within practical rea¬
son a conception of receptivity through which the link with finitude can
be maintained. Hence his interpretation of respect for the moral law as
the analogue, in the practical field, of what pure intuition is in the theo¬
retical field. Far from being secondary in relation to the moral law, its
reception by a finite being in the aspect of that nonpsychological feeling
that respect is “is neither subsequent nor is it something that takes place
only occasionally. Respect for the law . . . is in itself a revelation of
myself as the self that acts.”15
This interpretation, which is disputed by Cassirer (in his 1931 re¬
view of the Kantbuch, a text that should be read to grasp what the
Davos debate between Heidegger and Cassirer was all about), per¬
mits Heidegger to find again in the sphere of practical reason the uni¬
tary structure, at once spontaneous and receptive, that belongs to the
imagination. “The self-submissive, immediate surrender ... is pure
receptivity . . . ; the free self-imposition of the law is pure spontaneity.
In themselves, the two are originally one” (ibid., p. 166). The conse¬
quence of this interpretation is clear: the moral law should have as des¬
tination man, and not finite beings in general. As Heidegger recalls in
section 31 of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, man is, for Kant,
but a particular species of reasoning finite being, that in which finitude
is tied to sensibility (intuition at the theoretical level and, according to
Heidegger, respect at the practical level). But nothing hinders a purely
rational, nonsensual, conception of finitude, one that would be ex¬
pressed only in the difference between being [I’etre] and the ought-to-
be [le devoir-etre], the is and the ought. For an infinite being the moral
law is of the order of Being, for a finite being, of the ought-to-be, with¬
out this difference being, for Kant, necessarily tied to sensibility and
thus to a specifically human finitude.
Now, what Heidegger regrets about the second edition of the Cri¬
tique of Pure Reason is precisely the emergence of this distinction,
which obviously leads Kant to separate finitude and sensual receptivity
and thus to relegate the imagination to a secondary level. Heidegger
then demonstrates how Kant, obsessed with the idea of separating the
ethical from the psychological, unfortunately effects a distinction be¬
tween men and rational finite beings and posits the moral law as valid
also for the latter in general—which makes it independent of respect

1 09
THREE

and abstracts it out of the temporal structure of the transcendental

imagination. This is what Heidegger writes about it: “It is incontestable
that the distinction between a finite rational being in general and man
as a particular example of such a being comes to the fore in the tran¬
scendental deduction as the latter appears in the second edition” (ibid.,
p. 174). And, “In the second edition, Kant has enlarged the concept of
a rational finite being to the point where it no longer coincides with the
concept of man and thus has posed the problem of finitude with greater
comprehensiveness” (ibid., pp. 175 — 76).
Has this enlargement had, as Cassirer thought (and Lyotard along
with him, no doubt), the effect of an “improvement,” of a victory
against psychologism and “anthropomorphism”? Heidegger’s answer
to this question is also explicit: “On the contrary, when correctly un¬
derstood, this edition is even more ‘psychological’ simply because it is
oriented exclusively on pure reason as such” (ibid., p. 176). It is thus
not, as Lyotard believes, Cassirer the neo-Kantian, but Heidegger him¬
self who never stopped criticizing the distinction between two kinds of
finitude: man’s sensible finitude and the purely rational one of the finite
being in general. It was furthermore Heidegger who first showed the
way in which this distinction, contrary to appearances, could have the
second edition of the Critique lapse back into anthropology as a con¬
sequence, in so far as it leads Kant to “thrust the imagination into
the background, thus concealing its transcendental nature completely”
(ibid., p. 174).
Is a further proof needed that, to the contrary, it is neo-Kantianism
that holds the distinction disapproved of by Heidegger to be crucial,
and that maintains the idea that the moral law addresses itself to finite
beings in general and not only to man? We need only read the review
Cassirer wrote of Heidegger’s book on Kant in the 1931 Kant-Studien.
Kant, he wrote, went to some lengths so that

the meaning of his “transcendental” problematic should not be displaced onto

the psychological—nor his observations shoved over into the merely anthropo¬
logical planes. He tirelessly stresses that any analysis that would set out from
the mere “nature of the human being” would miss the transcendental Idea of
freedom, and with it the laying-out of the grounds for ethics, in its very prin¬
ciples. It is owing to this preoccupation that the Kantian proposition, so often
ill-known and ill-interpreted, was uttered, that one could only arrive at a pure
conception of the ethical law if one took care that it should be valid not only

I 1 0
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

for humans but also for “all rational beings in general” [fur alle Vernunftwesen
iiberbaupt}. Kant was here not really thinking, as Schopenhauer mockingly re¬
proached him, of the dear little angels —here also he was speaking as critic
and methodologist, whose concern was not to allow the frontiers between the
disciplines to run into each other,” and who accordingly wished to separate,
strictly and following principles, the tasks of ethics and those of anthropology.
This line of demarcation is given him through the opposition between “appear¬
ance” and “thing-in-itself,” between time and freedom. And here lies also the
authentic and essential objection I must raise against Heidegger’s interpretation
of Kant.16

This text has evidently been forgotten by the very thinkers who
today pretend to carry on the inheritance of what they believe to be the
Heideggerian interpretation of Kant. It is rather piquant to see Lyotard
take up, almost word for word, against neo-Kantism an argument so
typically neo-Kantian that Cassirer did not hesitate to make of it the
true point of separation from Heidegger. It proves, if proof were needed,
that the contempt with which the Heideggenans have always looked
upon the neo-Kantians is most often accompanied by ignorance of es¬
sential pieces in the record of the ongoing debate. Why such a blunder?
Because the imagery around the Davos debate and the Kantstreit has it
that, in the eyes of an overhasty Heideggerianism, any and all reference
to man or to humanism inevitably refers back to the idea of anthropol¬
ogy, and therefore to the metaphysics of subjectivity. And, as is well
known, neo-Kantism = positivism = metaphysics of subjectivity,
therefore anthropology. Q.E.D.
But beyond the philological mistake, Lyotard’s adopted position
leads him to miss that in Heidegger’s interpretation which, though de¬
batable, may be philosophically fertile. As I have tried to demonstrate
elsewhere,17 the idea of thinking ethics without losing the link to tem¬
porality, therefore—Heidegger is right—with man as the site of a fini-
tude whose structure is that of the schematizing imagination, has
nothing absurd about it. Correctly understood, it finds its most devel¬
oped formulation in the Critique of judgment, where the Ideas of theo¬
retical and also of practical reason, conceived of as principles of the
reflective judgment, maintain an unbreakable, even though symbolic,
link with aesthetics, with sensibility and temporality seen as the radical
signs of human finitude.
At the end of this analysis, we can see more clearly the way in which
THREE

the “Kantian moment” can legitimately put itself forward as an impres¬

sive attempt to articulate the three most characteristic tendencies of
what has here been called the prehistory of aesthetics:
—Rationalism keeps some of the rights it could lay claim to within
Boileau’s classical tradition: some, but not all. The ideas of reason, in
the theory of the beautiful as in that of the sublime, do in the final
instance remain the supporting pillars of the common sense. But ratio¬
nalism itself has, all the same, lost its dogmatic character, and the
project of a science of the beautiful, at the source of the Art poetique,
is invalidated at the same time that the temptation to reduce beauty
to a simple sensual presentation of truth vanishes. Inescapable conse¬
quence: aesthetics, even when thought of as a philosophical discipline,
must once and for all give up the pretension of establishing infallible
criteria of good taste. One can, at best, interpret the common sense as
a presumption in favor of a work’s greatness—supposing it not to be
“ideological.”
—Sentiment thus finds again the place denied it by dogmatic clas¬
sicism. While the reference to ideas permits the grounding of the com¬
mon sense, sensibility becomes the touchstone thanks to which logic
and aesthetics can separate without a reduction of one realm to the
other being possible. Bouhours’s argument that the Beautiful is as inef¬
fable as it is unforeseeable recovers its legitimacy—though, as criticism
requires, it too must be limited in its relativistic penchants.
—And that also permits us to accord the demands of baroque aes¬
thetics their rightful place. If classical good taste, in its metaphysical
horror of excess, “clips the wings of genius,” it must no longer hinder
it to the point of blocking its flight. The Beautiful is no longer the sen¬
sible image of truth, the imitation of what is essential, rational, in na¬
ture. It acquires its own structure, an autonomy without which the
smallest aesthetic pleasure could not exist, also and perhaps even espe¬
cially due to its irregularity and its contingency in relation to the neces¬
sities inherent in logical thought. Like humor, the veritably beautiful
must surprise, otherwise it will never overstep the narrow frame of an
aesthetics of perfection where the “well painted” remains, will always
remain a thousand miles removed from the trait of genius.
The Kantian moment is thus par excellence the moment of the
breach: a breach in the theology of a satellizing divinity that intermedi¬
ates between monads walled up in themselves; a breach also in the secu¬
lar reduction of sensibility to a confused perception of the intelligible
world, to a deformed copy of ideal truth; a breach, finally, in the con-

1 1 2
 THE KANTIAN MOMENT

ception of man as creature, as a being whose finitude must forever be

downgraded when measured against a divinity whose existence “in it¬
self could be demonstrated.
’1

Hegel s aesthetics tries, with a doubtlessly unequaled grandeur, to

wall up this opening through the power of the concept.

1 1 3
 FOUR

T RUTH IS ONE, yet it is impossible to dispute the fact that there

exists a multitude of mutually contradictory philosophical systems:
“Upon this stands the shallow demonstration which affirms, with a
knowing air, that nothing is obtained from the history of philosophy;
one man proves the other wrong; the very accumulation of philosophies
is proof of the nullity of philosophy as an undertaking.”1 Confound-
ingly banal though it may be, the objection raised by scepticism still
requires an answer. Worse, the philosopher knows all too well, having
once taken it seriously, that the challenge thrown down by nonphiloso¬
phy is of the kind that can take you very far away from where you
thought you were going—an observation all the more irritating in that
the problem itself remains one of extraordinary simplicity: if the true
should be the same for everyone, as human reason demands, then what
status should this bothersome plurality be given?
We have to acknowledge it: the “shallow argument” was worrying
Hegel well before his system received the definitive form that alone al¬
lowed him to bring to the problem a satisfying answer (meaning in his
own eyes, of course). When in his youth he created in Jena, together
with his friend Schelling, the Critical Journal of Philosophy (it appeared
in Tubingen in 1802/1803), the first issue’s introduction was devoted to
this delicate question. Bearing the title “On the Essence of Philosophical
Criticism in General and Its Relation to the Present State of Philosophy
in Particular,” it intended to set out the conditions under which criti¬
cism could legitimately sort out the wheat from the chaff, meaning not
only philosophy from nonphilosophy (mere opinions), but also, at the
very heart of that which deserves the name of philosophy, the true sys¬
tem from the others. The solution Hegel considered in those days is not
without interest. Inspired by Schelling, it consists in the description of
the history of philosophy by analogy with that of art, as the presenta-

1 1 4
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

tion, in diverse forms, of one and the same idea. Thus art criticism also
becomes the model for philosophical criticism. Just as the aesthetic
work is the expression of presentation [Darstellung] of an idea in a
sensual form (colors, sounds, etc.), and just as criticism’s aim is the
singling out of the idea, of the signified, from the manifest signifier, so
one can distinguish within each philosophical system between the con¬
tent, the “rational kernel,” identical in the final analysis among all sys¬
tems of thought worthy of the name, and the contingent form in which
it is expostulated.
The young Hegel could thus believe he was refuting the skeptics’
argument by stating that only the form is variable and historically de¬
termined, in so far as it depends on each historical period’s own culture
[Bildung]. Philosophical criticism’s task consists then in breaking the
shell that prevents the inner movement of thought from coming to light.
At which point there is no longer any veritable contradiction between
the different philosophical systems, since they all, in the last instance,
express the same Idea. Their apparent diversity proceeds only from the
fact that the philosopher is obligated, following the various periods and
cultures, to express his ideas in a relative and contingent form, which
must be set aside by placing oneself at the highest philosophical point
of view, that is, at the point of view of a philosophy of identity in which
the form of the presentation, unburdened, finally, of the particular as¬
pects of such and such a determinate historical culture, is identical to
the Idea of philosophy itself. (This harmony of content and form defines
the systematicity that, in 1802, Hegel still thought he saw brought to
reality in Schelling’s philosophy.)
It may perhaps be objected that the grounds for philosophical criti¬
cism’s claims to objectivity—or art criticism’s claims, for that mat¬
ter are not easy to grasp. By what right does one authorize oneself to
declare that this or that work is a proper expression of the true idea,
while that other one is nothing but an embroidery of opinions, without
truth? Hegel’s answer is, again, borrowed from Schelling; it depends on
the argument that one can use the Idea present in the work to disengage
it from the form, which is defective because specific and tied to the
culture of its time. There would thus be a “need for philosophy,” unsat¬
isfied as long as it has not been molded into a systematic form. It is
upon this need that criticism can set foot in order to become legitimate;
in order, that is, not to be radically external to its object (without
which, because unacknowledged, it would behave violently towards it).
It is easy enough to perceive this first solution’s shortcomings when

1 1 5
FOUR

set against the standards of the definitive system. First of all, though
grounded, criticism does not entirely avoid what Hegel, in the Introduc¬
tion to the Phenomenology, later designates as dogmatism. Criticism is
always carried out, in fact, from the viewpoint of a supposedly true
knowledge, thus from that of the achieved, completed system—which
is why it never really manages to become an internal criticism (the hy¬
pothesis of a “need for philosophy” being, so to speak, the dues dog¬
matism pays to virtue). Even more seriously, the skeptical argument is
actually refuted in the context of a vision of the history of philosophy
whose inconvenience is merely that of denying historicity as such. If we
think about it, we will indeed realize that it is precisely the historical
element in each philosophical system that is its inessential component
(the part tied up with the historical Bildung). If, at bottom, all the sys¬
tems give expression to the same idea, we hardly see what could be so
interesting about the unfolding of their diversity in the course of time,
and the criticism that would separate out the content from what is
mere contingent form in them has no other finality than that of self¬
justification.
Herein lies the real analogy with the aesthetic sphere. In 1801,
Hegel still conceived of the temporality of the one and eternal philo¬
sophical Idea as its expression in a form other than itself (in the Bil¬
dung), but also as something other than temporality itself, whereas in
the definitive system the philosophical Idea enjoys its own development,
its own intrinsic evolution during which it unfolds its different mo¬
ments, contained within it originarily as if within a seed. Historicity has
here become a constitutive element of the idea itself, being no longer
either contingent, or tied only to the external form, but truly necessary
to the life of the Idea.
We should understand clearly this decisive rupture in Hegel’s intel¬
lectual itinerary, at least in its principle. Although as late as 1801 — 02
aesthetics and philosophy could to a certain extent be put at the same
level, this ceases to be the case beginning with the Phenomenology of
1806 (to cite a gigantic but very convenient landmark). Of course, the
idea of the beautiful—which is and will remain for Hegel the idea of
the truth—will also be “historicized,” penetrated through and through
by an internal evolution. But the immense difference between aesthetics
and philosophy will nevertheless consist in the fact that art, as in 1801,
continues to be thought of as alienation (as “presentation” or exposi¬
tion) of the idea of the true in a form external to it (the sensible), while
philosophy becomes the expression of the Idea in thought, thus, we may

1 1 6
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

say, in itself, in its own element. Art criticism maintains therefore a

function identical to what it had in 1801. Its aim is still to single out an
intelligible signified behind a sensual signifier; the beautiful continues
to be, in this sense, an object for interpretation. Philosophy, on the other
hand, ignoring this diremption between content and form, between the
idea and its expression, definitively disassociates itself from the world
of art, forcing the latter back to a superseded phase among the ordered
stages of the progress of the spirit. It is indeed hard to see why, if the
essential thing is the Idea, the content, we should limit ourselves to
grasping it through the distorting form of sensibility rather than ap¬
prehending it in and for itself, as it is in itself. The death of art, so
spectacularly decreed by Hegel, could well have about it a whiff of
Platonism.
But, to be certain of this, it behooves us to grasp the source of the
distinction between art and philosophy. Reexamining, in the Lectures
on the History of Philosophy, the skeptical argument drawn from the
plurality of systems, Hegel counters it with an argument the inverse of
that developed in 1801: the history of philosophy is no longer con¬
ceptualized as the unfolding of the Idea “in its other”—in an exter¬
nal form—but rather as an internal development, as a self-unfolding.
This latter presents a ternary structure whose real principle should be
grasped (commonplaces about “the three moments of the Hegelian dia¬
lectic” being most often screens camouflaging a much more delicate
method of thinking than would appear at first sight).
The first moment in this trinity of the idea’s development is the in-
itself, which Hegel willingly compares to Aristotle’s dynamis, meaning
(at the level that interests us here) being as potential, merely virtual
being. Following the well-known imagery (itself based on a complex
logical argument concerning the category of “becoming”), the in-itself
may be compared to the seed, containing as potential all the richness of
the reality to come. The second moment is that of being-there [Dasein].
The term quite simply means, in German, “what exists,” the particular
real of existence. This second stage in the becoming of the Idea is the
one where the elements, the determinations contained virtually in the
seed, pass over into existence. The third moment is the for-itself. It
indicates the return to unity, the re-collection into a system of the spe¬
cific determinations of the Idea so far developed. Following the imag¬
ery, the for-itself may be compared to the fruit, simultaneously the
ultimate result of the development and bearer of new seeds (of new
“in-themselves”).

1 1 7
FOUR

Even if we ignore the details, we can easily understand how the

application of this logical structure to the problem raised by the skepti¬
cal argument provides a solution completely different from that consist¬
ing in making of art criticism the model for philosophical criticism, in
order to clear the irrational dross away from the idea. Here, not only is
the plurality of systems no longer an objection to the idea of truth, but,
rather, the real objection would be the absence of such a multiplicity,
for the plurality—as the reader will have already intuited—corresponds
to the second moment of the unfolding of the idea, the moment of the
being-there in which the multiple determinations incarnate into the ex¬
istence of specific philosophical systems. Once gathered into the “for-
itself,” this multiplicity finally appears as what it is: a system—or, to be
more exact, the system of philosophy in which historicity has been fully
incorporated. With Hegel, the history of philosophy accomplishes its
task of becoming philosophical, since it purely and simply fuses with
the auto-unfolding of the complete system of the determinations of
thought. There are indeed—the skeptics are right in a certain sense—
various philosophical “systems” that contradict each other; but to that
must be added that the true system, the only one worthy of such a pres¬
tigious name, is nothing that is external to them. On the contrary, it
fuses into their recollection.
The consequence of this temporalization of the idea of truth: if phi¬
losophy’s history, unlike art’s, is no longer the narrative of the sensual
incarnations of an idea, if, on the contrary, its different moments are
the necessary and logical ones of the auto-unfolding of this idea, then
there is no longer any point in interpreting the works that signal its
development:

About any thing, we can ask about its sense or its meaning: so, with a
work of art, about the meaning of its form [Gestalt]; with a language, about
the meaning of the word; with religion, about the meaning of the image or of
the worship; with other types of activity, about their moral value, etc. This
meaning or sense is nothing else than the essential or universal substantial con¬
tent of an object, and this substantial content is the concrete Thought of the
object. Here we always have two aspects, an outer and an inner, an outer ap¬
pearance that is sensually perceptible and intuitable, and a meaning, which is,
precisely, the Thought. But where our object is now Thought itself, there are no
two aspects at hand: Thought is what is meaningful for itself. [Indem nun aber
unser Gegenstand selbst der Gedanke ist, so ist bier nicht zweierlei vorhanden,
sondern der Gedanke ist das Bedeutende fur sich selbst.] (Ibid., p. 95)

1 1 8
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

Of course, in the final system, the idea of the beautiful will itself be
historicized. But art will keep its status as the presentation of the differ¬
ent moments of thought in sensible form and, as such, it cannot pretend
to the same dignity as philosophy. Thus, Hegelianism effects, going
back before Kant, a certain return to a devalorization, much like Leib¬
niz’s, of the sensual world.

THE THEODICY REVISITED

Hegelian aesthetics developed within a metaphysics whose inner core

remained prisoner of monadic individualism—a framework that needed
to be taken apart, as Baumgarten’s Aesthetics had already intuited, to
preserve the autonomy of the sensible and establish the intellectual
room for a true philosophy of art. This is true enough for us to be able
to single out, without great difficulty, the five constitutive principles of
Leibniz’s Monadology at work within the system’s innermost struc¬
ture the affirmation about “the death of art” being thus a priori in¬
scribed into the architectonics of a preestablished harmony no doubt
further refined, but on this point not decisively modified, by the intro¬
duction of dialectics and historicity. A few indications:
L The identity principle. Understood in its Leibnizian meaning, it
secretly continues to define the individuality of what Hegel, in a broader
meaning, calls the “determinations” [Bestimmtheiten] of thought—
whether these be the different configurations of the Spirit, of conscious¬
ness, or of the logical categories. We could say, to be entirely explicit,
that these determinations within Hegel’s system are the exact analogue
to the monads in Leibniz’s theodicy. Each moment—if we think, for
example, about the stages of consciousness in the Phenomenology—
represents a point of view, a partial perspective upon an ensemble
which, contemplated from God’s or the philosopher’s viewpoint, is seen
as integrated (in the mathematical sense of the word) into a harmonious
totality.
2. The principle of sufficient reason. It regulates the linkage of the
monadic determinations down to the smallest detail. The Phenome¬
nology can again be the model here: not only does each stage of the
naive consciousness’s experience literally produce the next stage, but
also when, anguished by the discovery of the contradictions immanent
in its worldview, consciousness desperately tries to hold on to its view
by systematically exploring all possible fallback positions, it is con¬
stantly guided in its operations by the principle that it must not without

1 1 9
FOUR

reason abandon the knowledge it possesses or thinks it possesses. More

generally, we can say that it is the perception of a dialectical contradic¬
tion that furnishes sufficient reason for passing from one determination
to another.
3. Thus, the continuity of the integration of the different moments
or points of view is preserved. Just as in the Monadology there is no
emptiness (nature makes no leaps), so in Hegel’s system there are no
ruptures and the distance separating one determination from the next is
infinitely small.
4. For the same reason, the system cannot unnecessarily multiply
entities. We will never find two perfectly identical stages in the divine
process of the auto-unfolding of the Idea. Otherwise they would
be indistinguishable and would be in reality one sole and unique
determination.
5. Like the Leibnizian world, the Hegelian system at every point
conforms to the principle of the best. The maximum of determinations
are integrated within the most economical, the most elegant
figure—circularity.
To this comparison it will perhaps be objected that it hides the
dimension of History that Hegel obviously adds to the Leibnizian mo¬
nadology. Objection granted. But that should not obscure the fact that,
from an aesthetic point of view, Hegel’s conception of temporality con¬
curs with Leibniz’s in its common refusal to consider the sensible as
something other than a confused intelligible. Here again I will limit
myself to pointing out a few indications of this continuity.
I have already alluded to the way Kant grounded the autonomy of
sensibility in the theory of pure intuitions. We need to come back to this
to better grasp how Hegelian thinking about time remains strangely
pre-Kantian. The aim of the “Transcendental Aesthetic” section of the
Critique of Pure Reason was that of separating, contrary to the Leibni-
zians (meaning contrary to the principle of indiscernibles), the sensible
intuition from the concept. It is with this in mind that Kant defined time
(and space) as “infinite given totalities.” He, indeed, had to distinguish
carefully between aesthetic time and conceptual time. Aesthetic time is
characterized by the fact that, in it, the totality precedes the parts (one
cannot conceive of a moment in time without immediately thinking of
it against the horizon of an indefinite totality of instants). Conceptual
time, on the contrary—meaning for example the time of the history of
scientific progress—should be conceived of as an addition of parts (the

1 20
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

stages in the evolution of science) which, ideally (at the level of Ideas as
metaphysics imagines them) should end up constituting a totality. It’s
through such a distinction, and only through it, that Kant could quali¬
tatively oppose the sensible to the intelligible, there where Leibniz could
only make of the first an epiphenomenon of the second. It is also
through this distinction, and, again, only through it, that, the autonomy
of sensibility secured against the concept, Kant could carry out Baum-
gartens project, otherwise unrealizable within Leibnizian metaphysics.
Now, paradoxically—and contrary to the received idea that would
have Hegel be the great introducer of historicity in philosophy—the
latter s conception of temporality signals a twofold return to the Leib¬
nizian integration of time in the concept:
1. One of the consequences of Kant’s distinction between concept
and sensibility was that time and space had to be thought of as empty
frames, though they could never be perceived as such. In his wish to
recapture the totality of what is in the concept, Hegel, as opposed to
Kant, comes back to the idea that time, in Leibniz’s famous formula, “is
only conceivable through the detail of what changes.” This thesis be¬
comes visible within the entirety of the system at the point at which
temporality is defined as “the concept being there.” Temporality is thus
reduced to the “intelligible” development of the various determinations
of the Idea so that, as with Leibniz, from God’s point of view or fur
uns, for us philosophers who know the truth, it is but an appearance. It
is, in essence, just the confused way in which the finite subject, the re¬
flective subject, apprehends the development of determinations that in
themselves exist since and for all eternity. Establishing as it does the
distinction between the effectively real and the contingent, this thesis is
also found at a key moment of the logical dialectic, since it undergirds
the first fundamental category of the logic of Being: the category of
becoming. It is because pure becoming is nonthinkable (or aesthetic,
nonconceptual time, if one prefers) that it must immediately be concep¬
tualized as the becoming of something. Right from the beginning, from
its very first pages, Hegel’s Science of Logic rehabilitates the Leibnizian
conception of aesthetic time as a pure illusion of finitude destined to be
superseded in the perfection of the divine point of view.
2. But we can go further, we can find the entire ontological struc¬
ture of Leibniz’s Theodicy in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Hegel
himself never made any secret of it: Reason in History will go so far as
to define the whole of the system as a working out of what was already
FOUR

contained in embryo in Leibniz: “Our meditation will therefore be a

theodicy, the justification of God that Leibniz had attempted metaphysi¬
cally, after his fashion and with as yet indeterminate categories.”
This upgrading of God’s point of view in relation to man’s results
in two consequences that are basic in aiding us to grasp the inferior
status of aesthetics in Hegel’s oeuvre:
1. Hegel, paradoxically, does not escape from the monadological
configuration of modern individualism. It is thus not at all accidental
not only that his philosophy of history locates its metaphysical origins
in the Leibnizian theodicy but also that its perfect expression, in the
sphere of political theory, is the liberals’ famous “invisible hand.” That
the liberal state may have been elsewhere criticized by Hegel in no way
affects the structural similarity between the “cunning of reason” and
the “invisible hand”; aesthetic communication thus once again becomes
a mediated communication. It is in the aesthetic idea—itself related to
truth—that the spectators can recognize themselves and each other, and
it is through the mediation of a system (i.e., of a preestablished har¬
mony) that they can communicate among themselves.
2. Sensibility’s autonomy over against the concept also vanishes, if
it isn’t altogether fused with pure and simple contingency. As the “Pre¬
liminary Concept” in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia states, intuition is a faculty
in embryo, capable only of grasping confusedly what reason alone can
veritably think. Art, corelatively, can only be an equally inferior means
of grasping the truth of the idea; it is, in a word, a gnoseologia inferior.
Under these conditions, the tendency of Hegelian thinking will be to
challenge the Critique of Judgment's effort to break with classicism,
which in the end leads, as we shall soon see, to Hegel’s affirmation of
the superiority of the artistic over the natural Beauty.

THE COPERNICAN COUNTERREVOLUTION:

ARTISTIC BEAUTY OR NATURAL BEAUTY?

Kant has often been taken to task for his relative lack of interest in, and
even want of taste for, artistic beauty. Frederick the Great’s verses,
quoted in section 49 of the Critique of Judgment as an instance of artis¬
tic genius, make us smile even in their original French. The passages
given over to the classification of the fine arts are profound, but in vain
would we look for the traces of an authentic aesthetic culture therein.
On this point, no doubt of it, Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics are quite
superior to the third Critique. Besides, the way Kant links “the advan-

1 22
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

tage of natural beauty over artistic beauty” with the fact that it is “in
harmony with the purified and serious way of thinking of all human
beings who have cultivated the moral sentiment” (§ 42) seems today, to
put it kindly, antiquated. Even worse, from the point of view of tran¬
scendental philosophy itself, the argument looks to be entirely empirical
and rather feeble in this regard. The world is full of quite serious and
quite respectable people who would place artistic beauty well above
natural beauty. Any number of interpreters have thought to see in this
point the Achilles’ heel of Kant’s aesthetics.
And that began with Hegel himself. The Kantian position is coun¬
tered from the very first page of the introduction to the Lectures. Hegel
stresses there that the object of aesthetics is not the realm of the beau¬
tiful in general but only that of artistic beauty. It is not even certain that
the qualifier “beautiful” can properly be used of natural entities. And
even if we allow ourselves this poetic license, we shall have to assert
anyway that “the beauty of art is higher than nature.” Hegel’s justifica¬
tion for this reversal of Kantism is not without interest. If artistic beauty
is the only valuable one, it is because it is “beauty born of the spirit and
born again”; therefore “the higher the spirit and its productions stand
above nature and its phenomena, the higher too is the beauty of art
above that of nature. Indeed, considered formally, even a useless notion
that enters a man’s head is higher than any product of nature, because
in such a notion spirituality and freedom are always present.” Who
could dispute that the human is superior to the inhuman and that, in
that condition, it must have been through a strange naivete or through
a surprising disinterest for culture that the Critique of Judgment did not
perceive the obvious superiority of art over nature?
But the problem of the relation between the two types of beauty is
much more complicated than it seems. If we judge too hastily we risk
missing the target and not seeing, for example, that he who truly holds
art in contempt is not the one we think, and that nature’s “advantage”
is perhaps, in a paradoxical way that merits dwelling upon, the best if
not the only way of saving art from the inevitable handicap it suffers in
classicism. If beauty is but the sensible expression of truth, and if this
expression is itself fully mastered by a subject (the artist), art will doubt¬
less be superior to nature because more adequate to the ends thereby
assigned to beauty. But in that case we don’t see how art could avoid
having a status lower than that of science and philosophy, supposed to
provide a more direct and more reliable access to “the thing itself.”
When nature is accorded pride of place over artifice a certain portion of

1 23
FOUR

beauty is, indeed, taken away from the power of the spirit, but that is
also the way aesthetics can hope not to be reduced to a “theory of in¬
ferior knowledge” nor to a simple formula indicating the means capable
of communicating to the common understanding truths too abstract to
be grasped by it at the level which is, nonetheless, the only level befitting
them: that of true speculation.
The better to grasp this paradox, we must keep in mind the motives
leading Kant to the position that beauty must, above everything else,
contain a natural element, independent of the human mind. The beau¬
tiful object, as we know, is one which, though purely sensible (natural),
brings about in us an intellectual agreement of the faculties analogous
to what would be required for the Ideas finally to be actualized. What
reason demands, in fact, is for nature and spirit to be reconciled as they
would be seen from the point of view of a completed science or—what
comes down to the same thing—of an infinite, omniscient understand¬
ing, as the divine understanding must be. But for it to be of any interest,
this reconciliation of nature and spirit must proceed from nature itself.
We may say of the beautiful object that it is that which evokes in us the
idea of God. But for this Idea to be “revived in us,” as Kant puts it, it is
important that this accord between nature and spirit that reason de¬
mands not be fabricated. It should not be artificially produced, other¬
wise it would lose all that makes for its charm, namely its contingency,
its naturalness, the fact that it is not a product of our will. What reason
finds pleasant about the beautiful has to do precisely with this contin¬
gency; it is because reason’s demand is that nature should, in the end,
conform to the laws of the understanding that it is, so to speak, happy
to see certain objects manifesting, independently of us, without being
forced, something like a “trace” (§ 42) or the beginning of a satisfaction
of this uncancelable stipulation. The beautiful is like humor, it can never
be completely “intended.”
What is at stake is not negligible. At the philosophical level, the
difference between reflection and determination is here at play. The re¬
flective judgment always presupposs that the agreement between nature
and spirit is in principle contingent, therefore natural since it proceeds
from the particular to the general and not the contrary. Only at that
price can the beautiful object remain for us always a surprise. At the
aesthetic level, in the sense of a specific intellectual discipline, it’s the
key problematic of classicism that is set aside along the way. Since
beauty is not of the domain of the determining judgment, there can be
no “poetics of art” [art poetique], no science of the beautiful that would
1 24
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

once and for all determine both the general rules of the production of
beauty and their correct criteria of application.
That is what the famous examples where Kant denounces imitation
as inaesthetic are trying to illustrate. Like Leibniz, Kant admires the
beauty of flowers and of insects. In the symmetrical designs of rare com¬
plexity sometimes adorning beetle or butterfly wings, in the extraordi¬
nary variety of colors, nature has all the appearances of art. One would
say it means to do it, in purposive fashion, and, precisely because that
is not the case (nature has no intentions), human reason can experience
a certain pleasure in seeing some of its most unrealizable demands con¬
firmed just a little bit. It is indeed truly remarkable that if we had “se¬
cretly gone behind” the lover of the beautiful and “planted artificial
flowers (which can be prepared so as to closely resemble the natural
ones) in the earth, or had placed artificially carved birds on the branches
of trees, and he had thereupon discovered the deceit, the immediate
interest he had previously taken in these things would in an instant
disappear,” for only “the notion that nature produced this beauty”
(§ 42) is capable of grounding out immediate interest in the very exis¬
tence of the beautiful thing. Kant insists upon this several times: “But
this interest that we have in beauty quite requires that it be beauty of
nature; it disappears entirely as soon as one notices one has been de¬
ceived” (ibid.). Thus, “what could be more valued of poets than the
enchantingly beautiful song of the nightingale, in a lonesome bush, on
a quiet summer evening, but the soft light of the moon?” (ibid.). But if
we learn that some “kid who knows how to imitate this song” of the
nightingale has been deceiving us, what seemed beautiful to us a few
moments before is now “not to be supported” (ibid.).
The example of the nightingale is no doubt one of the most cele¬
brated passages in the third Critique, and perhaps one of the least un¬
derstood. Hegel commented upon it, and many after him agreed in
seeing in it the mark of great naivete, or of a regretable lack of taste, as
if the important thing here were the biographical aspect. As if the aim
here had been to display all the culture of an art historian! The intention
is entirely different: what it aims to testify to is the fact that only what
is external to human subjectivity, and therefore natural, can be said to
be beautiful, at least if we refuse purely and simply to fuse beauty with
truth, art with science. The passage is also, negatively, about art, and
about its irreducibility to either an imitation of nature or to the appli¬
cation of a mere technique permitting the perfect accomplishment of a
purpose to be illustrated. Authentic art must thus contain an element of

1 25
FOUR

naturalness, an element that escapes from the control of subjectivity and

of its consciousness of the objectives it can assign itself in art. If we wish
to avoid the reefs of a classicism a la Boileau, we must (and this is the
deeper meaning of the allusion to the nightingale) resolve the following
paradox: how can art at the same time set itself conscious .ends, explic¬
itly aim at the bringing into reality of a certain form of beauty, yet still
belong to nature so as not to be reduced to the technically successful
actualization of a “good idea” (of one or another “truth of reason”)?
The theory of the genius responds to this strange equation. In
Kant’s anticlassical perspective, art confronts us with this dilemma: “It
is either such an imitation of nature that it passes for a mistaking of it,
and then it has the same effect as the natural beauty (that was mistaken
for it); or else it is an art intentionally aiming at our satisfaction [Wohl-
gefallen]. Immediate satisfaction through taste will then indeed take
place, but there will be nothing other than a mediated interest in its
original cause, that is to say, an art that may be of interest through its
goal but never in itself” (§ 42). Kant intends to free art from this alter¬
native by introducing in it, through his conception of geniality as a natu¬
ral talent, the predominance of nature over a mind conscious of itself
and of the rules it is supposed to apply. Zeuxis’ grapes, of which Plato
tells us they were so well imitated that the thrushes flew down to pick
at them, have no beauty, if they have any, except as copies, in which
case it’s easy to understand why one might prefer the original—unless
one takes art to be a simple technical performance. But art is not better
off in the other situation evoked in the above-cited passage. If indeed
the aim is, as in classicism, “above all to please” by elegantly presenting
beautiful moral ideas, then, clearly, art’s finality and value are once
again external to it; it is yet again an instrument, the vehicle, itself sec¬
ondary in importance, of a communication whose terms are played out
elsewhere.
This is the essence of Kant’s position on art: “Nature was beautiful
when it simultaneously looked like art; and art can only be called beau¬
tiful when we are conscious it is art, yet it nevertheless looks like nature
to us” (§ 45). He could hardly be clearer: since beauty resides in a
certain reconciliation of nature and the mind, since this reconciliation
is of no interest to human reason unless it is a happy surprise, an un¬
foreseeable and contingent harmony, then, when it comes to natural
beauty, nature must astonish us in resembling the mind, and therefore
in having the appearance of art; when it comes to artistic beauty, we
must be able to, through genius, recognize the work of nature in the
1 26
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

finished product: “Thus, finality/purposiveness [Zweckmafligkeit] in

the products of the fine arts must not seem intentional although it is
intentional . . . the ‘school form’ must not shine through, that is, it must
show no trace that rules floated in front of the artist’s eyes and laid
chains upon the powers of his mind” (§ 45). Contrary to what the
French classicists thought, art has nothing to do with the concept of
perfection: the point is not to present correctly a good idea, but to un¬
consciously create an unprecedented piece of work, radically new yet
immediately gifted with significance for everyone.
We can better understand under these conditions why Kant meets
up again with certain aspects of the aesthetics of feeling, and even with
baroque art. Not only is the true genius unconscious—which invests
him with a component of naturalness without which the fine arts would
be nothing but applied arts—but the rules he invents as he applies them
are as mysterious for him as they are for the spectator. “The creator of
an [artistic] product, for which he must thank his genius, does not him¬
self know how the ideas within him found their way to that product”
(§ 46). The “aesthetic Idea” that guides genius can be neither conceived
nor stated clearly, “no expression can be found for it that indicates a
determined concept; it allows then, besides the concept, much that is
unnameable, the feeling for which animates the faculty of knowledge
and to language, as mere letters, joins spirit” (§ 49). The artist of genius
therefore does not follow rules, he invents them, and the miracle of art
consists in the happenstance that this unconscious, and therefore natu¬
ral, invention immediately makes sense to others, and this because of
the same principles that made of natural beauty a symbolic trace of the
ideas of reason. The artistic Beautiful thus turns out to be, in man, the
exact analogue of the natural Beautiful. This is why it is of the essence
to maintain, against classicism, that the rule for art, supposing there is
one, “cannot be written down in any formula that would serve as pre¬
scription” (§ 47).
Making all due allowance for their obvious differences, art turns
out to be much like humor: it proceeds from a natural gift that cannot
be taught, yet is communicative in that it immediately makes “common
sense.” We can learn every particular art’s technique just as we can learn
to tell “funny stories,” but this workmanlike accomplishment is not
going to transform anyone into an artist or a comedian. Between bring¬
ing out what is stored in the memory and having, as is so well said, a
sense of humor, there is a chasm no amount of effort is ever going to
bridge. The advantage of the artificial over the natural, in its very Car-

1 27
FOUR

tesian will to recuperate the beautiful into the orbit of the powers of the
spirit, risks making us forget this “aesthetic truth.” Criticizing Kant
would inevitably lead Hegelian aesthetics down the path of a renewed
classicism.

TOWARDS A NEW CLASSICISM:

ART'S TRIPLE HISTORICITY AS
SENSIBLE PRESENTATION OF THE TRUE

Let us first of all avoid a misunderstanding connected to the ambiguity

of the word “classicism.” I don’t mean by the term to designate either
ancient Greek art, as Hegel himself does, nor even the most signifi¬
cant works of the French seventeenth century, but rather the aesthetic
doctrine of Cartesian origin that holds that art’s main function is to
represent the truths of reason in this element, external to them but ac¬
cessible to the common understanding, that sensibility is. In classicism
thus understood the key moment of the beautiful is clearly the idea, the
sensual element being but the—in its essence inadequate—medium
within which truth becomes perceptible in pleasant fashion. We have
already seen how Boileau’s Art poetique was one of the first great intel¬
lectual thematizations of this very “classical” precedence of art’s ideal
content over its sensual form. We have also already pointed out how,
for Boileau, this representation of the beautiful is accompanied by art’s
claim to eternity: since truth can only be one and atemporal, since
the humanity it addresses itself to by way of the various aesthetic
forms possesses an intangible, invariable essence, art cannot and should
not undergo the kind of historical progress that agitates the scientific
world.
The originality of Hegel’s aesthetics lies in the very inversion of this
postulate. It is because truth has a history—or, better, is itself his¬
tory—that art, as sensual presentation of this truth, must also enter into
the sphere of historicity. There will therefore be “stages” in art’s devel¬
opment, as there are in the unfolding of the configurations of conscious¬
ness described in the Phenomenology of Spirit, or in the working out of
the logical idea or of the various forms of spirit (to which, besides, art
belongs). But—and this is the thesis I want to make explicit here—the
classicism that Kant’s aesthetics had tried to tear down is not at all
modified in its principles. However historical it may have become, truth
still remains the essential moment in the work of art, which is still con-

1 28
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

ceived of as a sensible presentation of the true; so that we could say of

Hegelianism that if, on the metaphysical level, it consists in a historici-
zation of Leibniz’s theodicy, on the aesthetic level it reveals itself to be
a historicized classicism.
But a formula cannot replace an explanation. The modalities of this
historicization of the Beautiful in Hegelian aesthetics are of such great
depth that by following them we can truly understand the ultimate po¬
sition art can aspire to within a metaphysical system in which it is des¬
tined to hold an inferior status. Baumgarten’s Aesthetics and Kant’s
Critique of Judgment tried, in opposition to Leibniz’s reduction of the
sensible to a confused intelligible, in opposition to the primacy of God’s
point of view over that of human finitude, to ennoble aesthetics. For
that, it was necessary to guarantee it the autonomy of its object. With
the introduction of historicity into truth, Hegel intended to reestablish
this primacy of the divine and the intelligible. The aesthetic sphere, born
out of the legitimation of the sensible, must thereby be reintegrated into
the whole of the system. The philosophy of art must thus embrace its
object the better to kill it—or, to be fairer, the better to secure it in the
subordinate role it never should have left.
That Hegel’s aesthetics takes up again the fundamental theme of
classicism is confirmed by the mode in which it defines art’s supreme
destination. According to the introduction to the Lectures on Aesthet¬
ics, art has reached this point

when it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and
when it is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine,
the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the
spirit. . . Art shares this vocation with religion and philosophy, but in a special
way, namely by displaying even the highest reality sensuously, bringing it
thereby nearer to the senses, to feeling, and to nature’s mode of appearance.2

Hegel never ceased to repeat that art’s object is the presentation of

truth. Far from being a pure illusion, as a certain Platonic tradition
would have it, art’s aim is identical to that of religion and philosophy,
even if the truth is presented therein in the form of phenomena, of the
sensual manifestations that works of art are. “Thus, far from being
mere pure appearance, a higher reality [Realitdt] and truer existence
[Dasein] is to be ascribed to the phenomena of art in comparison with
those of ordinary reality ['Wirklichkeit]” (1:22/9). For, as Hegel often
insisted throughout his lectures, the sensual presentation of truth in the

1 29
FOUR

beautiful work of art must be made in such a way that the two moments
present in it not be brought together arbitrarily but, on the contrary, in
the strongest, fittest fashion. “It has already been said that the content
of art is the Idea, while its form is the configuration of sensuous mate¬
rial. Now art has to harmonize these two sides and bring them into a
free reconciled totality” (1:100/70). Within the variety of modes of
such a reconciliation Hegel locates the principle of a chronological hi¬
erarchy, not only of the different apprehensions of the concept of
beauty, but of the various arts themselves. Before making this principle
explicit—which will allow us to understand exactly how Hegelianism,
in however grandiose a fashion, goes back on some of the advances of
Kantian aesthetics—we should grasp how this simple definition of art
implies a threefold return to classicism:
1. It is, first of all, the case that a certain “Cartesian” conception of
the mind is reactivated here. I do not of course mean to suggest that the
Hegelian concept of Spirit is a mere continuation of the Metaphysical
Meditations; from Cartesian consciousness to Hegelian Spirit the dis¬
tance is clearly great and is not about to be negated. Nevertheless, as in
Descartes, and unlike what was the case with Kant’s theory of genius,
the spirit is once again granted unlimited mastery of itself. At least in its
ultimate moment, when it finally conforms with its concept, there can¬
not subsist within it the least obscurity, not the smallest portion of the
naturalness that Kant did not hesitate to attribute to the artist’s creative
powers. There is for Hegel no doubt about this point: true beauty is a
creation of the spirit, and if there is something we cannot deny, it is
“that the spirit is capable of considering itself, and of possessing a con¬
sciousness, a thinking consciousness, of itself and of everything origi¬
nating in itself. Thinking is precisely what constitutes the inmost
essential nature of spirit . . . Now art and works of art, by springing
from and being created by the spirit, are themselves of a spiritual kind,
even if their presentation assumes an appearance of sensuousness and
pervades the sensuous with the spirit.” (1:27/12.)
2. We can understand, in this case, why Hegelian philosophy
should be diametrically opposed to the aesthetics of sentiment; it’s as a
connoisseur of this tradition that Hegel can distance himself from those
authors—notably “French” ones—who, against Cartesian classicism,
have defended the irrationality of the “heart,” of the “je-ne-sais-quoi”
that for Bouhours and Dubos constituted, as we have seen, “the soul of
delicacy.” He indeed wishes to put an end to “these scruples, and others

1 30
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

like them, against a truly scientific preoccupation with fine art” that one
can read “in older books, especially French ones, about beauty” (1:19/
6 — 7) but also, as we must point out, in Baumgarten and even in the
Critique of judgment.
3. Hegel must therefore resolutely argue—and here we measure the
extent to which he moves away from Kant and rejoins the orbit of clas¬
sical aesthetics—not only that the fine arts are worthy of generating
philosophical reflection, but especially (going much further) that they
are an adequate topic for strictly scientific treatment (1:18/5). This is
an important nuance: it means that art is not an irrational object which
philosophical reflection could choose to work on, as if from the outside,
but that it is intrinsically part of science’s development, that is to say, of
the spirit’s self-unfolding in all its systematicity.
It’s from this aspect that art fully appears to be what it is: a moment
of truth, possessing its own (internal) development (its own historicity);
but also, and precisely to the extent it is but a moment, its external
historicity. Within the complete system of science there is a before of
art (in this case, and for reasons we won’t go into here, the State) and
an after (religion and philosophy, as we will perhaps better understand
in subsequent pages): “But just as art has its ‘before’ in nature and the
finite spheres of life, so too it has an ‘after,’ i.e., a region which in turn
transcends art’s way of apprehending and representing the Absolute.
For art has still a limit in itself and therefore passes over into higher
forms of consciousness” (1:141/102).
In this key passage, Hegel gives us the principle of an aesthetics that
will essentially consist of an ordering into a chronological hierarchy of
the stages of art’s autodissolution into religion, then into philosophy.
We now know the nature of the limit art contains within itself; it has
nothing to do, as the aesthetics of feeling would naively have us believe
(seeing in it, second naivete, a supposed superiority of beauty over
truth), in the fact that art allegedly contains an irrational element, or
would itself belong to some other realm than that of reason. The limit
Hegel evokes is obviously that of the sensibility in which truth expresses
itself—a sensibility that from the philosophical, from the divine point
of view, has no more ontological validity within the system than it does
within the Leibnizian theodicy.
The task then becomes one of understanding how the introduction
of historicity into art, as the sensuous presentation of a truth that is
itself historical, is not the contrary of classicism but the surest method
FOUR

towards its completion, towards its finally conforming to its con¬

cept—to what was true and just in it from the very beginning of its
struggle against the baroque and the sentimental. The triple historicity
of the beautiful that structures all of the Lectures achieves its full signifi¬
cance at this nodal point of the Hegelian aesthetic. Let us attempt to
formulate it adequately.

1. The First Historicity:

Symbolism, Classicism, Romanticism

Let us look again at the way Hegel defines the articulation between the
two constitutive moments of the concept of artistic beauty. We find,
“first, a content, an aim, a meaning; and secondly the expression, ap¬
pearance, and realization of this content. But, thirdly, both aspects are
so penetrated by one another that the external, the particular, appears
exclusively as a presentation of the inner” (1:132/95). Though art is
structured like a language, with, as we would say nowadays, a signifier
and a signified, it remains nonetheless very different from ordinary lan¬
guage in that the signifier, the sensuous form, should in principle cede
nothing to arbitrariness: “In the work of art nothing is there except
what has an essential relation to the content and is an expression of it”
(ibid.). There are other ways of stating a truth than the aesthetic mode;
what characterizes it among all others is that, though sensible, the form
of the expression leaves strictly nothing to contingency. (1:101/71.)
The principle for the hierarchization of art’s great forms is deduc-
ible from this simple remark: to the extent that “art has the task of
presenting the Idea to immediate perception in a sensuous shape and
not in the form of thinking and pure spirituality as such, and, since this
presenting has its value and dignity in the correspondence and unity of
both sides, i.e., the Idea and its outward shape, it follows that the lofti¬
ness and excellence of art in attaining a reality adequate to its Concept
will depend on the degree of inwardness and unity in which Idea and
shape appear fused into one” (1:103/72). The hierarchy principle thus
unfolds itself into two:
—An art form’s superiority will first of all be measured by its ca¬
pacity to adequately, though sensuously, express the truth of the idea;
art seeks what Hegel, following Kant, calls the “ideal,” meaning indi¬
viduality defined as the synthesis of the universal contained in the idea
and of the particular inherent in the sensuous form it takes, “for the
Idea as such is indeed the absolute truth itself, but the truth only is its
not yet objectified universality,” while, as idea of the beautiful, sensually
1 32
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

incarnated therefore or individualized by its union with a particular

form, it approaches the ideal. We can say that the demand expressed in
art is that the Idea and its configuration as a concrete reality shall be
made completely adequate to one another” (1:104-5/73-74). It’s by
referring back to this demand that we shall have to judge the “ad¬
vances” along the history of aesthetics.
—But it goes without saying that, thus formulated, the principle of
hierarchization remains quite insufficient (“abstract”). For the value of
art—and here again Hegel’s classicism comes through—depends also
(we shall see that it is, in fact, all one thing) upon the richness and the
depth (the concreteness’ ) of the idea. And this latter in turn refers back
to a historicity: “For, before reaching the true Concept of its absolute
essence, the spirit has to go through a course of stages, a series grounded
in this Concept itself; and to this course of the content which the spirit
gives to itself there corresponds a course, immediately connected there¬
with, of configurations of art, in the form of which the spirit, as artist,
gives itself a consciousness of itself” (1:103/72).
As the reader will have anticipated, it’s at this point that Hegel suc¬
ceeds in fully reconciling classicism and historicity, the latter conferring
its maximum potency on the former. Far from, as with Dubos, the his¬
tory of art constituting an argument against the position that defends
art as a sensuous manifestation of the truth, it, on the contrary, magis¬
terially confirms this position; it is because the “true” truth is itself
historical (and not “eternal,” at least not in the naive meaning the
seventeenth-century classicists “still” gave the term) that there is neces¬
sarily also a history of the sensuous manifestations of this truth. There
is thus nothing there to urge the abandonment of the project of trans¬
forming art into an object for science; also nothing to argue in favor of
an “insurmountability” of art. On the contrary—and the two themes
are strongly bound up to each other—because it is, within the realm of
sensibility, a historical manifestation of a truth itself historical that it
will become necessary to surmount or supersede art for expressions bet¬
ter suited to the spirituality of a content that, in the last instance, repu¬
diates sensuousness, even though it can take pleasure in it for a while.
Since art is not a language similar to other languages, the connec¬
tion within it between form and content, signifier and signified having
nothing to do with arbitrariness, the historicity of the content is also
that of the forms. We can, in other words, complete the principle for
the hierarchization of the arts by stressing the fact that imperfection of
form is, in the aesthetic sphere, radically dependent on imperfection of
FOUR

the content: “the defectiveness of a work of art is not always to be

regarded as due, as may be supposed, to the artist’s lack of skill; on the
contrary, defectiveness of form results from defectiveness of content.”
Hegel illustrates his assertion in cultural terms: if “the Chinese, Indians,
and Egyptians” produced images of God that “never get beyond form¬
lessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form,” it’s because their
“mythological ideas” are themselves indeterminate and abstract (1:
105/74). It is thus only thanks to the development of the idea that “ar¬
tistic beauty acquires a totality of particular stages and forms”; the
three great moments symbolic, classical, and romantic, therefore “are
nothing but the different relations of meaning and shape, relations
which proceed from the Idea itself and therefore provide the true basis
for the division of this sphere” (1:107/75).
This triple partition of the great genre forms, that manifests itself
as the first relation of art to historicity, is (relatively) well known.
Within the perspective of a history of aesthetics defined as history of
subjectivity it offers the immense interest of bearing witness, though
negatively, to the intimate connection binding aesthetics to what could
be called the philosophical secularism inherent, in Kant, to the with¬
drawal of the divine. Because Hegel truly carries out Leibniz’s project
of a perfect systematicity, because, along the way, he is led to making of
philosophy man’s attempt to go beyond the point of view of human
finitude (of reflective subjectivity) towards the point of view of God (of
the absolute subject or knowledge), that his ordering of artforms into a
hierarchy not only takes the form of a chronology, of a logic of tempo¬
rality, but that it also turns into the killing off of art. The ordering can
in fact be read two ways: as the auto-unfolding of art through the dif¬
ferent stages that the gradual complication of the idea imposes on the
diversity of forms; but also as art’s auto-disintegration, since, as the
process goes on, it must inevitably realize, at the very moment it attains
perfection in its genre, that it is not the most adequate means of expres¬
sion of the idea, that it is inferior to the representation of the divine in
religion and, in the end, in philosophical thought itself. We must grasp
this paradoxical structure of art before going into the other two forms
of historicity that will also come to affect and complete this structure of
auto-unfolding and of supersession of itself.
Art begins, then, by being symbolic. This first moment presents no
particular difficulty, so easy is it, following the principle of hierarchi-
zation, to detect its double defect: “The symbolic shape is imperfect
because, (i) in it the Idea is presented to consciousness only as mdeter-
1 34
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

minate or determined abstractly, and, (ii) for this reason the correspon¬
dence of meaning and shape is always defective and must itself remain
purely abstract (1:109/77). Two visible consequences result from this.
Since the idea is as yet too indeterminate to itself concretely indicate
the form it should receive, symbolic art, as its name suggests, often lim¬
its itself to using natural objects as simple representatives of the content
to be expressed; one can, for example, symbolize force with the image
of a lion. We then think as if the idea were present in the form that the
natural object has become, but, quite obviously, the relation between
art’s two moments here remains completely external. The idea is not in
fact found in the natural object and the relation between the two re¬
mains one could hardly put it better—merely symbolic.
The idea cannot be satisfied with such an external relation to its
form, and it is with this dissatisfaction, that is for Hegel the moment of
the sublime, that symbolic art begins to bring itself to ruin, that its self¬
unfolding becomes self-supersession. What connection can be estab¬
lished between the symbolic and the sublime? Sublime, in German, is
erhaben, that which rises above. In the dissatisfied quest for an ade¬
quate form the idea experiences its own sublimity, the fact of its being
above all the sensuous forms clumsily being attached to it. The idea thus
becomes tyrannical toward the natural phenomena, literally torturing
them and finally rejecting them in the very attempt to appropriate them.
Symbolic art will therefore express itself both in giants and colossi, ef-
fortfully trying, through their monumental, grandiose character, to con¬
vey this superiority of an as yet indeterminate and abstract idea, and in
Indian statues with a hundred arms and chests, whose tortured diversity
and artificial richness correspond to the same unfulfilled aspiration.
Classical art is the crowning achievement of this still vain effort. If
the ideal is to be defined as the perfect adequacy between form and
content, sensuous presentation and idea, then only with classical art do
we reach it, thus penetrating into the sphere of perfect beauty. It is im¬
portant, from our perspective, to fully understand the paradox consti¬
tutive of this second stage. It will seem, within the Hegelian system, to
be the highest perfection of a limited order, to be perfect art, but, after
all, still an art, therefore inadequate to the idea, since the idea, being
such, can never be fully satisfied at being incarnate in a sensible form,
even if the latter were, unlike what is the case with symbolic art, the
most adequate possible, the most intrinsically determined by its con¬
tent. What, indeed, happens in the passage from the symbolic to the
classic? Following the hierarchy principle, the idea must simultaneously

1 35
FOUR

determine itself, become richer and more concrete, but also, by doing
this, produce, so to speak, its own form, determine not only its content
but also the only expression fully fit for it. Classical art can no longer
fulfill itself by borrowing from external nature forms symbolizing the
idea and spirituality. And yet it must remain an art, and, as such, a
sensual, and therefore, in a way, a natural presentation of the truth:
“Consequently, to suit such a content we must try to find out what in
nature belongs to the spiritual in and for itself” (1:110/78).
The only natural form that answers to this equation is the human
form, and, for Hegel, classical art is essentially incarnated in Greek
sculpture, which presents the visible unity of the human and the divine.
The human body, and particularly the face, thus appears as the “only
sensuous appearance appropriate to spirit.” But of course, in this new
stage of aesthetic life, unlike what took place in the symbolic, the body
“counts in classical art no longer as a merely sensuous existent, but only
as the existence and natural shape of the spirit, and it must therefore be
exempt from all the deficiency of the purely sensuous and from the con¬
tingent finitude of the phenomenal world” (1:110/78). That is what
Greek art, more than any other, manages to express in the calm and
serenity of its bodies and faces. It thus arrives at the ideal since, on the
one hand, the idea is sufficiently developed to perceive itself as subjec¬
tive, and, on the other, this subjectivity finds in man an expression that
has nothing arbitrary about it. But it’s exactly at this point that art’s
paradox bursts into daylight.
This is because the subjectivity that expresses itself in the most per¬
fect art is still only a finite, human subjectivity, for this very reason
assigned to a natural, therefore aesthetic (sensible) body. Art, in a sense,
cannot help it: how could it break free from all reference to sensibility
and, thereby, to finitude, since its very essence is to present the idea in
sensuous form? In another sense, it is precisely that which condemns it
at the very moment of achieving perfection. Beforehand this limit could
still have been ascribed to an accidental, temporary, imperfection; this
is no longer possible when we finally have the ideal before us. This is
the reason why Hegel evokes in very reserved terms what we must re¬
sign outselves to calling the anthropomorphism of the most perfect art:
“Of course personification and anthropomorphism have often been ma¬
ligned as a degradation of the spiritual, but in so far as art’s task is to
bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner, it must get
involved in this anthropomorphism” (1:110/78). The true idea is in¬
deed the unity of human and divine that the Greek statue represents;
1 36
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

but, at the same time, the fact that this representation remains within
the realm of the aesthetic, of sensuousness, since it expresses itself in the
human body, is a limitation that in return inevitably affects the concep¬
tion of spirituality itself. “Therefore here the spirit is at once determined
as particular and human, not as purely absolute and eternal.” Classical
form, despite its perfection, can thus not sustain itself either: “The clas¬
sical form of art has attained the pinnacle of what illustration by art
could achieve, and if there is something defective in it, the defect is just
art itself and the restrictedness of the sphere of art” (1:111/79). “Just”
art. . . The formulation is not without interest: it confirms if confirma¬
tion had been needed, the degree to which the history of aesthetics is,
within a metaphysics of reason, the history of its own supersession or
transcendence. The transition from classicism to romanticism bears wit¬
ness to this even more explicitly.
Indeed, with the romantic period we enter into what could be called
the art that leads out of art” [I’art de la sortie de l’art]-, romanticism is
in fact defined as “the self-transcendence of art but within its own
sphere and in the form of art itself” (1:113/80). The paradox merits
contemplation. It becomes clearer if we take into account the double
structure (content/form) of the hierarchization principle.
The content of romanticist art is, on the one hand, one degree
higher than that of classical art. The latter had arrived at the true idea
that the spirit is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the human and
the divine, a union that Greek sculpture presented ideally within sensi¬
bility. But, among the Greeks, this unity of finite and infinite remains
an in-itself, an immediate unity, undeveloped and indeterminate. It’s
precisely for this reason, as a function of its limitation, that this spiri¬
tual content can still find a perfectly adequate expression in sensuous¬
ness. In romanticist art, by contrast, this in-itself becomes for-itself: the
spirit becomes conscious that it is unity of divine and human, infinite
and finite. From the Greek god we go over to the Christian God who is
spirit, therefore interiority, inwardness, for-itself.
This modification of the content must inevitably affect the form. In
these new conditions, “the true element for the realization of this con¬
tent is no longer the sensuous immediate existence of the spiritual in the
bodily form of man, but instead the inwardness of self-consciousness.
Now Christianity brings God before our imagination as spirit, not as
an individual, particular spirit, but as absolute in spirit and in truth. For
this reason it retreats from the sensuousness of imagination into spiri¬
tual inwardness and makes this, and not the body, the medium and the

1 37
FOUR

existence [Dasein] of truth’s content” (1:112/80), unlike what was the

case with the classical Greek representation of the divine. We can better
understand the paradoxical situation of romanticist art: having finally
arrived at a correct, spiritual representation of the divine, it realizes it
can no longer present it in a sensuous material that would particularize
it and thereby deform it through individuation. “The new content, thus
won, is on this account not tied to sensuous presentation, as if that
corresponded to it, but is freed from this immediate existence which
must be set down as negative, overcome, and reflected into the spiritual
unity” (1:113/80). The content of romanticist art becomes from that
point on the internal world, whose presentation is the new task at hand.
And therein lies the paradox. However romanticist it may be, art
does not stop being art and, as such, inherently tied to the sensuous,
and thereby in some way or another to externality. The problem, as far
as form is concerned, is that of knowing how a content that is pure
interiority (consciousness, for-itself) can be adequately presented in sen¬
suous exteriority. In romanticism, “inwardness celebrates its triumph
over the external and manifests its victory in and on the external itself”
(ibid.). Romantic art will consequently be an art of the internal sense,
of feeling, and, if one considers the forms of sensibility, of time rather
than space. One observes here the degree to which aesthetics, in Hegel,
receives the odd mission of superseding sensibility, the extent to which
romantic art is, in this sense, truly the art that leads out of art and the
entryway to religion. The idea it has raised itself to is that of spirit, no
longer externalized in beautiful Greek individuality but self-conscious,
and although rationally superior to classical art it must in some way or
another become aesthetically inferior to it. Its task can no longer be one
of finding again a perfect adequacy with a sensuousness that is from
now on considered the enemy.
Such is the reason why romantic art must resolve itself to aban¬
doning classical perfection and taking up again the bothersome separa¬
tion of form and content characteristic of the symbolic. The moment
is somewhat analogous to that of the sublime since the Idea is once
again above the sensuous, but, in this case, for a radically inverse rea¬
son: it must once again distance itself from form because it has be¬
come too rich and too concrete for it, and not because it might still be
indeterminate.

Thereby the separation of Idea and shape, their indifference and inade¬
quacy to each other, come to the fore again, as in symbolic art, but with this

1 38
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

essential difference, that, in romantic art, the Idea, the deficiency of which in
the symbol brought with it deficiency of shape, now has to appear perfected in
itself as spirit and heart. Because of this higher perfection, it is not susceptible
of an adequate union with the external, since its true reality and manifestation
it can seek and achieve only within itself. (1:114/81)

The three moments (symbolism, classicism, romanticism) of the

Idea s relation with its form thus reveal themselves to be the three
instances of a process consisting in “the striving for, the attainment,
and the transcendence of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty.” This
first historicity resolves itself in another, more particular one, within
which aesthetics’ intrinsically untenable—thus by essence provisional—
character is better defined.

2. The Second Historicity:

Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music, and Poetry

The examination of the diverse individual arts’ chronological—in the

strong sense, as in the first historicity—hierarchy is rich with lessons.
To understand its profoundest meaning, we have to grasp how this new
division of aesthetics is distinct from the first though referring back to
it directly. The trinity of art’s great forms—symbolism/classicism/ro¬
manticism—is the most general, the one that exposes the moments of
the idea of the beautiful itself. Now, when taking into account the spe¬
cific arts, the goal is to analyze the concrete way these great stages of
the concept of beauty incarnate themselves in “external being-there
[■Dasein]” in the form of specific works. There will therefore be an in¬
timate connection between the different artistic genres and the idea of
the beautiful since the former are, in the final analysis, the sensuous
actualization of the latter (1:114/82). After what has been said on the
subject of romantic art, the second hierarchy’s principle should be easy
to grasp: following the paradox inherent in art as “sensible presenta¬
tion” of an intelligible truth, Hegel logically posits that the highest art
is, quite simply, that which manages to maximally liberate itself from
the sensuous sphere, therefore, in certain ways, from what constitutes
art as such. Reciprocally, the more an art remains stuck in the exter¬
nality of bodily matter, the more it will deserve to be placed on the
inferior rungs of the ladder.
The object then is to be emancipated above all from spatiality as
being the form par excellence of sensuousness (of externality), in which
case we can comprehend why, according to Hegel, the first artistic

1 39
FOUR

genre, going of course from bottom to top, is architecture; not only is

it displayed in the realm of the three dimensions of space, but, besides,
the materials it uses to represent the idea—or perhaps we ought to say,
to house it, since its favorite exercise is the building of temples—are
entirely borrowed from inorganic nature. It is furthest away from true
spirituality, which is why it is called upon, by essence, to correspond to
symbolic art.
It is precisely in the project of rendering the sensible material more
adequate to the idea, less external to it, that we go from architecture to
sculpture. The latter is still, of course, situated within tridimensionality,
but it has stopped seeing sensuous material merely mechanically and
tries to give it an organic and, thereby, an individual form. Sculpture
turns out to be quite adequate to the classical ideal, “by architecture,
the inorganic external world has been purified, set in order symmetri¬
cally, and made akin to spirit, and the god’s temple, the house of his
community, stands there ready. Then into this temple, secondly, the god
enters himself as the lightning-flash of individuality striking and per¬
meating the inert mass” (1:118/84) by giving the infinite spirit the form
of the organized human body.
Once art has taken it upon itself to build the divine temple, once it
has invited in God himself as individuality incarnate in the sculptural
organization of matter, the community of the faithful remains to be
dealt with. We could say that, in this third stage, God humanizes him¬
self; he becomes spirit reflected in the multiplicity of those who make
up its invisible church. “The compact unity in itself which the god has
in sculpture disperses into the plurality of the inner lives of individuals
whose unity is not sensuous but purely ideal.” In a movement of inter¬
nalization analogous to that by way of which we passed from classicism
to romanticism, sculpture gives way to three arts that lead out of art, to
the three stages during which the project of putting an end to spatiality
will truly accomplish itself.
It begins with painting. Not only does this art manage to do with¬
out inorganic matter (or nearly, materiality, strictly speaking, is mostly
not of the essence in the pictorial realm), it also spiritualizes the act of
making visible by breaking free of the constraints of the third dimen¬
sion. In Hegel’s happy formula: “The visibility and the making visible
which belong to painting . . . free art from the complete sensuous spa¬
tiality of material things by being restricted to the dimensions of a
plane surface” [von der sinnlicb-raumlichen Vollstandigkeit: in the Ger¬
man text, the terms for sensuousness and for spatiality are inseparably

1 40
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

linked L.F.] (1:121/87). As a compensation for the loss of the “com¬

pleteness of external volume, this new artistic genre we have come to
can allow itself a first expression of subjective feelings, a first approach
to interiority: Whatever can find room in the human breast as feel-
ing, idea, and purpose, whatever it is capable of shaping into act, all
this multiplex material can constitute the variegated content of paint¬
ing” (ibid.).
Music penetrates further into this interiority, since it is the first
amid the other aesthetic genres to completely rid itself of spatiality: “Its
material, though still sensuous, proceeds to still deeper subjectivity and
particularization (1:121/87). Sound, indeed, transcends “the indiffer¬
ent self-externality of space” (ibid.) and allows penetration into the
realm of temporality or, to speak like Kant, into the realm of internal
sense. Musical notes can be considered like points: just as in going from
architecture to sculpture to painting we had passed from volume to
surface, we pass here from line to point. And, always following the same
trade-off, what is lost in exteriority is gained in interiority. Music is the
first art truly appropriate to the expression of the human soul’s infinite
variety of feelings and passions.
This internalizing movement, characteristic of romantic arts, ends
with poetry. Sound, in music, is still tied to sensibility, even if the latter
no longer takes the form of exteriority but is, rather, embodied in the
time of consciousness. To put it very simply, musical sonorities are in¬
trinsically feeling-bound [sentimentales]. In poetry, on the other hand,
sound distances itself from this form of spiritualized sensuousness; it
becomes arbitrary, in the sense used in linguistics today of the “arbi¬
trariness of the sign.” “Sound in this way becomes a word as a voice
inherently articulated, the meaning of which is to indicate ideas and
thoughts” (1:122/88). It thus becomes a “point of the spirit,” for “this
sensuous element, which in music was still immediately one with in¬
wardness, is here cut free from the content of consciousness, while spirit
determines this content on its own account and in itself and makes it
into ideas. To express these it uses sound indeed, but only as a sign in
itself without value or content” (1:122-23/89).
Poetry is the art that leaves art behind to which the history of aes¬
thetics had aspired since its beginnings; it is the art within which—at
least in Hegel’s vision—sensibility has erased itself to the point that it
gives way to spirituality represented in subjective consciousness. If we
keep in mind that the idea that is to be exhibited is that of the divine,
we will understand that the end of art can only mean the transition to a
FOUR

superior sphere of the spirit; we shall also grasp that this sphere can
only consist in religion—always defined by Hegel as the apprehension
of the divine in the mode of representation. But with this observation
we enter a third form of historicity. The first two—leading from sym¬
bolism to romanticism, then from architecture to poetry—were internal
to aesthetics itself. As we leave its domain, we can situate aesthetics
within the temporality that encompasses it; situate it, therefore, in re¬
lation to what precedes it and what follows it within the system as a
whole.

3. The Third Historicity:

Art’s Dissolution into Religion

Here, Hegel’s famous affirmation that art belongs, from now on,
to a bygone era in human history gains its full meaning. When Hegel
calmly asserts that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and re¬
mains for us a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes],” that “it has lost for
us genuine truth and life” (1:25/11), the asseveration should be under¬
stood at two successive levels of depth.
It is, of course, clear, that the “for us” is intended first of all in a
historical sense and means “for us, moderns,” we who have left human¬
ity’s childhood behind. The time gone by is here measured from Greek
antiquity: “The beautiful days of Greek art, like the golden age of the
later Middle Ages, are gone” (1:24/10), and if they are, it’s because we
live in a culture of “reflection” or even of reason, which allows us to go
beyond the framework of sensuousness when we seek to think the truth.
“Consequently the conditions of our present time are not favorable to
art” (ibid.). Whereas Greek culture had above all been an aesthetic cul¬
ture, a religion of beauty, Christian modernity has so well spiritualized
the religious that our cultural environment has been able to distance
itself from art. To be convinced of this it suffices to consider the differ¬
ence separating the ancient divinity, as it is ideally manifested in classi¬
cal art, from Christian spirituality: “The Greek god is not abstract but
individual, closely related to the natural human form. The Christian
God too is indeed a concrete personality, but is pure spirituality and is
to be known as spirit and in spirit. His element of existence [Dasein] is
therefore essentially inner knowledge and not the external natural form
through which he can be represented only imperfectly and not in the
whole profundity of his nature” (1:103/72).
The “for us” becomes more precise. It now means for us, philoso¬
phers of Christian culture, who have come to understand that the di-

1 42
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

vinity does not need a sensuous form, does not, therefore, need art, to
be represented to consciousness. Since it is pure spirituality, it is only
through a kind of fundamental naivete that the aesthetic vision of the
world can come to think we could remain at a sensible apprehension of
the absolute. It is thus because of his classicism, because of the idea that
art’s mission is the sensuous presentation of truth, that Hegel is inevi¬
tably led to affirm art’s dissolution into religion—the latter being itself
conceptualized as a mere mode (superior of course, because less sensu¬
ous) of the presentation of truth. The logic we had witnessed at work
in the transition from Leibniz to Kant via Baumgarten is simultaneously
inverted and confirmed. In establishing, as Leibniz had, the autonomy
of sensibility, Kant had been led to making of the divine a simple idea,
and of religion a modest “practical faith,” directed in the end by rea¬
son’s requirements. He thus brought us into the sphere of philosophical
secularism. In reestablishing the legitimacy of God’s viewpoint, in reas-
suming the concept of an absolute subject as truth, and not as mere idea
of human reason, Hegel eventually had to take up again for his own
purposes Leibniz s old thesis about the sensible being the “kingdom of
the confused intelligible.” It’s not an accident, then, if, traveling back¬
ward along Kant’s road, Hegel invites us to supersede the sphere of
sensibility, meaning aesthetic reflection’s point of view, and enter that of
religion. A procedure that renders art’s “third historicity” more explicit.
It is, indeed, in the Greek world that art’s own limits begin to be
manifest:

For us art counts no longer as the highest mode in which truth fashions an
existence for itself. In general it was early in history that thought passed judg¬
ment against art as a mode of illustrating the idea of the Divine; this happened
with the Jews and Muhammadans, for example, and indeed even with the
Greeks, for Plato opposed the gods of Homer and Hesiod starkly enough. With
the advance of civilization a time generally comes in the case of every people
when art points beyond itself. (1:141-42/103)

Hegel holds that that time came in Europe when, with the Refor¬
mation, Christianity, which had itself made use of art, finally had to
give it up, God’s representation having achieved too high a degree of
spirituality to be any longer thus debased: “when the urge for knowl¬
edge and research, and the need for inner spirituality, instigated the
Reformation, religious ideas were drawn away from their wrapping in
the element of sense and brought back to the inwardness of heart and
thinking. Thus the ‘after’ of art consists in the fact that there dwells in
FOUR

the spirit the need to satisfy itself solely in its own inner self as the true
form for truth to take” (1:142/103).
One could hardly be plainer, and this passage through the Refor¬
mation summarily expresses all that religion adds to art by adopting the
form of representation. With the latter, “the Absolute has removed
from the objectivity of art into the inwardness of the subject,” so that
Hegel can speak of an “advance from art to religion” (1:142—43/103).
This advance, as is well known, comes to its fulfillment in philoso¬
phy, which can alone think inwardness in a way fully adequate to the
nature of absolute spirit. However much it may have internalized him,
religion does not thereby cease representing God as an object external
to consciousness—truth to tell, this is inherent in the very structure of
representation as such. The latter is in fact always reflective; it therefore
remains always within finite consciousness, for which every object re¬
mains, one way or another, in a certain exteriority. Only speculative
philosophy, which comes to understand that the reflection of finite con¬
sciousness is but a moment in the unfolding of absolute subjectivity, and
that it is in this sense that authentic spirit cannot express itself in any
form other than pure thought, is able to reconcile art’s objectivity and
religion’s subjectivity.
The modalities of this strange reconciliation are not our concern
here (besides, we would have to mobilize all of the more general theses
of the Hegelian system to justify the possibility of a reconciliation—
assuming, of course, we even managed to get there). The important
thing to grasp, on the other hand, is that with it the Kantian idea that
beauty, artistic or natural, is not reducible to the powers of the spirit is
also “superseded.” Kant wanted to critique the metaphysics of subjec¬
tivity, and his critique’s culminating point was, no doubt, in aesthetics.
Whether or not the Hegelian “supersession” of this attempt is philo¬
sophically legitimate is another question, one of determining the extent
to which Kant can also be a post-Hegelian. I have elsewhere tried to
answer it. What can, in any case, be but little doubted, is that aesthetics’
subsequent progeny will—for quite a long time, even to our own days
perhaps—not stop hesitating between these two models. Nietzsche’s
own aesthetics can, in their reassertion of the autonomy of the sensible,
to a certain extent be considered as a kind of “return to Kant.” But
what will radically differentiate them from Kantian aesthetics, as from
Hegelianism, is their willful determination to put an end to the idea that
art is a world.

1 44
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

OF ART AS "HISTORICAL WORLD"

If there is one thesis Kant thinks it important to hold onto, it is the one
that maintains there exists a world of beauty. Not only does beauty not
make sense except in relation to the cosmologicul idea—alone cap¬
able, it must again be stressed, of granting it a certain “objectivity,” that
of the “common sense”—but, besides, the artistic beautiful itself, al¬
though a product of the human spirit, preserves an aspect of naturalness
without which it could not pretend to by right belong to the sphere of
aesthetics. As we have seen, that’s the meaning and significance of the
theory of the genius.
It is, to that extent, not inexact to think that Hegel’s challenge to
this theory, by way of the assertion of the superiority of the artistic over
the natural beautiful, is a decisive blow to art’s worldliness [monda-
neite]. The aspect of naturalness in the Hegelian genius is, so to speak,
in the process of extinction. It tends in fact towards non-being, and art
as a whole is thus given over to the powers of subjectivity and of his¬
tory—metaphysics recommences its triumphal march. Yet, seen from
another side, Hegel, since he is a “classicist”—that is, a rationalist, as
was here defined—cannot but continue to consider the universe of the
beautiful as a world, even if it has become since Kant thoroughly ideal
and historical. Hegel thus explains how, in the third part of the Aes¬
thetics, dealing with particular arts, “we have to deal with the beauty
of art as it unfolds itself, in the arts and their productions, into a world
[word underlined by Hegel himself—L.F.] of actualized beauty” (1:
115/83). And this is the description Hegel gives of it in a text that merits
being quoted at length:

The content of this world is the beautiful, and the true beautiful, as we saw,
is spirituality given shape, the Ideal, and, more precisely, absolute spirit, the
truth itself. This region of divine truth, artistically represented for contempla¬
tion and feeling, forms the center of the whole world of art. It is the indepen¬
dent, free, and divine shape which has completely mastered the externality of
form and material and wears it only as a manifestation of itself. Still, since the
beautiful develops itself in this region as objective reality [Wirklichkeit] and
therefore distinguishes within itself its single aspects and factors, granting them
independent particularity, it follows that this center now arrays its extremes,
realized in their appropriate actuality, as contrasted with itself. One of these
extremes therefore forms a still spiritless objectivity, the merely natural environ-

I 45
FOUR

ment of God. Here the external as such takes shape as something having its
spiritual end and content not in itself but in another.
The other extreme is the Divine as inward, as something known, as the var¬
iously particularized subjective existence [Dasein] of the Deity. (1:115 — 16/83)

A first observation: it’s easy once again to find in this description of

the world of beauty, or of beauty as world, the principle behind the
three hierarchies, the three forms of historicity, that we have seen at
work inside as well as on the immediate outside of art. As with them,
art’s intimate essence (the ideal) is at the center, preceded by the more
natural and followed by the more spiritual. We should then observe
that, as in Kant, it is the idea of the divine that structures worldliness,
that makes up its infrastructure or framework, so to speak. Without it,
there could be no systematic unity, and without that, there could be no
world either, so obvious is it, for Kant as for Hegel, that what is not
One world is not a World. But the immense difference separating these
two visions of art as intrinsically tied to worldliness is easy to discern,
though its implications run deep. It is still the case with Kant that the
idea of world is only evoked by art (as by beauty in general) because of
the former’s contingency and naturalness, that is, because of that in
which it is not integrally dominated by subjectivity. And it is also to that
extent that it can claim a universal, that is, in a certain sense an atem-
poral and ahistorical validity. If the little nightingale’s song, once imi¬
tated by man, no longer evokes the idea of the world, if it isn’t beautiful,
nor even touching in some way, it is because we now know it to be
dominated by subjectivity and, from that point on, nothing in it can
evoke the cosmos.
Though, for Hegel, art remains a world, this world has all the same
ceased to be external to subjectivity conceived of as absolute subjec¬
tivity. It is so well integrated that it finds itself to be historicized through
and through, since this absolute subjectivity itself can only unfold
within temporality. At which point we may be truly allowed to ask
whether Hegelianism does not, despite itself, open up the way for what
is going to happen in Nietzsche’s aesthetics, namely the world’s explo¬
sion in an infinity of historical points of view, of “perspectives” for
which, in the famous Nietzschean formulation, “there are no facts, only
interpretations.”
The answer to this question is actually more complicated than it
would seem. Hegel’s historicism is of a very strange kind, not to say,
quite simply, that it is repelled by the historicity it embraces the better

1 46
 THE HEGELIAN MOMENT

to annihilate. Everybody today thinks it’s perfectly obvious that Hege¬

lianism was the first philosophical taking-into-account of the problem
of historicity, that transcendental philosophy, “structuralist” before its
time, supposedly neglected. It’s something of a commonplace, not to say
a banality since it s not to be doubted that in every part of the Hegelian
system one finds successive stages,’ whether they be of consciousness,
of the logical Idea, of universal history in the proper sense or, as we
have just seen, of aesthetics. But, seen another way, we must not be
afraid to assert that this proposition is an error—to the degree that the
term has any meaning in philosophy. The Hegelian project is not at all
one of opening philosophy up to history, but of absorbing historicity
back into the concept, which task, until proof to the contrary, is not the
same thing. The project, a direct descendant of Leibniz’s (whose influ¬
ence on Hegel is, decidedly, too little acknowledged in Hegelian stud¬
ies), is to demonstrate that temporality, at the opposite end of what
Kant held, is nothing outside of the concept; that it is, in the Phe¬
nomenology's famous formula, but the “Concept in existence” [der das-
einde Begriff\.
And it is in that way that Hegel, we might say, still resists Nietzsche.
If he can hold onto the idea of a unique, though historical, world, it is
not by making of history, as Kant did, a reality external to the concept
and of the world an Idea of reason, but, on the contrary, through—
more or less successfully—integrating historicity into the system so it
will not cause any more disorder. It is therefore this very Leibnizian
systematicity, this unification of finite points of view into a superior
harmony now carrying the name “absolute subject,” that Nietzsche will
have to destroy as a first step, in order to liberate the historicist poten¬
tialities contained in Hegelianism. Then and only then will the era of
the nonworld burst forth, the period of the pure dispersion of the voli¬
tional atoms, whose expression could only be a new art configuration.

1 47
 FIVE

A CCORDING TO ONE INTERPRETATION, dominant in France

since Foucault’s and Deleuze’s work in the sixties, Nietzsche is sup¬
posedly the anti-Hegelian philosopher par excellence. We have to “take
seriously the resolutely antidialectical character of Nietzsche’s philoso¬
phy,” for “if we do not discover its target the whole of Nietzsche’s phi¬
losophy remains abstract and barely comprehensible.” The target is,
essentially, Hegel, since, as Deleuze goes on to write in his excellent
book, Nietzsche and Philosophy, “Anti-Hegelianism runs through
Nietzsche’s work as its cutting edge.”1 In the manner of practicing de-
construction called “genealogy,” the philosophy of “difference” is alleg¬
edly already at work against the categories of identity which have
marked, in the hackneyed expression, “all philosophy since Plato.”
We shall see, following a line of argument Heidegger developed
with gr^at-conviction, that there is a subterranean continuity between
.Nietzsche’s and Hegel's, work. But it remains true that, at least at first
sight, everything opposes the tragic conception of the irreducible mul¬
tiplicity of Life to the philosophy of reconciliation that is Hegelianism.
Through the virtues of the dialectic, conflicts and contradictions are
forever destined to be overcome within a harmonious synthesis. Nietz¬
sche does not merely assert the impossibility or even the mendacious
character of this, he also, from a genealogical point of view, denounces
the “nihilist” meaning of any antitragic philosophy. Beginning with The
Birth of Tragedy, he comes up with the hypothesis that “if ancient
tragedy had been pushed off its path by the dialectical drive towards
knowledge and the optimism of science, we would have to conclude
from this fact that there is an eternal struggle between the theoreti¬
cal and the tragic world-views.”2 Theory’s passionate antitragedism is
brought to a high point by dialectics, which makes of all “difference,”

148
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

of all contradiction, a mere moment of transition towards the identity

of the final reconciliation.
This “war between the gods” in which the tragic and the theoretical
confront each other underlies the two critiques Nietzsche never fails to
make of Hegelian dialectics. The first may seem trivial: it aims at “the
philosopher’s submission to reality,” that “dialectical fatalism”3 im¬
plicit in the illusive identification of the rational with the real. Hegel is
suspected here of having “planted in the generations he leavened that
admiration before the ‘power of history’ that, in practice, transforms
itself at every moment into a bare admiration of success and leads to
the idolatry of the factual.”4 We should not be misled: Nietzsche does
not here take up on his own account the objections already formulated
by the neo-Kantians. Nor does he echo Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach.
His intention is obviously not that of rehabilitating any kind of “moral
vision of the world” over against the dialectic’s fatalism. In this confu¬
sion of the real and the rational, what genealogical analysis aims at is
not at all to eliminate the notion of an ideal, but, quite the contrary, the
fact that Hegel, instead of giving himself over to the idea that what is
should be, still seeks to demonstrate that what should be, is. As the
outstanding example of the theoretical man, he saw in history the pro¬
gressive incarnation of the divine, whereas to the genealogist’s more
practiced eye, it goes without saying that “God has only been created
by history” (ibid.). If “the Hegelian worship of the real as the rational”
comes down to a “divimzation of success” (ibid., p. 169), it is thus not
due to “immoralism,” as the Kantians so dully think, but, on the con¬
trary, due to an excess of moralism, to the fact that Hegel sustains at all
costs the idea that the “is” and the “ought” must be reconciled, and
that this reconciliation cannot, of course, be effected from any basis
other than the “ought” (the ideal: that is, reason).
Nietzsche’s second criticism against the systematic form Hegelian¬
ism takes must be understood from within the same perspective; “psy¬
chological nihilism” also sets in when one “has supposed a totality, a
systematization, even an organization in every event and among all
events, so that the soul that thirsts for something to admire and to
honor revels in the all-encompassing notion of a supreme form of mas¬
tery and domination (if it is the soul of a logician, absolute logical con¬
sistence and a dialectics of the real suffice to reconcile him with
everything). One imagines a kind of unity, any form of “monism,” and
following this belief, the human being feels a deep togetherness with

149
FIVE

and dependence from a whole that infinitely surpasses him, one of the
divinity’s modes.”5
The will to system is but the ultimate aspect adopted by the meta¬
physics inherited from Platonism. It, paradoxically, restores the Platonic
duality between appearance and truth since, in order to maintain the
illusion of monism, it must be constantly demonstrated that plurality
reintegrates unity, that the particular enters into the universal—the
“philosophical laborer’s” work that definitively assures the victory of
the theoretical over the tragic. Through the dialectic, Hegel establishes
“history in the place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as
sole sovereign, insofar as it is the ‘self-realizing concept,’ the ‘dialectic
of the spirit of nations,’ and the ‘universal judgment.’”6 It is this vision
of the world that leads to the affirmation of “the death of art”; it must
be overcome if aesthetics is finally to be put in its proper place.

AGAINST DIALECTICS:
THE REVALORIZATION OF AESTHETICS

If its Greek, or, rather, “Socratic” origins are examined, dialectics ap¬
pears to be not only antitragic, but—a constant theme with Nietzsche—
inaesthetic: “With Socrates, Greek taste changes towards dialectics:
what exactly has taken place? It is, above all, a distinguished taste that
is vanquished; with dialectics it is the populace that gains the upper
hand. Before Socrates, dialectical manners were avoided in good soci¬
ety. They were considered bad manners.”7
As is often the case with Nietzsche, the terse judgment conceals a
form of argumentation; the latter must be reconstituted to grasp exactly
dialectics’ antiaesthetic essence, and to understand how the reversal of
Platonism Nietzsche aspires to should culminate in a simultaneous re¬
habilitation of both the sensuous realm and of art. In a sense further to
be defined, the “Nietzschean moment” in philosophy maintains a rela¬
tion with the dialectical, Platonico-Hegelian negation of art analogous
(which does not mean identical) to that which the “Kantian moment”
has with classical rationalism. Even if the paths that are followed are
quite different here and there, the aim in both cases is to conquer or
reconquer sensibility’s autonomy—for Kant, over against the “con¬
cept,” for Nietzsche, against the dialectical “will to truth”—and thus
to open up the space necessary to the very existence of aesthetics.
What, first of all, does dialectics’ “popularity” and, thereby, its in¬
elegance, consist of (Nietzsche compares the dialectician to someone

1 50
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

who would eat with his hands)? The answer can be put concisely: if the
Socratic method takes the path of dialogue, it is the better to refute the
adversary’s positions with the purpose of arriving at a truth which will
be that of the Idea (of the intelligible). But, unlike error, which is, as is
generally known, multiple, truth pretends to be unique. It claims to be
valid at all times and in every place, for everybody. In that, it is “demo¬
cratic, ‘plebian,” even, in the sense Nietzsche gives to the term, “re¬
actionary,” since it cannot but react against the forces of falsehood and
of illusion, especially, therefore, against art—which for these reasons is
denounced by Plato in one of the most famous passages of the Republic.
By opposition to the dialectician, who is the theoretical man
(learned man or philosopher), animated always by the will to truth, the
artist appears as an aristocratic character. Still living in the predemo-
cratic world of tradition (for example, the universe of the “great Hel¬
lenes’ before Socrates), he posits values without discussion, without
arguments, with authority. The forces he plays with are not reactive:
unlike the truth, they don’t need to deny other forces to posit them¬
selves. We can therefore better understand this decisive assertion made
against dialectics: “What needs to be proven in the first place is not
worth much. Everywhere authority is sure of itself, everywhere one does
not demonstrate, one commands, the dialectician is a sort of buffoon”
(ibid.). And if Socrates is the “buffoon who managed to make himself
be taken seriously,” it’s because, drawing his “ferocity” out of a deep
“popular resentment” (ibid., § 7) against aesthetic aristocratism, he suc¬
cessfully set out to inject a “bad conscience” among his interlocutors
by constantly placing them in contradiction with themselves. With his
“sick man’s malevolence,” armed with dialectics and the “slashing knife
of the syllogism” (ibid.), he succeeded in doing away with the illusive
temptations of sensuous beauty in favor of truth. His ugliness and his
lowly origins are, in quite precise fashion, inseparably linked, as Nietz¬
sche does not fail to stress: “By his very origin Socrates belonged to the
lowest of the low folk: Socrates was the populace. We know, we can
even see how ugly he was,” which should make us doubt that he was
really Greek (ibid., § 3).
And here is the essential: dialectics can only exert themselves within
the framework of a theory of the Ideas that maintains the sensible world
must be denied in order to favor the intelligible world. Everyone knows
that sensuousness is deceitful, that it shows us the same realities under
different aspects (we can, for instance, bring to mind the various forms
of a piece of wax), and that, consequently, it offends the most sacred
FIVE

rules of logic, and first of all the famous principle of identity. True ideas,
on the contrary, are stable: they are what remains under the contin¬
gency of changes that never cease to affect the sensible world. All of
which is well known, and Nietzsche, despite a received opinion to the
contrary, does not merely inverse the terms of the opposition between
the temporal and the eternal, the sensible and the intelligible. Before
anything else, it is with the eyes of the genealogist that he looks upon
the negation of aesthetics that Platonism is as prototype of all theory:
“These senses, which are, besides, so immoral—these senses deceive us
about the true world.” This is, in the style of Nietzschean irony, the
core of the scientific-technological discourse. The “besides,” of course,
has nothing gratuitous about it: it is, in truth, out of fear of sensuality
(always “immoral”) that sensibility (always “erring”) comes to be de¬
preciated. In the eyes of the “genealogist” (as, later on, in those of the
psychoanalyst), philosophical theses are nothing but “rationalizations,”
“symptoms” as Nietzsche already put it (ibid., § 2), the fetishized ex¬
pression of a certain pathos, perhaps even of a pathology.
If, as Nietzsche states in a famous aphorism, “my philosophy is an
inverse Platonismwhat is the result of this inversion as far as the
establishment (or re-establishment) of aesthetics is concerned? The an¬
swer is given us in a section of Twilight of the Idols titled: “How the
‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable.” Heidegger has made an impec¬
cable commentary on it, of which I shall recall only the main con¬
clusion. The key theme of Nietzsche’s text is crystal clear, it seeks
to demonstrate how the “true world,” as opposed to the “apparent
world”—the way the intelligible world is opposed to the sensible
world—itself turns out to be, at the end of a long history that begins
with Plato and finishes with Zarathustra, the illusion par excellence. But
what is most important to note is that at the end of this process the
point is not at all that appearance (the sensuous) should be valorized as
such, but rather that we must eliminate the idea that there is something
like appearance: “The true world—we have abolished. What world has
remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we
have also abolished the apparent one.”
Only at this price will the conditions of possibility be created that
will permit art to take precedence over philosophy. For the liberation of
the sensuous and of appearance that the genealogy of the true world
brings about is just as much a liberation of art, since the latter “affirms
precisely that which the application of the supposedly true world
denies.”8

1 52
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

Art is indeed but the will to appearance in the aspect of the sen¬
sible” (ibid.), and since this appearance, as we have just seen, is not
“really” one, we have to say with Nietzsche that “the will to appear¬
ance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and changing is deeper,
more metaphysical’ than the will to truth, to reality, to being.” It is in
this that art, by essence anti-Platonic, “has greater value than truth,”
that it is the most transparent expression of life, of that will to power
that forms “the most intimate essence of Being.” As The Birth of
Tragedy had already laconically put it: “Only possible life: in art. Oth¬
erwise, we turn away from life”—and we sense here that the genealogi¬
cal deconstruction of Platonic truth does not do away with every notion
of truth, that there is perhaps a truth deeper than that of ideas, more
real,” if we may say so, than that animating philosophic or scientific
rationalism, truth that perhaps only art could do justice to, just as, at
this level, only the senses cease lying to us “in as far as they show us
becoming, disappearance, change.” There are thus at least two truths
and two lies, one kind beneficial and quite real, the other reactive and
unreal, and this duality matches that between theory (false truth and
bad lie) and art (good truth and good lie).

NIETZSCHE AS ANTI-HEGELIAN? THREE THESES ON NIETZSCHE

The whole problem, of course, consists first of all in determining the

extent to which this “inversion of Platonism” remains, or not, depen¬
dent on what it seeks to overturn—a phenomenon that would not be
contradicted by the other great “overturning” of the nineteenth century,
Hegel’s by Marx. Contrary to Deleuze and to Foucault (on this precise
point, we mean; Heidegger’s influence, on Foucault at least, being de¬
cisive in other realms), Heidegger has brought to light a certain conti¬
nuity between Nietzsche and the metaphysics with which the latter
pretended to have definitively broken. I will, without going into the
details of this interpretation that makes of Nietzsche the thinker of tech¬
nology, briefly retrace its principle before putting forward three theses
on Nietzscheanism as the foundation not so much of our technologized
world, as of a contemporary aesthetics from which Heidegger himself
is perhaps not as distant as he himself thought.
Heidegger never ceased to urge thinking of technology beginning
with its essence, which, in his eyes, is to be found in the completion of
modern metaphysics as a “metaphysics of subjectivity.” The notes titled
“Overcoming Metaphysics,” written between 1936 and 1946, set out

1 53
FIVE

to show that, understood from the standpoint of its essence, the term
“technology” is equivalent to “completed metaphysics,” and that the
latter finally finds adequate expression in Nietzsche’s theory of the “will
to power.” Going right to the essential: it could be maintained that,
since Descartes, metaphysics has been, according to Heidegger, an an¬
thropology, a way of thinking about man as a foundation or ground
following the two traditional axes of philosophical questioning, the
theoretical and the practical. Modern metaphysics, as a theoretical an¬
thropology, consists in a conception of the real as obedient to the prin¬
ciples constitutive of the human spirit, transferring, for example (in
Leibniz), the principle of sufficient reason (a logical or “subjective”
principle) to the real itself and, ontologizing it, positing that nihil est
sine ratione [nothing is without reason]. But such a theoretical anthro¬
pology, which reaches its summit with Hegel’s affirmation of the iden¬
tity between the real and the rational, does not by itself alone, undergird
technology’s domination as “completed metaphysics.”
In order to apprehend the presence of “completed metaphysics” in
the technologized relation to the world, we have to take into account
the practical aspect of the metaphysics of subjectivity. As a practical
anthropology, it represents beings to itself not only as existents subject
to rationality’s subjective principles, but as “objects for the will.”
Throughout the modern intensification of the essence of subjectivity as
will, the existent, the totality of beings [Vetant], has tended more and
more to have no reality except as object, manipulatable by the subject
under the aspect of accomplishing his ends, uniformly at the disposal of
the will whether as instrument or as beings. From this viewpoint, Kant’s
reinterpretation of the I think as an I want, and especially his doctrine
of the autonomy of the will, were decisive steps towards the technic
interpretation of the world that Nietzsche’s philosophy makes a theme
of. Up until then, the will had been subordinated to something other
than itself, to the ends it was supposed to pursue. But with Kant, on the
other hand, practical reason wills nothing other than itself, it wills itself
as freedom. In “Kant’s concept of practical reason as pure will,” what
is taking place is the very completion of the idea of will, “the completion
of the being of will,” which becomes will unconditioned by anything
other than itself, “absolute will” or, since it wills nothing other than
itself, “will to will.”
Essential link in the process of the technologization of the real, the
“autonomy of the will” in Kant’s sense would not, truth to tell, be sepa¬
rated from the ultimate absolutization of the will save for one, still in-

1 54
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

dispensable, mediation, that of the Nietzschean theory of the will to

power as the “second to the last stage of the will’s development.” With
Nietzsche s will to power a new figure of the will comes forward explic¬
itly, one which in appearance still wants something other than itself
(power), but which—following an interpretation constructed, from
1936 on, during Heidegger’s courses on Nietzsche—in fact wills more
power (more domination) only the better to experience itself indefinitely
as will ruling the real; in a word, The being of the will to power can
only be understood in terms of the will to will,”9 in terms of this un¬
conditioned will through which the Cartesian project of mastery and
possession of nature comes to completion. We can thereby better under¬
stand how Heidegger could have thought that, with the advent of the
reign of technology, it is “the development of the unconditional domi¬
nance of metaphysics” that truly begins, when it finally finds a histori¬
cal period adequate to itself (ibid., p. 90). Along the road leading from
Descartes to Nietzsche, reason’s becoming and its fate—and here Hei¬
degger s analysis is rather close to Max Weber’s—will have consisted in
no longer establishing objectives itself, in transforming itself from the
objective reason it attempted to be into purely instrumental reason.
The will is, in parallel fashion, itself no longer assigned to any end.
The mastery over the world no longer aims, as it did with Descartes or
during the age of Enlightenment, at emancipating human beings or at
obtaining their happiness; it becomes the quest for mastery for the sake
of mastery or, put another way, for brute force for the sake of brute
force. And yet this rupture with Cartesianism is, still according to Hei¬
degger, more apparent than real, since in liberating the will from any
subordination to ends Nietzsche does nothing more than fulfill the es¬
sence of willing, raising it up to the level of its concept, thus bringing
to completion the conception of the subject that was, in the final analy¬
sis, still only embryonic in Cartesianism. It is thus as a metaphysician
that Nietzsche, following a central theme in his aesthetics, conceptual¬
izes art more in terms of the artist, that is, of the creator (of his will)
than in terms of the work of art itself; it is still in direct continuity
with this metaphysics of subjectivity he was supposed to have over¬
turned through his genealogical critique of the Platonic-Hegelian dialec¬
tic that his philosophy of art takes the form of a “physiology,” or a
theory of the “vital forces” at the beginning of creative activity. That is
why Nietzsche, according to this interpretation, “thinks through and
through in the modern way [durcbaus neuzeitlich denkt] despite his
high estimation of the early Greek, pre-Platonic thinking.”10

1 55
FIVE

The force of Heidegger’s reading can hardly be denied, even though

it leads to the strange paradox that, in it, genealogy is less distant from
dialectics than seems at first to be the case. And yet it also seems to
me difficult to deny that Nietzsche’s thought is already far closer to
Heidegger’s than the latter cares to admit. After all, this subjectivity
that Heidegger is pleased to discover in the concept of will to power
no longer quite possesses, to say the least, the habitual characteristics
of the metaphysical subject. Consciousness, rationality, identity, auto¬
transparency, etc., are so absent here that we hardly see how we could
still speak about “subjectivity.” And this will to power which, Nietzsche
maintains, identifies itself with Life in order to constitute the most inti¬
mate essence of Being is characterized by such diversity that it becomes
difficult to put it in relation with the durability of any kind of substance.
We could, furthermore, with good reason state about Life that it is mul¬
tiplicity and difference, so that between Heidegger’s Being and the sort
of radical splintering-up Nietzsche tries to conceptualize, the distance
might be, here again, smaller than Heidegger wishes to suggest. As so
often with the latter thinker, his interpretation of Modern Times as be¬
ing uniformly destined to working out the different stages of metaphys¬
ics’ activity in the world leads him to neglect the task of retracing the
history, not of the metaphysical subject, but of the various modern con¬
ceptions of subjectivity. Heidegger’s book on Nietzsche is admirable, at
times even grandiose, but I’m not sure it gains anything from squeezing
the Nietzschean conception of the subject into that of Descartes.
And thus the first thesis I would like to put forward, before devel¬
oping the arguments to support it in the following pages: Nietzsche’s
aesthetics—which is to say, finally, his philosophy (since art is life’s
most adequate expression)—are not so much a result of the “metaphys¬
ics of subjectivity” as a newly opened door onto a new, radically origi¬
nal form of individualism. Heidegger himself has quite exactly pointed
to what is perhaps the specific trait of such an individualism. Com¬
menting on one of The Will to Power's aphorisms, which states that
“perspectivism” is a property of Being itself, Heidegger makes this
decisive observation: “No drawn-out proof is needed to show that
this conception of the existent is the very one Leibniz held, except
that Nietzsche excludes its theological metaphysics, that is, Platonism”
(ibid., p. 245). In other words: Nietzsche = Leibniz, less harmony, less
God, understood, that is, as the monad of monads that brings into ac¬
cord the different individual monads’ multiple perspectives so that they
may form a world, a universe, meaning a coherent totality and not, as

1 56
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

in Nietzsche, a radically chaotic multiplicity. One could hardly put it

better. But we have yet to determine the meaning to be given to an
individualism—or, if one prefers, a monadology—in which the notion
of the individual is shattered (the subject is no longer closed in on the
identity of his consciousness as it was for seventeenth-century thinkers)
at the same time that the idea of a reconciling harmony has vanished—
whether this latter be called, as in political philosophy, the “invisible
hand, or, as in speculative philosophy, “theodicy,” “the cunning of
reason,” “system,” etc.
The second thesis can only be put in the form of a foreshadowing
of what will hereafter follow, since it specifies the content of this new
figure of individualism. A reading of the texts Nietzsche consecrated to
the concept of individual, when compared to those, much more numer¬
ous and better known, concerning aesthetics properly speaking, makes
a central duality become clearly apparent:
—On the one hand, the abandonment of any and all “dialectical”
project, aimed at integrating life’s radical multiplicity (what is tragic in
existence) into some sort of system, makes of Nietzschean individualism
the prototype of the contemporary era, in that it takes the form of a
historicism and of a relativism such as had never before been seen in the
entire history of philosophy. The famous assertion that “there are no
facts, only interpretations,” can and should be understood not only, as
Deleuze and Foucault did, as a genealogical critique of metaphysical or
scientistic rationalism, but also and perhaps above all as the inaugura¬
tion of what could be called an “ultra-individualism,” with every one
from now on possessing the “right” (the quotation marks becoming
necessary here, since the term no longer has any meaning) to express
what is, strictly and properly speaking, his “point of view.” Nothing
any longer constrains the various perspectives to unwillingly align
themselves with some sort of order. There is thus nothing surprising,
when seen from this aspect, at the fact that Nietzsche should have be¬
come the thinker-in-fashion for an intellectual generation that felt itself
to be close to the various libertarian/liberationist movements that
marked the intellectual and political life of the sixties and seventies.
—Yet, on the other hand, nothing would be more absurd than to
see in Nietzsche a thinker of the “liberation of mores.” Well-known are
his taste for classical rigor and his aversion to anything that closely or
distantly resembles a surging up of the passions, and first of all, of
course, to romanticism. However, it goes without saying that Nietz¬
sche is not a classicist in the “Cartesian” sense of the expression, in

1 57
FIVE

which, as is still the case with Hegel, the goal of art is to give expres¬
sion to reason. And yet, despite everything, it is in fact a case of the
same classicism: art continues for Nietzsche to maintain a direct link to
truth. The true has naturally ceased to be defined as identity, transpar¬
ency, and harmony in order to become the pure difference that is the
multiplicity of vital forces. But what the Nietzschean “physiology” of
art teaches us is that beauty is nothing other than the wisely hierar¬
chized (in the “grand style”) expression of this multiplicity. To create a
symmetry with ultra-individualism, we could speak of a hyperclassicism
(the use of this term will be justified in the next chapter) since it is more
than ever art’s task to translate truth into sensuousness—though it must
be made clear that this new classicism is, so to speak, a classicism of
“difference” and no longer one of harmonious identity.
And it is under this aspect—third thesis, which will be developed
in the next chapter—that Nietzsche can be considered the true thinker
of avant-gardism. Not that he himself wrote about the subject or be¬
longed to any kind of movement that could have been considered to be
“avant-garde.” Nor did he evidence any special kind of daring in his
own artistic tastes. But, less anecdotally, Nietzsche announces the du¬
ality that is the basis for all of the avant-garde movements that have
left their imprint on the twentieth century’s aesthetics up to the end
of the sixties: ultra-individualism on one side, which, while pursuing
the revolutionary values of the individual emancipation from tradition,
consecrates innovation as the supreme criterion of the aesthetic judg¬
ment, and thus causes the latter to fall into the sphere of historicity; the
other side being a hyperclassical concern that art should be assigned
a truth-function, or even that it should be aligned upon science’s prog¬
ress so that it may translate a reality which, unlike what was the case
in the original classicism (the seventeenth-century one), is no longer
rational, harmonious, Euclidean, but illogical, chaotic, shapeless, and
non-Euclidean.

THE INDIVIDUAL: AN AMBIGUOUS CONCEPT

Nietzsche’s theory of art as the only honest perspective on life was a

particularly important contribution to the internal logic of philosophi¬
cal individualism as it developed, in the history of aesthetics, through
the conflict between sentimentalism and rationalism—two aspects of
individualism about which we have already discussed how each in its
own way took the form of a monadology, where individuals commu-

1 58
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

nicate with each other only mediately, whether through the intermedia¬
tion of a common psychological structure (Hume) or of a system of
harmony (Leibniz, Hegel). I should here like to indicate how Nietzsche
at the same time takes up again and overturns what had truly emerged
with Leibniz: ontologically, the installation of individuality as the prin¬
ciple of the real (with the affirmation that the real is, in its most intimate
core, a tissue of monads), and, axiologically, the promotion of the val¬
ues of independence and personal creativity.
But this hypothesis—of Nietzsche completing philosophical indi¬
vidualism—is obviously paradoxical. Not only does it run against the
idea that Nietzsche, as is widely known, was a forerunner of Freud’s
critique of philosophies of consciousness and therefore, it would seem,
of philosophical individualism (Nietzsche never stopped attacking the
idea of monad or atom, and its relevance to the theorization of the idea
of subject); it also exposes itself to a certain number of “factual” prob¬
lems that cannot be underestimated. To put it in a nutshell, when the
texts Nietzsche dedicated to the notions of individualism or the indi¬
vidual are surveyed, they appear to be shot through by a constant ten¬
sion that seems to forbid a priori any project that would try for a
somewhat concordant reading.
Quite obviously, Nietzsche makes of the individual an absolute
value, and first of all an ontological principle. For example, we read
in The Will to Power that there are no species, “only different indi¬
viduals”—a sort of reformulation of the principle of indiscermbles by
reference to which Nietzsche presents, in various well-known texts,
concepts and words (reason and language) as processes of the homoge¬
nization of differences, of obliteration of individuality and, in this
sense, as figures of the loss of the real understood as the interplay of
“pure differentiations,” according to the formulation used in another
fragment.
Following the logic of this ontological individualism, Nietzsche
puts forward an axiological individualism that reaches its high point
with the defence of the values issued out of originality against what he
sometimes calls “vulgarity,”11 meaning the dissolution of the differen¬
tiated individual element within the flattened-out average. Certain
memorable moments in the Nietzschean discourse are part of this cri¬
tique of vulgarity, moments I recall only to aid the memory a bit:
—The genealogy of the values stemming from gregariousness and
from the civilization of the herd, whose succeeding stages Nietzsche
reconstitutes by following a line that goes from Judaism to socialism,

1 59
FIVE

by way of Socrates, Christianity, Rousseau, the French Revolution and

democracy.
—The critical analysis of the genesis of consciousness and of lan¬
guage, a genesis ascribed to a certain evolution of life. It is the very
important section 354 of The Gay Science, titled “On the ‘genius of the
species,’” that here develops in a particularly brilliant way the idea that
the birth of consciousness in this living being that is man (its emergence,
then its valorization) did not happen by itself, it was not fated to be,
but was rather connected to the requirements (themselves not fated to
be) posed by communication and by language. A certain type of human
being could not, Nietzsche explains, face up to life’s necessities without
needing other human beings, without, that is, substituting the values
proper to independence with those corresponding to mutual help and
solidarity. This need for the other at the same time brought to the sur¬
face the need to express and to communicate this need, for, that is,
“mutual understanding,” and first of all for the necessity of arriving at
the consciousness of this need. Such is, according to Nietzsche, the rea¬
son why consciousness is born at the same time as language: “Con¬
sciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for
communication.” The result is that man only became conscious of what
was communicable, shareable with another, and therefore common,
and, from this point of view, what gains access to consciousness and to
language is never the individual but all that is gregarious and vulgar:

My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man’s
individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that, as follows from
this, it has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd
utility. Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand ourselves as
individually as possible, “to know ourselves,” each of us will always succeed in
becoming conscious only of what is not individual but “average.”12

Earlier, Nietzsche argues that “the thinking that rises to conscious¬

ness is only the smallest part of all thinking—the most superficial and
worst part”—meaning the part that corresponds to individuality. Even
though “fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably
personal, unique, and infinitely individual,” consciousness and lan¬
guage stem from this “great . . . falsification” consisting of a “general¬
ization” and, as such, a “reduction to superficialities” of what is.
Here we can perceive how a theme as important to Nietzsche as the
critique of consciousness and language fits readily into the framework
of a revalorization of individuality. If generalization is falsification, ren-

1 60
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

dering superficial, the true (the nonfalsified) and the profound (the non-
superficial) must truly reside in the affirmation of the individual as such.
This is one, first line of analysis in which Nietzsche’s thought takes on
tones similar to those of certain anarchistic young Hegelians. Its conclu¬
sion is, quite logically, a critique of modernity as a civilization in which,
the values of consciousness having imposed themselves through cogito
philosophy and its scientific appendices, the individual is dissolved in
the general, defined as gregariousness. Modernity as the triumph of the
“genius of the species” over the individual, over the great individualities
incarnated by, for example, the Greeks (the ones before Socrates, of
course), and, in parallel fashion, democracy, supreme value of the mod¬
ern world, scientific and therefore “of the commoners,” in that it aims
at a truth that is “valid for all,” democracy as the equalization of men,
and therefore as the obliteration of the differences constitutive of indi¬
viduality: this is, without a doubt, one first approach of Nietzsche’s
thought, that coheres around the erection of the individual as true re¬
ality and absolute value—what is well resumed by this fragment from
the posthumous writings of the Will to Power period, “nothing is so
opposed to these herd instincts as the sovereignty of the individual [das
Einzelnen].”13
The difficulty, as always with Nietzsche, is that other texts, just as
numerous and as important, contradict the first ones and put forward a
radical criticism of the notion of individual and, correlatively, of indi¬
vidualism. Nietzsche insists upon it many times. In reality, the notion of
individual is no more valid than that of species or, as a fragment from
the left-behind writings of the 1880s puts it: “The concepts ‘individ¬
ual’ [Individuum\ and ‘species’ are equally false and merely apparent”
(ibid., § 521)—a statement that, now, seems to issue out of an onto¬
logical anti-individualism (the individual as mere appearance and no
longer as the basis of what is) to which corresponds an axiological anti¬
individualism: “The ‘welfare of the individual’ is just as imaginary
as the ‘welfare of the species’” (ibid., § 552). Thus, the individual
is neither a good ontological principle nor a legitimate axiological prin¬
ciple—all of which seems to be in perfect contradiction with the pas¬
sages we have just looked at.
In fact, when Nietzsche describes the notion of the individual as an
“error” (the expression used in The Twilight of the Idols), he is aiming
at a quite precise particularity of individuality. On this point, the texts
are in agreement:
— Twilight of the Idols: “The single one, the ‘individual,’ as hith-
FIVE

erto understood by the people and the philosophers alike, is an error

after all: he is nothing by himself, no atom, no ‘link in the chain,’ noth¬
ing merely inherited from former times; he is the whole single line of
humanity up to himself.”14
The value of the individual varies, therefore, according to whether
he “represents the rising line of life” or “the descending development,
decline, chronic degeneracy, illness.” The individual can thus not be
considered by himself, neither ontologically nor axiologically. Neither
does he exist in isolation nor is his worth independent of the processes
that come to achievement within him. The “moment” that individuality
is will be valued highly if it is a moment of intensification and increase
of the will to power—and devalued if it consists in a moment of ex¬
tenuation or exhaustion.
—The Will to Power contains a parallel text (§ 785): the concept
“individual” must be refuted, Nietzsche explains, in order to perceive
that in fact “every single creature constitutes the entire process in its
entire course (not merely as ‘inherited,’ but the process itself),” that he
is in fact “all of life up to now in one line and not its result” (§ 379).
To be correctly interpreted, these assertions, which may seem
strange when compared to the Nietzschean valorization of individual¬
ism that we have elsewhere observed, have to be set side by side with
the critiques of the notions of atom and of monad such as Nietzsche
understands them. In the important fragment from the Will to Power
cited above (§ 785), Nietzsche evokes the construction of the notion
of subject by designating it as a “false substantialization of the ego”
through which it has been artificially “pried out of becoming,” posited
“as something that is a being” (the motor of this fetishization being “the
faith in individual immortality”). Such a substantialization of the ego is
also described by Nietzsche as a “declaration that it exists in and for
itself,” that it has been considered “in an atomistic sense.”
What thus turns out to be erroneous in the notion of individuality
is not the concept of individual in general but a particular conception
of the individual, that of the individual made autonomous in relation
to the world and to becoming, and posited as atom or “monad,”15—
as, that is, an ultimate, stable, durable, even indestructible (immortal)
unity, the original source of its own acts and its own representations.
Against such a vision of individuality, a passage from The Will to Power
(§ 715) asserts that “there are no durable ultimate units, no atoms, no
monads”; that “ ‘units’ are nowhere present in the nature of becoming”;

1 62
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

that there is no “will” that could be the ultimate and self-identical

source of what it itself posits, etc. The “autonomization of the indi¬
vidual in atomistic form in truth refers back to the stabilized images
of the world that religion, metaphysics, and science have constructed
simultaneously by inventing, instead of the chaotic play of “pure differ¬
ence and pure successions of states, a “true world” of beings, causes,
unities, etc. (in physics, for example, “a firm systematization of atoms
in necessary motion, the same for all beings”) (§ 636).
Before Heidegger, therefore, but heading in the same direction, it
is the metaphysical” individual that Nietzsche criticizes, meaning the
individual centered on the values of unity (atomic or monadic) and au¬
tonomy, where in reality reigns within every man a plurality of force-
centers, at every instant combining and fighting each other (the unity of
the “I” being but a fiction), and what we call the will is the ultimate
expression of an uncontrollable conflict between force-centers rather
than “free” will, in the sense of a will positing its own laws (autonomy
is an illusion).
In a manner parallel to these texts, which work out a critique of
metaphysical individuality that is in many ways a forerunner of Heideg-
gerian deconstruction, Nietzsche sketches out an interesting critical
challenge to individualism. These passages in his work are quite aston¬
ishing on first reading when put next to his high valorization of the
individual against the herd, since he here explicitly denounces individu¬
alism as being one of the characteristic components of a civilization of
gregariousness. We can for example quote from two of The Will to
Power's fragments:
—“Individualism is a modest and still unconscious form of the ‘will
to power’” (§ 784): a strange statement, if we recall how Nietzsche
elsewhere makes of the individual’s sovereignty the value that is most
opposed to those of the herd.
—“My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not at an individu¬
alistic morality” (§ 287): but we might have thought that the affirma¬
tion of the individual’s sovereignty is, in point of fact, the principle of
an authentic individualistic morality against the morality of the herd.
Along the same lines, we might be troubled at seeing Christianity—
in Nietzsche’s eyes one of the most characteristic expressions of herd
values—credited with the valorization of the individual. “In fact, it was
Christianity that first invited the individual to play the judge of every¬
thing and everyone; megalomania almost became a duty: one has to

1 63
FIVE

enforce eternal rights against everything temporal and conditioned!”

(§ 765). Nietzsche describes how Christianity thus contributed to the
genesis of individualism by making us accustomed to the superstitious
concept “of the ‘soul,’ the ‘immortal soul,’ soul-monads that really are
at home somewhere else” and whose being is therefore not at all con¬
ditioned by earthly things (ibid.). There is of course a return, in this
description of the Christian contribution, of the monadic version of in¬
dividuality whose Nietzschean critique we have already seen, but we are
still somewhat surprised that in a sense that is yet to be precisely defined
individualism should be put on the same shelf as the Christianity whose
plebeian, anti-aristocratic evaluations must be overcome.
This puzzlement obligates us to a closer examination of that which
Nietzsche intends to genealogize when he criticizes negative individual¬
ism. The key text in this context might well be this fragment from The
Will to Power: “The modern European is characterized by two appar¬
ently opposite traits: individualism and the demand for equal rights;
that I have at last come to understand” (§ 783).
What has Nietzsche come to understand? That, in reality, modern
individualism is inseparable from the egalitarianism through which it
expresses and fulfills itself. This bond (quite paradoxical, since indi¬
vidualism should be the affirmation of difference and of otherness, and
not the valorization of identity or of equality) and its origin are ex¬
plained by Nietzsche thus: modern individuality is weak and fearful
(“for the individual is an extremely vulnerable piece of vanity”); in or¬
der not to suffer from differences, the modern individual will set out to
deny them; the only way for him to defend the worth of his own exis¬
tence is for “this vanity [to] demand that every other shall count as its
equal, that it should be only inter pares”; therefore “the principle of the
individual rejects very great human beings and demands, among men
approximately equal, the subtlest eye and the speediest recognition of a
talent” (ibid.). The appreciation of individuality and of its “little differ¬
ences will thus take place against the background of a foregoing equal¬
ization and homogenization; against the background, in this context, of
a certain depersonalization. Against the individualism of the moderns
Nietzsche opposes what he calls the “personalism of the Ancients,”16
for whom individuality was appreciated as such, in its distance and its
difference.
The opposition between ancient and modern, or, if one prefers, be¬
tween tradition and democracy, brings out the following structure:

1 64
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

1. Modern individualism, valuing equality more than difference:

and it is through this quality that it marches hand in hand with Chris¬
tianity (equality before God) and democracy (equality before the
law); and it is also “the most modest stage of the will to power,” the
individual only asserting himself within it by holding himself to be equal
to others instead of positing his difference with authority, without com¬
parisons or arguments, as is clearly pointed out by this fragment of The
Will to Power:

Individualism is a modest and still unconscious form of the “will to

power’ ; here it seems sufficient to the individual to get free from an overpow¬
ering domination by society (whether that of the state or of the church). He
does not oppose them as a person but only as an individual; he represents all
individuals against the totality. That means: he instinctively posits himself as
equal to all other individuals; what he gains in this struggle he gains for himself
not as a person but as a representative of individuals against the totality. (§ 784)

For that reason, Nietzsche assimilates modern individualism to a

form of “individual egoism” (ibid.), to the risible wish to see oneself as
in isolation from society and from humanity in its totality. No accident,
then, if this figure of individualism is, on the metaphysical level, asso¬
ciated with the illusion of the “I,” of the monadic subject transparent
to itself or at least ultimate origin of its own actions and ideas. For the
truth of this individual as “isolated man”—of this “error,” in fact—
truly is individualism as the ego’s will to egoistically separate itself, to
posit itself “against the totality.” The goal here is not the authentic cul¬
tivation of one’s own originality, the creative affirmation of self, but, in
this still embryonic, or rather “degraded,” “decadent” version of the
will to power, only the positing of self as a “one” against the “all.” Zero
degree of life, therefore, since this emancipation from the whole takes
place under the aegis of the equalization of all. By positing myself as
identical to all the others, following the Kantian/liberal conception of
the law, by positing all the others as being my equals, I install a soci¬
ety—the democratic society—in which, by way of the theme of the
individual’s rights (of the universal suffrage Nietzsche abhors) that mini¬
mum of independence is assured within which the will to power finds
its least sophisticated expression.
Nietzsche’s analysis of modern individualism as being intrinsically
tied to the appearance of the democratic universe can’t help bringing to
mind Tocqueville’s analysis, except that, in its essential arguments, and
FIVE

despite whatever Tocquevillian nostalgias, its signs are inverted. Moder¬

nity here exhibits no “progress,” it is to be read, of course, rather as a
decadence, as a regress towards a withered form of life: “One desires
freedom [meaning differentiation from the all through identification
with all] so long as one does not possess power. Once one does possess
it, one desires to overpower.”
We would however be mistaken if we were too hastily to liken
Nietzsche’s critique of liberal individualism (defined as the “egoism” of
the “isolated man”) to the Marxian critique. Despite the similarity of
the formulas used—and although denouncing individualism was al¬
ready quite well looked upon in the nineteenth century—Nietzsche
subtly associates liberalism and socialism in the same rejection. Using
terms near to those employed by Tocqueville when the latter saw in the
birth of a “tutelary” state one of modern individualism’s possible hori¬
zons, he explains that, in fact, socialism is “merely a means of agitation
employed by individualism,” insofar as “the instinct of socialists” is not
at all to make “a social order as the goal of the individual” but of using
society “as a means for making possible many individuals”—the so¬
cialist state being conceived as the one that must provide individuals
with equal access to the greatest possible happiness, fulfilling a demand
that turns out to be the very one made by “individual egoism” (ibid.).
2. Against the modern individualism (democratic, Christian, and
socialist), Nietzsche rates highly the attitude that consists in asserting
oneself, not as an individual against the all, but as a person in one’s
incomparable difference (because to compare is already to presuppose
terms of comparison, and consequently identities). This is the “person¬
alism of the Ancients” that corresponds not to the spirit of democracy
but to that of aristocracy; what is then highly valued is no longer
equality, but distance and hierarchy, the model being found by Nietz¬
sche in what he calls the “great individualities” he discovers among the
pre-Socratic Greeks and during the Renaissance.17 The supreme value
is no longer the autonomy of individuals from the whole, but a self-
assertion that is wholly independent from consideration of the others.
Particularly important in this respect are the fragments where Nietz¬
sche evokes his morality’s principle,18 the antisocial “individuation”
that “denies universal equality and equivalence among men.”19 Con¬
trary to what takes place in modern individualism, the point is “to say
‘me’ oftener and louder than the majority,” to dominate the others, “by
making them submit or sacrificing them,” if one’s independence can
only be brought about at that price (ibid., § 196).

1 66
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

THE TRUE NIETZSCHEAN BREAK: FROM MODERN INDIVIDUALISM

TO CONTEMPORARY OR POSTMODERN INDIVIDUALISM

The ambiguities in the notion of individualism, as Nietzsche uses it, are

of twofold interest for the analysis and the understanding of his philoso¬
phy as a philosophy of art. It is first of all clear that the concept of
individuality can be taken in many ways and, notably, quite unlike what
happens for example in Tocqueville’s analysis, it can be understood as
designating an ancient reality, a premodern state of the will to power
that is, late in the day, weakened by the birth of egalitarianism. But what
exactly is at stake for Nietzschean thought in this opposition of the
ancient and the modern has to be clearly understood. As usual among
the contemporaries (and this goes just as well for Heidegger or for Leo
Strauss), the revalorization of the ancient over the modern is not an end
in itself, but a strategic disposition senseless outside the perspective of a
postmodernity. If Nietzsche’s “observations” are so “unmodern” it is
because they shock egalitarian “democratic” modernity, but also be¬
cause they are thereby more modern than modernity itself, because they
prepare a future that sees itself as unprecedented. In the case at hand,
since we are dealing most of all with philosophy, they prepare for the
transformation of the philosopher’s status, which—following a theme
constant in Nietzsche’s thinking—should go from that of worker to that
of artist.
Within this perspective ancient individualism should be of use, if
not as model, then at least as a guide in the search for a new figuration
of individualism; if the latter should find its most complete expression
in art, taken in its most general sense as the most adequate manifesta¬
tion of the will to power, it is because, in a universe that is now wholly
perspectival, in a world once again become infinite in that it offers the
possibility of an infinity of interpretations, only art presents itself au¬
thentically as what it is: an evaluation that makes no pretence of truth.
The assertion that Nietzsche’s philosophy takes the form of a monadol-
ogy with neither subject nor system is here once again verified. Neither
monads (individuals in the modern meaning), nor unique viewpoint
from which, as in Leibniz or Hegel, the various perspectives could be
synthetized following a harmony (that this harmony be thought of as
dialectical or not in the end matters little): such could be the formula
for Nietzschean, postmodern individualism, through which art becomes
the will to power’s mode of being for itself.
This kind of individualism is still “monadological” though in a

1 67
FIVE

radically new sense, since out of the Leibnizian-Hegelian theodicy it

keeps only the idea of a multiplicity of points of view, which it gives up
trying to integrate into the unity of a harmonious synthesis. To better
outline this individualism we need to consider two types of clue, the
first concerning that which Nietzsche holds to be specifically German in
philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel, the second the nature of his perspec-
tivism as an unprecedented form of relativism or historicism.

THE FRACTURE OF THE SUBJECT

The very interesting section 357 of The Gay Science, titled “On the old
problem: ‘What is German?’,’’ is consecrated to the analysis of three of
Germanity’s typically representative thinkers: Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel.
With Nietzsche, criticism of these authors for being within the tradition
of Platonic rationalism is usually de rigueur. But what makes this text
stand out is the very fact that in it he takes, for once, an extolling at¬
titude; and that through his homage to the German philosophers the
features of an aesthetic individualism sustained by a new theory of sub¬
jectivity are sketched out step by step.
What Nietzsche judges to be indeed ‘positive’ in the philosophical
work of the Germans is its depth, understood here in its strict meaning
as the capacity for bringing “hidden worlds” to light. This oeuvre bears
witness to the fact, as Nietzsche puts it when discussing Leibniz, that
“our inner world is much richer, more comprehensive, more concealed”
than had been thought until then. It is here that the genealogist’s task
begins to become visible, at the same time that the modern, metaphy¬
sical vision of the subject begins to deconstruct itself—a flatly indi¬
vidualist vision that grants an entirely unjustified primacy to surface,
to consciousness.
To faithfully understand what Nietzsche here credits Leibniz, Kant,
and Hegel with, we have to comprehend the significance that the project
of going beyond appearances, of rendering the hidden worlds visible,
has for him—as opposed to what takes place in every philosophy of
Platonic inspiration. Such a will to parousia may seem paradoxical. We
have in fact seen how one of the principal reproaches addressed to Pla¬
tonism, as well as to Christianity, the former’s popular version, had to
do with its effort to deny the sensible world in the name of an intelligible
world—the first being designated as the appearance in relation to which
the second plays the role of the demystifying “world-behind” or hidden
world (if we follow the famous myth of the cave). Why, in such circum-

1 68
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

stances, should that which is negative in Plato (the critique of appear¬

ances in the name of a hidden world, only accessible to philosophical
reflection) become positive when it comes to the Germans? Aren’t we
dealing in both cases with a relativization of the real world in the name
of a hidden world?
Actually, “appearance” has changed position so much in the itin¬
erary from Plato to the Germans that it is no longer the same illusion
being denounced in the one and the other case. Whereas in Plato and
Christianity (this “horror of touching”) it is the sensible world that is
criticized from the standpoint of a beyond whose model is provided by
the theory of the Ideas, in Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel it is, on the contrary,
Platonic truth that takes the place of appearance. The critique of Plato¬
nism will, for Nietzsche as later for Heidegger, find its natural extension
in a deconstruction of modern science, which limits itself to developing
and fulfilling what is already embryonic in metaphysics. The various
scientific disciplines indeed tirelessly pursue the goal of denouncing na¬
ive, sensuous, opinions in the name of a hidden truth, only accessible to
the scholar’s and the scientist’s reason. Only the inversion of Platonism
can create the conditions of possibility for genealogy. The latter will no
longer attempt to “spare the phenomena,” to unveil the immutable
clarity of ideas under the confusing chaos of sensuous images. On the
contrary, true depth consists in revealing, under the superficial appear¬
ance of the light of the intelligible, that obscure and mad world the
young Nietzsche had called “dyonisiac.” In this, such an “archeologi¬
cal” activity is typically germanic.
Beginning with Leibniz: what are profoundly challenged are the
supposed “self-evidences” of Cartesian philosophy and, especially, the
primacy of consciousness, in the name of which “interior” life should
be identified with clear and distinct life. Leibniz is in fact the first to
introduce the concept of the unconscious into philosophy through his
notorious “small perceptions” that, because of the principle of conti¬
nuity, must necessarily precede the appearance of clear consciousness,
that is, they must connect a zero degree of consciousness to a degree N.
He thus came up with “the incomparable insight that has been vindi¬
cated not only against Descartes but against everybody who had phi¬
losophized before him—that consciousness is merely an accidens of
experience and not its necessary and essential attribute; that, in other
words, what we call consciousness constitutes only one state of our
spiritual and psychic world (perhaps a pathological state) and not by
any means the whole of it” (The Gay Science, § 357).

1 69
FIVE

The parenthesis is, of course, Nietzsche’s own addition; it points to

what still separates Leibniz’s “discovery” from a true genealogy. For it
seems clear that, though having “discovered the unconscious,” Leibniz
still thinks in terms of modern individualism. The subject is defined as
a monad/substance and consciousness, though partially challenged, re¬
mains the philosopher’s ideal at the same time that the intelligible realm
remains the truth of a sensible no more autonomous than it was for
Plato. Nevertheless, there are, according to Nietzsche, reasons to think
“that no Latin could easily have thought of this reversal of appear¬
ances,” and that germanic depth has here opened up the path towards
an authentic genealogy of the subject. The metaphysical background of
modern individualism has been subverted.
As far as Kant is concerned, it is scientific as well as philosophical
reason, no less, whose secular supremacy is contested: we must here
recall the “tremendous question mark that he placed after the concept
of ‘causality’—without, like Hume, doubting its legitimacy altogether.
Rather, Kant began cautiously to delimit the realm within which this
concept makes sense (and to this day we are not done with this fixing
of limits)” (ibid.).
A nice example of Nietzsche’s style. We would have expected him
to prefer Hume to Kant, to appreciate the doubt that scepticism hangs
over the very category of causality (over the legitimacy of its use as much
as over its capacity to go beyond the stage of “belief” and reach that of
truth). And yet he judges the Kantian critique to be profounder than the
empiricist one: for if Kant, unlike Hume, admits a certain validity for
the principles of reason, it is only to immediately relativize it through
his famous postulate that the law of causality applies only to phe¬
nomena, the sphere of practice being perhaps outside its domain. Thus,
“As Germans, we doubt with Kant the ultimate validity of the knowl¬
edge attained by the natural sciences and altogether everything that can
be known causaliter; whatever is know able immediately seems to us
less valuable on that account” (ibid.).
Finally, it is “the astonishing stroke of Hegel” that must be credited
to German depth. Its merit is twofold: it consists, first of all, in putting
an end to the primacy of identity, of accepting the idea of contradiction
within the very heart of logic; second and above all, it consists in the
fact of introducing historicity into the categories of reason and thus
marking a break away from the Platonist theory of eternal, stable ideas.
These breakthroughs towards true genealogy quite obviously re¬
main fleeting, and modern individualism’s dependence on traditional

1 70
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

metaphysics is still obvious in all three cases: in Kant, because the pri¬
macy accorded practical reason still refers back to Platonism and to the
rationalist tradition; in Leibniz and Hegel, because the.discoveries of
the unconscious and of history are still put to the service of a systema¬
tization of the existent so that, in the one as in the other case, the
discoveries are soon cancelled—the unconscious is recaptured by
consciousness and history by Reason, rather than the reverse.
But it remains highly significant that the judgment carried out by
Nietzsche on the value of what is German indicates a new age, one in
which individualism adapts itself to the disappearance of subject and
object and their replacement by a pure perspectivism, by an absolute
dispersal of the various points of view in a radical historicism.
What is at stake in Leibniz’s unveiling of the unconscious is in fact
the enfeeblement of the subject—an enfeeblement that finally works it¬
self out in the advent of a “burst” individual, no longer aspiring to self-
mastery or to autonomy. This is the reason why the word “subject”
does not, in the final analysis, refer to anything more than to “the term
for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the high¬
est feeling of reality: we understand this belief as the effect of one
cause,”20 and through this hypostatization of identity we come to be¬
lieve that the ego is an ultimate substratum of our representations. The
Cartesian cogito turns out to be only an effect of what Nietzsche calls
the trap of words or “our grammatical custom” (ibid., § 484). Actually,
“‘the subject’ is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect
of one substratum: but it is we who first created the ‘similarity’ of these
states” (ibid., § 485).
This fiction is well and truly shaken by the hypothesis of an un¬
conscious since, as Nietzsche goes on to explain, we now have to
resolve ourselves to consider consciousness as a mere epiphenome-
non of life, and in no way as life itself: “consciousness of me,” “self-
consciousness,” from then on looks only like “the last trait added to the
organism when it already functions to perfection; it is almost superflu¬
ous”—so that if the fiction of the unity of the ego contains some sort
of truth, it is not, in any case, at the level of consciousness, as all of
Platonic-Cartesian philosophy has naively believed: “If there is any
unity within me, it surely does not consist in my conscious me,” which
is nothing more than a “terminal phenomenon” whose causes are en¬
tirely unknown to me, but in what Nietzsche designates as “the organ¬
ism’s wisdom.”21 There is thus, in the Marxist sense of the word, a
fetishism of the subject, that genealogy literally dissolves by showing
FIVE

that the “I” is but a “created entity,” “a simplification with the object
of defining the force which posits, invents, thinks, as distinct from all
individual positing, inventing, thinking as such.”22 We thus think we
exhibit a real faculty in the “ego,” but, in truth, this faculty is nothing,
or, more exactly, it is only the concretion, the reification of an activity
that always only exists as a particular activity.
The eradication of the subject, through which Nietzsche links up
again with the “personalism of the Ancients,” is accompanied by the
inevitable disappearance of the object, as a key passage in the Will to
Power suggests following a subtle line of argument (ibid.). It is first of
all clear that the elimination of the subject/substance (of Cartesian con¬
sciousness) leads to thinking of the world as of a tissue of interpreta¬
tions, irreducible to any kind of unity (they lack any stable substratum);
in all rigor, therefore, “One may not ask: ‘who then interprets?’ for the
interpretation itself is a form of the will to power, exists (but not as a
‘being’ but as a process, a becoming) as an affect.” And if interpretation
alone constitutes the core of what is, then it is not only the subject that
is an illusion, an effect of fetishism, but also the idea that there is an
“in itself” of “facts,” independent of interpretation: “A ‘thing-in-itself’
just as perverse as a ‘sense-in-itself,’ a ‘meaning-in-itself.’ There are no
‘facts-in-themselves.’ ”
From this point on, just as it is vain to look—in the metaphysical
sense—for a “subject” of interpretation, and just as one must give up—
again, in the metaphysical meaning—the question “who interprets?,”
one also must resolve oneself to abandon asking the question “what is
that?”—for it itself is but “an imposition of meaning from some other
viewpoint... At the bottom of it there always lies ‘what is that for mef”
(for us, for all that lives, etc.)”—the parenthesis aimed at making it
understood that the “me” is, here, no longer taken in the sense of a
metaphysical subject identical with itself in the transparency of its con¬
sciousness, but as a fractured subject [un sujet brise], as an interpreta¬
tive force among others, as a pure point of view: “In short: the essence
of a thing is only an opinion about the ‘thing.’ Or rather: ‘it is consid¬
ered’ is the real ‘it is,’ the sole ‘this is.’”
Nietzsche never stops insisting on this: if “there are no facts” but
only interpretations, it is because, as the Twilight of the Idols puts it,
“every judgment is a symptom,” or, as it is phrased in a fragment from
The Will to Power, all evaluation is senseless outside of “a definite per¬
spective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race,
a state, a church, a faith, a culture.” We simply “forget that valuation is

1 72
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

always from a perspective” (§ 259). In short: “there is no ‘thing-in-

ltself’ ” (§ 557) because, unlike what happens in Leibniz or Hegel, the
multiplicity of viewpoints proves to be irreducible in the postmodern
individualism that is here inaugurated, and that for the very good rea¬
son that there is no longer a subject capable of establishing in itself any
kind of systematic recollection.
That this extreme form of individualism was explicitly adopted by
Nietzsche is not to be doubted if we look again at the way it extends
the critique of science he perceives, or thinks he perceives, in Kant. It is
not only the sphere of scientific truth that is deprived of all objectivity,
but also the sphere of signification or meaning. There where Kant tries,
especially in the aesthetic domain, to maintain the possibility of a “com¬
mon sense, of a contingent agreement between subjectivities or sensi¬
bilities outside the conceptual rules of objectivity, Nietzsche postulates
a radical heterogeneity: “Our values are interpreted into things. Is there
then any meaning in the in-itself? Is meaning not necessarily relative
meaning and perspective? ” (S 590).
But the core nature of Nietzschean individualism also determines
itself using Hegel as a reference. In the Hegelian supersession of Leibniz
and Kant—still too Platonist—relativism reveals its true meaning to
be that of a radical historicism, as this fragment suggests: “What sepa¬
rates us from Kant, as from Plato and Leibniz, is that we believe only in
becoming ... We are historians through and through” and here Nietz¬
sche evokes the names of Lamarck and of Hegel, of whom Darwin is
but a later avatar.
We have already pointed out Nietzsche’s distance from the system¬
atic, reconciling spirit of the Hegelian dialectic. Deleuze is no doubt
right in insisting upon it. Yet his interpretation, unlike Heidegger’s,
underestimates the kinship between these two thinkers even though it
was acknowledged by Nietzsche himself, for whom the reference to his¬
tory permits dealing a fatal blow to Platonic idealism. As Leo Strauss
quite correctly remarks, until Hegel, “all ideals pretended to have an
objective basis: nature, God, or reason. The historical sense destroys
this pretention and, with it, all known ideals.”23 It is this potential
that Nietzsche greets in Hegelianism before drawing out all its conse¬
quences, which evidently implies that historicity be unburdened of its
systematic harness. According to Strauss, the various ideals and cultures
“are no longer arranged, in Nietzsche, into a system,” because it has
become impossible to operate “a veritable synthesis” (p. 96). Following
in Heidegger’s wake, Strauss invites us to see in Nietzschean perspec-

1 73
FIVE

tivism more a prolongation of Hegelianism than its refutation, in that

(1) in it, everything finally becomes historical, and (2) the basis for every
ideal (to the extent that the term still makes any sense) is subjectivity
understood as will to power: “The transvaluation of all values Nietz¬
sche tries to carry out is justified in the end by the fact that its root is
the greatest will to power—a will to power greater than that which gave
birth to all the previous values;” or, to take up Heidegger’s terminology:
a triumph of the metaphysics of subjectivity rather than its overcom¬
ing; or, using the formulation adopted in this work: a triumph of post¬
modern individualism, since with Nietzsche we witness “the end of the
domination of chance,” man for the first time becoming “master of his
destiny” in an apology of artistic creativity that no longer acknowledges
substantial limitations.

THE "PHYSIOLOGY OF ART": A NEW ASPECT OF HISTORICISM

To radicalize Hegelian historicism one has to, as has been indicated,

remove history from the dialectical framework it still belongs to for
Hegel. Only this way can one put into place a perfect relativism, a rela¬
tivism that is characterized in Nietzsche’s work by two particularly de¬
cisive traits:
1. By the fact, first of all, that there can be no exteriority, no tran¬
scendence to the perpetual becoming that life is (which is why vitalism
is a historicism). Becoming still had an end-goal for Hegel, and rea¬
son encompassed history more than it was produced by it. Elsewhere, 1
have already had the opportunity to analyse this fundamental aspect of
Nietzschean thought24 and to indicate how this definition of Being as
life or as “will to power” implies an inevitable rejection of rights and
laws—indeed, of any question of the Quid juris? type. It is this very
position of principle that Nietzsche designates with the term “physi¬
ology,” as we can see particularly well in the quite explicit section 2 of
the “The Problem of Socrates” chapter in Twilight of the Idols. Nietz¬
sche there argues that the “consensus of the sages” around Platonism
proves nothing about their having been right; it indicates at best that
“these wisest men agreed in some physiological respect, and hence
adopted the same negative attitude to life—had to adopt it.” Further¬
more, not only is the Platonic dualism of a sensible and an intelligible
world unfriendly towards life (it is a forerunner of the latter’s depreca¬
tion by Christianity in the name of the beyond), but, especially, it is
based on a “stupidity” that is, alas, consubstantial with it, the belief
1 74
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

that one can judge life, where in fact all our judgments upon life are in
all obviousness expressions of life, so that “judgments of value, concern¬
ing life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true.” Since “the
value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an
interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the
dead, for a different reason,’ there is in the Platonic pretention to judge
life here on earth a veritable hermeneutic circle. To understand this
circle is to also understand that no philosophical utterance can escape
history (can escape life as historicity), that there is no “metalanguage”
in whatever sense of the term: “judgments of value . . . concerning
life . . . have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration
only as symptoms.”
But the essential point would go by us if we did not perceive that
this historicist vitalism is a direct consequence of the “fracture of the
subject [brisure du sujet]—which thus distinguishes it from older
forms of relativism. One of the consequences of this “fracture” is, pre¬
cisely, that our evaluations, our points of view, our interpretations
of the world can never be grounded on any kind of reference to an
absolute knowledge in its strict meaning (that is, unrelated to life’s his¬
toricity). This is how we should understand section 374 of The Gay
Science, with the title “Our new ‘infinite,’” which asserts that “the
world [has] become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we can¬
not reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.”
Under such circumstances, there can be no objectivity either; there can
be, to borrow the vocabulary from another domain, no more signified,
only signifier, or, as Foucault quite lucidly put it in a commentary on
Nietzsche: “if interpretation can never come to an end, it is quite simply
because there is nothing to interpret . . . for, in the end, everything
already is interpretation.”25
2. At this point, the philosopher ends up merging with the genealo¬
gist in the most radical sense, with, that is, him who sees that behind
the evaluations there is no ground, but an abyss, that behind the hidden
worlds themselves there are but other hidden worlds, forever ungrasp-
able because having no existence in themselves except as hypostases of
an interpretation itself forever ungraspable. Foucault was right in insist¬
ing on this as well: “genealogy does not stand in opposition to history
as if it were the lofty and profound view of the philosopher against the
mole’s perspective of the scholar. On the contrary: it is opposed to the
metahistorical display of ideal significations” and moreover, “it needs
history to drive away the chimaera of origin” (ibid.). The genealogist,

1 75
FIVE

then, a typical character of postmodern individualism, is a “loner” or

“hermit.” Being marginal to the herd, the anguishing task of looking
into the abyss falls to him:

The hermit . . . will doubt whether a philosopher could possibly have “ul¬
timate and real” opinions, whether behind every one of his caves there is not,
must not be, another deeper cave—a more comprehensive, stranger, richer
world beyond the surface, an abysmally deep ground behind every ground, un¬
der every attempt to furnish “grounds.” Every philosophy is a foreground
philosophy that is a hermit’s judgment . . . Every philosophy also conceals a
philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.26

The hermit’s cave is no longer Plato’s.

Historicism and relativism had always taken the shape, in modern
philosophy, of a subjectivism (even if the subject is constantly reduced
to the isolated atom consisting of the individual of the empiricists as
well as that of the dogmatic rationalists). If relativism there was—in,
for instance, the aesthetics of feeling, or in the various kinds of sceptical
empiricism—it was precisely because the individual’s subjectivity was
so strongly asserted that it rendered any hope of finding acceptable cri¬
teria for the objectivity of taste (or of truth, or of morality) impossible.
No such thing in Nietzsche’s thought where, as we have seen, histori¬
cism assumes the form of a perspectivism with neither subject nor
object, of a perspectivism at whose extreme—an extreme we have to
remain at—exists only interpretation as such, independently of any con¬
ception of a subject that interprets as of an object that is interpreted.
The Nietzschean theory of art as being the will to power’s only
adequate expression is the site par excellence where the new conception
of relativity, where the new individualism with neither subject nor ob¬
ject finds its most authentic translation. The problem with Nietzsche’s
texts is that, through their relativist appearance, they borrow from the
form and vocabulary of the sceptical subjectivism inherent to modern
individualism, whereas, at bottom, they on the contrary imply a radical
critique of all the forms of subjectivity hitherto known—which is why
it seems to me that a distinction must be made between this contempo¬
rary individualism and the “metaphysics of subjectivity.”
As a first approach, we must of course cite the famous dictum in
Nietzsche contra Wagner that “aesthetics is nothing but a kind of ap¬
plied physiology” (“Where I Offer Objections”); in the development of
this argument Nietzsche has recourse to psychology and biology so of¬
ten that he at times seems like an eighteenth-century French material-

1 76
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

ist. The conclusions that physiology’ arrives at have to be understood

within the perspective of this apparent subjectivism (in the sense of a
rejection of the very notion of an objective criterion of taste), and espe¬
cially the one that holds that the beautiful and the ugly do not at all
exist “in themselves,” but only as “symptoms” of certain “aesthetic
states” more or less useful in the development and intensification of life:
That which is instinctively repugnant to us, aesthetically, is proved by
mankind’s longest experience to be harmful, dangerous, worthy of sus¬
picion: the suddenly vocal aesthetic instinct (e.g., in disgust) contains
a judgment. To this extent the beautiful stands within the general
category of the biological values of what is useful, beneficent, life-
enhancing.”27 As for Hume, it would seem, the beautiful is relative to a
material structure, in this case to an instinctual structure whose potency
it intensifies.
This relativistic “materialism” always shows two aspects—a bio¬
logical one (reference to the body) and a psychological one (reference
to unconscious drives), a duality which quite naturally finds its unity in
the concept of life, about which Heidegger was right to stress that it is,
in Nietzsche, a metaphysical (ontological) concept and not at all a sci¬
entific notion:28
—Nietzsche follows the first aspect of the duality when he writes in
The Will to Power that “all art exercises the power of suggestion over
the muscles and senses” (§ 809) since “every inner movement (feeling,
thought, affect) is accompanied by vascular changes and consequently
by changes in color, temperature, and secretion,” phenomena he goes
on to put into relation with “the suggestive power of music, its sugges¬
tion mentale” (§ 811). It is in the same spirit that we are invited to this
strange refutation of the Aristotelean conception of tragedy: “On re¬
peated occasions I have laid my finger on Aristotle’s great misunder¬
standing in believing the tragic affects to be two depressive affects,
terror and pity . . . One can refute this theory in the most cold-blooded
way: namely, by measuring the effects of a tragic emotion with a dyna¬
mometer. And one would discover as a result what ultimately only the
absolute mendaciousness of a systematizer could misunderstand—that
tragedy is a tonic'’’ (§ 851). In short, everything here seems to be purely
material, to such an extent that, according to Nietzsche, “art reminds
us of states of animal vigor; it is on the one hand an excess and overflow
of blooming physicality into the world of images and desires; on the
other, an excitation of the animal functions through the images and
desires of intensified life—an enhancement of the feeling of life, a stimu-

1 77
FIVE

lant to it” (§ 802). Not a “tranquilizer,” as Schopenhauer so insipidly

thought.
—Nor does the psychology of artistic drives offer any kind of open¬
ing to the emergence of some sort of objective criterion of the beautiful,
and Nietzsche’s relativism is, here once again, radical: it quite simply
leads to making artistic creation the effect of excessive sensuality. One
of The Will to Power's fragments thus explains that “artists, if they are
any good, are (physically as well) strong, full of surplus energy, power¬
ful animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system
a Raphael is unthinkable” (§ 800). One version—at first sight, a rather
flat one—of Freudian theory emerges here, holding artistic creation to
be analogous to sexual activity: “Making music is another way of mak¬
ing children” (ibid.). This is the source of the theme that is developed at
length in the aphorisms dedicated to the physiology of art, that there is
a sort of zero-sum game in the relation between the two types of cre¬
ation (sexual and artistic), the artist having to stay chaste if he wishes
to conserve all of his aesthetic energy, “chastity is merely the economy
of an artist—and in any event, even with artists fruitfulness ceases when
potency ceases” (ibid., § 800).
As in Flume, once again, “The beautiful exists just as little as does
the good, or the true” (ibid., § 804). There is no beauty “in itself,” no
“objective” beauty, since everything is reducible to evaluations, them¬
selves dependent on the individual or, to speak as Nietzsche does, on
the type of man ’ who does the evaluating: “thus the herd man will
experience the value feeling of the beautiful in the presence of different
things than will the exceptional or over-man,” for “it is not possible to
remain objective, or to suspend the interpretive, additive, interpolating,
poetizing power (the latter is the forging of the chain of affirmations of
beauty)” (ibid.).
The ambiguity of postmodern individualism becomes here lumi¬
nously visible: historicism, on the one hand, seems to blend into a form
of subjectivity since one of its principal characteristics is that of reject¬
ing the objectivity” of the beautiful, of having it depend radically upon
the “type of man” who evaluates—which suggests that the beautiful
remains prisoner of a certain form of subjectivity. Yet we have seen
how the condemnation of modern individualism, though it makes room
for another type of individualism, that which Nietzsche attributes to the
ancients, is based on a rejection, on a veritable “deconstruction” (in the
Heideggerian sense) of the Cartesian, metaphysical, conception of sub¬
jectivity. If the criteria for beauty can therefore not be “objective,” this
1 78
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

cannot mean that they go back to conscious choices effected by an au¬

tonomous subject, endowed with the free capacity of voluntary decision
making that modern philosophy habitually designates with the expres¬
sion “freedom of the will” [libre arbitre).
Nietzsche never tires of pointing it out: the notion of freedom of
the will implies that of causa sui. It contains the idea that the conscious
subject, the cogito, should be considered as a “substance,” as the unique
and ultimate substratum of decisions and choices whose roots are to be
found, so to speak, in themselves: “The desire for ‘freedom of the will’
in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortu¬
nately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire
and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve
God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less
than to be precisely this causa sui.”29 But this idea is quite simply
absurd: “The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been con¬
ceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic,” comparable,
minus the wit, to Baron Miinchhausen’s extravagant stories, in attempt¬
ing, “with more than Miinchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into
existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness” (ibid.). The
Nietzschean genealogy of this is well known; it consists in showing how
the illusion of freedom of the will stems from the reification of the con¬
cepts of cause and effect in their application to the will, where in fact
“in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills,” but not of
“free” will in the sense of autonomy.
Though Nietzsche’s individualism, taken in the sense of a reac¬
tivation of ancient individualism, denounces belief in objectivity in
general, this cannot be on the basis of any kind of metaphysical con¬
ception, whether empiricist or rationalist, of subjectivity. But in order
to denounce objectivity, in order also to conserve some sort of meaning,
however minimal, in the notion of individuality, the possibility of a ref¬
erence to subjectivity must be preserved. Of what nature? This is the
question we must answer if we wish to interpret correctly the new in¬
dividualism expressed in Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory.
An aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil can show us the way. In
it, Nietzsche questions the “superstition of logicians” which consists
in referring a verb back to a subject (always this faith in grammar!).
Against such a superstition, it must be emphasized that “a thought
comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification
of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the
predicate ‘think.’ It thinks [Es denkt]; but that this ‘it’ is precisely the

1 79
FIVE

famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion,

and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’” (§ 17). Nietzschean gene¬
alogy takes the form, as is its habit, of a “defetishization” of the hypo-
statization that the illusion of the ego consists in. “One infers here ac¬
cording to the grammatical habit: ‘Thinking is an activity; every ac¬
tivity requires an agent; consequently—” (ibid.). The analysis is well
known, but here Nietzsche takes it to its conclusion: not only do we
need to get rid of the fetishism of the subject (of the sophism that, as
Kant had already sensed, consists in taking what is a mere “philology”
to be an ontology), we also have to put an end to the idea that there is
“something” that thinks. This “something,” even if it had another form
than that of the Cartesian cogito as retrieved by Hegel’s Phenome¬
nology, to which Nietzsche alludes here, would still be illusory in put¬
ting forth the idea of a substratum identical to itself: “After all, one has
even gone too far with this ‘it thinks’—even the ‘it’ contains an inter¬
pretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself . . .
perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians,
to get along without the little ‘it’ (which is all that is left of the honest
little old ego)” (ibid.).
The Nietzschean deconstruction of metaphysical subjectivity can¬
not in fact be formulated. One might be tempted to replace the formula
“I think” with “it thinks in me”—but one would risk ceaselessly con¬
fusing the “it” with the “substratum” Nietzsche asks us to get rid of.
Besides, it is doubtful that such a deconstruction of subjectivity could
be fully carried out without falling into performative contradictions too
banal for us to provide the inevitable illustrations here. (What is the
subject that declares there is no subject? What does the “we” mean,
through which Nietzsche designates, as Hegel also did, the philoso¬
phers position, that is to say his own position? What meaning should
be assigned to the “in fact”s and “truth to say”s, etc., in the name of
which the ideas of factuality and of truth are denounced as “interpre¬
tations”? . . .)30 What matters here is to understand that such a philo¬
sophical “position” (supposing it can be “held”) in the end comes down
to saying that neither one of these two terms, objectivity and subjec¬
tivity, exists, that there are only interpretations without interpretans or
interpretandum, and that this is what justifies the foremost position art
should have as the finally adequate expression of the essence of what is,
of life or the will to power.
We should better be able to understand now the sense in which it
can be stated that Nietzsche’s historicism is based on a new form of
1 80
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

individualism, on an individualism with neither subject nor systematic-

ity, on a monadology with neither monads nor preestablished harmony.
Only evaluations as such—“points of view” or “perspectives”—con¬
stitute, in their absolute particularness, forever fugitive moments of
individuality, in that each time they happen they represent specific and
temporary expressions of the will to power, or life.
We can therefore put aside the question of the internal coherence
of this postmodern individualism—a question whose very relevance
would obviously be rejected by an orthodox Nietzscheanism—and ask
some questions about its translation into aesthetics. Heidegger, in the
first part of his Nietzsche, formulates in these terms the problem a radi¬
cal relativism, concerning the question of the beautiful, seems to meet
with: “On the one hand, art is to be the countermovement to nihilism,
that is, the establishment of the new supreme values; it is to prepare and
ground standards and laws for historical, intellectual existence. On the
other hand, art is at the same time to be properly grasped by way of
physiology and with its means.”31 But it is clear that “if art is just a
matter of physiology, then the essence and reality of art dissolve into
nervous states, into processes in the nerve cells. Where in such blind
transactions are we to find something that could of itself determine
meaning, posit values, and erect standards?” (ibid.).
Heidegger’s question can be made more explicit: art is said to be
antinihilistic because, unlike science, philosophy, or religion, it presents
itself straightforwardly as an interpretation, or, in Nietzsche’s eyes, as
an “honest” expression of the will to power. It thus, in principle, dis¬
tances itself from the fetishized negations of life that are the Platonic
rejection of the sensuous (which therefore withholds all legitimacy from
art) and the naive belief in self proper to herd individualism—with its
procession of “democratic” values, foremost among them this “truth”
anyone can lay claim to and which claims to be valid for everyone. The
“physiological” mode in which Nietzsche envisages aesthetic creation is
an expression of this opposition between artistic, perspectivist will, and
the will to truth that always shunts aside the sphere of aisthesis. But, in
this subversion of Platonic philosophy, doesn’t Nietzsche’s position it¬
self risk losing all legitimacy, reduced as it is to a pure relativism? For,
as Heidegger adds, from the physiological point of view.

there is no establishment of rank or positing of standards. Everything is the way

it is, and remains what it is, having its right simply in the fact that it is. Physi¬
ology knows no arena in which something could be set up for decision and
FIVE

choice. To deliver art over to physiology seems tantamount to reducing art to

the functional level of the gastric juices. Then how could art also ground and
determine the genuine and decisive valuation? Art as the countermovement
to nihilism and art as the object of physiology—that’s like trying to mix fire
and water.32

Heidegger is right. After the moment of criticism and dissolution of

Platonism, new standards have to be established in the end—otherwise
relativist individualism falls into flat contradiction. If there are no facts,
nothing but interpretations, if these interpretations are themselves but
the emanations of a “physiology,” then why even discuss Platonism?
Why not simply acknowledge that “things are as they are,” that Plato’s
and Nietzsche’s viewpoints are “equivalent,” at least in the sense that
there obviously is no exteriority, no outside of physiology, from which
it would be possible to choose between them?

FROM ULTRAINDIVIDUALISM TO HYPERCLASSICISM:

THE "GRAND STYLE"

The problem of standards, that is to say, in its most general sense, the
problem of truth, returns in and through aesthetics. The paradox con¬
tained in such a statement is obvious: Nietzsche never ceased to affirm
that “art is worth more than truth,” (WP, § 853), that “we possess art
lest we perish of the truth” (§ 822), etc. How could he, following the
classicists, in turn once again make of beauty a sensuous presentation
of the true?
As I have suggested, this is only possible through a revolution in the
notion of truth. It obviously no longer designates the stable identity of
the Ideas in whose name the philosophers claim to “save phenomena,”
to exhibit their true rationality that is camouflaged for the near-sighted
senses. In the terms Heidegger chose so well: truth is no longer the
“rectitude of the representation.” But it has not for all that ceased to lie
in a certain kind of “agreement,” that of the “evaluation” with the
real.33 To make the paradox quite explicit, one would have to say that
it is because art is false that it is true, and this in at least a twofold sense:
—First of all because, as an interpretation that does not claim to be
more than what it is—therefore, because it gives up any claim to an
absolute truth—art happens to be in harmony with the perspectival
character of existence, with the “truth” that all our judgments are but

1 82
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

symptoms, mere evaluations. As Deleuze writes, commenting on one of

Nietzsche’s famous formulations: “art is the highest power of falsehood,
it magnifies the ‘world as error,’ it sanctifies the lie; the will to deception
is turned into a superior ideal . . . Then truth perhaps takes on a new
sense. Truth is appearance. Truth means bringing of power into effect,
raising to the highest power. In Nietzsche, ‘we the artists’ = ‘we the
seekers after knowledge or truth’ = ‘we the inventors of new possibili¬
ties of life.’”34
It could hardly be better stated that the classical ideal of an art that
would be the expression of truth has not vanished in Nietzsche. On
closer inspection, moreover, the definition of truth has not changed
all that much, and the Nietzschean “revolution” of Platonism leads us
partly back to its starting point: for if art is true, isn’t it, despite every¬
thing and whatever words may be used, because it is adequate to real¬
ity, or even much more adequate than the lie that, ever since Plato at
least, has habitually been given the name of truth? Deleuze is, in this
context, quite right in asserting that the artist is for Nietzsche a seeker
after truth; he is in fact par excellence the example of him who is after
the “true truth, the only one who does not lie (just as the senses don’t
lie either)—and that is why, in the final analysis, the “true” philosopher
should also become an artist.
—Not only does art thus “have grounds for” presenting itself ex¬
plicitly as a mere interpretation, as a pure evaluation, but, in playing
upon appearances, in producing illusion, it turns out to be truer than
any other activity, beginning with intellectual activity. That is the ulti¬
mate meaning of the famous fragment which asserts that “the will to
appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and change (to ob¬
jectified deception) here counts as more profound, primeval, ‘meta¬
physical’ than the will to truth, to reality, to mere appearance” (Will to
Power, § 853) because it is at bottom more adequate to the multiplicity
of life that goes by the name of “will to power.” Since, as Nietzsche
puts it, “appearance as I understand it is the real and unique reality of
things,” the one that resists and always will resist “all metamorphosis
into an imaginary ‘true world,’” we can understand not only that art
should be truer than truth, but also bow philosophy should itself be¬
come an aesthetics. All of Nietzsche’s interpreters have remarked upon
the nonanecdotal, philosophical character of aphoristic writing; many
have seen in it, following what seems to be most visibly evident, a “sub¬
version” of the idea of truth, a sort of rebellion against the “systematic-

1 83
FIVE

ity” that is inscribed in even the grammar and syntax of traditional

writing. But one can, I think, more strongly argue that it is, rather, a
very classical concession to the idea of truth.
Of course, at first sight “an aphorism formally regarded presents
itself as a fragment; it is the form of pluralist thinking” (ibid., p. 31),
not in the democratic and “liberal” sense of “pluralist” but in that frag¬
mented writing is supposedly, through its “openness,” opposed to the
“closure” of the “system,” taken to be the final development of the Pla¬
tonic theory of truth. The aphorism is thus an excellent example of
philosophy’s artistic form. As Deleuze says, “Only the aphorism is ca¬
pable of saying the meaning; the aphorism is interpretation and the art
of interpreting” (ibid.). No doubt. But the subversion is far from being
as deep as might be imagined and the aphoristic form is, in many ways,
also the sign of an astonishing naivete. In the will to be adequate to the
“fracture” and the multiplicity of Being as life through the fracturedness
and multiplicity of writing, it is, in the end, the old concept of truth
as adequacy to the real that is renewed and nearly confirmed, so that
Nietzsche’s thought, and that of his epigones, seems to suffer from a
cruel lack of self-reflection. To use a formula Fichte applied to Spinoza:
he thinks well, “but he does not think his own thinking.”
It remains for us to understand, in such conditions, the motives that
lead Nietzsche to side so vigorously with classicism and against roman¬
ticism. There is, as I have just suggested, in the final analysis a profound
analogy between classicism and Nietzsche’s aesthetics, since in both
cases art is assigned the task of expressing truth in a living, sensuous
way. But a fundamental difference remains despite the depth of the anal¬
ogy. In Cartesian aesthetics (defined very broadly, to comprehend He¬
gelianism), the truth to be presented had been defined as rationality. In
Nietzsche, it is “raised to a higher power” in that art presents itself as
an exhibition of the true. The goal is no longer that of expressing some
sort of Platonico-Cartesian truth, but the “true truth” that difference is,
and which permits us to consider his aesthetics to be a “hyperclassicism
of difference.” How, in that case, to interpret the fact that Nietzsche
sees in classicism, and specifically in the French seventeenth century, the
most successful incarnation of the artistic summit he calls the “grand
style”?
On this point at least his thinking is perfectly lucid, and his defini¬
tion of “grandeur” is, in all the work of his mature years, flawlessly
unambiguous. As is quite well explained in one of The Will to Power's
fragments, “The greatness of an artist cannot be measured by the ‘beau-

1 84
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

tiful feelings’ he arouses” but by the “grand style,” that is, in the capac¬
ity to become master of the chaos one is; to compel one’s chaos to
become form; to become logical, simple, unambiguous, mathematical,
law that is the grand ambition here” (§ 842). Only those who make
The absurd but frequent—mistake of seeing in Nietzscheanism some
sort of anarchism, or even a theory anticipating the libertarian move¬
ments of our century’s seventh decade, can be surprised by this text.
Nothing could be more misleading; the apology of “mathematical”
rigor also has a place in the definition of the multiple forces making
up the will to power. The reason is simple to point out: if one admits
that reactive ’ forces are those which cannot exert themselves with¬
out denying other forces, then it must be conceded that the critique of
Platonism, however justified, cannot lead to a pure and simple elimina¬
tion of rationality. Such an eradication would indeed be reactive by
definition.
Therefore, if one wants to achieve the greatness that is the sign of a
successful expression of the vital forces, one must rank those forces into
a hierarchy so that they cease reciprocally mutilating themselves—and
in such a hierarchy, reason also will have a place. And a theme that is
constant in Nietzsche, moreover, is that the “logical simplicity” char¬
acteristic of the classics and classicists is the best approximation to this
“grandiose” hierarchical ranking, as this other fragment from The Will
to Power suggests explicitly: “‘becoming more beautiful’ is a conse¬
quence of enhanced strength. Becoming more beautiful as the expres¬
sion of a victorious will, of increased coordination, of a harmonizing
of all the strong desires, of an infallibly perpendicular stress. Logical
and geometrical simplification is a consequence of enhancement of
strength” (§ 800, italics added). Clearly, we are here far from the image
of a Nietzsche apologist for a “liberation of mores.”
Opposite the grand style stand all forms of activity, aesthetic or not,
which, incapable of achieving the self-mastery demanded by the hier¬
archical ordering of the instincts, give free rein to the surging up and
overflowing of the passions; they, that is, make reaction possible, be¬
cause this overflow is always synonymous with the reciprocal mutila¬
tion of forces. This mutilation defines ugliness, which is always “the
decadence of a type, contradiction and lack of coordination among the
inner desires—[ugliness] signifies a decline in organizing strength, in
‘will.’”35 As is well known, it is Platonism that provides the prototype
of reaction within the sphere of philosophy. But we have to try to un¬
derstand exactly how it is symmetrically opposed to the “grand style.”

1 85
FIVE

As the Twilight of the Idols explains at length, if Socrates invents the

“true world,” it is, at his profoundest, in order to put an end to the
“anarchy of the instincts” that appears when one has left tradition’s
aristocratic universe behind, and that questioning, interrogation, and
doubt have taken the place of authority, command, and of the will that
posits values without discussion. Socrates is a “doctor philosopher”;
but his “cure” consists in “castration,” in the suppression of all the
instincts (of the sensible world) in the name of the alleged “truth” (of
the intelligible world). But for Nietzsche the solution would have been
not the mutilation of vital forces in the name of other forces (the sen¬
sible in the name of the intelligible), but their ranking into a hierarchy:
in the end, Socrates’s sin was lack of mastery.
In art it is, for analogous reasons, romanticism which appears to be
the peak of reaction. The passions are there so unchecked they cannot
but hinder one another. The archetypal romantic character is unhappy,
torn, pale, ill. As one of The Will to Power's fragments significantly
suggests, “Whether behind the antithesis classic and romantic there
does not he hidden the antithesis active and reactive” (§ 847). Whereby
the Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian conceptions of art as consolation
would appear as the aesthetic equivalent of Socratic reaction on the
philosophical level. If, that is, classicism is the incarnation of the grand
style, since “to be classical, one must possess all the strong, seemingly
contradictory gifts and desires—but in such a way that they go together
beneath one yoke” (§ 848), so that “a quantum of coldness, lucidity,
hardness is part of all ‘classical’ taste: logic above all, happiness in
spirituality, ‘three unities’” (§ 849). The aesthetics of sentiment that
anticipated romanticism must be broken with, “We are enemies of sen¬
timental emotions” (§ 850)—and Nietzsche does so in a way that leaves
no doubt about the side he takes in the conflict between classicism and
sentimentalism: he invites every artist worthy of the name to cultivate a
“hatred for feeling, heart, esprit, hatred for the manifold, uncertain,
rambling, for intimations” (§ 849), in a word, for everything that Bou-
hours’s and Dubos’s aesthetics set at high value.
As we can see, Nietzsche’s rehabilitation of the sensible sphere and
of aesthetics is not as unambiguous as we might have believed. We can
even grant that, coming from Nietzsche’s pen, such an invitation to hate
the “sensuous,” the “multiple,” can seem strange. Against Victor Hugo,
he rehabilitates Corneille, as being one of those “poets from an aristo¬
cratic civilization . . . who made it a point of honor to submit their
perhaps even more vigorous senses to a concept [Nietzsche’s italics],
1 86
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

and, on the brutal pretensions of colors, sounds, and forms, to impose

the law of a refined and clear intellectuality. In this they follow, it seems
to me, in the footsteps of the great Greeks.”36 The triumph of the Greek
classics and French neoclassicists thus consists in victoriously fighting
against what Nietzsche oddly calls “this sensual rabble,” so admired by
“modern” (romantic) painters and musicians. The problem is, as he
himself points out in another fragment (§ 846), that these terms are
ambiguous, and can be taken in various senses. For example, “the desire
for destruction, change, becoming” can be “Dionysian,” active and
anti-Platonist; it can also indicate the ressentiment that leads the weak
to wish to destroy all (Wagner and Schopenhauer being used as ex¬
amples here).
We can see that the problem comes down to learning how to ar¬
ticulate the ultraperspectivist or ultraindividualist critique of Platonism
with the hyper classicism that leads Nietzsche, after careful weighing, to
find the classics to be quite superior to the romantics, and in a sense,
therefore, to find again, in a certain conception of truth, a privilege the
work of art possesses over the artist.

NIETZSCHE'S COHERENCE; NEARNESS TO HEIDEGGER

It is difficult to avoid a certain feeling of strangeness after one has read

or reread all of the passages in Nietzsche’s work he consecrated to art.
Depending on whether one considers the texts that evoke the project of
a “physiology of art” or those that define the “grand style,” one could
elaborate two entirely different or even opposite interpretations of his
aesthetic theory:
—When he is expressing himself as a “physiologist,” Nietzsche of¬
ten seems to flirt with a materialist relativism that threatens to com¬
pletely reduce the work of art to the psychological or biological reality
of the artist. And even if we follow Heidegger’s interpretation (as in my
opinion we should, on this point) according to which Nietzsche’s “biol-
ogism” is not a form of scientism but an ontology (a definition of the
Being of beings as equal to life), it still remains true that his aesthetics
seem to remain prisoner of the individualistic framework. They con¬
tinue to conceptualize the work using the subject or, at least, the artist
and his “aesthetic” states as starting point, as for instance with the
“Dionysiac intoxication” without which there is supposed to be no au¬
thentic creation.
—When, on the contrary, Nietzsche looks upon art adopting a

1 87
FIVE

“classicist” attitude, when he invites us to think of the grand style as

of a hierarchical ordering of the multiple that implies self-mastery, the
“psychologistic” tendency fades away, at which point the subject tends
to be eclipsed by the truth of the work.
These two moments—which I have here designated with the expres¬
sions “ultraindividualism” and “hyperclassicism”—are, truth to say,
indissolubly interconnected in a modality which can be rather simply
indicated as we arrive at the end of this analysis. It is indeed enough to
perceive the extent to which they both stem from the same source, the
extent to which they are both the effect, to the same degree, of the same
cause: the subject’s “fracture” [la “brisure” du sujet]. Far from oppos¬
ing, they converge and complete each other.
This is first of all clear as far as ultraindividualism is concerned.
It is indeed hardly doubtful that Nietzsche’s radical relativism, his
perspectivism, issue directly from the genealogical process through
which the cogito is deconstructed. If there is no longer any “world,”
nor “facts in themselves,” nor “objectivity,” it is certainly because, the
subject having been itself opened out onto the infinity of “its” uncon¬
scious, it is from now on impossible for it to claim to be stating any
kind of absolute truth. As we have seen, it must, on the contrary, resolve
itself to consider all its judgments to be symptoms, evaluations, or inter¬
pretations strictly relative to its specific situation. And the infinity of
points thus established (what Nietzsche calls “the new infinity”) is not
itself ever reducible to the unity of a totality, to a uni-verse—which
makes for a most profound difference between perspectivism and the
monadology.
But if one thinks about it, one realizes that Nietzsche’s classicism,
inasmuch as it is a classicism of difference (an invitation to think of art
as the expression of a “reality,” no longer of Being, but of Becoming),
also finds its origin in the fracture of the subject. It is because the latter
is cleft that the world has ceased to be, that objectivity has vanished,
that “the real” is a process of change; it is therefore also for the same
reason that truth can no longer be defined as identity, as noncontradic¬
tion, universal validity, etc., but has become Life, which is to say mani¬
foldness, difference, and temporality.
Interpreted this way, the two moments of Nietzschean aesthetics
converge and, all things considered, foreshadow Fleidegger’s thinking
about art rather more than they counter it in advance. For Heidegger,
also, the deconstruction of subjectivity leads to making of the art yet to
come to the extent that art, following the Hegelian prophecy he seems
1 88
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

near to sharing, is not already dead—a classicism of difference, and of

the work an expression of the truth of Being.
A formulation often repeated in “The Origin of the Work of Art”
has it that “Art is the setting-into-work of truth” [das Ins-Werk-Setzen
der Wahrheit]; more precisely, it is “the creative preserving of truth in
the work . . . Art lets truth originate. Art, founding preserving, is the
spring that leaps to the truth of what is, in the work.”37 Two precau¬
tions, in order not to distort the meaning:
—We would be completely mistaken if we did not realize that truth,
here, is no longer understood as adequacy to an object, to a being vis¬
ible in representation. As one of our best philosophers of aesthetics
quite correctly points out, for Heidegger, “art is by essence given over
to truth. But does that mean that art is supposed to be the ‘true’ repro¬
duction of the real? That would mean to recreate the traditional con¬
ception of truth as adequacy to an object. Instead, the analysis of the
work will lead us to a more original definition of truth as unconcealed¬
ness a term that translates the German Unverb orgenbeit and the
Greek aletheia.
This is not the place to recall the significance of this theory of truth.
Suffice it to say that, in Heidegger’s phenomenology, the essential is to
be found not in representation but in the coming into presence of the
being, of the existent, as such, in unconcealedness. What the work of
art “shows” is, if we may say so, invisible; what it manifests is that there
is “the visible,” there is representation, and that this simple fact has
nothing banal about it, as the universe of everydayness would have us
believe. And yet, in another way, the idea of adequacy has not lost all
legitimation. Although truth is no longer the agreement of the judgment
with the thing, though it has become unconcealedness, it is nevertheless
the case that the notion of adequacy finds a new meaning at a higher
level of potency. Authentic art is, then, that which places us “in the
presence of” this invisible act that is the coming into presence of beings;
it is that which, to borrow a formula Lyotard himself borrows from
Kant, “presents that there is the nonpresentable,” and which thereby
shows itself to be truer, or, if you prefer, more adequate, if not to the
“thing itself,” then at least to the “matter of thinking”; though it may
not be a visible being, an object present in representation, identifiable
and stable, but a nothingness, an absence, a difference, it is nonetheless
this matter that the work of art is about and whose dimensions it must
hint at, and it is in this sense that art keeps its classic task of expressing
the truth.

1 89
FIVE

—In these circumstances, subjectivity’s portion—or, if preferred,

the artist’s role—tends to be reduced in favor of the work’s. When Hei¬
degger makes of art a “setting-into-work of truth,” it is to immediately
add: “In this proposition an essential ambiguity is hidden, in which
truth is at once the subject and the object of the setting (Heidegger, op.
cit.). Even though the terms “subject” and “object” are unsuitable since
they refer back to a metaphysical conception of truth as the judgment’s
adequacy to a represented state of things, they do express what they
wish to express: that the work is a “founding preserving.” In other
words, everything in it is not invented; its truth does not he entirely in
the artist; it is not, or at least not essentially, the expression of his psy¬
chological states, or of his “intoxication” or of his “physiology,” as cer¬
tain of Nietzsche’s formulas might lead one to think (but we have just
seen how those formulations are less “subjectivist” than they seem).
Thence the work’s ambiguity, work which is certainly creation, and
therefore a founding, but a nonsubjective founding, since its essential
aspect is the preserving of a truth that does not belong to the artist,
who is neither its master nor its owner.
If one accepts the idea that the notion of subject has already been
disassociated from that of the author, “master and possessor of his
works,” in Nietzsche’s thinking, and if one also admits that the will to
power that defines the core of all that is, of the Being of beings, is to be
thought of more as pure difference and temporality than as the remnant
of any kind of conception of subjectivity, one will perhaps agree with
the observation that Nietzsche’s conception of art is not all that far from
Heidegger’s.
Whatever the case may be—and this question is, after all, only a
“philological” one—it remains true that this new classicism of differ¬
ence that emerges with Nietzsche and finds mature expression in Hei¬
degger has bequeathed us a difficulty which, as we shall see, runs
through the major currents of what is usually called “contemporary”
art. I will state it brutally, the nuances will follow in the rest of this
enquiry: Can we imagine that an art that would give itself, as main task,
that of “saying the difference,” of “presenting the fact that there is the
nonpresentable,” could bring into being works of the same order as
those which have punctuated the history of the aesthetics known up
until today? To put it more clearly perhaps—since, after all, one could
very well not care about the old “metaphysical” conception of the work
of art: if art always was the expression of a world, as Heidegger joins
Hegel in thinking, how then can we conceive that works of art that

^ 90
 THE NIETZSCHEAN MOMENT

pretend to say the nonpresentable (what escapes representation, non-

being) could ever structure themselves into a world as did the—if we
may put it this way—“classically classical” works that “only” aimed at
the expression of something like “a vision of the world”? I can conceive
of the “deconstruction” of the metaphysical tradition occupying a cer¬
tain, no doubt temporary, place in the history of philosophy since such
a deconstruction remains, like it or not, in the conceptual sphere. That
an analogue of the deconstructive discourse could install itself in art
seems to me, improbable, unless this kind of art explicitly adopts its
own death as its theme and purpose, as it so often has throughout the
twentieth century. But in that case it cannot make the pretence of con¬
stituting itself into a world.
Paradox: the new classicism that makes of the truth unconcealed
by the work of art a difference, no longer an identity, will find its voca¬
tion in the “avant-gardes” which, from Cezanne to Malevitch and from
Mallarme to Rene Char, fascinate contemporary philosophy. Nietzsche
had announced it prophetically: “Reason, like Euclidean space, is but
an idiosyncrasy.” While thinkers were deconstructing the former, the
painters of the avant-garde were not about to shy away from overturn¬
ing the latter.
 S I X

Neurosis and Modern Art

That is the title of an announced conference at a waltzer’s univer¬
sity at the beach where I spend the month of August. If I knew the
professor who is going to conference [sic], I would invite him to
come see our modern painters from up close. He would decide for
himself if neurosis or pathology has something to do with them.
He would see Andre Derain, Georges Braque, Maurice de Vla¬
minck, Fernand Leger, near-giants, robust with calm and good
sense in what they say, he would see Picabia, sportsman full of
sangfroid, Marcel Duchamp, G. de Chirico, Pierre Roy, Metzin-
ger, Gleizes, Jacques Villon and many others, ornate spirits, gifted
with talent and perhaps afterwards he would ask to change if not
the title of his conference, at least his conclusions.
—Guillaume Apollinaire
Chroniques d’art, 1902—1918
(August 1, 1914)

THE DIALECTIC OF THE END OF THE AVANT-GARDES

W ITH THEIR EXHIBITIONS without pictures and their silent

concerts, the dying avant-gardes* have derided art and unwit-

The avant-gardes have been going through a dark phase, not to say an
irreversible crisis, since the end of the seventies. This diagnosis is all the harder
to refute as it most often emanates from the avant-gardes themselves. Some, for
instance Philippe Albera, director of Contrechamps magazine, lucidly agree:
“The ideas of radical rupture, of revolutionary struggle, of the aggressiveness of
the artist who wants to shock the bourgeois and overturn the established order
have virtually disappeared.”1 The same observation is found, barely disguised,

1 92
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

tingly prepared the way for postmodern eclecticism. Through the pre¬
tension of shocking or subverting, works of art have become modest.
Burens columns at the Palais Royal in Paris do not overwhelm us, they
amuse, bringing forth feelings of irritation or approval in reality so fleet¬
ing they border on indifference.
Things were entirely different for the first avant-gardes. Still driven
by ambitious aesthetic projects, they did not aim at the death of art so
much as at its radical renewal. Yet, sometimes decades after their cre¬
ation, there are works that are still dead letters for the public said to be
cultured not to mention the larger public,” who most often remain
in complete ignorance of the contemporary culture that is most es¬
teemed by enlightened amateurs. In this respect, some recent studies
show up the impressive economic and sociological marginality of “mod¬
ern music.” (Strangely enough, this term only covers so-called “learned”
music, as if the other musical forms (jazz, rock, pop, etc.) were not also
contemporary. An effect of the first avant-gardes’ elitism.)
Paradigmatic of the crisis, modern music doesn’t succeed in reach¬
ing a public other than that of professionals or semiprofessionals. Could
one blame state institutions, that might wish to hinder a thriving sub¬
versive art? Alas! They are the ones that support it and subsidize it, to
an amount three times greater than that provided by a market which
was, besides, itself dominated until recently in France by public radio
and public television. As Maurice Fleuret declares: “For the first time
in history, we live without any dominant theory, without references,
without landmarks. No major personality emerges out of the young
generation. The aesthetic revolution of the last few years is not qualita-

even in the program notes for Paris’s IRCAM modern music center: “Having
been preceded by a period of radical evolution, the contemporary music of the
’70s and ’80s seems to be looking for itself,” at a time when “certain recent
tendencies—bearers of illusions—are exhausting themselves.”2 And Jean Clair,
who used to be the director of one of the most important avant-garde reviews,
and who organized exhibitions that signalled Paris’s renewal within contempo¬
rary art, draws up a veritable obituary: “The aesthetics of modernity, insofar as
it was an aesthetics of innovatio, seems to have exhausted the possibilities of its
creation. Within itself, its development during the teens, then its accelerated
institutionalization in the ’50s exasperated and accelerated its tendencies . . .
dealing it a deathblow. The utopia of the novum is foreclosed.”3 The very idea
of the avant-garde has such bad publicity now that a contemporary musician
like Luciano Berio can calmly declare: “He who calls himself avant-garde is a
cretin . . . The avant-garde is nothing [L’avant-garde, c’est du vide].”4

1 93
SIX

tive but quantitative: the history of recent music boils down to a catalog
of works and of names. I have multiplied the credits to creation sixfold
without bringing about the blossoming I had hoped for.”5 (A text to
be read, of course, as symptom more than as analysis, so obvious is it
that the technocratic multiplication of subsidies has little to do with
creation.)
Pierre Michel Menger points out in the conclusion to a painstaking
sociological investigation: “The function of and the need for a political-
ideological justification of avant-gardism have largely lost their impor¬
tance. Oppositional culture has become official culture; the maelstrom
of ‘revolutionary’ aesthetic innovations is orchestrated by the market
and/or largely subsidized by the state; daring, provocation, and the will
to rupture have become banal.”6 And young composers don’t delude
themselves about this, as witness the vivid declaration made by Alain
Daniel, author of a remarkable quintet for strings, to a journalist who
interviewed him after a day dedicated to him by Radio France-Culture:
“People who are always experimenting for the sake of experimenting
are god-damned nuisances! You try to show that everything you are
about to have played is experimental; it’s easy that way, if no one likes
it, you can always excuse yourself saying the experiment didn’t work
out . . . Composers today wear themselves out trying to do something
new ... It is the idea that pleases in contemporary music, in our case,
the reaction against what has been done and what is being done, but
the music itself? I don’t think it pleases.”7
Some will object, not without reason, that “the serious composer is
not—we could almost say by definition—looking for a market share,”
he is motivated by an inner necessity in comparison with which “the
public’s approval, quantitatively measured, is not the criterion for aes¬
thetic accomplishment either.”8 We would gladly concede the argument
if its aim were to separate the authentic artist from the demagogue. But
the logic of the avant-garde goes well beyond this. In the conflict oppos¬
ing public and artist, the avant-garde holds it to be obvious that the
artist, well in advance of the cretinized and manipulated masses, is nec¬
essarily right. Who would not want to reconcile art with society?” the
argument continues, “but with what society? To consumer society, art
‘of appeasement,’ in Malraux’s words. Innovative art must show the
way, not follow the herd. The marching wing of a merchant society, art
does not easily accommodate itself to the market” [aile marchante dans
une societe marchande, I’art s’accommode mal du marcbe] (ibid.).
Seductive arguments, no doubt, but which in the given instance

1 94
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

touch upon a theme a little too dear to the hearts of the larger public,
that of the unknown genius, solitary martyr of a soulless world that has
been turned over to the domination of technology. Reassuring argu¬
ments, even, avant-garde art is doing quite well, in fact it is more alive
than ever, and the public’s desertion is, so to speak, the surest sign of
this. Reassuring because, in the elitist vision that was always that of the
avant-gardes, hell is, of course, the others: the culture industry, subject
to the imperatives of capitalist (Marx) and technological (Heidegger)
profitability; the media—which simultaneously relays and consecrates
the eclectic conformism secreted by the economy; and, finally, the
masses” themselves, which refuse—but they must be forgiven, they are
manipulated—to be educated, to be initiated to the highest creations of
contemporary art.
That questions have to be asked about the dangers of a world domi¬
nated by technology, that bourgeois society also lives off the production
of a feeble-minded and enfeebling culture, no one can ignore all this.
But to go on from there and conclude that this “subculture” and its
media relays are suffocating an authentic creation which is supposedly
in the best of shapes today, is to take a step one cannot take unless one
lacks that minimal tragic sense without which philosophical question-
ing is, in some fashion, mutilated. In the case of contemporary culture
more than in any other, we have to stay away from the idea, which is
always too simple, that “the ones at fault are elsewhere.” The destiny
of this culture is, to a not unimportant extent, linked to that of the
avant-gardes, and the avant-gardes, at the exact opposite of what the
pro domo arguments we have just mentioned suggest, live from the ba¬
nality of the everyday. Without banality, no avant-garde, if the avant-
garde is the movement through which a small group, an elite, animated
by a new project, radically rejects the reigning conformism, received
ideas, and the inheritance of tradition. The crisis of the avant-gardes
can thus never stem from the oppositions they meet with. On the con¬
trary, it is, perhaps, the exhaustion of such an opposition nowadays, the
very absence of conflict between avant-garde artists and a quasi-in¬
existence public, that truly creates a problem.
Let us try out a hypothesis: and if the avant-gardes are dying out
because they have become banal? And what if it were the avant-gardes
which, since the beginning of the century, have secretly, and, sometimes
against their own intentions, worked towards the abolition of all dis¬
tinction between “subculture” and “high culture”? Isn’t the urinal that
Duchamp brought to the museum the symbol of this will to break away

1 95
SIX

from banality that has itself become banal and creative of banality, in
that it erases any distinction between work of art and technical object?
We have to look for the origins of the crisis affecting the avant-
gardes today within a dialectic internal to them. As Octavio Paz, in his
1972 lectures on the fate of modern poetry, suggests, “Modern art has
begun to lose its powers of negation. For years now, its negations have
become ritual repetitions; rebellion has become a mere procedure; criti¬
cism, rhetoric; transgression, ceremony. Negation has ceased being cre¬
ative. I am not saying we are living through the end of art. We are living
the end of the idea of modern art.”9 Although he keeps his distance
from Hegel, who decreed the death of art much more radically, the con¬
tradiction Paz uncovers is well and truly a dialectical contradiction in
the Hegelian sense; in becoming purely critical, the modernism of the
avant-gardes turns against itself. Solely obsessed by the quest for nov¬
elty and originality for their own sakes, it slips over into its oppo¬
site, the mere empty, dreary repetition of the gesture of innovation for
innovation’s sake. The break with tradition itself becomes tradition,
“tradition of the new” certainly—to appropriate Harold Rosenberg’s
expression—but tradition all the same and, according to Paz, a tradi¬
tion that is in our day void of meaning and content.
Paz’s reasoning touches on one of the main problems that contem¬
porary “high culture” meets with. The crisis he discerns is all the more
serious in that it is an internal one, and not some sort of “reaction”
which, from the outside, might seek to put a brake on a blossoming
movement. But is it for all that legitimate to indict “modern art” with¬
out more information? The formulation is, truth to tell, so vague it
nearly loses all meaning, and one can’t but be a little surprised to see it
taken up so unanimously by the most informed critics and the most
subtle philosophers. In what follows, I would prefer referring to the
more limited concept of avant-garde. Stravinsky and Ravel are, no
doubt, 'moderns”; their art would have been unthinkable in the nine¬
teenth century. They are not avant-gardists. The notion merits being
dwelt on if we want to understand the nature of the crisis.
The expression “avant-garde” belongs originally to military vo¬
cabulary. But it is noteworthy that its first use in a figurative sense (to
the extent that it is ever possible to date, with absolute precision, the
emergence of a concept)10 to designate radical movements in the fields
of both art and politics, should appear within the scientistic context of
a philosophy of history: Saint-Simon s. During the dialogue between the
artist and the scholar, found in his Opinions litteraires, philosophiques
1 96
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

et industrielles (1825),11 the artist declares to the scholar that artists

must serve as the avant-garde” in the “great enterprise” whose goal is
the “establishment of the system of the public weal,” “the artists, the
men of imagination will begin the march;12 they shall proclaim the fu¬
ture of the human species; they shall take from the past its golden age
and with it enrich the future generations.”13 We will come back to the
interpretation of this irreducibly scientistic and progressionist element
which, throughout the twentieth century, leaves its mark on avant-
gardes, even those that seem most distant from this Enlightenment
ideology.
In the realm not of the history of ideas but of real movements, * it
would appear that, in the French context, the first aesthetic avant-garde
worthy of the name was the group known as the “Incoherents.”14 Much
talked about between 1882 and 1889 (at which date the movement tired
itself out and dissolved), the Incoherent Ones were created from the
fusion of various small groups in which habitual Paris cabaret-goers
were to be found: “Hydropathes,” “Hirsutes,” “Zutistes,” or “Jemen-
foutistes” [Idontgiveadamnists], their main activity consisted in the or¬
ganization of more or less humorous exhibitions essentially intended to
“shock the bourgeois,” to symbolically draw the distinction between
the Bohemian’s and the Philistine’s way of life. External signs of recog¬
nition thus played a primordial role in the life of the group, as attested
by this manifesto, in which the most characteristic elements of an ide¬
ology at once elitist and schoolboyish are expressed:

The Incoherent One is young, he in fact needs suppleness of mind and limb
to give himself over to perpetual physical and moral dislocations . . . The Inco¬
herent One therefore has neither rheumatisms nor migraines, he is nervy and
robust. He belongs to all the trades that come close to art: a typographer can
be incoherent, a zinc worker never . . . The Incoherent One retires through
marriage or through developing a rheumatism. (!)

It is, more seriously, during the early years of this century that we
observe artists themselves taking up the themes of the ideology of the
avant-garde, whose exemplary expression is, no doubt, Kandinsky’s es¬
say, On the Spiritual in Art and in Painting in Particular (1912). To
describe the “spiritual life,” Kandinsky has recourse to a metaphor that

* As Poggioli remarks, the avant-gardes no longer adopt the form of a school,

judged to be too “academic,” but rather the more flexible one of “movement”
(Theory of the Avant-Garde, pp. 12-13).

1 97
SIX

merits attention, since it contains all the elements necessary for deter¬
mining the ideal type of the avant-garde:

A large triangle divided into unequal parts; the smallest and most acute, at
the top, being a rather good schematic figure for the spiritual life. The entire
triangle moves slowly, barely perceptibly, forward and upward, so that where
the highest point is “today”; the next division is “tomorrow,” i.e., what is today
comprehensible only to the topmost segment of the triangle and to the rest of
the triangle is gibberish, becomes tomorrow the sensible and emotional content
of the life of the second segment.15

The rest of the text draws out the metaphor and deduces its main
implications.
The first implication is, without a doubt, elitism: “At the apex of
the topmost division there stands sometimes only a single man. His joy¬
ful vision is like an inner, immeasurable sorrow.” His task is to “help
the forward movement of the obstinate cartload” of the cretinized popu¬
lace found at the bottom of the triangle. On the one hand, then, we find
the “superior men” who dare challenge the traditions and are therefore
fated to solitude; on the other, “the partisans of popular representa¬
tion,” “republicans” and “socialists” buried within mass conformism.
“The inhabitants of this large division of the triangle have never man¬
aged to solve a problem for themselves and have always been pulled
along in the cart of humanity by their self-sacrificing fellow men stand¬
ing far above them” (pp. 133, 139). The metaphor of the avant-garde
thereupon finds again the military accents that had inspired it at its
beginnings: the superior men, the artists or scientists of genius “move
forward forgetting all prudence, and fall during the conquest of the
citadel of the new science as do those soldiers who, sacrificing them¬
selves, perish in the desperate assault of a fortress that will not sur¬
render” (ibid.). The genius is thus alone and the triangle’s apex but a
point. People “call him deranged” or “a candidate for the madhouse”
(p. 134). But this solitude is the surest sign of belonging to an elite,
as Schonberg confesses to Kandinsky in a letter on January 24, 1911:
“My works are provisionally refused the favor of the masses. They will
thereby all the more easily reach the individuals: those truly worthy
individuals who alone count for me.”16 This theme is so important for
Schonberg that, in 1937, he makes it the center of an essay entitled
How One Becomes a Man Alone, in which both elitism and the prob¬
lem of the public (that is, of its absence) are articulated around the
notion of individuality. The artist s solitude is the mark of his person-
1 98
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

ality, the sign of his individualization as compared to the shapeless mass

which blindly absorbs the values of the tradition, against which the for¬
mer rebels.
The second aspect that the triangle metaphor points to could be
designated by the term historicism. Despite a certain pessimism, that
has to do with the triangular structure of a spiritual life that imposes
solitude upon the artist, his unwavering belief in progress allows him to
bring optimism back within the sphere of history: “Despite [the
masses’] blindness the spiritual triangle in fact continues to advance”;
it slowly ascends with an irresistible force.” The elite can feel reas¬
sured: its solitude is only temporary; sooner or later it will be under¬
stood by the mass, to whom it is pathfinder and guide. “Today’s
pictorial and musical dissonance is nothing but tomorrow’s conso¬
nance.” 1 But, because of this very philosophy of history, the artist has
an obligation to break with tradition in order ceaselessly to create the
new: “Thus, every period of culture produces its own art, which can
never be repeated. Imitation of past and bygone forms of art “re¬
sembles the mimicry of the ape,” a gesture whose “inner meaning ... is
completely lacking.”18 The avant-garde is tied to the idea of revolution;
its mission is to boldly overturn the established order—it being under¬
stood that this movement is without end. The artist’s originality and
individuality are therefore no longer defined only in relation to rules;
they are explicitly thought of as a function of a certain placing of art
within history.
As a consequence of this elitism and of this historicism, the avant-
garde sees itself as the expression of the Self or, to use Kandinsky’s own
expression, the “pure expression of the inner life” of him who, through
his originality, finds himself at the same time at the apex of the triangle
(elitism) and ahead of his time (historicism), and who therefore alone
contributes a veritable individuality (the other “individuals,” even those
just below the apex, already begin to make up a “mass”; they are simi¬
lar to one another, they have things in common, and they are thus less
individualized than the genius). This theme is quite central, it provides
the main theoretical justification for the abandonment of “figuration”
in painting and tonality in music. If we have to put an end to figurative
art, if we have to stop imitating nature, it is so we may be able finally
to give full expression to subjectivity, as Kandinsky sums it up in this
extremely important formulation: “the total renunciation of accepted
beauty, which regards as sacred every means that serves the purpose of
self-expression” (ibid., p. 149).

1 99
SIX

We shall see that the position of the Cubists was, on this point,
different. It is nevertheless as a function of this last criterion, and keep¬
ing those whom he situates at the triangle’s leading point—Picasso and
Schoenberg—as a steady point of reference, that Kandinsky sketches
out a history of contemporary art in which the three implicit presup¬
positions (elitism, historicism, individualism) of all avant-garde ideolo¬
gies come through in most significant fashion. While Debussy, despite
certain worthy innovations, still gives way to “the charms of more or
less conventional ‘beauty,’ ” Arnold Schoenberg “goes his lonely way un¬
recognized, even today (1912), by all but a few enthusiasts”: “Schoen¬
berg’s music leads us into a new realm, where musical experiences
are no longer acoustic, but purely spiritual. Here begins the ‘music of
the future.’”
The situation is analogous in painting. Here, it is Picasso who “goes
beyond” Cezanne and Manet. Unlike those two, who were, all the
same, “in advance” of their time,

the Spaniard Pablo Picasso never succumbs to this (conventional) beauty. Led
on always by the need for self-expression, often driven wildly onward, Picasso
throws himself from one external means to another. If a chasm lies between
them, Picasso makes a wild leap, and there he is, standing on the other side,
much to the horror of his compact cohort of followers. They had just thought
they had caught up with him; now they must begin the painful descent and start
the climb all over again. (Ibid., p. 152)

Avant-gardism’s three constitutive moments are here clearly brought to¬

gether; it is because the artist of genius is gifted with a personality that
puts him ahead of his time—his followers, although they are already,
as such, an elite, have something “compact” about them—that he is
destined to the solitude reserved for the elite of this elite.

AN "INDIVIDUALIST" INTERPRETATION OF THE AVANT-GARDE

If by individualism we understand the modern ideology that holds that,

in the name of freedom and of autonomy, the individual must break
with the heteronomy of inherited traditions,19 then it seems that an in¬
terpretation of the avant-garde by reference to individualism becomes
necessary. Its principle has been put forward by Daniel Bell in his essay
on The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.20 Taking up certain as-

200
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

pects of the Marxian analysis of bourgeois civil society,5' he shows how

the emergence of capitalism definitively ruined the notion of tradition
and at the same time the holistic social vision that was attached to it:
“The fundamental assumption of modernity, the thread that has run
through Western civilization since the sixteenth century, is that the so¬
cial unit of society is not the group, the guild, the tribe, or the city, but
the person ’ (p. 16). And from the moment that this individual thinks of
himself as not only a free and autonomous monad, but as the true social
atom, he inevitably grants himself the capacity and the right to question
any values he has not posited himself, and to modify at will any norms
he may institute. Carrying the argument in Bell’s direction, we may add
that, at the level of political philosophy, this principle has been justified
in Rousseau s Social Contract: the individuals gathered in assembly give
themselves their own laws, they are their own masters and possessors;
no one may hinder them from changing these laws at will since it would
be “absurd for the will to lay chains upon itself for the future.”21
At the sociological level, Bell quotes the passage from the Com¬
munist Manifesto in which Marx describes the revolutionary essence of
bourgeois society: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly
revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations
of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . . All
fixed, fast, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify.” From the beginning, therefore,
“bourgeois” individualism had a revolutionary aspect, its temporality
was oriented toward the future, and one can see the way in which Bell,
a former Marxist, can envision establishing a paradoxical continuity
between the bourgeois world and the birth of avant-gardes whose mam
concern is to break with tradition, to ceaselessly create the new by con¬
stantly revolutionizing the world of culture.
A continuity paradoxical indeed, since the spiritual universe of the
avant-gardes seems to be the diametrical opposite of the bourgeois way
of life. The artist’s, the “bohemian’s” way of life sees itself as opposed
to that of the Philistine and, as Malevich pointed out, the connections
between aesthetic and political avant-gardes are sometimes very tight:
“Cubism and futurism were the revolutionary forms in art foreshad-

* It hardly need be said that, in other matters, Bell keeps his distance from
his erstwhile Marxism.

201
SIX

owing the revolution in the political and economic life of 1917.”22 Yet
it is this very paradox that Bell places at the heart of his interpretation:

What is striking is that while bourgeois society introduced a radical indi¬

vidualism in economics, and a willingness to tear up all traditional social rela¬
tions in the process, the bourgeois class feared the radical experimental
individualism of modernism in the culture. Conversely, the radical experimen¬
talists in the culture, from Baudelaire to Rimbaud to Alfred Jarry, were willing
to explore all dimensions of experience, yet fiercely hated bourgeois life. The
history of this sociological puzzle, how this antagonism came about, is still to
be written. (Ibid., p. 18)

For Bell, the problem is then one of knowing how to maintain, without
contradiction, the idea of an individualist background common to both
the bourgeoisie and the avant-gardes (both of them upsetting tradition
in the name of individual autonomy) even though the conflict opposing
the two forms of life is evident.
Bell’s answer presupposes a critique of the dominant paradigms of
contemporary sociology, Marxism and functionalism. He argues that,
against these paradigms, the heterogeneity of the different levels making
up capitalist society must be stressed. To this end, we can separate out
three spheres: first of all, the techno-economic structure, which for the
most part can be described in Weberian terms. Governed by a bureau¬
cratic mode of organization, its main principle is efficiency, maximum
profitability [Zweckrationalitdt or “instrumental rationality”]. The sec¬
ond sphere is that of the polity. Since the emergence of modern indi¬
vidualism—let us say, in the French context, and to limit ourselves to
what is most visible, since the 1789 Revolution—it has been increas¬
ingly oriented, as Tocqueville’s analyses had predicted, by a democratic
legitimation whose ultimate grounding is the requirement of equality—
formal, at first, then more and more real (p. 12). And finally, there is
the sphere of culture—and here Bell is referring no longer to Weber or
to de Tocqueville, but to Ernst Cassirer (ibid.), whose principle, in the
modern world, is self-expression or “self-gratification” (p. xli).
Marxism and functionalism, otherwise completely at odds, have,
according to Bell, a shared tendency to represent these three levels as
being integrated within a coherent totality (or at least coherent from the
interpreter s point of view). One asserts that the superstructures express
the infrastructure (with delays, feedback, etc., but they do so all the
same); the other presupposes a common value system within a consen¬
sus.23 It is this unitary vision of a social totality that Bell sets out to
202
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

challenge through the examination of the discordances that appear

more and more frequently between the economic, the political, and the
cultural spheres. The emergence of these discordances comes in fact
relatively late in the history of capitalism (which partly explains the
mistakes of the aforecited sociological paradigms). At the beginning,
bourgeois society s infrastructure and superstructure were in relative
harmony; as Max Weber’s analyses show, the ideology of capitalism,
for long Puritan and Protestant, managed, until the end of the nine¬
teenth century, to maintain its coherence with the economic sphere. The
thirteen “useful virtues” to which Benjamin Franklin claimed to de¬
vote thirteen weeks four times a year are the very embodiment of this
homogeneity: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, indus¬
try, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and
humility qualities whose valorization (if not always their actual ex¬
ercise) was able to legitimate the entrepreneurial spirit of a nascent
capitalism.
But it is clear that this “Protestant ethic” has disappeared today,
replaced by a new culture Bell designates as “hedonistic” and “narcis¬
sistic.” Two stages waymark its development within the context of
American history: the nineteen-teens first of all, which witnessed the
birth, around a group of “Young Intellectuals” at Harvard, of the de¬
mand for a sweeping liberation of mores: “The exuberance of life was
summed up in a series of catchwords. One of them was ‘New.’ There
was the New Democracy, the New Nationalism, the New Freedom, the
New Poetry, and even the New Republic (which was started in 1914).
A second was sex. Even to use the word openly sent a frisson through
the readers of the press . . . And a third catchword was liberation’’'’
(p. 62). This wind of freedom was to lead the United States to discover
not only Freud and Bergson—more copies of Creative Evolution were
sold in two years than in France in the previous fifteen—but also the
principal representatives of the aesthetic avant-garde of old Europe.
For this first emancipatory thrust away from the Protestant ethic
Bell provides two key reasons: the end of the reign of the “small town”
as an effect of demographic growth, and, above all, the birth of a real
consumer society in which the development of credit shook up the ex¬
istence of the masses by ruining the antiquated ascetic ideology of sav¬
ings and of abstinence: “The cultural transformation of modern society
is due, singularly, to the rise of mass consumption, or the diffusion of
what were once considered luxuries to the middle and lower classes in
society” (p. 65).

203
SIX

The second stage was in the 1960s. It did not, for the most part,
innovate so much as take up again and democratize the themes already
expounded by the “Young Intellectuals” (p. 69). The sixties witnessed
the propagation of a morality of authenticity whose categorical impera¬
tive can be summed up in two words: Be Yourself. A simplistic pro¬
gram, of course, but one that passes for a virulent criticism of the
bourgeois values and morality of middle-class America [I’Amerique
profonde]. As a result of this “counter-cultural” period, Bell notes, “tra¬
ditional morality was replaced by psychology, guilt by anxiety” (p. 72).
Psychology, because the problem is no longer one of imposing norms
but of understanding the individual personality and furthering its self-
realization; anxiety and not guilt, because “not feeling good” is, against
the background of a warning “moral law,” the mere effect of an intra¬
psychic conflict. The cultural consequence of this new world-vision: the
main themes of the early avant-gardes pass over to everyday existence.

Authenticity in a work of art was defined [in the 1960s] almost exclusively
in terms of the quality of immediacy, both the immediacy of the artist’s intention
and the immediacy of his effect upon the viewer. In the theater, for example,
spontaneity was all; the text was virtually eliminated and the reigning form
became improvisation—exalting the “natural” over the contrived, sincerity over
judgment, spontaneity over reflection. When Judith Malina, the director of the
Living Theater, said, “I don’t want to be Antigone (on stage), I am and want to
be Judith Malina,” she aimed to do away with illusion in the theater, as the
painters have eliminated it in art. (P. 131)

At the end of this analysis, the opposition between bourgeois and

artist looks like the paradoxical effect of a new aspect of individualism:
having entered into the era of mass consumption, capitalist society can
no longer fit in an ascetic ethic that might restrain this consumption.
Therefore the conflict between an economic sphere, still requiring the
same efforts and still regulated by the aim of profitability, and a cultural
sphere which, though appearing to be a radical critique of the consumer
society, in fact cheers it on as never before:

This abandonment of Puritanism and the Protestant ethic . . . emphasizes

not only the disjunction between the norms of the culture and the norms of the
social structure, but also an extraordinary contradiction within the social struc¬
ture itself. On the one hand, the business corporation wants an individual to
work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification—to be, in the crude
sense, an organization man. And yet, in its products and its advertisements, the

204
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

corporation promotes pleasure, instant joy, relaxing, and letting go. One is to
be “straight” by day and a “swinger” by night. This is self-fulfillment and self-
realization! (Pp. 71-72)

This interpretation—to which I hardly see how one could remain

indifferent so well does it describe one of the profoundest characteristics
of contemporary behavior—leads to a paradox: whereas avant-garde
art presents itself willingly, not to say complacently, as subversive and
antibourgeois, it would in fact be the ultimate expression of a bourgeois
society that, in order to satisfy the new consumer demands it itself has
engendered, has given up the ascetic morality Max Weber described to
make room for the hedonistic ideologies of cultural liberation.
I will not come back here to the problems that, at the level of meth¬
odology, this type of interpretation brings up.24 It is clear that, despite
the distance it claims to keep from Marxism, it renews the—in my eyes,
doubtful—idea that the “superstructures” are but an effect of the “in¬
frastructures” (the ideology of the avant-garde; the effects of the age of
credit). And yet, if its conception of individualism undergoes a certain
elaboration,-' it does, it seems to me, rather adequately account for
what could be called the “avant-garde form” of modernist movements,
if their specific content is abstracted out. It is indeed obvious that the
three moments we saw at work in Kandinsky’s text—elitism, histori-
cism, and the cult of self—can be plausibly interpreted within the per¬
spective sketched out by Bell.
It seems to me, moreover, at the level of the content of the different
avant-gardes, that we find the limits to Bell’s reading of history. Two
key difficulties have to be pointed out, both of which seem to require a
more complex interpretation of the phenomenon:
1. The first has to do with the fact that, insisting as he does on the
continuity linking modernism to classical individualism “since the six¬
teenth century,” Bell underestimates the rupture that the abandonment
of perspective and tonality brings into the history of art. In his eyes this
rupture is to be classed within the, if we may call it this, “continuity of
ruptures” that has characterized the history of democratic/individualist
societies since their beginnings. We would thus go over from impres¬
sionism to cubism or to abstractionism just as once artists had gone, for
instance, from romanticism to impressionism, the only noteworthy dif¬
ference between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries being, in the
end, that in the latter the ruptures become ever more frequent as an
effect of a ceaselessly exacerbated individualism. Observing from a not

205
SIX

very distant standpoint, Gilles Lipovetsky has given this continuist vi¬
sion of art history its full expressive power:

Modernism is not a first and incomparable rupture: in its rage for destruc¬
tion and radical innovation, modernism continues, in the cultural order, with a
century’s delay, the work of modern societies aiming at instituting themselves in
the democratic fashion . . . Just as the democratic revolution emancipates soci¬
ety from the forces of the invisible and from their correlate, the hierarchical
union, so does artistic modernism liberate art and literature from the cult of
tradition, the respect of masters, and the code of imitation.26

It is hardly to be doubted that the ideology of rupture with tradition

finds its highest expression in the French Revolution, and that, to that
extent, we can look for the origins of the “avant-garde forms” therein.
But, if we agree that one of the fundamental aspects of the pictorial
avant-gardes consists, as far as content is concerned, in their abandon¬
ment of Euclidean perspective, then the analogy with the French Revo¬
lution becomes problematic. * If the movement of art history were to
be compared to that of the history of political ideas and realities—an
intellectual exercise which, I’m well aware, would not be an exact sci¬
ence—I would say rather that it is the emergence of perspective which,
with a few centuries’ advance, presages political revolution and coin¬
cides, on the level of ideas, with the appearance of the humanism that
is expressed in the various social contract theories. That at least is what
is suggested by the idea—put forward, for example, in the work of
Pierre Francastel—that the valorization of perspective corresponds to
a vision of the world dominated by the modern notion of equality, by a
metaphysics of subjectivity where man occupies a point of view upon
the world from which the latter appears as a material that is manipu-
lable and controllable at will.27
It is not, in fact, the individualist interpretation that is here ques¬
tioned down to its roots, but rather the periodization of the history of
the concept of individualism it implies. To formulate the hypothesis
which I should like to specify and try out in what follows: though we
can make a parallel between the birth of modern individualism and that
of classical pictorial perspective, we have to, on the other hand, realize
that the rejection of this perspective—like the rejection of musical to¬
nality—has, perhaps, as correlate a new configuration of subjectivity,

v It goes without saying that these reservations take nothing away from the
interesting and pertinent aspect of Lipovetsky’s analyses in other respects.

206
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

or, if you prefer, a new era of individualism that cannot be reduced to

the features of the first era. On the level of the history of ideas—but
also, as we shall see, on that of art history—the parallel between the
avant-gardes and the French Revolution leads to a certain underesti¬
mation of the rupture brought about, toward the end of the nineteenth
century, by the emergence of the new configuration of subjectivity that
Nietzsche s philosophy thematizes so well. Where in classical individu¬
alism, whose heir and political expression was, simultaneously, the
French Revolution, the subject is conceived of on the model of the co-
gito, of the monad that is closed in upon itself and upon its private in¬
terests, the nineteenth century witnesses the appearance of ever more
radical critiques of the cogito leading to the elaboration, in Nietzsche
above all, of a “fractured subject,” of a subject that differs from itself
and opens onto an indomitable unconscious.
In liberal theories of the individual, the multifariousness of view¬
points and interests could still be harmoniously “integrated” into a
monadology or market theory—“invisible hand” or “ruse of reason.”
In the perspectivism Nietzsche thematizes but which goes indisputably
beyond the framework of philosophy to become the Stimvnung of the
waning nineteenth century, this multifariousness becomes irreducible
and irreconcilable. The idea of harmony gives way to that of chaos,
and identity to “difference”—and it is this “difference,” inherent to a
new epoch of subjectivity, that is expressed by philosophy as well as
by painting or avant-garde music. From Schonberg to Kandinsky or
Malevich, it is this critique of the cogito that justifies the avant-garde,
if it is true, as Malevich insists, that radically new aesthetic forms can¬
not be created without having “eliminated from all our arts the petit-
bourgeois idea of subject” and “hammered upon consciousness as upon
nails one drives into a stone wall.”28
2. The second difficulty Bell’s interpretation encounters stems from
the first. The avant-gardes were, in certain aspects—and we shall see
the extent to which this observation can be verified right down to the
smallest details—characterized by the cult of the self, by the “sacrali¬
zation,” to take up Kandinsky’s formulation, of “every means permit¬
ting the expression of personality.” Yet, as far as the avant-gardes’
content is concerned, we know, at least since Apollinaire, that two main
currents separated themselves out very early in this century. One was
that of abstract art, of the “Orphism” which, with Delaunay and Kan¬
dinsky, rejects perspective in the name of pure abstraction. The other
was cubism, which, despite its rejection of “naturalism,” maintains the

207
SIX

strictly speaking classical ideal of an objective or realistic art, one that

remains attached to the principles of figuration even when the latter no
longer traverses the laws of Euclidean perspective but rather their
contrary.
That this distinction, established by Apollinaire in Les Peintres cu-
bistes [The Cubist Painters],29 may have been vividly disputed when he
undertook to classify each artist as belonging to one or the other camp
did not prevent it from becoming generally predominant among paint¬
ers themselves, as witness one text among many others: this one, dating
from 1946, we owe to the great theoretician of cubism Metzinger. From
1912 on, he confesses, “we already envisaged two possibilities: a paint¬
ing of ‘pure effusion’ and a ‘new realism.’ The former is now called
abstract or nonfigurative painting, the latter has kept the name cub¬
ism.30 And we may recall how often the surrealists scolded cubism for
its concern with realism and objectivism.31
If “classicism” is broadly defined as a form of art that defines the
beautiful as being an exposition of the true, of the real, then we can
state that a classical component is not at all absent from the avant-
gardes, not even from cubism, the most remarkable among them. And
it would also be misleading to think that abstract art and surrealism set
every classical reference to a science of art aside so as to set themselves
off from the cubist painters’ realism. It would be easy to show how, in
Kandinsky himself, color theory tries to adopt the form of a science, or
how, in surrealism, automatic writing is legitimated by referring to the
“scientific” theory that psychoanalysis is in Breton’s eyes. In a word,
what the individualist interpretation of the avant-gardes does not ac¬
count for is this classicist, realist, at times even scientistic component
that counterbalances the subjectivism or narcissism inherent in the
avant-garde form. Where individualism’s logic disencumbers from the
norms of tradition, classicism’s logic leads, on the contrary, to laying
down constrictive norms. It is this “objectivist” aspect of the avant-
gardes—and particularly of cubism—that must be accounted for, to
measure more exactly what the individualist interpretation perhaps can¬
not quite grasp.

THE “FOURTH DIMENSION"

“In the early years of the twentieth century,” Pierre Francastel reminds
us, “the fashion was all for scientism.” The world was “astonished at
the constantly renewed applications not so much of science as of tech-
208
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

nology, which upset the vision of a physical universe that had been
thought “stable for several centuries.”32 Such is the context in which
the first avant-gardes blossomed; a context that has faded somewhat
since scientific progress evokes, nowadays, disquiet rather more than it
does astonishment or admiration. We have, thanks to a retrospective
illusion, a tendency to forget that the Italian Futurists’ fascination with
modern machines”33 was, all things considered, closer to Jules Verne
than to Kafka, or that the first cubist painters could subscribe without
reservations to a philosophy that held that “through the modifications
of artworks, it was possible to follow the modifications in science step
by step, ’ so much did the latter’s influence upon the former seem
decisive.34
Without falling into the trap of a causal vision of the relation be¬
tween art and science, we do have to agree with Francastel that “cub¬
ism’s first initiative, towards 1907, was to speculate on the dimensions
of space. Influenced by the terms circulating around them, the cubists
thought they were carrying out positive scientific work by introducing
a fourth dimension in their canvases or in suppressing the third one.”35
As Francastel puts it further on, perhaps without realizing all of the
aesthetic and philosophical implications, “For Picasso, the world has a
twofold aspect. It is most of all curved and near. He is, plastically, the
closest to some of Riemann’s and Einstein’s geometrical hypotheses”
(p. 250).
And yet, strangely, most art historians (with the notable exception
of Jean Clair and Linda Dalrymple-Henderson, to whom I shall return)
have avoided granting these scientific allusions any importance other
than metaphorical. Concerned, and justly so, with avoiding any con¬
fusion between painting and the new geometries, between the scien¬
tist s mathematical space and the artist’s plastic space, they have most
often preferred dwelling on the negative aspects of a reference that
constantly threatens to furnish fodder for the accusation of “intel-
lectualism” so commonly made against avant-garde art. Allusions to
“non-Euclidean” * geometries would, in the end, only have been useful
for the painters themselves to legitimate, over against a conservative
public used to the naturalism of “perspectival” pictures, the abandon¬
ment of a Euclidean space limited to tridimensionality.36 This was, once
again, a legitimate precaution, but one which leads to significantly

” We shall see that, in fact, this expression covers quite various mathematical
theses.

209
SIX

underestimating the true significance of the recourse to the new geome¬

tries. The contemporaries of the first avant-gardes were not misled
about this, as witness this passage from Cubist Painters that Apollinaire
consecrates to modern mathematics:

Up to now, the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry sufficed for the

anxieties that the feeling of infinity introduces into the soul of artists . . . But
today, the scientists and learned men do not limit themselves to the three di¬
mensions of Euclidean geometry. Painters have, quite naturally and, so to speak,
by intuition, been led to take an interest in the possible new measures of exten¬
sion which, in the language of modern workshops, are jointly and briefly des¬
ignated by the term of fourth dimension.

This text is all the more noteworthy in that it knowingly and

consciously insists upon the importance of this “fourth dimension.”
Apollinaire knows, better than anyone else, that the aspiration of “geo-
metrism” has already become so banal at the time he is writing his
book (in 1912) that it is the origin, no less, of the very term “cubism,”
which was used at first as an anathema. * And yet he cannot but stress
the irreplaceable role the new geometries played, if not in cubism’s
creation, then at least in the legitimacy accorded the new “intuitive”
relation to what he, following the mathematicians’ terminology, calls
“extension.”37 Painters, in turn, explicitly evoke the need for “going
beyond” Euclid’s three dimensions and for challenging, thanks to the
non-Euclidean geometries, the postulate of the “nondeformity of mov¬
ing figures.”38 As Metzinger and Gleizes assert, “If one wished to con¬
nect space in these painters to some sort of geometry, one would have
to make reference to non-Euclidean researchers, and meditate some of
Rieman’s [sic\ theorems” (ibid.). The utterance’s hypothetical character
(“If one wished . . .”) should not mislead us. Metzinger and Gleizes
were not trying to say—on the contrary—that the new geometries were
not pertinent for artists, but only to remind us that artists did not

* Forced, so to speak, to take up a pejorative term, but one already conse¬

crated by usage, Metzinger and Gleizes wrote the first pages of their major
theoretical work, Du cubisme [On Cubism, 1912], with the same worry in
mind: “The word cubism appears here only to spare the reader any hesitation
as to the object of this study, and we hasten to declare that the idea it calls forth,
that of volume, cannot by itself define a movement that tends towards the inte¬
gral fulfillment of painting.”

21 0
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

thereby become geometers; that their mathematical knowledge still be¬

longed to the realm of the amateur and remained—as their own mis¬
spelling of Riemann’s name shows—second-hand.
We know today39 through what complicated paths painters became
acquainted with the new geometries, and we can rather precisely recon¬
struct the concrete meaning that this famous “fourth dimension” must
have had for them. Although the essays of its principal theoretician,
Charles Howard Hinton,40 were not translated, several books on the
new geometries were easily accessible to the French public from the first
years of this century’s first decade. Besides Poincare’s La Science et I’by-
potbese [Science and Hypothesis]—whose influence is as visible in Met-
zinger and Gleizes s writings as in Duchamp’s Notes sue le grand verre
[ Notes on the Large Glass"]—the year 1903 saw the publication of
Boucher s Essai sur l byperespace [Essay on Hyperspace] and Jouffret’s
Elementary Treatise of Four-Dimensional Geometry. This last, which
has the advantage of providing numerous graphic representations of
four-dimensional or “hyperbodies,” could certainly attract the interest
of artists eager to break with the naturalism of preceding years. Evoking
“the universe we dwell in and those we suspect to be beside it,” it lets
float a promising doubt about the existence of the fourth dimension:
“The four-dimensional world exists, no doubt, only in the geometrical
sense. But nothing prevents us from assuming its concrete existence
also, in which case our world would be part of it.”
The foreword sets out to relativize Euclidean geometry’s three-
dimensional space by reducing it to a mere convention, born out of
habit: “This number [three] seems to have no logical necessity, for we
can replace it with any other whole number when we wish to formulate
any kind of analytical system; it seems thus to be a mere product of
experience, not, certainly, of individual experience, but of the accumu¬
lated experience that furnishes hereditary ideas” (p. v). If it is, there¬
fore, neither logical truth nor intangible law of perception, how then
not to envisage the possibility of a “transformation corresponding to
that of the analysis, whose result would be to give our descendents the
sensation of seeing themselves, and of conceiving of space, in four di¬
mensions” (p. viii) ? For Hinton, quoted by Jouffret,41 there is not the
slightest doubt; the perception of the fourth dimension is well and truly
a matter of adaptation; it awaits only the ripening of our mental devel¬
opment: “When the faculty is acquired, or, better: when it is brought
to consciousness—for it exists within each of us in imperfect form—
SIX

a new horizon opens . . . Our perception is subjected to the condition

of being in space; but space is not limited, as we at first believe, to
tridimensionality . . .42
Jouffret, more prudent than Hinton, no doubt agreed with Poincare
in being convinced tht the fourth dimension would forever remain out¬
side our perception. But he did not for all that cease suggesting that its
imperceptible character in no way implied nonexistence:

The non-perception of bodies external to our space in no way hinders es¬

tablishing their geometry, that is to say the descriptive and metrical relations
they sustain among themselves and with those who, on the other side, people
the superior extensions. The reader who follows us into these curious regions
of thought, into this country that has been called mathematics’ fairytale world,
will quickly become used to the oddities he finds there, since these oddities are
in agreement with the most rigorous logic.43

As we will see in a moment, this language comes very near that through
which science fiction was to retrieve the fourth dimension from the spe¬
cialist’s domain and bring it to the public’s attention. But we first of all
have to define this famous fourth dimension—being unable to give it an
adequate visual representation.
The difficulty in understanding, or in leading to an understanding
of what the fourth dimension could be, has indeed to do with the fact
that it lies outside perception. To give an idea of it, we thus have to
follow a line of reasoning, actually fairly simple, that Jouffret formulates
in these terms: “The geometer conceives of space as being divided into
an infinity of infinitely thin slices he calls planes, these being in turn
divided into an infinity of infinitely thin strips he calls straight lines, and
these into an infinity of infinitely short segments he calls points”
(p. viii). One can say then that instead of having three dimensions, as
volumes do, planes only have two, lines only one, and points none. Here
then is how, beginning with this series’s simple elements, we arrive at
the idea of the fourth dimension: “Taking the series in reverse, begin¬
ning, that is, with the point, the geometry that is going to concern us
pursues it beyond three-dimensional space. The latter is, for it, only a
slice (we cannot keep on diversifying words and we therefore gather up
the last one left behind by the series we began), an infinitely thin slice
in the midst of an infinity of other spaces constituting an equal number
of similar slices within a four-dimensional extension” (p. ix).
It is an example of reasoning by analogy: just as the point can be
thought of as an infinitely thin slice cut out of, so to speak, a line, so the

21 2
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

line can in turn be seen as an infinitely thin slice of a plane, and the
plane as an infinitely thin slice of volume (for instance, a square is an
infinitely thin slice of a cube), so—by analogy—nothing prevents us
from imagining that a volume, a cube in our example, is itself a slice
cut out of a four-dimensional body that will thereafter be called a
“hyperbody.”
We cannot, as mentioned above, perceive this hyperbody, but noth¬
ing hinders us from tracing its figure in two dimensions. Let us begin
with the straight line. If we shift this line parallel to itself, we obtain a
plane and thereby go from the first to the second dimension:

T t

If we now push this square while keeping it parallel to itself, we

obtain a cube.44

Still by analogy, we can again shift a cube perpendicular to the

three dimensions, and obtain a hypercube, meaning a volume in four
dimensions.

Of course, the representation of the fourth dimension is here given

only in two dimensions, and we cannot always intuitively grasp four-
dimensionality. But we can say, always by analogy, and taking up the

21 3
SIX

argument in Edwin Abbott’s famous fable,45 mentioned by Poincare in

Science and Hypothesis, that we have exactly the same difficulty grasp¬
ing the fourth dimension as perfectly flat beings, limited to two dimen¬
sions, would have in understanding the third.
Not seeking to rely on intuition any longer, we can state therefore
that a body of n dimensions is always the infinitely thin limit of a body
of n + 1 dimensions, and that consequently a three-dimensional vol¬
ume can be looked at as being the slice of a hyperbody, even though this
hyperbody escapes our perception. It is in this precise sense that Jouffret
could, in one and the same sentence, evoke “the universe we dwell in
(in three dimensions) and those we suspect are next to it (or beside it)”
without our being able to perceive them—nonperception, we repeat,
being in no way a mark of nonexistence.
To give the same idea one last formulation, we will add that the
hyperbodies can be represented “by projections onto our space, by
means of perpendiculars extracted out of various points of the body into
this space, much as the bodies of our space can be, through perpen¬
diculars, represented by projections on a plane . . . But though, with a
projection onto a plane, or, even better, with two projections on two
planes, we have no problem constituting a space solid and seeing it with
our minds, it is quite impossible to ascend from the projection of a four¬
dimensional body to the body itself,”46 so as to have an intuitive repre¬
sentation of it.
We know about the taste the cubist painters developed for geome¬
try: “Art, or that art that has not been accepted, is based on a mathe¬
matics,” as Metzinger put it.47 And also: “This science gave me a taste
for the arts. It is numbers that permit us to account for sounds and
silences, lights and shadows, forms and emptiness. Michelangelo and
Bach seem to me to have been divine calculators. I already felt that only
mathematics allows for the creation of durable work. Whether it be the
result of patient study or of a lightning intuition, only it is capable of
bringing our pathetic diversities down to the strict unity of a composi¬
tion for the mass, or of a fresco or a bust” (p. 20).
We also know those painters possessed a rather exact knowledge of
Jouffret’s theses, thanks to the lessons given them by a young mathe¬
matician, Maurice Princet. Princet was obviously not the “father of cub¬
ism” (nor, for that matter, the new geometries’ only popularizer), as
Vauxcelles jokingly argued in an article of December 1918 that Juan
Gris hotly disputed.48 But it would be inaccurate to deny that his theo¬
retical contribution to the young artists’ thinking was unimportant, as
2 1 4
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

witness, among so many others, these two confessions of Metzinger that

deserve all our attention:*

Maurice Princet joined us often. Although quite young, thanks to his

knowledge of mathematics he had an important job in an insurance company.
But, beyond his profession, it was as an artist that he conceptualized mathe¬
matics, as an aesthetician that he evoked n-dimensional continuums. He loved
to get the artists interested in the new views on space that had been opened up
by Schlegel and some others. He succeeded at that. Having listened to him by
chance, Henri Matisse was caught one day reading an essay on hyperspace. Oh!
It was only a work of popularization! But it at least proved that for the “Great
Fauve the days of the ignorant painter running after the pretty motif with his
beard to the wind were over.
As for Picasso, the speed of his comprehension astounded the specialist. It
was the case that his tradition prepared him better than ours did for problems
of structure.49

An interesting text, in what it indicates about the change in Stimmung

when compared to the romantic artist. Though the scientists were be¬
coming aestheticians, the inverse movement, in an atmosphere heavily
impregnated with scientism, was no less real: painters had the feeling
that a new scientific age legitimized a new artistic age. Metzinger is just
as precise as to the content of Princet’s teaching:

It is indeed folly, Maurice Princet declared to me in front of Juan Gris, to

want to unite in one sole system of relations color, which is a sensation, and
form, which is an organization you have only to accept and which you should
try to understand; and, initiating us into non-Euclidean geometries, he incited
us to create a painter’s geometry. We could not do so in the same way as he.
But, from rue Lamarck to rue Ravignan, the pretension of imitating a ball on a
vertical plane, or of providing, with a horizontal straight line, the figuration of
a vase s circular hole when placed at eye-level, were now considered to be the
artifices of an outdated illusionism. Cubism was born. (Pp. 62—63)

Four-dimensional geometries had at least one decisive effect: they

legitimated in the minds of painters the critique of traditional perspec¬
tive as being an “outdated illusion,” and they subsequently gave rise to
the idea of a reduction of plastic space to bidimensionality. This point
is decisive. There was, in the eyes of the painters, no doubt in this re-

* See also Duchamp’s “Notes on the Large Glass.” (Duchamp, Ecrits,

op. cit.)

21 5
SIX

duction that four-dimensional and non-Euclidean geometries could be

united. Contrary to a commonly held opinion, Riemann’s and Loba¬
chevsky’s geometries were not completely inaccessible to the layman
who took the trouble of reading the presentation made of them by Poin¬
care in his Science and Hypothesis. Without going into this exposition
in detail, we can still grasp how these geometries reinforced the idea of
a necessary supersession of perspective.
Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Euclid’s postulate that
“only one line parallel to a straight line passes through a point outside
this line” was, in fact, less a first principle than a badly demonstrated
theorem. The number of mathematicians who tried to fill in this gap by
making a direct demonstration was incalculable, until Lobachevsky hit
on the idea of trying a demonstration through the absurd: he simply
inverted the famous postulate, and set out from the hypothesis that one
can lead several parallels through a point outside a given straight line.
And, he obtained a new mathematical system, apparently irrepresent-
able, but coherent. Riemann, in his wake, repeated the same procedure,
but setting out this time from the inverse hypothesis, that through a
point external to a given straight line one can trace no parallels.
Lobachevsky’s and Riemann’s geometries deduce a series of theo¬
rems from these premises that seem to be in perfect contradiction with
those of Euclidean geometry. To cite only the two best-known ones: in
Lobachevsky’s geometry, the sum of angles of a triangle is inferior to
180 degrees, while, for Riemann, it is superior to 180 degrees. Were
they dealing—as long as their respective systems were, from a strictly
mathematical viewpoint, coherent—with a new space? That, of course,
was the question that artists and philosophers would inevitably ask
themselves. And if the answer were affirmative—as nearly everyone
thought (and as some think even today!)—then what plastic represen¬
tation could be made of these new spaces in which the angles of a tri¬
angle no longer add up to 180 degrees, in which the ends of a line
perpendicular to a straight line meet, etc.?
I will not deal here with the question of the real significance of these
geometries in the history of the sciences. It is, unfortunately, clear that
they have not overturned our perception of space, though they have led
to favoring the internal coherence of mathematical systems over the re¬
course to intuition and to “figures.” Here, I am only interested in the
ways they could have been understood by artists thanks to a book, Poin¬
care s, they all knew. A few examples taken from Riemann’s geometry
should be enough to grasp the main points.

21 6
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

According to Poincare, this geometry could be presented as the one

that would be devised by “infinitely flat” intelligent creatures living on
a sphere s surface. It is, first of all, clear that “such beings would attrib¬
ute but two dimensions to space: a straight line, to them, would be the
shortest path from one point on the sphere to another, which is to say
the arc of a great circle.”50 Understanding this simple example suffices
for us to understand also how, in Riemann’s geometry, two lines perpen¬
dicular to the same straight line can “meet,” and how the angles of a
triangle can add up to more than 180 degrees. Let us, as Poincare invites
us to, imagine that for these infinitely flat beings living upon a sphere a
straight line is a great circle, comparable to the meridians on a globe of
the earth, and we will see that two lines (meridians (a) and (b)), perpen¬
dicular to the same line (equator (c)), cross at the North and South
poles:

It will also be granted without difficulty that angles a, /3, y, of triangle

ABC add up to more than 180 degrees, since a and (3 already are, by
definition, right angles.
Through spherical geometry one can thus, without great difficulty,
render visually the at first incomprehensible properties of these theories,
that have been perhaps a bit too hastily called “non-Euclidean.” But, to
repeat, the historical truth is not really what matters most here. What is
of interest here is that four-dimensional and non-Euclidean geome¬
tries—specially Riemann’s—could, in the minds of artists, converge
upon one point: in the idea that it was time to put an end to perspective
in order to return to two dimensions. For, in an easily understandable
paradox, the plastic effect of four-dimensional geometry was the reduc¬
tion of the canvas to bidimensionality, within which alone the fourth
dimension could be represented through projection. Perspective, an art

21 7
SIX

of illusion, is in fact of no use in representing hyperbodies, so that a

plastic representation of the fourth dimension can only be effected by
considering only the purely mathematical properties of figures that are
definitively limited to two dimensions. And, presented in the form Poin¬
care’s model gave it, Riemann’s geometry suggested the idea of a curved
space, also limited to two dimensions. In short, in a space like that
described by Jouffret, at least one thing is certain: that perspective has
to be put to an end; in this light, all these geometries could well seem
to be, generally speaking, “non-Euclidean.”

THE ROLE OF SCIENCE FICTION

It must be added that, though four-dimensional geometry reinforced the

idea of a plastic space limited to two dimensions, it also brought in a
mysterious element, halfway between aesthetics and science: the “feel¬
ing” of there being a hyperspace, peopled with hyperbodies, secretly
surrounding our space. It is therefore not surprising that science fiction
should have taken hold of the theme to such an extent that it became
the mam medium of popularization of the new geometries among the
avant-garde milieux in the nineteen-teens. It was, in fact, by way of
theosophy and science fiction that Charles Howard Hinton’s principal
theses concerning the fourth dimension reached the public. They were
available in French in works such as Leadbeater’s L’Autre Cote de la
mort [The Other Side of Death], published in 1910 by the Theosophical
Publishing House. One could read therein statements that come rather
close to those of a serious mathematician like Jouffret: “In reality, we
know only three dimensions in our physical world. Not that only these
three dimensions exist, but that only they can be understood by the
physical brain. We live, in truth, in a space that possesses a number of
dimensions . . . We see only what we are capable of seeing, but there is
much more to see.” And, going in the same direction, Level’s and Noir-
came’s theosophical texts suggested the possibility of gaining access to
a four-dimensional world through the development of certain of our
mental faculties.51
But it was doubtless Gaston de Pawlowski52 who was to have the
greatest influence on modern painters by popularizing, in his essay he
Voyage au pays de la quatrieme dimension [The Voyage to the Coun¬
try of the Fourth Dimension], Hinton’s, Jouffret’s, and Poincare’s
arguments.
A friend of Jarry’s and of Apollinaire’s and a doctor by training, but

21 8
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

in practice a distinguished humorist, Pawlowski had embarked upon a

career as a journalist.53 In love, like the Futurists, with the “new ma¬
chines,’' he was editor of the magazines Veto and Automobilia before
becoming director of one of the most influential art reviews of the pe¬
riod, Comoedia, in which, between 1910 and 1912, he published seri¬
ally what was to become the Voyage. Joining the love of pure fiction to
the most recent scientific discoveries, Pawlowski intended to use this
book to escape from “bourgeois certainties” the same way the new
artists did, by mobilizing the ideas the most opposed to the best-
established mental attitudes.54 Following in Jarry’s footsteps, and with
reference to the latter’s “Commentaire pour servir a la construction pra¬
tique de la machine a explorer le temps” [Commentary to be used in
the Practical Assembly of the Time Machine]55—which already men¬
tions the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometries—Pawlowski
set out to describe after his own fashion the new universe that was
thought at the time to be discernible “beyond the one we live in.”
Pawlowski’s book was a great success from the moment of its pub¬
lication in 1912. It in essence takes up an argument analogous to the
one that had been central to Abbott’s novel Flatland. Just as, in the
latter, a two-dimensional being (a square) against all expectations dis¬
covers the existence of a theretofore unsuspected third dimension, in the
Voyage it is the fourth dimension that is discovered.56 Pawlowski had
fun bringing to light paradoxes such as the “anguishing problem” of
the horizontal staircase, which “after an undeniable succession of steps
takes you back to the floor you started at”:

These are things one smiles at at first, believing there to be a passing error;
the problems become dismaying when one persists in seeking to solve them by
following the primitive principles of three-dimensional Euclidean geometry.
And, for myself, I confess I felt truly relieved the day I understood that if such
staircases could exist, their possibility could only be conceived of within a four-
dimensional space, and that only that could be enough to provide a definitive
explanation of the problem. And, soon, it was with a strange pleasure, even,
that I strolled through some of these old residences, dreamed up once upon a
time by transcendental geometry, where the floors mixed itself up [sic], where
the first floor was not necessarily below the fourth, nor the third above the
ground floor.

It was after reading Pawlowski’s Voyage that Marcel Duchamp

thought up the Large Glass project,5 as he states unequivocally in a
passage from his interviews with Pierre Cabanne:

21 9
SIX

I had at that time [Duchamp says] tried to read some things by this Povo-
lowski,* who explained measurements, straight lines, curves, etc. All that was
running around in my head while I was working, even though I made practically
no calculations for the Large Glass. Quite simply, 1 thought of the idea of a
projection, of a fourth dimension, invisible since we can’t see it with the eyes.
Since 1 found that one could make any kind of object out of the shadow of a
thing with three dimensions—like the sun’s projection on the earth, making two
dimensions—through purely intellectual analogy I thought that the fourth di¬
mension could project an object with three dimensions: in other words, that
every three-dimensional object, that we look at so coldly, is the projection of a
four-dimensional thing we do not know. It was a sophism, but it was possible.
It was on that that I based the Bride, in the Large Glass, as a projection of an
object in four dimensions.58

We can recognize here, almost word by word, Jouffret’s proposi¬

tions as popularized by Pawlowski; the interpretation of the Large
Glass could begin here and continue on into the most apparently insig¬
nificant details since, as Duchamp put it in a 1955 letter to Andre
Breton: “The Bride ... is a four-dimensional projection (and in the case
of the flat glass, a re-projection of these three dimensions onto a two-
dimensional surface).”59 If, finally, we add that the theosophist Pierre
Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky, whose Tertium Organum, published in
St. Petersburg in 1911, fascinated Malevich, drew, like Jouffret, on Hin¬
ton’s works for the core of his reflections on the fourth dimension,60 we
will better realize the theme’s importance in the birth of the avant-
gardes at the beginning of our century.

THE "FOURTH DIMENSION'S DOUBLE DIMENSION:

ULTRAINDIVIDUALISM AND HYPERCLASSICISM

I have already mentioned how, despite certain lacunae, the interpreta¬

tion of the avant-gardes in terms of individualism has to be taken seri¬
ously. The reference to a fourth dimension fits in several ways into such
an interpretative framework. Even for the most theoretical among the
cubist painters, Metzinger,61 the discovery of a new dimension of space
had to be understood as a liberating break with tradition, as a progress
for the personal expression of the individual in revolt against the norms

* Duchamp is here confusing Pawlowski with a certain Povolowski, who

owned an art gallery on the rue Bonaparte in Paris in the 1920s.

220
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

admitted by the “schools.” Metzinger narrates, in his memoirs, how,

very early on, he was to “measure the difference separating art prior to
1900” from what he felt was being born: “I knew that all teaching was
over. The era of personal expression was finally beginning. The value of
an artist would no longer have anything to do with the finish of his
execution, with the analogies his works offer with such and such an
archetype. It would have to do—exclusively—with what distinguishes
this artist from all the others. The period of the master-teacher was
finally through.”62
One could hardly put better the extent to which the new painters
felt that the essential thing was the capacity to express, forgetting
all watchwords, the fine edge of individuality through which it is
possible to set oneself apart, to arrive at originality, the value above
all values within an individualist perspective. That the expression
of originality requires a negation of tradition, and especially of the
Euclidean tradition, was something Metzinger did not fail to bring
to mind either: That Juan Gris disarticulated objects, that Picasso sub¬
stituted his invented forms for them, that someone else replaced conical
perspective with a system based on perpendicular relations: all that
proves that cubism was not born from any slogan or watchword, and
that it only signaled the will to put an end to a kind of art that should
not have survived Pascal’s condemnation” (ibid., p. 62). The allusion to
Pascal, denouncing the vanity of the type of painting “that attracts
admiration by resembling things whose originals we admire not” here
becomes perfectly clear: in this critical opinion, Pascal was aiming not
at painting in general, but at a particular kind of painting, the trompe-
l’oeil,63 that has no other goal than the perfect imitation of some object
or another.
Metzinger, therefore, sees that the tradition that must be broken
with is, quite clearly, academic figurative art, which has anyhow been
rendered pointless by photography, the contemporary equivalent of
trompe-l’oeil.* In an article titled, significantly, “Cubism and Tradi¬
tion,” he goes even farther and perceives that the tradition of art history
is already, before the emergence of cubism, a “tradition of the new.” A
true pioneer, he grasps the essence of the individualist logic at work in
this history. Speaking of the avant-garde painters, he writes: “Because

* “The excuse of being documentary was becoming ridiculous among paint¬

ers: photographers and filmmakers could go far beyond anything they did” (Le
Cubisme etait ne, p. 58).

221
SIX

they use the simplest, the most complete, the most logical forms, they
have been designated as ‘cubists.’ Because they work at extracting new
plastic signifiers out of these forms, they are accused of betraying tra¬
dition. How could they betray tradition, an uninterrupted succession of
innovations, they who, by innovating, do nothing but perpetuate it?”64
Avant-garde painting has often been described, even by its most
impassioned defenders, as being “a vast enterprise of demolition, that
begins by getting rid of the cardinals, water lilies, and nude ladies of
academic painting,”65 as a “destruction of plastic space” (that is, in
essence, Francastel’s argument, [Etudes, chap. 3]), the breaking with a
tradition—that of treatises on perspective—well-established ever since
the schools of the Italian quattrocento. And we haven’t yet mentioned
how perspective was denounced as “repressive,” its “demolition” lik¬
ened to that of a “prison” from which an individuality in rebellion could
finally escape. As Jean Paulhan wrote,

One finds, on every page of treatises on perspective, those model prisons,

peopled by cubes, some of which are seen from the side, some from in front,
others in three-fourths and two-thirds perspective, and so on. These are the
saddest menageries one could imagine . . . This bit of work is called squaring
the plan [wise au carreau]—an expression that evokes tortures, and it could
hardly be more apt. It is indeed a case of making martyrs out of lines, colors,
and plane surfaces, until they produce the illusion of depth, some sort of paltry
equivalent of infinity. (Peinture cubiste, p. 93)

In this analysis, in which the demands and aspirations of revo¬

lutionary individualism find expression, we easily discern what the
reference to the new geometries could have meant: being, in general,
“ttorc-Euchdean,” they symbolized the break with a history of thou¬
sands of years; in the second place, to the extent that Euclidean, three-
dimensional space began to seem to be a mere “convention”66—in
every sense of the word, as mathematical postulate and received and
passively admitted habit—an art that aimed to put an end to traditional
perspective could also be thought of as a challenge raised against the
certainties that Pawlowski, as we have seen, did not hesitate to qualify
as “bourgeois.” The geometrical reference, finally, brought in relativ¬
ism and historicism—the two consummate expressions of the high
point of individualism. Didn’t the new mathematics demonstrate that
what had been considered as the undoubtable truth for thousands of
years (tridimensionality) was, in reality, but an illusion, an error con-

222
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

nected to a “slow” stage of humanity’s scientific and cultural develop¬

ment? As Metzinger and Gleizes confidently declared in the conclusion
to Cubism:

To sum up, the cubism that was accused of being a system in fact condemns
all systems ... To the partial liberties conquered by Courbet, Manet, Cezanne,
and the Impressionists, cubism substitutes an infinite liberty. Now that objective
knowledge is finally held to be a chimera, and that all that the crowd under¬
stands as natural form has been proved to be a convention [thanks to the dis¬
coveries of the new geometries—L.F.], the painter has no laws other than those
governing colored forms . . . There is only one truth, ours, when we succeed in
imposing it on all. (Pp. 74-75)

This subjectivization of truth, this conception of art as the expres¬

sion of a distinct and original individuality, was also to have narcissistic
consequences. I have already indicated how revolutionary individualism
contained the risk of drifting toward narcissistic individualism. Without
much problem, we could put together a book consisting exclusively of
quotations from artists, giving crude and immodest expression to every¬
thing that the ideology of the “tradition of the new” potentially contains
in the way of fanatical egotism. It would be an unbroken series going
from Marcel Duchamp, beginning a lecture in the United States mod¬
estly titled Apropos Myself with this touching slide-show commen-
tary, “Blainville is a village in Normandy where I was born and where
this picture was painted in 1902, when I was only fifteen years old,” to
Pierre Boulez, who does not hesitate to publish, as a foreword to Pen-
ser la musique aujourd’bui [Thinking about Music Today], an “auto¬
interview” no less modestly titled “De Moi a Moi” [From Myself to
Myself].67
It is hard to underestimate this “ultraindividualist” dimension, and
I can understand how it could have been argued that this is what the
avant-gardes “modernist” core consisted of. Yet, if we consider the ref¬
erence to the new geometries in all its significance, we cannot fail to be
struck by another dimension, the “objectivist” one I have designated as
classicism.
In his 1917 article on ’Avant-Garde Painting”68—consisting essen¬
tially of a detailed elucidation of the meaning the fourth dimension had
for modern painters—Gino Severini, one of the master thinkers of Ital¬
ian Futurism and a great friend of the cubists, already warns against the
dangers of an individualistic drift in the tradition of the new: “Today,

223
SIX

originality is often confused with singularity, and the illusion is enter¬

tained that a more or less apparent originality can alone make up the
value of a work of art. I intendby that a brief allusion to this ultraindi¬
vidualist tendency which, remarkably late, emerges today from the ru¬
ins of our violent reactions of seven or eight years ago.” Convinced that
the individual’s revolts against tradition should not lead to the narcis¬
sistic cult of originality for originality’s sake, the veritable avant-garde
artist is the one who also knows how to mobilize the resources of sci¬
entific objectivity: “If I love trying to support myself with the truths of
science, it is because I see in them an excellent means of control, and
besides, none of us ought to ignore the notions science puts within our
reach to intensify our sense of the real” (p. 460). From this a classicist
or “realist” interpretation of the avant-gardes that were inspired by the
new geometries.
Severini insists upon it: the reference to the fourth dimension does
not have an essentially “individualist” significance. In following scien¬
tific discoveries, the point is not to seek at any price an originality that
breaks off from the Euclidean tradition; if the art of appearances called
perspective has to be transcended, it is, above all, to be able to arrive at
a “new realism,” a realism Severini calls, in allusion to Plato, “ideist,”
since, in Picasso’s famous words, the goal is to paint objects as we think
them, not as we see them: “All of the efforts of avant-garde painters
tend toward the expression of this new realism . . . The obsession with
penetrating, with conquering the sense of the real by every means, with
identifying with life through every fiber of our bodies, has been the basis
for our researches and for aesthetics since the beginning of time. We
must see in these general causes the origins of our exact geometrical
constructions” (p. 452).
It’s at this point in Severini’s line of argument that the reference to
Poincare becomes all-important. If Euclid must be surpassed, it is not
only because tridimensionality is a supposedly bourgeois convention
that limits the imagination (it is that also), but above all because “the
forms that constitute our reconstruction of the object do not live from
the imagination or the culture but from the object itself” (p. 451), and
the new geometries permit us to capture this object more precisely.
Truth to tell, the avant-garde’s revolutionary (“subjective”) and “real¬
ist” (“objective”) aspects come together in one and the same struggle
against traditional naturalism, denounced as being at the same time op¬
pressive (as concerning the new demand for liberty) and illusory (as
concerning the new demand for truth and objectivity):

224
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

The [traditional “Euclidean” geometer’s] ordinary space is, in general,

based upon the unmoveable convention of there being three dimensions; paint¬
ers of unlimited inspiration have always found this convention too narrow. That
is, to the three ordinary dimensions they try to add a fourth . . . People have
often tried to insult cubism by applying the epithet “mathematician” to painters
like Braque, Picasso, Gris, and Metzinger, whose first plastic analyses consti¬
tute, after all, an important contribution to pictorial art. The fact that these
researches correspond to certain geometric and mathematical truths, as I will
show further on, only create, in the eyes of any impartial person, a supplemen¬
tary reason for interest and trust in them. (P. 459)

The analogy between the development of the history of art and that
of science is not a mere coincidence since, as Severini confesses, “the
first cubist and futurist researches are based—relatively, of course, and
by intuition [we should not forget that he still had to refute the accusa¬
tions of ’geometrism’—L.F.]—on the hypotheses elucidated by Poin¬
care on the fourth dimension and on non-Euclidean geometries”
(p. 461). By underlining that the abandonment of perspective does not
aim only at freeing the pure expressivity of a personality otherwise hin¬
dered by conventions, by declaring that avant-garde art must aim at a
deeper figuration than that of traditional perspective, Severini meets up
with Princet’s teaching: appearances (tridimensionality and the perspec¬
tive that presupposes a fixed observer) must be overcome in order to
attain the true reality, the one that, like the fourth dimension or Platonic
ideas, is not visible, but accessible only to the intelligence. As Princet
declared to his friends, in the terms one finds again in the cubist paint¬
ers’ main writings: “With the aid of a trapezoid, you represent a table,
such as you see it deformed by perspective. But what if the whim took
hold of you of expressing the ideo-typical table? You would have to
straighten it up on the canvas’s plane and, from the trapezoid, come
back to the veridical rectangle. If this table is covered with objects simi¬
larly deformed by perspective, the same straightening-up movement
will have to be operated for every one of them.”69 Here, then, visible
perspective becomes “deformed” appearance, and bidimensionality (we
have already mentioned that it becomes the plastic consequence of the
fourth dimension) becomes the real, that is to say the intelligible. Let
us, after Princet, listen to Severini, who, in the aforementioned article,
defines this new “ideist realism” with great precision:

Italian perspective has been our foundation up to now, but we now know
that it does not allow the painter to integrally express visual space . . . Our

225
SIX

intoxicating goal of penetrating and giving back reality has taught us to shift
this unique viewpoint, because we are at the center of the real and not in front
of it; to look with our two moveable eyes and consider in parallel the horizontal
and the vertical deformations. These means permit us to give expression to a
hyperspace, that is, a space as complete as possible. (P. 463)

A strange reversal, but one highly characteristic of the cubist revo¬

lution, and invariably found in the period’s writings. Contrary to what
a naive naturalism thought, it is not the Euclidian perspective that is
true, but rather this fourth dimension and this curved, non-Euclidean
space where figures are deformed when shifted. If we believe Gleizes, if
“the nineteenth-century geometers (Riemann and Lobachevsky) were
right in repudiating the intellectually absolute character of Euclid’s pos¬
tulates,” it is because “Euclid is practical, but he isn’t ‘TRUE’; a science
of knowledge cannot be hoped for come out of him [sic]”;70 or, as Met-
zinger insists over against those who denounce the new painting’s ap¬
parently nonfigurative side, since the quattrocento school, since the
appearance of treatises on perspective, the academic painters are the
ones who find themselves in the wrong: “Exaggerating relief and depth,
painters exerted themselves to create an absurd, theatrical space, in
which a path’s edges meet at one point, preventing you from walking
on, in which a vase’s circular opening becomes a simple straight line, in
which all the imperfections of our visual mechanics are consecrated,
and all this with the puerile intention of bringing a supplementary di¬
mension to what, since the time of chaos, counts but two.”71 A remark¬
able text, in which the interest in a new realism, profounder than that
of all past and surpassed forms of figurative art,* converges with it in a

On perspective as a “lie,” as the art of deformation and of appearance, cf.

Jean Paulhan: “It is also known that brute vision would have us see (as in a
photo) the nearer objects much bigger, but the more distant ones much smaller,
than a utilitarian vision, rectified at every instant by our mind, shows them to
us. In a word, if there is a truth of sight, perspective seems to have no other
purpose, through its conventions and ready-made ideas, than to hide this truth.
I have—with all the perspectivists—said that, against things, it took the side of
their appearance. But that is to say too little. It takes, moreover, against their
immediate and sensible appearance the side of their abstract and cold appear¬
ance, and treats all objects as if they did not interest us” (Sur le cubisme, p. 96).
Conclusion: we must therefore, together with the cubist painters, attack “the
very lie of trompe-l’oeil; the conventional space it uses, the glass prison in which
it cleverly tries to enclose us—attack that in it that is false in its very essence”
(ibid., p. 100; see also pp. 88, 104, 105, etc.).

226
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

return to the bidimensionality implied in the plastic interpretation of

the new geometries.
We can now better understand in what sense this new classicism
counterbalances—at least among the early avant-gardes, those of the
very beginning of this century—an undeniable tendency toward “ul¬
traindividualism.” For, according to this realism of ideas, the break with
tradition aims at more than just freeing the individual, at conquering
the new for the sake of the new. Seventeenth-century classicism was also
a realism of ideas, it also claimed to give expression to the essence of
things; contemporary painters must try to fulfill its project while lead¬
ing it, so to speak, beyond itself. What non-Euclidean geometries (in the
larger sense, including four-dimensional geometries) demonstrated in
their eyes was that what the classicists had held to be the essence of the
real and had tried to render through perspective is still only an appear¬
ance. In other words, if we may assert that, in their eyes, Euclidean
space is but an illusion that has to be abandoned for the truth of a
hyperspace, we can, by analogy, say just as well that classicism must in
its turn be replaced and furthered by a hyper classicism.
The terminology is not forced. If we follow out Metzinger’s line of
thought, it could have been agreed upon by cubism’s most eminent
representatives:

Cubism, whose influence extends out to its worst adversaries, has not, since
1912, ceased, true to itself, to approach the real by profound paths. If the word
surrealism had not been appropriated to designate a different movement “I be¬
lieve, Picasso told me recently, “that it would have defined my painting.” . . .
Indeed, cubism exceeds the exterior thing the better to envelop it and grasp it.
Observing the model is not enough; the painter has to think. He transports it
into a simultaneously spiritual and plastic space, about which it is not alto¬
gether light-headed to speak of a fourth dimension.” {Du cubisme, 1946 After¬
word, pp. 80-82)

As Boileau would have put it:

Le Vrai seul est beau, le vrai seul est aimable,

II doit regner partout et meme dans la fable.

The True alone is beautiful, it alone is lovable,

It must govern everywhere and even in the fable.

with the proviso that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the true
is no longer ascribed to the harmony in which the classicists saw or
thought to see the essence, the “nature” of the real.

227
SIX

Like neoclassicism’s purest theoreticians (see chap. 2, above), the

avant-garde painters Severini evokes willingly reappropriate the idea
that the work of art’s capacity to have universal value, and not simply
value for such and such specific individuals, lies in its scientific objec¬
tivity, in its exclusion of the imaginary (of the genius) in favor of the
intelligent:

The work of plastic art will not be autonomous and universal unless it
maintains its deep attachment to reality; it will be a reality in itself, more alive,
more intense and more true than the real objects [since, as with the classicists,
it expresses their essence—L.F.] that it may represent, that it may reconstruct,
as long as the elements that compose it belong neither to the arbitrary, nor to
whim, nor imagination, nor to decorative good taste [for] our art does not
aspire to represent a fiction of reality, but wishes to express this reality as it is.
(“Le Peinture d’avant-garde,” pp. 454-65)

The interpretation of modernism put forward by Bell, despite its

pertinence for the analysis of avant-garde form, is incapable of account¬
ing for the new constraints and new rules that the avant-gardes impose
on themselves at the level of content. It will perhaps be objected that
that remark applies mainly to cubism. But even if this limitation were
to be admitted—and it would have to be proved, the “scientific” com¬
ponent in abstract or surrealist art, though more flexible, is nonetheless
quite real—it cannot be denied that in many ways cubism incarnates
the ideal type of the avant-garde movement.
It may be more pertinently objected that there is quite a bit of para¬
dox in claiming to discern a “classical” or even “hyperclassical” com¬
ponent in forms of art in which everything, apparently, is opposed to
seventeenth-century classicism. In the latter, the goal assigned art was
to represent the essence of a nature that was, since Descartes, held to be
rationally and harmoniously established. In the eyes of the classicists,
to “imitate nature” was to imitate whatever nature had that was iden¬
tical, eternal, and stable, beyond the apparent diversity of its sensuous
manifestations. When Moliere pretends to “paint after nature” and
make “public mirrors” out of his comedies, it is because he intends to
unveil the essence of man through the presentation of archetypes—the
miser, the misanthrope, etc.—that unify the specific diversity of individ¬
uals. Therefore this definition of beauty, found in treatises on the Beau¬
tiful from Leibniz to Crousaz: “Unity in plurality is nothing other than
harmony, and it is from the fact that a thing agrees with this other thing
and not with any other that emerges the beauty that awakes love.”72
228
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

Isn t avant-garde art the very contrary of this classicism that aims at
identity and harmony? Doesn’t it go after “distortion, dispersion, differ¬
ence, and exteriority to every form,” rather than “the rule, the synthesis,
the beautiful totality, the thing lost or recovered, the fulfillment of uni¬
fying eros”?73
In the first letter he wrote to one who was to become his friend, but
who here is still addressed with deference as “Professor Schoenberg,”
Kandinsky insists with all his energy, “Precisely, I believe that we cannot
today find our harmony through ‘geometrical’ paths, but, on the con¬
trary, through the most absolute anti-geometry, anti-logic. This is the
way of ‘dissonances in art’—in painting as in music” (Correspondence,
p. 154). However imprecise,74 the parallel Kandinsky establishes be¬
tween pictorial and musical “dissonances” is so significant it will be
taken up again by the most authorized theoreticians, notably by Pierre
Boulez, in an article significantly entitled “Parallels” (Contrechamps,
no. 2 [1984], p. 154), “I would readily place the emancipation of to¬
nality in parallel with the emancipation of the object or of the subject.”
And in the same vein, Adorno wrote, “Modern painting’s turn away
from the representation of objects (Gegenstdndlichkeit) points to the
same rupture there as atonality is in music . . . what was valid before
this break, the constitution of musical contexts through tonality, is ir¬
remediably lost.”75
Dissonance, atonality, illogicality, rupture, difference: those are the
key words preferred by the painters and musicians of the first avant-
gardes in their theoretical writings. What is new in the reality cubism
wishes to represent, according to Gleizes, is that in it that is shocking
compared to a traditional, “logical, classical, Euclidean” image of the
world.76 And Metzinger adds that modern painters, “conscious of the
miracle that takes place when the canvas evokes space, as soon as
the line threatens to take on a descriptive, decorative importance, they
break it up.”77
If we were to pursue this parallel between new painting and new
music we would see how the latter aims at putting an end to all the
reference points and all the factors of identity that make up the tonal
system, so as to open the way for a music of pure difference that in its
most radical principle excludes any “pole of attraction,” thus bringing
forth in the listener the feeling of a “nonidentifiable” music that is al¬
most impossible to reproduce mentally, the way one hums the “melo¬
dies” of the “classical” repertoire. Rene Leibowitz, who, through his
teaching, initiated a group of young French composers—Boulez, Philip-

229
SIX

pot, Martinet, Rigg ... to the principles of Schoenbergian dodeca-

phony, points this out with a certain vehemence in his Introduction a la
musique de douze sons [Introduction to Twelve-Tone Music}: “Con¬
sciously or through bad faith, most contemporary musicians remain the
slaves of what I would call a certain musical psychologism. Without
even speaking of those who wallow in an odious hedonism, it is a fact
that what hinders certain so-called “advanced” composers from taking
the decisive step toward the new musical language is their, I would say,
atavistic fear of writing ‘something not beautiful.’”78
The point is then to break with all the “classical” representations
of the idea of the beautiful, understood as the harmonious synthesis of
a multiplicity of sounds. “It is enough,” Leibowitz adds, “to listen to
the music or to read Schoenberg’s theoretical work to realize that such
considerations no longer have any place in musical art. The Treatise on
Harmony [Schoenberg’s major work] is full of passages in which the
author rebels against the tendency to qualify such and such an aggre¬
gate as ‘beautiful’ and such other as ‘ugly,’ appreciations that issue out
of a false and confused ‘psychologism’” (ibid.).
The very idea of beauty is without meaning. It cannot therefore
provide any kind of principle of orientation for the artist, nor can the
“odious” idea of aesthetic pleasure. Thus tonality, with the reconcilia¬
tion, the supersession [Aufhebung] of dissonances that it always allows,
still thinks difference against a background of identity; it is with a cer¬
tain perceptiveness that Leibowitz remarks how “Schoenberg’s attitude
participates in the radical movement of contemporary thought, and re¬
sembles Husserl’s phenomenology” (ibid.).
On their side, phenomenologists won’t fail to see this either, and
will look upon “modern art” as an attempt at going past the classical
visions of the beautiful, of the harmonious synthesis, with the aim of
negatively presenting the nonpresentable, whether it be designated as
the “Invisible” (Merleau-Ponty) or as “Difference” (Heidegger). “I
would call modern,” writes Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard, “the art that dedi¬
cates its little technique, as Diderot used to say, to presenting the fact
that there is the nonpresentable. Make us see there is something one can
conceive and neither see nor bring to seeing: that is what is at stake in
modern painting.”79 The “pictorial avant-gardes” thus aim at “allud¬
ing to the nonpresentable through visible presentations” (ibid., p. 28).
Once again, to that extent, isn’t the avant-garde the very opposite of
classicism?
I accept the objection and, as I have said, were the expression not
230
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

so vague, I would readily adopt the definition Lyotard proposes here of

modern art. Besides, isn’t the fourth dimension the very symbol of
this invisible thing whose idea has been negatively presented, or at¬
tempted, through two-dimensional projections? Isn’t it the analogue for
the hidden facets of the cube the phenomenologists also use as a meta¬
phor for Being or Difference?
And yet, bow can we not see that the essential aspect of classicism
remains, that the project of “rendering the real,” of gaining access to it,
albeit by indirect methods, subsists? Moreover—and this is the reason
I spoke of hyperclassicism—did not the avant-gardes claim, with the
new realism they were setting into motion, to be more realistic than the
classicists were, therefore, in a way, more classicist than the latter were
themselves? Commenting on Malevitch’s famous black square, Andrei
Nakov remarks in his Introduction to the painter’s Writings that “the
notion of free plane constitutes one of the cornerstones of his con¬
ception of a new logic. And the latter, he adds, is incomprehensible
if not brought into relation with the fourth dimension: “The purely
conceptual relation of our logic to another—superior—one is symboli¬
cally illustrated by the choice of bidimensional projections of a reality
whose existence we only partially perceive. These surfaces only repre¬
sent the ‘faqade’ of a four-dimensional object, the way a bidimensional
figure represents the only projection into another dimension of a three-
dimensional geometric body” (p. 87). Isn’t this a concrete way of illus¬
trating what I have here called hyperclassicism, meaning a classicism of
difference and no longer of identity or, to speak as Lyotard does, a
classicism that seeks to “present that there is the nonpresentable”? As
with the classicists, doesn’t avant-garde art continue to be guided by the
project of imitating a real that has meanwhile ceased to be defined as
order, but which nonetheless remains the artist’s “objective”?
Indeed, we can’t forget that one of the principal motives for the
abandonment of Euclidean space for the one indicated by the new ge¬
ometries lies in the idea that the habitual space, in Gleizes’s formulation,
“is not true” but only “comfortable.” As Jean Paulhan puts it, “I can
see traditional space’s advantage: it lets us live in a simple world, where
events take place in proper order . . . There is only one problem, and
that is that it does not resemble. It does not in the least resemble, I won’t
even say nocturnal space, but our everyday space, with all its differences
and all its chaos” (Sur le cubisme, p. 104).
We have therefore to distinguish, at the heart of the early avant-
gardes, between two divergent, not to say contradictory moments: the

231
SIX

will, on the one hand—elitist, historicist, and “ultraindividualistic”—

to break with tradition to create the radically new; but, on the other,
the no less remarkable project of leading classical aesthetics to their
logical end, of taking them to their limits in the name of a new realism
that, however much it may be oriented to the expression of what re¬
ality—whether internal or external does not matter much—may con¬
tain that is chaotic and “different,” remains all the same bound to the
intelligence more than to the imaginary and, to that extent, accepts new
constraints and new rules.
It is this duality that has led me to judge the interpretative frame¬
works that refer back to individualism to be too narrow. And yet it is
the duality that we have to try and understand if we wish to glimpse the
nature of the specifically contemporary phenomenon the avant-gardes
constitute. One of Apollinaire’s texts puts forward a hypothesis:

Greek art had of beauty a purely human conception. It took man to be the
measure of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as
its ideal, and it is to this ideal that we owe a new measurement of perfection
permitting the painter to give the object the proportions befitting the degree of
plasticity he wishes to give to it. Nietzsche had intuited the possibility of such
an art . . . Using Dionysus as mouthpiece, Nietzsche passes judgment on Greek
art. (Les Peintres cubistes, p. 52)

The Greek art Nietzsche criticized in the name of the Dionysiac is

the art of consciousness, of identity, of order, of the visible, and the
Dionysiac symbolizes chaos, fracture, difference, and intoxication. We
may recall how, in one of the Gay Science's most celebrated paragraphs,
Nietzsche defined the “new infinite” to which Apollinaire perhaps
alluded:

the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only
in these. We cannot look around our own corner . . . But I should think that
today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved
in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this
corner. Rather has the world become “infinite” for us all over again, inasmuch
as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.
Once more we are seized by a great shudder.80

The sense of Nietzsche’s discovery is clear: it works toward liberat¬

ing thought from the illusion inherent to the unique point of view, to
the idea that there is supposed to be an absolute truth. This “moment”
of Nietzsche’s thinking thematizes the possibility of what I have here

232
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

designated as the avant-gardes’ “ultraindividualism,” that is to say their

absolute freedom with respect to norms, with respect to the habitual,
traditional definitions of truth. That is indeed the significance of the
“new infinite”: perspectivism, the infinite multiplicity of viewpoints
that cannot, as in Leibniz’s definition of harmonious beauty, be reduced
to the identity of a unique point of view.
Perspectivism therefore signals the end of the classical perspective.
But the project of attaining the real cannot thereby be abandoned, even
if the real is life, with its radical multiplicity of forces and points of view.
Whether as such it can be reduced to unity is one thing; that we should
give up trying to seize it is another, and Nietzsche, in a formula that
foreshadows cubism, exhorts us to see the world “with the greatest pos¬
sible number of eyes.”
Apollinaire suggests, through the juxtaposition he makes between
the avant-gardes and Nietzsche’s philosophy, that the “new painters’ ”
project is inseparable from a certain conception of human subjectivity.
What Nietzsche formulates in his philosophy and what the artists spon¬
taneously invent or reinvent, is the idea that the subject can no longer
be reduced to consciousness, that it is a fractured subject and that the
era of the cogito, of the I think”s closed in upon themselves under
the hegemony of consciousness, is over. Schonberg writes to Kandinsky:
Every search that tends to produce a traditional effect is more or less
marked by the intervention of consciousness. But art belongs to the
unconscious.”81 It is this conception of the unconscious that is formu¬
lated by Nietzsche, before anyone else perhaps, in his critique of phi¬
losophies of the cogito. This conception introduces into the history of
subjectivity (or of individualism, if we wish to keep the term) a rupture
comparable to that represented by atonality or the rejection of Eu¬
clidean perspective. It is this conception that should be considered in
parallel with the emergence, symbolized by the fourth dimension, of a
new representation of the real as a real that is also fractured and
chaotic.
Much was at stake here and remains so today, for each of the basic
facets of modern aesthetics carries an obvious danger with it. On the
one hand, ultraindividualism risks foundering in a dialectical contradic¬
tion in which it wears itself out in the empty repetition of the gesture of
rupture and creation of the new. Literally obsessed by historicist con¬
sciousness, by the imperative of originality when faced with a history of
art, the artist ceases to be a “genius,” a free and unconscious creator.
Confronted with the demand for originality, he must integrate into his

233
SIX

work a reflection on tradition which risks leading him to the privileging

of consciousness over the unconscious, mastery over the genius’s free¬
dom; his work becomes a meta-work, his aesthetic reflection a meta¬
reflection. Since imitation or repetition tend to become the sin against
taste par excellence, in fact the only one that is unanimously so re¬
garded, the artist, who believed himself to be finally free from rules and
constraints see himself subjected to the constraint of constraints, the
one imposed by his own historical consciousness. In our day, postmod¬
ernism is timidly attempting to abolish this new prison. In this it is not
at all the comeback of historicity (contrary to what Felix Torres argues
in the book he dedicates to postmodernism) but, on the contrary, the
naive attempt to break free of it by proclaiming the right to reestablish
links with the past. I very much doubt that this could be a “solution.”
It is at best a symptom of the impasse ultraindividualism leads to.
And, on the other hand, hyperclassicism carries the risks of any
classicism within itself. When it declines, realism, even of a new kind,
even if it is a realism of “Difference,” also becomes academic. Art is
given the “mission” of embodying a vision of the world, a conception
of the real, and, here again, paradoxically, it falls under the hegemony
of consciousness and of intelligence.
This opposition between “subjectivist” and “objectivist” tendencies
is not new.82 It stands in fact at the origin of aesthetics as a philosophical
discipline, and we were able to discern its premises in the conflict op¬
posing rationalist aesthetics and aesthetics of sentiment during the Age
of Reason. It is from this very opposition that postmodernism is trying
to liberate itself today.
Nietzsche, who was perhaps modernity’s true prophet, announced
it in one of the most beautiful pages of Morgenrote [The Dawn]: from
now on, authentic grandeur would not be satisfied with the mere display
of power, with the visible and objective manifestation of its drives. For
those who can see it, it lies in the individual more than in his produc¬
tions, “in the spectacle of that strength which employs genius not for
works but for itself as a work; that is, for its own constraint, for the
purification of its imagination, for the imposition of order and choice
upon the influx of tasks and impressions” (§ 548, Colli-Montmari ed.).
The “grand style”—Foucault understood this so well he consecrated his
last writings to the subject—is nothing other than the “care of the self”:
a care that is not to be confused with mere “egoism,” but which is not
connected either (at least not in unmediated fashion) to the libertarian-
anarchist project of liberation from institutionalized forms of “repres-
234
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

sion which implies, on the contrary, a most rigorous discipline in ef¬

fort, for the purpose of shaping one’s existence the way an artist would
a sculpture.
In the contemporary universe, characterized by the “withdrawal
from the world whose history is reflected in that of aesthetics, the ten¬
sion between the work of art’s subjective and objective moments tends
to fade away to the benefit of the subjective. After the era of the avant-
gardes comes that of “postmodernity.’’ The expression is, of course, far
from having been unanimously adopted, and its uses are so various that
at times they are diametrically opposed. But, to the extent that the se¬
mantic problem is not without importance, its assumptions can here be
usefully reviewed.

THE THREE MEANINGS OF "POSTMODERN"

The term first seems to appear in the sixties, used by certain American
literary critics to designate fictional works that aim to break with—the
model here being William Burroughs—the first modernism, and in
particular with Joyce. This is the sense in which the expression is em¬
ployed in Ihab Hassan’s book The Dismemberment of Orpheus: To¬
ward a Postmodern Titerature (1971). But it has to be perceived that
this new rupture sees itself as an extension, not a questioning, of avant-
gardism. As the British critic Charles Jencks—who truly popularized
the notion—points out, among these sophisticated theoreticians post¬
modernism is still applied to the search for novelty for novelty’s sake,
ending up in fact in “ultramodernism.”83 But this is, according to
Jencks, the preoccupation that must be left behind. For him, as for
the architects he gathers under the banner of the postmodern—Graves,
Venturi, Rossi, Ungers, Bofill, Hollein and a few others—the point is to
put an end to the tyranny of innovation at any price, of finally granting
oneself the right to reestablish the links with the past. The conflict of
interpretations is, as we can see, such as to call for clarification.

1. The Postmodern as Summit of Modernism

If by “modernism” we understand, following Anglo-American usage,

the twentieth-century’s avant-gardes or what we ordinarily call “mod¬
ern art,” the postmodern appears to be, on first approach, an exac¬
erbation of the modern. Why then, in such circumstances, speak of
“post-” rather than “ultra-” modernism?
To understand, we have to recall that modernity, for most contem-

235
SIX

porary philosophers, designates what Heidegger called “humanism,”

that is, essentially the rationalism stemming from Descartes, and no¬
tably, of course, the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its technico-
scientific fallout. Understood this way, modernity is not to be confused
with “modernism.” The latter in many ways seeks to break off from the
illusions—in particular those of a clear and distinct cogito and of a
“euclidean” order—that have weighed so heavily on the “metaphysics
of subjectivity” and through them on the history of art. The postmodern
would then have to be understood as the indication of a break with
the Enlightenment, with the idea of Progress that holds that scientific
discoveries and, more generally, the rationalization of the world ipso
facto represent a liberation for humanity. According to this first defini¬
tion, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Freud, since they lay down a challenge
to the “philosophies of consciousness,” are postmoderns just as much
as Malevitch, Picasso, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, or Stockhausen.
Simply put, when it opposes the project of modernity, in the meaning
the Enlightenment gave it, the postmodern joins the “modern,” under¬
stood as the avant-gardes’ “modernism.”
This is, most notably, the meaning one finds—with an explicit ref¬
erence to “modern art” and to the “avant-gardes”—in the texts Jean-
Frangois Lyotard devoted to the analysis of the concept. As it did for
Adorno, the deconstruction of the Aufklarung's philosophical universe
expresses itself in the most radical contemporary works, the ones that,
according to Lyotard, deserve to be called “postmodern” because of
their will to break with the primacy of rationality and of representation
(Heidegger would have said, “presence”). The goal now is “to allude to
the nonpresentable through visible presentations,” to “show [faire voir]
that there is some thing one can conceive of but neither see nor cause to
see [faire voir]”84 The postmodern consequently turns out to be a part
of the modern, in the sense the word takes in “modern art.” It desig¬
nates the philosophical rejection of representation, of which the rejec¬
tion of tonality and of figuration are supposed to provide aesthetic
translations. In Lyotard’s vocabulary, “I would call modern the art that
applies its ‘bit of technique,’ as Diderot used to say, to presenting the
fact that there is the nonpresentable” or, in other, just as easily identi¬
fiable domains, to “show” that there is something invisible in the vis¬
ible, absence within presence, Being beyond beings, difference hidden
by identity, etc.—which is why Lyotard can conclude that the postmod¬
ern “is surely a part of the modern,” in that “everything that has been
perceived, even if only yesterday . .. must be suspected.” This suspicious

236
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

attitude is in turn expressed in the indefinite succession of ruptures and

innovations that have marked the history of the avant-gardes: “What
kind of space did Cezanne set out to attack? The Impressionists’. And
Picasso and Braque: what kind of object? Cezanne’s. What presupposi¬
tion did Duchamp break with in 1912? That a painting has to be made,
even if it is a cubist one. And Buren questions another presupposition,
that he thinks remained intact in Duchamp’s work: that the work needs
a site, a place for its presentation. Astounding acceleration; the genera¬
tions rush forward” (pp. 29-30).
We have seen that this “acceleration” that fascinates Lyotard is not
in fact very astounding, implicit as it is in the best known and most
observed dynamic logic of democratic societies, which ceaselessly tend
toward innovation and the erosion of traditions. But that is not impor¬
tant here. On the semantic level—the only one that interests me for the
moment—we may note that modern and postmodern are clearly in¬
stalled by Lyotard within one and the same genre which he (inadver¬
tently?) calls “avant-gardist history,” supposedly the incontestable site
(we shall see that it isn t that simple, far from it) of subversion of mo¬
dernity in the sense of Aufkldrung. The difference between this history’s
two constitutive moments—the modern and the postmodern—is infini¬
tesimal or downright inessential. In the project of presenting the non-
presentable, of demonstrating the invisible, we can either stress the
attempt s failure (since it has, by definition, a paradoxical aspect) or on
the contrary the innovative power of the faculties it calls into play (the
model for this analysis then being found in Kant’s theory of the sub¬
lime). The modern would then comprise “melancholy,” and the post¬
modern, “novatio” [innovation],
Lyotard explains: You will understand what I mean through the
cartoon-like distribution of a few names on the playing field of avant-
gardist history: on the side of melancholy, the German expressionists;
on the novatio side, Braque and Picasso. On the first Malevitch, on the
second Lissitzky; on one de Chirico, on the other Duchamp” (ibid.)_
whereby we see that moderns and postmoderns are equally “anti¬
modern” in their common opposition to the “Cartesian,” enlightened,
and rationalist heritage; they each indicate a way to translate the desire
or necessity to not naively install oneself within representation. Post¬
modernism can even be said to be even more “modern,” even more
“deconstructive” than “modern art.” It is its quintessence, which is why
the “post” does not here have any chronological meaning: “The post¬
modern is that which in the modern alleges the nonpresentable within

237
SIX

presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of proper forms”

(ibid.) and thus resolutely, “joyously,” takes over the concern with in¬
novation that was constitutive of the avant-gardes.
We can no doubt begin to glimpse what ambiguities may be nour¬
ished by the notion of postmodernity:
—On the strictly terminological level, it will have antinomic mean¬
ings according to whether the “modern” it refers back to (and it must
refer back to it if it is to be its “post-”) indicates Enlightenment ratio¬
nalism or its avant-gardist deconstructions.
—More to the point, perhaps, another problem, strangely ignored
by Lyotard, has to do with the fact that the Enlightenment and its
radical critique within the philosophic or aesthetic avant-garde are far
from being diametrically opposed. The emergence of nonfiguration and
of atonality are doubtlessly fractures in the history of art that one
can, if one wishes, call “postmodern.” A continuationist history is here
certainly untenable. It nevertheless remains the case that, as we have
seen, the avant-gardes in many respects also carry on the revolutionary
project of innovation (of the tabula rasa), that they willingly nourish
themselves on scientific or philosophical theories, and that they thereby
join fully in the enlightening and rationalist modernity they may other¬
wise claim to divorce from.
This fundamental ambiguity must be kept in mind to understand
the second meaning of postmodern, the only one, truth to tell, that has
gone well beyond the small circle of professionals of philosophy to be¬
come a “cultural unit of communication.”

2. The Postmodern as “Return” to Tradition: Against Modernism

The tyranny of innovation has played itself out and, from about the
middle of the 1970s, we are witness to a vast movement, especially in
architecture, of reaction against the ultramodernism of the 1950s, itself
heir to the modernism of the twenties. The movement now goes, as in
the title of one of Tom Wolfe’s books, From Bauhaus to Our House.
Humor is more at hand than the messiamsm of the avant-gardes, as we
see in the way Charles Jencks writes up their obituary: “Modern archi¬
tecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m. (or
thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several
of its slab blocks, were given the coup-de-grace by dynamite . . . Boom!
Boom! Boom!” (The Language of Postmodern Architecture, p. 9). Need
it be recalled that “Pruitt-Igoe,” built in the Bauhaus low-cost-housing-
style, and winner of a 1951 prize awarded by the International Modern

238
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

Architecture Congress, was one of this architecture’s most impressive

symbols, like the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the high-rise block
Ronan Point, in England, in 1968”? (ibid., p. 9).
In its second meaning, postmodern thus designates the result of the
dialectical contradiction affecting the very principle of the will, cease¬
lessly reactivated to produce the new for the sake of the new. Con¬
fronted with the new academicism such a constraint has engendered,
architects, in Jenck’s analysis, “began again to run the gamut of the
repertoire in order to try and communicate with the public: metaphore,
ornament, polychromy, convention,” but also their right to renew aes¬
thetic traditions that might be distant from the architectural creator,
whether in terms of cultural space or of temporality (the return to the
past, for example, of Ancient Greece or of medieval villages, as in “re¬
vivalism,” or, on the contrary, the presence of the new in an old neigh¬
borhood, as in Paris’s Beaubourg/Centre Pompidou).
Defined this way, postmodernity has, indeed, rapidly reached all the
other artistic domains. Much of contemporary painting has rediscov¬
ered the pleasures of figuration, and “high” music, though it most of¬
ten remains atonal, has explicitly broken with the serial imperialism of
the 1950s. We therefore have to speak of a work’s postmodernity in a
sense entirely opposed to the first meaning. But we have to go further:
it is not only isolated aesthetic creations which could be called post¬
modern, as others are classic or modern, but rather the present histori¬
cal period as a whole. For the most characteristic trait of the culture
we bathe in today is without a doubt its eclecticism. In principle, every¬
thing can cohabit within it, or, if one prefers putting it in a way that
conforms even more to the spirit of the times, nothing in the culture is
a priori illegitimate. Every style, every historical period benefits from
the right to difference —including, in the Italian Transavant-garde,
avant-gardist productions themselves. Nothing is ruled out, neither a
collaboration between Pierre Boulez and Frank Zappa nor matching
blue jeans with a tuxedo jacket. Aggrippine, Claire Bretecher’s comic-
strip teenager, studies for her French high school finals while leafing
through a comic book titled Heidegger in the Congo.

3. Postmodernity as Supersession of Modernism

Though the second meaning of postmodernity seems to be a paradoxi¬

cal but logical consequence of the first—avant-gardism’s dialectical self-
destruction giving rise to its “determinate negation”—we can allow
ourselves to envision a going-beyond of modernism that does not take

239
SIX

the Hegelian form of an Aufbebung. To this we have been invited, for

some years now, by the various philosophical undertakings which, in
Germany as in France, are trying to elaborate anew, after the avant-
gardist deconstructions of rationality and subjectivity, a renewed, more
differentiated and nuanced, conception of reason and of the subject.
Along these lines, I think I can subscribe to the postmodern project such
as it is described by Albrecht Wellmer, a thinker close to Habermas:

Against rationalism as a whole, we have to object that we cannot expect

from it either final justifications or definitive solutions. But that does not mean
that we have to say goodbye to democratic universalism, nor that we have to
give up on the Marxian project of an autonomous society, nor give up on rea¬
son. It means, rather, that Enlightenment universalism, and the ideas of indi¬
vidual and collective self-determination, and of reason and history, have to be
thought through again. In the attempt to do that I see an authentic “postmod¬
ern” impulse towards an autosupersession of reason.85

It is, it seems to me, from an analogous perspective that the present

contribution to the history of modern subjectivity has been conceived:
as the necessary positive addendum (since one cannot be contented for¬
ever with “neither-nor”) to the critique of the philosophical avant-
gardism of the 1960s as it was carried out in La Pensee 68.
In what follows, I will leave aside postmodernity’s first and third
meanings and concentrate on the second, which alone, in reality, occu¬
pies a visible place in contemporary culture, proportionate to the im¬
portance of the social phenomenon it points to. It seems clear that the
eclecticism Jencks describes raises decisive questions within the perspec¬
tive of a history of aesthetics understood as a history of modern culture
(i.e., “subjective” or individualist culture). It forces us in particular to
face up to the intimidating problem not so much of decline per se as of
the significance and meaning of this theme today. It is indeed difficult to
see how our historical consciousness, which has not stopped growing
in the last two centuries, to the point that it now, in the guise of histori-
cism, bathes in its light every aspect of contemporary culture, could ac¬
commodate itself to the idea that we could now do without the new. It
is doubtful under such circumstances that we could explicitly give up
innovation without the threat of a real or supposed “decadence” finding
expression in such a way that it would delegitimize the postmodern
Stimmung, which would then be suspected of being, at best, empty of
meaning and creative energy and, at worst, reactionary. After the end
of utopias and the great narratives, are we today witnessing that of great

240
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

works of art? That is the interrogation we cannot avoid today, like it

or not.
The theme, far from being new, is as old as modernity. It comes
back periodically, following a logic inherent to the very functioning of
a democratic universe that ceaselessly secretes its own antidotes. What
is different today is that the idea of a decline of the liberal worldview is
put forward ever more insistently by authors who are, in other respects,
at the very opposite of traditional counterrevolutionary right-wing
ideas. I would like to comment on one of these “left” critiques of liber¬
alism, namely, the one Cornelius Castoriadis has developed in the texts
he has consecrated to aesthetics and to the state of contemporary cul¬
ture, the better to make out the reasons for the diagnosis that has it that
we are witnessing, at the end of the twentieth century, the exhaustion of
Western culture.

THE END OF INNOVATION: DECLINE OF THE WEST?

Castoriadis’s position deserves our interest. Among those who hold the
modern world in contempt he is no doubt one of the most radical, yet
his attachment to the values he calls democratic is no more to be
doubted than his rejection of the ideological pathos that weighs on the
work of a Spengler or, on another level, of a Heidegger.
His works evince a certain vehemence against the “platitudes,” “in¬
eptitude, futility, intellectual dishonesty,” etc., characteristic of the
contemporary period, as we can observe on reading the very first pages
of the preface to Carrefours du labyrinthe II [Crossroads in the Laby¬
rinth, vol. 2]. This is how Castoriadis describes our times: “Comic
epoch—excremental perhaps? No, excrements fertilize the soil, the
epoch’s products pollute and sterilize it—of prostitution? No, why in¬
sult those women; epoch that disarms every epithet . . .” In the artistic
realm, every creation worthy of the name supposedly disappeared
around 1930: what was “done over half a century ago” by Schonberg,
Webern, and Berg; Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Picasso; Proust, Kafka,
and Joyce; Reinhardt, Meyerhold, or Piscator. Since then, “they pretend
to make revolutions by copying and making bad pastiches—thanks also
to the ignorance of a hypercivilized and neo-illiterate public—of the
last great moments of Western culture.” The conclusion is, in a word,
obvious: “Contemporary culture is, as a first approximation, a zilch
[nulle].”86
This at least has the merit of being said, and written, without beat-

241
 SIX

ing around the bush. To drive the point home, Castoriadis asks us to
make two mental experiments, after whose conclusion the nullity of
culture today could not possibly be doubted any more.
The first would consist in asking “the most notorious, the most
celebrated of contemporary creators this question, eye-to-eye: Do you
sincerely consider yourself to be at the same mountain height as Bach,
Mozart, or Wagner, as Jan Van Eyck, Velazquez, Rembrandt, or Pi¬
casso, as Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, or Frank Lloyd Wright, as Shake¬
speare, Rimbaud, Kafka, or Rilke?” From how many contemporaries
would a positive response not make us smile? (Ibid.)
Second experiment: Whereas the ruins of the Acropolis, when they
were destroyed by the Persians, were used to level out the ground so as
to build the foundations of the Parthenon and the new temples, “if
Notre Dame Cathedral were destroyed by a bomb,” can we imagine
for a moment that the French would do something other than piously
gather up the debris, try to restore it, or leave the ruins as they are?”
(Ibid., p. 45.)
Indeed, a hard question, and one that leads to another: that con¬
cerning the status of culture in a democratic society (I use the term
here, in its Tocquevillian sense, and not in the “self-management” [au-
togestionnaire\ sense given it by Castoriadis). Is it through sheer optical
illusion, out of lack of “historical distance,” that we hesitate to put con¬
temporary works at the same level as those of other centuries?—a phe¬
nomenon that is all the more strange in that it is not necessarily tied to
the purely subjective pleasure usually called “taste” (“pop” music is
much like what wordgames were for Freud: the honest person has to
learn to give it up, even if with regrets). Or is there in fact something
wrong with our culture, a loss of individual creative power within the
liberal universe—and, under these circumstances, how are we to inter¬
pret it?
As we have probably already guessed, Castoriadis’s answer consists
in choosing with assurance the second of these two alternatives. In this
“bureaucratic society,” that outlived itself until the 1930s to then be¬
come manifestly absurd, what has to be challenged is the very status of
our relation to values. Now that they have been finally unmasked, lib¬
eral values (we will see in a moment why quotation marks have to be
used) are, at best, nonexistent. The activity of individuals in this society
is essentially oriented toward “the antagonistic maximization of con¬
sumption, power, status, and prestige (the only objects of social invest¬
ment pertinent today).” They are, on the one hand (and at least on this
242
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

point Castoriadis s analysis follows Heidegger’s), handed over to a so¬

cial functioning that is itself “subjected to the imaginary signification of
the unlimited expansion of rational mastery (technology, science, pro¬
duction, organizations as ends in themselves).” And, to satisfy the de¬
mands put upon them in this “world of technology,” they must
constantly withdraw into the narrowness of a private sphere, about
which it is little enough to say that it is disenchanted. The technical
pseudo-mastery, “at the same time vaine, empty, and intrinsically con¬
tradictory . . . can only constrain human beings to put themselves at its
service through the deployment, cultivation, and socially efficient util¬
isation of essentially ‘egoistic’ motivations, in a mode of socialization in
which cooperation and community are only considered and only exist
from an instrumental and utilitarian point of view” (p. 36).
It is thus clear that the supposed “liberal values” in fact lead to the
collapse of every value, and that capitalist society is the very example of
one that “believes in nothing [and] does not truly value anything uncon¬
ditionally,” since mastery over the natural world refers back to nothing
but itself (Heidegger called it “will to will”). How could there, in these
conditions, be a truly innovative creation? Indeed, the work of art—
meaning here the great work—“maintains a strange relation with the
values of society, it doubts and questions them”; in more trivial terms,
it is subversive, “its intensity and its grandeur are inseparable from a
commotion, a vacillation that can only come about if and only if mean¬
ing is well established, if values are solidly founded and are lived as
such” (ibid.). But it is this very solidity that is always being ruined by
the liberal universe, to the extent that it gives way to a cynical relativ¬
ism that gives every indication, according to Castoriadis, of being what
shapes the mentality of what represents itself to itself as today’s cultural
elite. The dramatization of absurdity and of the tragic aspect of exis¬
tence in Hamlet and Oedipus the King could and did legitimately jolt,
perhaps elevate their publics; how could this same absurdity, so dear
nonetheless to contemporary theater, still shake anything up now that
“there is no pole of nonabsurdity against which it could, by opposition,
strongly reveal itself as absurdity”? (Ibid.)
Under such circumstances the forms characteristic of great art,
whether popular or not, disappear. The essential relation between work
and public vanishes first of all, just as towards the end of the nineteenth
century the distinction emerges between the philistine’s and the artist’s
lives, with its inevitable correlate: the “avant-garde” public. Thereafter
it is genres which wear themselves out so manifestly one can legitimately

243
 SIX

ask “whether the form ‘novel,’ the form ‘painting,’ the form ‘play,’ are
not outliving themselves. Finally, the work, understood as a “durable
object, destined in principle to a temporally indefinite existence, indi-
vidualizable, imputable, at least in principle, to an author, a milieu, a
precise date” disappears in turn, replaced by “products” which share
with the period’s other products the trait of being destined not to last,
not to have any certain author, and not to be “particularizable” any
longer (we can, for example, bring to mind “chance” music).
It must be stressed that, despite appearances, Castoriadis is not at
all interested in taking up again the too familiar theme of “the decline
of the West.” Not that the slogan, which has impregnated the “anti¬
modern” deconstructions of liberalism from Spengler to Heidegger, is
entirely false in its critical aspects; but, according to Castoriadis, it
tends to “mask the potentialities of a new world that the decomposition
of the ‘West’ posits and liberates.” In other words, the collapse of liberal
culture is not history’s last word, a history that would have no other
choice but to link up again with an origin lost in the world of tradition.
On the contrary, it is the forerunner of the possible renewal of an au¬
thentic democratic culture: “What is dying today, what is, in any case,
being profoundly challenged, is ‘Western’ culture: capitalist culture, the
culture of capitalist society . . . What is being born—with difficulty,
fragmentarily, and with contradictions—for the last two centuries and
more, is the project of a new society, the project of social and individual
autonomy” (ibid., p. 34).
We may wonder whether this encouraging forecast does not have
more to do with wishfull thinking than with a real observation. Besides,
Castoriadis himself points out that no one can predict the future and
determine, a priori, “what the values of a new society will be, or create
them in its stead. ’ It is, rather, a matter of wagering that an autono¬
mous society where autonomous individuals (the one cannot work
without the other) could set up their own ways of life in common would
open up a space that would render possible a reinvestment in collective
values, therefore a renewal of the creative powers of individuals.
Well, why not? We can, and we should, always grant the benefit of
the doubt, as a matter of principle. But if we want, as Castoriadis urges,
to “look at what is with ‘sober senses’ and chase away illusions,” then
we have to admit that, starting out with the selfsame premises of the
analysis we have just briefly outlined, another hypothesis—that, rush¬
ing things a bit, we can call “pessimistic”—seems to become much
more obvious. If the crisis of contemporary culture consists essentially
244
 THE DECLINE OF THE AVANT-GARDES

in the fact that in a liberal society the undergirding of values wears away
to such an extent that all contestation (and the work of art is primarily
contestation) becomes impossible because of the lack of a foil, how then
not to conclude that it is well and truly a return to tradition, if it were
possible, that could save us—rather than a democratization of the
world, about which it is hard to see how it would not accelerate the
movement of erosion already brought about by capitalism? A crucial
point, especially if we add that it is on this point that Castoriadis differs
from the neotraditionalist theories of the “decline of the West.”
With a bit of reflection we can see that the whole problem comes
down to knowing whether, from tradition’s point of view, liberalism
and democracy are or are not, at bottom, “the same thing”: the same
demand for autonomy that democracy, truth to tell, would only exac¬
erbate, rendering the idea of a “firm foundation of values” even more
problematic. Directly instituted by men, these values would perhaps be
subjectively “stronger” (admitting for the moment that this project
makes any sense); but, objectively, they would, by definition, fluctuate
even more (because they would be subject to men’s and women’s im¬
mediate will) and be even less assured than they are in a representative
system. The erosion of common traditions and values perhaps does not
come, as Castoriadis believes, from some sort of disaffection from poli¬
tics that is connected to liberalism, but from a demand for autonomy
that could hardly, as far as we can see, be the remedy for a crisis of
culture it itself has so powerfully contributed to bringing about. From
this perspective (which could be elaborated on setting out from Marx
as well as from de Tocqueville), what is characteristic of contemporary
culture is less its “zilchness” than—precisely because it moves toward
autonomy—its absence of reference to a shared world, its Weltlosigkeit.

245
 SEVEN

T HE IDEOLOGIES OF DECLINE are a bad translation of an exact

observation: we no longer live in an a priori common world. That
does not mean, as is usually believed, that there are no longer any social
bonds, nor that atomization and the age of the masses are the inevitable
future for modern societies. It is simply the case that cohesion must
from now on lie in interindividuality (to avoid saying intersubjectivity),
and not in the transcendence provided by a cosmic reality that would
be humanity’s shared lot. We can now perhaps better understand, at the
end of this history of aesthetics, why democratic culture, whose every
part is oriented towards the withdrawal from this shared world, has a
tendency to structure itself around three aspects: in the artistic realm,
the work can no longer be anything other than an extension of the artist
himself. To the extent that there still is a world, it can only be a micro¬
cosm engendered by the mini-demiurge called the genius. Objectivity
continues to rule in the scientific realm, of course. The surest indication
of this is the constraint over minds it still exerts there. But it has to be
pointed out that objectivity is conceived of only in relation to the theo¬
retical constructs produced by a subject. Where there is no subjectivity,
there is no objectivity either, following a line of argument well devel¬
oped by Heidegger and also, mutatis mutandis, by most contemporary
epistemologists. “Nothing is given, everything is constructed,” as Gas¬
ton Bachelard used to say.
History, finally, finishes the job of providing the individual with the
knowledge lacking which he could never achieve autonomy, since he
would remain forever a prisoner of the past. For the slow work of eman¬
cipation from traditions to be fulfilled, the past has to become our past.
Only at the price of such an appropriation can it cease to appear as a
determination, in essence hostile to the democratic demand for liberty.
The world is no longer our shared lot. This proposition is also an
246
 THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

indication of the liquidation of the principles that were once the basis
for ethics, without our yet being able to assess the full consequences of
this. The ancient world considered justice as an art destined to bring
about, in the city or the individual, the order within which each element
finds the place and proportion due to it—a vision of the world whose
trace has been conserved for philosophical language in the German
word for justice, Ur-teil: originary share. It is along these lines that, for
instance, Plato s Gorgias invites us to meditate on the analogy connect¬
ing the various disciplines that aim at establishing or restoring order.
Gymnastics is thus to the body what legislation is to the soul, they both
tend toward creating the harmony that results from a just proportion of
parts, from a successful hierarchization of, in the one case, organs or
muscles, and in the other, the three components of the human soul:
intelligence, courage, and appetite (or of the three classes, artisans,
warriors, and magistrates, that correspond to them in the structure of
the city).
One can also compare medicine and justice: each one has for mis¬
sion the restoration of what has been perturbed or shattered within its
own sphere. The purpose is, in each case, to assign to every element the
just share due to it within the microcosm and the macrocosm. How
could such a sharing still be possible when, after the world’s with¬
drawal, there is nothing substantial to share? That is, it seems to me,
the question we are faced with in the ethical sphere when trying to take
into account the paradox that modernity, by abandoning reference to a
world, leads to associating the collapse of traditions to the ever-growing
emergence of new existential questions.
The status of ethics, and especially of the limits that we have a right,
at times perhaps a duty, to put on individual freedom, has never been
as problematic as it is today. It is indeed hard to see how to set the rules
for this very touchy game absent all objective reference, and this at the
very time when progress in science and technology, we could also say,
in the power of man over man, is raising more questions than ever be¬
fore. Confronted with the withdrawal of the world, the temptation to
restore lost traditions becomes strong, and the nostalgia for the past
that is the most frequent companion of the ideologies of decline seems
to be the obligatory concomitant to the anguish created by the disap¬
pearance of well-established reference points. In this respect, a historical
approach to ethics appears necessary prior to any reflection that seeks
to comprehend current events. It alone can permit us to understand the
seductive aspect of the project to reactivate lost traditions—but also its

247
 SEVEN

absurd and dangerous aspects. It will be the subject of another book,

but it is important here at least to glimpse what is at stake, in order to
grasp in what way the history of subjectivity, reviewed, as I have tried
to do here, using aesthetics as a starting point, converges with practical
concerns.

THE THREE AGES OF ETHICS:

EXCELLENCE, MERIT, AND AUTHENTICITY

The opposition between ancient and modern is habitually dealt with as

if it overlapped perfectly with that between hierarchy and equality.
From Alexis de Tocqueville to Louis Dumont or Leo Strauss, analyses
stemming from quite different intellectual perspectives converge upon
this observation: the universe of the Greeks, closed, hierarchical, and
finalized, does as a matter of fact seem at every point contrary to the
one that seems evident to us after Galileo’s and Newton’s discoveries
and, especially, after the upheavals occasioned by the French Revolution
and the explicit appearance of an egalitarian ideology. Such a presen¬
tation of the case is, no doubt, generally exact. But it does not for all
that hinder certain confusions. The point is often made against it, as if
it were a serious counterargument, that there are examples of equality
in the world of antiquity and, even more obviously, of inequality in the
modern world. A misunderstanding is at work here, one that must be
cleared up prior to any correct understanding of that which most pro¬
foundly differentiates the moral vision of the ancients from that of the
moderns—let us say, to respectively evoke their two most brilliant
philosophical thematizations, the Nicomacbean Ethics from the Cri¬
tique of Practical Reason.
The misunderstanding can, in a first approximation, be easily
cleared away. To truly understand the notion of formal equality it is
enough to realize that it does not claim to exclude differences in talent
or fortune, but only discriminations before the law that might be writ¬
ten into the law (which is why its most memorable symbol in the tradi¬
tion of the French Revolution is the abolition of aristocratic privileges
on the night of August 4, 1789). One can perfectly well consider our
democratic universe to be even more inegalitarian than was that of
antiquity—that differences in wealth, especially, are even more pro¬
nounced than was ever before the case in human history. It nevertheless
remains the case that these inequalities are juridically mercurial, that
t ey are not by nature assigned to certain individuals, and that therefore
248
 THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

the project of a struggle against “real” inequalities can and should be

accomodated without difficulty into the ideological frameworks issuing
out of the great Revolution.

1. Aristocratic Excellence

The notion of natural hierarchy remains, on the other hand, so alien to

modern conceptions of justice that its exact meaning within the Greeks’
moral vision does not, for us have the immediacy of obviousness. Let us
consider for a moment what is perhaps its most famous example: Aris¬
totle’s justification of natural slavery in the first book of the Politics.
Many commentators, especially Peripatetic ones, today take the stance
of considering these texts to be secondary ones; Aristotle’s position is
supposedly only the tribute any philosopher, even the greatest ones, has
to pay to the ideologies and customs of his time. Not only is this atti¬
tude contrary to the elementary rules of philological honesty, it also,
above all, misses or masks the essential, the fact that, far from being a
concession to the spirit of the age, the justification of natural slavery
obtains its full meaning only within antiquity’s hierarchical vision of the
universe. There is nothing accidental about it, and, in his Metaphysics,
Aristotle does not hesitate to give this justification cosmological weight
when he compares the universe to a big family where the stars corre¬
spond to free men whose actions are inflexibly ordered, and sublunary
beings to slaves and domestic animals. It is instructive to observe how
the most eminent interpreters have tried to get around the inevitably
troubled feeling we moderns experience when we have to reconcile the
idea that Aristotle was, incontestably, one of the greatest thinkers in the
history of humanity, and the fact that he nonetheless attempts to elabo¬
rate a complicated argument in order to defend an institution that to us
spontaneously appears as unjustifiable and so outmoded that it would
be boring even to discuss it.
Yet discuss it is precisely what Jacques Brunschwig has tried to do
in his article in the Cahiers philosophiques (Sept. 1979). He thinks the
texts in the Politics are perfectly clear if we recall that “there are species
in which a distinction is already marked, immediately at birth, between
those of its members who are intended for being ruled and those who
are intended to rule.” Aristotle defines “natural” slaves (those who have
not been reduced to that state through the hazards of war) thusly: “We
may thus conclude that all men who differ from others as much as the
body differs from the soul, or an animal from a man (and this is the
case with all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their

249
SEVEN

best when they supply such service)—all such are by nature slaves, and
it is better for them ... to be ruled by a master” (1254 b). In the
hierarchy of beings they are halfway between man and animal: “Herein
he differs from animals, which do not apprehend reason, but simply
obey their instincts. But the use which is made of the slave diverges but
little from the use made of tame animals; both he and they supply their
owner with bodily help in meeting his daily requirements” (1254 b;
Ernest Barker trans.).
Brunschwig’s concern is, here, a pedagogical one: how to make
young people beginning the study of philosophy understand that they
ought to withhold their first reflex—rejection—and suspend judgment,
to give themselves time for reflection. For these texts, this is the wager,
are more complex than they seem; they can in no way be reduced to an
“ideological” justification of the then status quo.
This is Brunschwig’s main argument, one that leads us to the heart
of the Greek conception of hierarchy and, thereby, of excellence. It is
that the “state of things” (the empirically observed reality of slavery)
is misleading. Aristotle, in fact, makes a point of this: nature can “im¬
print freedom and servitude even into bodily habits,” so that, for in¬
stance, we observe “robust bodies made for carrying loads,” while
others, “slimmer and more ornamented, seem good only for the politi¬
cal life.” But nature can also mislead us, since “the opposite often hap¬
pens: beastly men have the outer form of freedom, while others, not
having the appearances, have only a free soul.” The same thing applies
to the inheritance of virtue and nobility: it is far from being always
guaranteed. In these circumstances—continues Brunschwig’s reason¬
ing—“there may be, by nature, free men and slaves, but what good can
that do us, if we are incapable of knowing which are which, and if we
have no right to suppose that their real situation corresponds to their
natural one.” One cannot therefore hold that Aristoteliamsm is an ide¬
ology of legitimation of the established order since, on the contrary, by
stressing that facts do not coincide with law (with nature), Aristotle
cannot but instill doubt into the minds of the slave owners.
I will not discuss here the validity of Brunschwig’s remarks. I in fact
have some reasons to fear that his defense might turn against itself and,
despite its intentions, end up suggesting the conclusion that is necessary
to finally harmonize fact and law, so that the social order’s hierarchy
would not be vulnerable to the least criticism, with everyone de facto
occupying the position assigned him by nature. It is, on the other hand,
essential to point out that his analysis illustrates perfectly well the abyss
250
 THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

separating the Greek conception of hierarchy from that current in mod¬

ern societies. That fact and law may not come together in slavery’s em¬
pirical reality is one thing. That does not prevent there being, by nature,
slaves and free men, and the ideal to have been that the former should
obey and the latter command. In other words: modern hierarchies are
a priori empty. In principle, if not in fact, any individual has the right
to occupy any position in the social and political hierarchy; no one is
excluded or elected because of some supposed nature. In the universe of
antiquity, on the contrary, hierarchies are, in principle, “filled,” and it
is only de facto that they can be, so to speak, “improperly filled.”
Fact and law thus take up inverse positions in the two universes,
and it is beginning from that circumstance that we should reflect on the
notions of equality and difference. Even if it were convincingly demon¬
strated that the world of the ancients was in fact more egalitarian than
that of the moderns (Hannah Arendt suggests somewhere that, all
things considered, the situation of the slave is better than that of state¬
less persons today, and French political scientist Michel Villey has not
hesitated to take up the same argument again on the subject of the mod¬
ern working class), it would remain true that the inequalities in place
there were ascribed to the nature of individuals, and were, as such,
insuperable. One can never raise oneself above one’s nature, and each
person s definition constitutes, so to speak, the prison from which one
cannot escape. Inversely, when modern democratic societies are criti¬
cized for the “formalism” of the equality they proclaim, with the aim
behind the critique being the edification of a real equality of opportu¬
nities; what is in fact taking place is that the logic of modern equality is
being pursued: it is because human beings are equal by right that the
fact of it must some day end up rejoining what is, from now on, an
ideal.
It is because it is based on a specific natural cosmology, on the
reference to an order of the world, to a cosmos, that the moral vision of
the Ancient Greeks culminates in the concept of excellence. To go
straight to the essential point, we may define this latter quality as per¬
fection, meaning the bringing into reality, for each being, of that which
constitutes its nature and thereby indicates its function. That is why the
Nichomachean Ethics could not but begin with a reflection on man’s
finality, as distinct from that of other beings: “For just as a flute-player,
a sculptor, or any artist, and, in general, for all things that have a func¬
tion or activity, the good and the ‘well’ is thought to reside in the func¬
tion, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the

251
SEVEN

carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has
man none? Is he born without a function?”1
Here it is, therefore, nature which establishes the ends of man and
thus provides a direction to his ethics. That does not mean that, in the
execution of his proper task, man does not meet with difficulties, that
he does not need to exert his will and his capacity for reasoning. Ethics
is like any other activity in this, like, for example, learning to play a
musical instrument; to become excellent at it, one needs to exercise, but
one needs above all talent. Even though it does not exclude a certain
use of the will, only a natural gift can indicate the path to be followed
and permit us to overcome the obstacles we encounter (which is how
Aristotle’s texts on “deliberation” must be read, and not as some sort
of forerunners of a modern “free will” theory).
This is also why virtue, the “proper measure” or “intermediate¬
ness” or “mean,” can still coincide with excellence. If the aim is to
perfectly realize our natural destination, then virtue can only be located
in a median position; courage keeps its distance from cowardice and
from temerity, so that the proper measure has nothing to do here with
some sort of boringly moderate “centrist” position. From an ontologi¬
cal point of view (Aristotle writes “in respect of its substance”), virtue
certainly is an mtermediateness: the being that perfectly realizes its na¬
ture or essence is equidistant from extremes which, being at the limit of
their definition, lead to monstrosity. “Hence in respect of its substance
and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean, with regard
to what is best and right an extreme” (ibid., 1107 a 5).
We can better measure the extent to which such an ethics can seem
strange, from the standpoint of modern conceptions, when we keep in
mind the fact that it permits speaking of the “virtue” or “excellence” of
a horse or of an eye:

We may remark, then, that every virtue or excellence both brings into good
condition the thing of which it is the excellence and makes the work of that
thing be done well; e.g., the excellence of the eye makes both the eye and its
work good; for it is by the excellence of the eye that we see well. Similarly the
excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running
and at carrying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy. (1106 a 15)

The virtuous being is the one that functions well and even excel¬
lently, according to its own nature and function. In such a vision of
ethics the problem of limits receives an “objective” solution: we must
track them down within the order of things, in the reality of the world,
252
 THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

just as the physiologist, through understanding the end purposes of or¬

gans and members, also perceives the limits within which they can exert
their activity. The problem, for us moderns, is that such a reading of the
cosmos has become impossible, quite simply, because of the lack of a
cosmos we can scrutinize and a nature we can decipher.

2. Democratic Merit

I will not dwell here on the causes of this disappearance stemming from
the passage “from the closed world to the infinite universe” that has
been so well described by Alexander Koyre. And I have elsewhere ana¬
lysed what such a revolution meant in the juridical sphere.2 From the
point of view of a history of subjectivity, it is the emergence, with
Rousseau, of a new representation of man that has modified the pre¬
suppositions of the problem of ethics from top to bottom: from the
moment the human being is defined by its “perfectibility,” by its free¬
dom, defined as the capacity to tear oneself away from any natural or
historical determination,3 antiquity’s “functionalism.” The idea of a
natural teleology loses all meaning if man is the only being that is, by
essence, lacking in specific function. If he is “nothingness,” as was al¬
ready suggested by Fichte in the wake of Rousseau, if he possesses no
“nature” in which some sort of “mission” could be deciphered, then
virtuous activity can no longer be thought of in terms of end purposes
and the problem of limits becomes problematic once again. Absent all
“objective” reference to a cosmos, to a natural order that transcends
and encompasses individuals, it is indeed hard to see what could put a
limit to their infinite freedom. That, anyhow, is the challenge that must
be taken up by the morality of the moderns.
It means that we have to, in morality as in other domains, “ground
transcendence on immanence”; seek, within the subject itself, and no
longer in an external order, the means—the “reasons”—for a limitation
that must from now on be thought of as autolimitation, as autonomy.
The question of what is proper to man—of the definition of the human
subject—turns out to be inseparable from that of the ends of man, and
of the limits within which he must try to maintain his actions. It will be
more easily understood, under such circumstances, that, where the
ethics of the ancients began from a reflection on man’s natural finality,
that of the moderns begins with a theory of “good will,” of the free and
autonomous will.
Such a starting point leads in two directions, both of them radically
counter to the morality of antiquity. From a subjective point of view,

253
 SEVEN

the problem is one of knowing which attitudes of the mind are worthy
of being considered virtuous; along the way we come upon the problem
of disinterested action, one that is contrary to man’s sensuous nature.
From an objective point of view, it becomes necessary to determine
which, among all the ends a free will can set out to meet, are properly
speaking “moral”; we are then confronted with the problem of univer¬
sality as the new form of the common good or of the “general interest.”
We need to review both aspects briefly to see how they are diametrically
opposed to Aristotelianism.
Subjectively—considering the intentions that can motivate any
kind of activity—“good will” is defined as “disinterested” will. For rea¬
sons Kant analyzes methodically in his Groundings of the Metaphysics
of Morals, there is among the moderns a consensus in considering that
only disinterested action can be truly held to be moral. That is the
meaning of the famous distinction Kant establishes between “legality”
and “morality.” I can always act in conformity to a law (the prohibition
on theft, in the example given in the Groundings) out of interest—in
this case, out of the fear of being arrested and put in prison—but one
could of course come up with other examples where the interest would
be positive and would reside in the hope of reward and not in the
fear of punishment. From the point of view that concerns us here, it is
clear that both motivations are equivalent, since they are both “self-
interested.” My action is, in such circumstances, no doubt legal (gesetz-
mafiig: literally, “in conformity with the law”), but everyone will agree
that it does not for all that have anything virtuous about it. We associ¬
ate, without even thinking about it, the idea of virtue to that of effort,
and merit, for us, supposes in some way the will’s struggle against its
own interests, against egoism. As far as its motivations are concerned,
moral action, therefore, has to be carried out because of sheer respect
for the law.
We can thus better understand that only good will can be called,
strictly speaking, moral. Talents, which are natural gifts, have in them¬
selves no ethical value. Intelligence, force, beauty, even courage, can be
put at the service of not only our egoistic interests but also of crime (of
illegality). We can assess here the extent to which we are now at the
opposite extreme from the idea of excellence. Virtue, far from residing
in the perfection of natural gifts, in the fulfillment of a function in con¬
formity with man’s specific nature, becomes among the moderns a
struggle against the naturalness that is in us, the capacity to resist the
inclinations of our egoist nature.

254
 THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

The extraordinary power of Kantian ethics stems from the fact that
none of us is quite capable of thinking in different terms. I have never
yet met, among those who call themselves anti-Kantians (be they Spi-
nozists, materialists, phenomenologists, or partisans of an ethics in the
ancient style), a modern who could completely do without the concept
of merit (except in words, and even there). If it is thrown out the door
of philosophy, it returns through the window of everyday life and of the
innocuous value judgments it continuously forces us to make when we
are outside the control of a system of concepts. And, like it or not, the
notion of merit only makes sense within a modern perspective. If we
reflect on it, we will see that it always presupposes the idea of liberty
defined as the power to resist the nature within us, therefore as the
capacity to act disinterestedly. It has in practice become impossible for
us to, for example, consider that the fact of being tall, strong, good-
looking, skillful in bodily or even in intellectual activities is, properly
speaking, a virtue—and this whatever may be the extraordinary power
of seduction such qualities can sometimes exert on us, or whatever real
admiration they may call forth. For seduction, for us moderns, no
longer has anything to do with ethics, but with aesthetics.
From a subjective point of view, the morality of merit is thus a
morality of duty. Since the goal is no longer, as it was for the ancients,
to fulfill one’s nature but, most often, to oppose it, rules almost always
have to take the form of an imperative. Moral demands take the form
of a “You must. . .” or an “It must be so, that. . .” But we still need to
spell out in detail what the ends that thus impose themselves on us
consist in objectively in what concerns their precise content. This is the
second aspect of the modern reflection on ethics. It is not enough simply
to be capable of disinterest, of detachment from one’s egoistic nature,
one must also be able to indicate the direction this separation from
oneself should take. If virtuous action is subjectively disinterested, what
then is its objective?
It is common knowledge that the term has a double meaning—an
ambiguity around which plays the contemporary notion of “objective
reason,” whose origins go back to Kantianism. The objective is the
goal, but it is also that which is not subjective, that which is valid not
merely for me but also for the others. The common good is therefore
objective in a double sense—this is what the Kantian doctrine of imper¬
atives expresses in its own fashion through its three levels: skill, pru¬
dence, and morality. In going from one degree to another, we raise
ourselves along both the scale of ends and that of objectivity. The im-

255
 SEVEN

peratives of skill, indeed, reflect upon nothing other than means. They
are still purely technical or instrumental. They say only: “If you wish to
achieve an end X, do Y,” without in the least concerning themselves
with knowing whether this end should or should not be pursued,
whether or not it goes beyond the sphere of my strictly egoistic interests.
Skill, for Kant, corresponds to Epicure’s morality or to utilitarianism:
the “objectives” it permits us to attain remain, if we may put it so,
entirely subjective and particular.
With prudence—a translation of Aristotle’s pbronesis—we move
up one level in the scale of objectivity. The ends the prudent person
pursues are common to humanity, not specific to such and such an iso¬
lated individual, the way the ends pursued by skill can be. The typical
example here is the health everyone—with the exception of attempted
suicides—cannot but wish for himself, at least to the extent that the
human being is also an animal whose body must be taken care of. Pru¬
dence arrives at the level of the general or, as it is so well said, of “com¬
mon sense. But it is not yet at the level of the rigorous universality
characteristic of moral ends. The proof of this is that, when morality
demands it, one has to be “imprudent.” Freely consented to sacrifice
cannot be excluded from modern ethics.
With the ends of morality we therefore reach the level of veritable
objectivity. Here, the goals of our actions impose themselves on us in
the aspect of a universal law, absolutely valid for all. But since this law,
being a law of reason, is our law, since there is thus autonomy (which
does not happen in the case of a religious vision of ethics), we can say
that transcendence is here grounded in immanence. It is, so to speak,
within ourselves that we have to find the reasons—in fact, Reason_to
forget our personal interest. Merit is linked to this internal tension be¬
tween the particularity of egoistic desires and the universality of the law,
whose triumph is consecrated by virtue.
The two moments of modern ethics—disinterested intention and
universality of chosen ends—are reconciled in the definition of man as
perfectibility or nothingness. They both find their ultimate origin in this
philosophical anthropology: liberty is above all the capacity to act out¬
side the determination of our “natural,” that is to say particular, inter¬
ests. By distancing ourselves from the particular, we raise ourselves
toward the universal, and therefore toward taking the other person into
account.
If excellence is in essence aristocratic, merit on the other hand is of
democratic inspiration. Since it is ascribed to a domain other than that
256
 THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

of innate talent, no one can be said to be a priori wanting of it. It

“merely” requires good will. In the eyes of the moderns, the slave Aris¬
totle would have called “natural” can be virtuous, just as much as, if
not more than its master. And, in one of the most celebrated examples
in Kantian ethics, even the child is enlightened enough to know where
evil is—something that, for obvious reasons, we formally ruled out in
Aristotle’s morality.

3. Contemporary Authenticity

Effort, merit, duty, imperatives, respect, law, virtue—the terms modern

ethics are formulated in are eloquent; they express well the extent to
which the realization of the moral ideal is a difficult, is a constraining
matter for the subject who wishes to abide by it. The hierarchical cos¬
mos ancient virtue referred to has disappeared, and the substantial
world has retreated. The thinking of the moderns has, for all that, re¬
mained attached to the idea of the law’s transcendence when compared
to the desires of the individual, and practical reason, though it is, after
a fashion, “in ourselves,” through its universality and its transcendental
status, remains external to empirical man. The idea of auto-nomy no
doubt presumes that the law is my law, but the distance separating au¬
tos from nomos, self from norm, is not thereby canceled. Ethics does
not converge with psychology, nor with the sociology of morals that
leads certain of our contemporaries to consider every norm as being the
historical product stemming from the conditions of a specific society.
There have been, for a number of years, any number of indications
that we are witnessing a mutation linked to the momentous rise of
democratic individualism. Both in the United States and France, several
excellent studies have shown how hedonistic and narcissistic ideologies
have, especially since the 1960s, taken hold of traditional moral ques¬
tions. If we were to draw up identification cards for them, the key word
would no longer be excellence, and even less merit, but, without a
doubt, authenticity. Without having to repeat those analyses here, we
can very briefly review the double tendency characteristic of contem¬
porary individualism on the ethical plane.
The main thing, first of all, is no longer to come up against impera¬
tive external norms, but to arrive at the expression of one’s personality,
at the development and opening up of the self. Let us bring to mind
Daniel Bell’s admirably concise and exact formulation: “traditional mo¬
rality was replaced by psychology, guilt by anxiety.” When the notion
of transcendence vanishes, when, as a consequence, one faces oneself all

257
 SEVEN

alone, existential conflict and despondency can no longer be interpreted

in any other way than as “psychic conflicts”: the victory of therapy over
religion is assured.
On the other hand, the ethics of authenticity compensates the nar¬
cissism of the command to “be yourself” with an increase in tolerance
and respect for the Other. “Otherness” has become the one sure value
today, the inevitable and undebatable watchword. It is, in this respect,
significant that the declarative discourse of human rights—at the be¬
ginning, we mustn’t forget, the most accomplished expression of the
“geometrical” universalism of the French revolutionaries—has today
become synonymous with “the right to difference.” The French Revo¬
lution did, of course, emancipate the Jews, and it fought against slavery.
But we need to keep in mind that it did this in the name of principles
and by virtue of an assimilationist ideology, not at all out of respect for
a plurality of cultures, the very idea of which no doubt never even came
close to entering into any Jacobin head.
I will not come back here to the dead ends the ethics of authenticity
often (though not always) leads into—especially in the shape of cultural
relativism or of the differentialist” antiracism whose traps we are now
beginning to see.4 As a sort of conclusion, I should merely like to bring
to our attention a great difficulty that this ethics involves us all with,
like it or not.
Whether it was right or wrong in doing so (I believe it was right),
what I have here designated as the ethics of the moderns had not aban¬
doned the project of finding a solution to the problem of limits. Though
they are no longer located in a transcendent cosmos, but within the
subjects reason, the latter are nonetheless constraining, on a moral as
well as a juridical level. The principles of autolimitation, which hold
that my freedom ends there where the other person’s freedom begins,
and of universality of the law provide, whatever neotraditionalist Hei-
deggerians or Thomists (not to mention fundamentalists) may think,
general indications that can—at least that’s the wager made by the
moderns—become specific in every concrete case through the organi¬
zation of the public discussions that are mdispensible to the elaboration
of just compromises. The problem with the ethics of the contemporaries
and with the consecration of the authentic as such is that reference to
the very idea of limit seems to fade away, delegitimized as it is by the
imperious demands made by individual self-cultivation and by the right
to difference. When it is forbidden to forbid,” dogmatism becomes the
supreme sin, and tends to be confused with the very thing the moderns
258
 THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

held to be the truth of reason. Hatred of rationalism blossoms upon

the ethics of authenticity, and criticism of the former, until recently the
prerogative of contemporary philosophy, now finds echoes even in the
scientists’ universe—witness the success of various essays on episte¬
mology that happily trample on reason.
That is, at bottom, the argument we wanted to put forward in La
Pensee 68 when, making a distinction between “autonomy” and “in¬
dependence,” Renaut and I wrote that “the subject perishes with the
rise of the individual.” We wished to stress the narrow and paradoxi¬
cal correlation uniting the deconstructions of reason, and therefore of
modern subjectivity, to the liberal universe, where the full flowering of
individualism calls for the invention and dissemination of relativist ide¬
ologies holding that there are no facts, only interpretations.
It would, however, be mistaken to go to extremes and transform
the opposition between modern subject and contemporary individual
into a real antinomy, to believe that the golden age of the Enlightenment
is vanishing with the inexorable decline the West is supposedly fated
toward ever since the “era of emptiness” began. The history of aesthet¬
ics teaches us—and I believe the lesson is also valid for ethics—that the
withdrawal of a shared world is not synonymous with decadence. It
opens new horizons we would do better to investigate before giving in
to the facile attitude that neoconservatism has become. Nothing says
that these horizons are idyllic, but nothing proves either that they are
ineluctably leading us to new forms of totalitarianism. Indignation is
not called for, not, at least, before the comprehension of our moment
comes to justify it if need be—a task that is not being carried out by
anyone, as far as I can see.
That the advance of science and technology, especially in everything
having to do with biological life, raises the question of limits in a new
and urgent manner is undeniable. That individualist ideology does not
really predispose us to bring clear and decisive answers to it, and that
irresolution leaves the door open to the harsh laws of the market, is
more than probable. That this situation is the expression of a radical
evil, the mere glimpse of which should incite us to suspend our critical
judgment, to leave behind judicial humanism and replace it with a re¬
turn to traditional forms of thought is, on the other hand, extremely
doubtful, and this for two reasons we need to clarify.
It is, first of all, not certain that there is a perfect continuity between
humanism and individualism, and that therefore it would be valid to
transform a condemnation of individualism into one of humanism. On

259
 SEVEN

the aesthetic as on the ethical levels, it is crucial to distinguish as care¬

fully as possible between the modern and the contemporary. Unless
we aim to radicalize Heidegger’s reading of history, we have to admit
that, from Kant to Nietzsche, ruptures are at least as important as
continuities.
Second and above all, we should guard ourselves from immediately
putting a value judgment on the distinction between the autonomy of
the subject and the independence of the individual. The latter, even
when he is not aiming at the moral autonomy we attribute to the sub¬
ject, is not for all that reduced to merely consumerist activities. Between
the animality of the life cycle and the virtuous action through which we
claim autonomy, there is an entire sphere of intermediate activities, for
which aesthetics provides the model, and which allow the individual to
make use of forms of expression with fruitful possibilities. We would be
concealing nothing less than the sphere of culture if we were to neglect
this observation, and we are therefore in no way restricted to a binary
choice of life: for or against a transcendent law, for or against imma¬
nence within life, etc. What is unprecedented in the contemporary pe¬
riod is the fact that the three ages of ethics, though they would seem to
be antithetical, do not in fact cancel each other out—the requirement
of authenticity does not imply a total and definitive withdrawal of the
principles of excellence or merit. On the contrary, we are witnessing
today, if I am not mistaken, a return of the principle of excellence within
the democratic universe, while the meritocratic principle has never re¬
ally ceased to be at work. Authenticity, in fact, tends more and more to
be valued only when it is accompanied by either the courage of virtue
or the power of seduction, when, therefore, it is the authenticity of
an inner richness whose manifestation calls forth agreement or admi¬
ration for another. Expressivity for expressivity’s sake no longer inter¬
ests anybody, and the discourse against the society of the spectacle is
becoming the dominant ideology even as it pretends to be more subver¬
sive than ever—following in that the most outmoded fashions among
the intelligentsia.
To say that the individual is neither exclusively autonomy (modern
morality) nor exclusively consumeristic independence (contemporary
authenticity), is to evoke one of the profoundest significations of the
notion of individuality. We should not forget that the individual is, be¬
fore anything else, the indivisible being, the atom that, being unique, is
distinct from all the others. No one is going to be distinct, to stand
out, through the mere assertion of his independence and his selfness
260
 THE PROBLEM OF ETHICS

[ ipseite]. Following a line of argument whose model is provided by the

Phenomenology of Spirit, in the dialectic of sense-certainty, the exac¬
erbation of bare particularity reverts into its opposite and falls into the
banality of the abstract universal. We are all individuals, we are all
me s in the here and now; this particularity” is not what differenti¬
ates us from each other. Nor is it our capacity to consume nature’s or
society’s products. In the spectrum of reflection inaugurated by the Cri¬
tique of judgment and taken up by German romanticism, true individu¬
ality cannot reside in anything other than a synthesis of a concrete
particularity with the universal. For the individual to be an individual,
he has to be rich with a discrete, specific content that is all the same
generalizable. At that price, and only at that price, can the requirement
of authenticity be kept up. Individuality then resembles the ideal in
which Hegelian aesthetics saw the pinnacle of art. Comprehended this
way, individuality cannot at all be reduced to the anything-goes of con¬
sumerism, to the arbitrary freedom that consists in doing “whatever I
feel like.”
Illuminated by the history of aesthetics, ethical reflection today can
no longer do without this triple dimension of excellence, merit, and
authenticity. Each requirement traces the outline of a general theory of
limitations, one we shall have to resolve ourselves to think through out¬
side the framework of any cosmology, if we wish to meet the challenge
put forth by the withdrawal of a shared world without giving in to the
mirage of a lost tradition.

261
 NOTES

(Any unattributed translations in the text are by Robert de Loaiza)

ONE

1. Karl Borinski, Balthasar Gracian und die Hofliteratur in Deutschland

(Berlin, 1984).
2. Cf. A. Baumler, Das Irrationalitatsproblem in der Asthetik und Logik
des 18 Jahrhunderts bis zur “Kritik der Urteilskraft” (Halle, 1923), p. 19,
no. 3.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, La Democratic en Amerique, vol. 2, chap. 1.

TWO

1. K. Heinrich von Stein, Die Entstehung der neueren Asthetik (Stuttgart

1886).
2. Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts reduits a un meme princips (1746),
p. 13.
3. N. Boileau, Art poetique, chap. 1.
4. Boileau, Twelfth Satire, “On the Ambiguous.”
5. Bouhours, Des manieres, p. 432 (of the 1743 edition).
6. Cf. also pp. 435-36.
7. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A.
Koelln and James C. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951),
p. 297.
8. J.-B. Dubos, Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et la peinture (1719),
part 1, § 4. (All texts are from the 1770 edition.)
9. Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts, p. 102.
10. Dubos, Reflexions critiques, p. 341.
11. Cf. Baumler, Das Irrationalitatsproblem, pp. 25-26.
12. Dubos, Reflexions critiques, pp. 53ff., where this point is correctly
analyzed.
13. Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment] (Suhr-
kamp Taschenbuch Verlag: hrsg. Wilhelm Weischedel; 1974), § 56, p. 279.
14. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 57, Remark 2.
15. See especially, David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Hume, Es-

263
 NOTES TO PAGES 53 - 85

says: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), vol. 1.
16. Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,” in Essays,
ed. Green and Grose, vol. 2, p. 174.
17. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Essays, vol. 1, p. 266.
18. Cassirer, Philosophy, p. 305.
19. David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in Essays, vol. 1, p. 217.
20. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 268.
21. Dubos, Reflexions critiques, vol. 2, § 34.
22. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 268.
23. Dubos, Reflexions critiques, pp. 369—70.
24. Hume, “Standard,” p. 270.
25. David Hume, Four Dissertations (London, printed for A. Millar, in the
Strand, 1757), pp. v, vi.
26. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Un¬
derstanding, book 4, chap. 2, § 14.
27. Cf. for example, Christian Wolff, Psychologia empirica, § 545. On the
notion of perfection, see ibid., Ontologia, § 503.
28. G. W. Leibniz, Von der Weisheit: Deutsche Schriften, ed. Guhrauer,
vol. 1, p. 420.
29. Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, p. 114.
30. On these modifications, cf. Baumler, Das Irrationalitatsproblem
pp. 192ff.
31. A. G. Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema
pertinentibus, §§15 and following.
32. Ibid., § 9. Cf. also § 5.
33. On the same theme, cf. §§ 555, 560, and 563 of the Aesthetics.
34. Cf. §§ 14, 15,561, and 562.
35. Cf. also § 565.

THREE
1. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason],
2d ed., Akademieausgabe, vol. 3, pp. 399-400. (The full title of the German
edition used is Kant: Werke in sechs Banden, hrsg. Wilhelm Weischedel
[Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1964],—Trans.
2. Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” In Basic Writings, ed. David
Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 100.
3. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 452.
4. On the link between the idea of reflection and the critique of metaphys¬
ics it presupposes, see Luc Ferry, Political Philosophy, vol. 2, The System of

264
 NOTES TO PAGES 86-147

Philosophies of History, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1992).
5. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp Taschenbuch, 1974), Introduction, § IV.
6. I use again here an analysis already outlined in my Political Philosophy,
vol. 2.
7. Cf. Christian Wolff, Psychologia empirica, §§ 257-58.
8. Cf. Baumler, Das lrrationalitatsproblem, pp. 203ff.
9. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 40.
10. Ibid. See also Kant’s Reflections, no. 626, in Kant’s Gesammelte Schrif-
ten, hrsg. von der Koniglichen PreuSischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Ber¬
lin: Druck und Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1913), vol. 15 (handschriftliche
NachlaB. vol. 2, 1st half: Anthropologie), pp. 271—72.
11. Ibid., p. 342 (Reflection 782).
12. Jean-Fran<jois Lyotard and Jacob Rogosinski, L’Autre Journal, Decem¬
ber 1985, p. 34.
13. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 22.
14. Lyotard and Rogosinski, op. cit.
15. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans.
James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962 [1929]),
p. 165.
16. Ernst Cassirer, “Abhandlung iiber Kant und das Problem der Meta-
physik: Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kant-Interpretation,” in Kant-
Studien, Philosophische Zeitschrift, vol. 36 (1931), pp. 15-16.
17. It was the principal project of Political Philosophy, vol. 2. Cf. also “La
Dimension ethique chez Heidegger,” in Nachdenken iiber Heidegger (Ger-
stenberg Verlag, 1980); and La Pensee 68: Essai sur Pantihumanisme contem-
porain [French Philosophy in the Sixties: An Essay on Contemporary Anti-
Humanism] (Gallimard, 1985), last chapter.

FOUR

1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philo¬

sophic [Introduction to the History of Philosophy], hrsg. J. Hoffmeister (Ham¬
burg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1959), p. 94.
2. Hegel: Vorlesungen iiber die Asthetik, in Hegel: Theorie Werkausgabe
(Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), vol. 1 (of the Asthetik), p. 21. [At this point, Prof.
Ferry discusses the French translation of the Lectures on Aesthetics, which he
judges so defective he has seen fit to make his own translations from the Ger¬
man. I have judged the most recent English translation, by T. M. Knox (Ox¬
ford University Press, 1975), to be satisfactory, and have used it with minor
modifications. The parentheses after the quotations indicate the volume num¬
ber in the Werkausgabe’s edition of the Lectures, the page number, and, after
the slash, the page number in English: e.g., 1:100/70.—Trans.]

265
 NOTES TO PAGES 148-165

FIVE

1. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1983 [1962]), p. 8.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragodie, in Nietzsche, Kritische
Studienausgabe, hrsg. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich and Ber¬
lin: DTV/de Gruyter, 1967 and 1988), Band 1, p. 111.
3. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 422. [Prof. Ferry refers to the Karl
Schlechta edition (1956) of Nietzsche’s works, which uses a different arrange¬
ment of Nietzsche’s ‘ left-behind” writings of the 1880s from the one made by
Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and published as Der Wille zur Macht (1908). For
the convenience of the English-speaking reader, I have gone back to the earlier
version, the one adopted by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in their
translation of The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), except
where a fragment cited has not been reproduced there.—Trans.]
4. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen, vol. 2, § 8; Karl Schlechta ed.,
vol. 1, p. 95.

5. Nietzsche, “Aus dem Nachlass der Achtzigerjahre,” in Werke, ed. Karl

Schlechta (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1966), vol. 3, p. 677.
6. Nietzsche, “History in the Service and Disservice of Life,” trans. Gary
Brown, in Unmodern Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 127.
7. Nietzsche, F. Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates,” § 5, in
The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Vi¬
king Press, 1954), p. 475 (trans. mod.).
8. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, in Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe; vol. 43:
Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman
GmbH, 1985), p. 87.
9. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The End of Philosophy,
trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 95.
10. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, p. 551 (German ed.).
11. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York- Vintage
Books, [1886], 1966), § 268.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage Books, 1974 [1882-87]), sect. 354.
13. The Will to Power (hereafter, WP), § 786.
14. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, in the Viking Portable Nietzsche,
ed. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1968),
p. 534.
15. Werke, Schlechta ed., vol. 3, p. 689.
16. Cf. Nietzsche, Posthumous Works, Kroener ed., vol. 10, p. 277, in
Nietzsche Gesamtausgabe (Leipzig: A. Kroner, 1910-1922 [vollig neu gestal-
tete ausgabe]).
17. Werke, vol. 3, p. 585.

266
 NOTES TO PAGES 166 - 195

18. WP, § 997.

19. Posthumous Works, Kroener ed., vol. 11, pt. 2, § 504.
20. WP, § 485.
21. Posthumous Works, Kroener ed., vol. 14, pt. 2, § 63.
22. WP, § 556.

23. L. Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in Political Philosophy:

Six Essays by Leo Strauss (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975).
24. See Luc Lerry and Alain Renaut, 68—86, Itineraires de I’individu (Gal-
limard, 1987), chap. 3.
25. Michel Loucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Nietzsche, Col-
loque de Royaumont (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964).
26. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, § 289 (Kaufmann trans.).
27. WP, § 804.
28. See, for instance, Heidegger: Nietzsche, vol. 1.
29. Beyond Good and Evil, § 21.
30. On these difficulties, see Perry and Renaut, 68-86, Itineraires de
I’individu.
31. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, “Der Rausch als asthetischer Zustand,”
p. 110 (D. P. Krell translation, p. 92).
32. Ibid. (Krell trans., p. 93).
33. Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche (Krell trans., p. 93).
34. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 102-3.
35. Ibid., Schlecta ed., vol. 3, p. 755.
36. Posthumous Works, Kroener ed., vol. 14, pt. 1, § 370.
37. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in: Poetry, Lan¬
guage, Thought, trans. and ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and
Row, 1971), p. 77.
38. J. Lacoste, La Philosophie de Part (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
Prance, 1985).

SIX

1. Contrechamps, no. 3, Sept. 1984, “Avant-garde et tradition.”

2. IRCAM, Programme 1987, editorial.
3. Jean Clair, Considerations sur I’etat des beaux-arts: Critique de la mo-
dernite (Gallimard, 1983), pp. 115-16.
4. Liberation, Nov. 1983.
5. Le Point, April 21, 1986.
6. P. M. Menger, “L’Elitisme musical,” Esprit, March 1985, pp. 5ff.
7. Restons simples, no. 2, January 1986.
8. J.-C. Risset, “Le compositeur et ses machines,” Esprit, March 1985,
p. 71.

267
 NOTES TO PAGES 1 96 - 206

9. Octavio Paz, Point de convergence: Du romantisme a I’avant-garde

(Gallimard, 1974), p. 190.
10. See Donald D. Egbert, “The Idea of ‘Avant-Garde’ in Art and Poli¬
tics,” The American Historical Review (Dec. 1967), p. 343. On the concept’s
history, the books by Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cam¬
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1968 [Italian original, II Mulino, 1962]),
and Peter Burger, Theorie der Avant-Garde (Suhrkamp, 1974), do not con¬
tribute anything noteworthy.
11. Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, Opinions litteraires,
philosophiques, et industrielles (Paris, 1825), p. 331. (This text was in fact
written by Olinde Rodrigues and cosigned by Saint-Simon and Leon Halevy).
12. See also Lettres de Henri de Saint-Simon a messieurs les jures. (Paris:
Comeard, 1820), A., VI. p. 422: “New meditations have proved to me that the
order of march for things should be: the artists at the head, then the scholars
and scientists, and the industrialists only after these first two classes.”
13. Saint Simon, Opinions litteraires, p. 137.
14. On this strange movement, more amusing than truly innovative, see the
Encyclopedic des farces et attrapes et mystifications (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pau-
vert, 1964), as well as Daniel Grojnowski’s article in the Actes de la recherche
en sciences sociales (1975) from which I borrowed some of the following
remarks.
15. Vasili Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular
(1912). In Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1 (1901-1921), ed.
and trans. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co
1982), p. 133.
16. “Correspondance Kandinski-Schonberg,” Contrechamps, no. 2, April
1984.
17. Kandinsky to Schoenberg, Jan. 18, 1911.
18. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual, pp. 127—28.
19. Lor a more elaborate analysis of this concept, see Perry and Renaut,
68-86, Itineraires de Pindividu (Gallimard, 1987).
20. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York:
Basic Books, 1976).
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, book 2, chap. 1.
22. Text commented on by Bell in Cultural Contradictions, p. 18, n. 17.
23. Ibid., p. 11, n. 10; cf. also pp. 36ff.
24. See Luc Perry and Alain Renaut, La Pensee 68 [French Philosophy in
the Sixties].
25. Cf. Gilles Lipovetsky, L’Ere du vide [The Era of Emptiness], (Paris:
Gallimard, 1983), who introduces a Tocquevillian perspective into the analysis
of modernism.
26. Le Debat, no. 21, 1982, p. 48.
27. See Pierre Prancastel, Etudes de sociologie de Part (Denoel, 1970)
pp. 156, 178, 183, etc.

268
 NOTES TO PAGES 207 - 21 1

28. K. S. Malevich, Ecrits (Editions Gerard Lebovici, 1986), pp. 185-86.

29. See Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes (Hermann 1965)
pp. 25ff. ’

30. J. Metzinger (with A. Gleizes), Du cubisme (Editions Presence, 1980

[Afterword from 1946]), p. 79.
31. See J. Lacoste’s excellent book, L’Idee du beau (Bordas 1986)
pp. 146ff.
32. Francastel, Etudes, p. 55.
33. Gino Severini, La Peinture d’avant-garde (Mercure de France 1917)
ser. 1, vol. 6.

34. A. Gleizes, Art et religion, art et science, art et production (Editions

Presence, 1970), p. 55.
35. Francastel, Etudes, p. 247.
36. Cf., among others, Jean Paulhan: “Euclidean space is an extension that
could be entirely filled by juxtaposed, equal-sized cubes, without any row hav-
mg ^ last cube . . . But it is well known that the notion of Euclidean space is,
in our day, rather badly treated by mathematicians” (Sur le cubisme [Denoel,
1970], p. 103). Later on in this same text, the “it is well known” seems to be
an elegant denial.

37. In his Trade elementaire de geometrie a quatre dimensions [Elementary

Treatise of Four-Dimensional Geometry] (1903), with which Apollinaire was
acquainted, the mathematician E. Jouffret carefully distinguishes “space,”
characterized by an n number of dimensions (three for Euclid), from “exten¬
sion,” which, in four-dimensional geometry opens up to dimensional infinity:
“We shall call EXTENSION the ensemble formed by this infinite number of
spaces and which contains them, as each space contains an infinite number of
planes, each one of these in turn containing an infinity of straight lines, and
each of the latter containing an infinity of points. Nothing hinders us from
considering extension as being itself inserted into a five-dimensional field, and
so on indefinitely” (p. IX).
38. Metzinger and Gleizes, Du cubisme, p. 49.
39. Thanks to the remarkable work of Linda Dalrymple-Henderson in the
United States and Jean Clair in France. For the former, see The Fourth Dimen¬
sion and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press,
1975); for J. Clair, L’Echiquier, les modernes et la quatrieme dimension,” La
Revue d’art, no. 39 (June 1978), and Marcel Duchamp ou le Grand Fictif
(Galilee, 1975). These are the most enlightening works I’ve read on the subject
and what follows owes a lot to them.
40. See especially C. H. Hinton, A New Era of Thought (London, 1888).
41. To be honest, Jouffret does not share Hinton’s point of view, and agrees
rather with Poincare, who holds that the fourth dimension will forever remain
imperceptible. See Revue generate des sciences (1891), p. 774; and also “L’Es-
pace et la geometrie,” Revue de metaphysique et de morale (1895), pp. 63Iff.
42. Hinton, New Era (quoted in English by Jouffret, Trade, Foreword).

269
NOTES TO PAGES 212 - 219

43. Jouffret, Traite, p. XVII.

44. Cf. Jean Clair, “L’echiquier, les modernes, et la quatrieme dimension.”
45. Edwin Abbott, Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, by a Square
(New York: Dover Publications, [1884] 1952).
46. Jouffret, Traite, p. XIV.
47. J. Metzinger, Le Cubisme etait ne (Editions Presence, 1972), p. 23.
48. The article appeared on December 29, 1918, in the Carnet de la se-
maine. See L. Dalrymple-Henderson, Fourth Dimension, p. 72.
49. Metzinger, Le Cubisme etait ne, pp. 43—44.
50. H. Poincare, La Science et I’hypothese, p. 65.
51. Level, “L’Esprit et l’espace: La quatrieme dimension,” Le Theosophe,
March 16, 1911; Noircame, Quatrieme Dimension (Paris: Editions Theoso-
phiques, 1912).
52. See Jean Clair, Marcel Duchamp ou le Grand Fictif, chap. 2, as well as
L. Dalrymple-Henderson, Fourth Dimension, passim.
53. On Pawlowski, see Dalrymple-Henderson, Fourth Dimension, pp. 5Iff.
54. See the Preface to the 1923 edition of the Voyage.
55. Alfred Jarry, “Commentaire pour servir a la construction pratique de la
machine a explorer le temps,” which appeared in February 1899 in the Mer-
cure de France review, as an appendix to the French publication of H. G.
Wells’s The Time Machine. A sign of fiction’s increasing interest in the new
geometries, one could read in its introduction: “It is no more difficult to con¬
ceive of a machine to explore time than it is of one to explore space, whether
one considers time as space’s fourth dimension, or as a site essentially different
because of its content. . . Time is usually defined as the site of events, as space
is the site of bodies. Or, with greater simplicity, succession, whereas space—be
it three-dimensional Euclidean space; four-dimensional space, implied by the
intersection of several three-dimensional spaces; Riemann’s spaces, in which
spheres can be turned inside out, circles being geodesic lines on spheres of
equal radius; Lobachevsky’s spaces, in which a plane cannot be inverted; or
any space other than Euclidean, recognizable in that one cannot, as in the lat¬
ter, build two similar figures there—is simultaneity.”
56. See Gaston de Pawlowski, Le Voyage au pays de la quatrieme dimen¬
sion, p. 30.
57. See Clair, Marcel Duchamp ou le grand fictif.
58. Marcel Duchamp, Ingenieur du temps perdu, Interviews with Pierre
Cabane (Belfond, 1967), pp. 66-67.
59. See the brilliant pages Jean Clair devotes to this letter: “All of the
Large Glass s problematic is, one may say, one of point of view, of perspective.
The figure is transformed according to the observer’s position—a position in
relation to an observed object, but also to the reference system this observer
uses according to whether he lives in a two-, three-, or ^-dimensional world.
If thus all comes down to a problem of projection, projection of a three-
dimensional object on a plane, of a four-dimensional entity on a volume, etc..

270
 NOTES TO PAGES 220 - 229

these projections themselves altering depending on the angle one is considering

them from” (Duchamp, p. 47 [cf. pp. 43ff.]). This interpretation of the Large
ass not only renders a work intelligible that is certainly not so on first ap¬
proach; it is also the only one, to my knowledge, concordant with Duchamp’s
own declarations and fully compatible with the preoccupations of his age, as
numerous, very explicit, passages of Duchamp’s A I’infinitif [In the Infinitive]
confirm (Duchamp du signe: Ecrits [Paris: Flammarion, 1975], pp. 105ff).
60. See Dalrymple-Henderson, Fourth Dimension, chap. 5, “Transcending
the Present: The Fourth Dimension in the Philosophy of Ouspensky and in
Russian Futurism and Suprematism.”
61. The way Duchamp judged Metzinger is telling: “In 1911, two distinct
groups of painters gave shape to the new theory of cubism, then going through
an incubation period. Picasso and Braque on one side; Metzinger, Gleizes, and
Leger on the other. Metzinger was then cubism’s most imaginative theoreti¬
cian, and he must be largely credited with the ever increasing interest the pub¬
lic gave this new form of expression. Through his articles and his book, Du
cubisme [On Cubism], written with Gleizes, he was able to give a substantial
expose of the new painters’ main intentions, and contributed to the clarifi¬
cation of the truly obscure results obtained up to then” (Duchamp du signe,
p. 208). We note that this opinion had already been expressed by A. Salmon in
a Sept. 30, 1911 article in Paris-Journal: “More intellectual than Braque, Jean
Metzinger gathers up the confused, diffuse elements of cubism. He outlines, if
not a doctrine, at least a theory; so that though, truly, cubism comes from
Picasso, Jean Metzinger is, all the same, justified in calling himself its head.”
62. Metzinger, Le Cubisme etait ne: Souvenirs, p. 60.
63. See Jean Paulhan, La Peinture cubiste, pp. 83-84.
64. J. Metzinger, “Cubism and Tradition,” Paris-Journal, August 16, 1911.
65. Paulhan, Peinture cubiste, p. 53.
66. Poincare, La Science et I’hypothese, p. 66.
67. Cf. Duchamp du signe, p. 217.
68. Mercure de France, Ser. 1, vol. 6, 1917.
69. Cited by Jean Clair in “L’echiquier, la quatrieme dimension et les mo-
dernes,” n. 3.
70. Gleizes, Art et religion.
71. Metzinger, Le cubisme etait ne, p. 62.
72. G. W. Leibniz, ‘ Von der Weisheit,” in Deutsche Schriften, ed. Guhr-
auer, vol. 1, p. 442.
73. Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (1973), pp. 8-9.
74. C. Dahlhoun, “La construction du disharmonique,” Contrechamps,
no. 2, pp. 137ff.
75. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music [Philosophie der neuen
Musik], Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt/Main: 1975), Bd. 12, pp. 16-17.
76. Gleizes, Art et religion, p. 105.
77. J. Metzinger, “Cubisme et tradition,” Paris-Journal, August 16, 1911.

271
NOTES TO PAGES 230 - 261

78. Rene Leibowitz, Introduction a la musique de douze sons (17Arche,

1949), pp. 13-14.
79. Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard: Le Postmoderne explique aux enfants (Galilee,
1986), p. 27.
80. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Kaufmann trans., § 374, “Our New
Infinite.”
81. “Correspondance Kandinski-Schonberg,” Schoenberg letter of Jan. 24,
1911, Contrechamps, no. 2, p. 13.
82. Lacoste, L’Idee du beau, p. 5.
83. “I used the term to mean the opposite of all this” (i.e., of a return to
the past). Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (London:
Academy Editions, 4th ed. 1984 [1977]), p. 6.
84. Lyotard, Postmoderne explique, pp. 27-28. On Adorno, see the excel¬
lent article by Albrecht Wellmer, “Dialectique de la modernite et de la post-
modernite,” Cahiers de philosophie, no. 5, Spring 1988.
85. Wellmer, “Dialectique de la modernite,” p. 159.
86. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Transformation sociale et creation culturelle,”
in Capitalisme Moderne et Revolution (Paris: U.G.E., 1979), p. 37.

SEVEN

1. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1097 b 26; trans. W. D. Ross, in Intro¬

duction to Aristotle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
2. Luc Ferry, Political Philosophy, vol. 1, Rights: The New Quarrel be¬
tween the Ancients and the Moderns (Chicago and London: University of Chi¬
cago Press, 1990).
3. Cf. Ferry and Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990), last chapter.
4. On this subject, it pays to come back repeatedly to Pierre-Andre Ta-
quieff s outstanding book on racism, La Force du prejuge: Essai sur le racisme
et ses doubles [The Force of Prejudice: Essay on Racism and Its Double] (La
Decouverte, 1987).

272
 INDEX

Abbott, Edwin, 214, 219 Baumler, A., 14, 72

Adorno, Theodor, 26, 229, 236 Beauty: definitions of, 8-9, 20, 23,
Aestbetica (Baumgarten), 19, 27, 62, 36, 48, 50, 54, 228; by Baumgar¬
66-76, 119 ten, 67—68, 71—72; by Boileau,
Aesthetics, 27, 183, 186, 259; defi¬ 46; by Hegel, 145; in Kant, 88,
nition of, 41, 69, 73, 123, 176; 108, 112; irrationality of, 40
historical emergence of, 18-19, Bell, Daniel, 200, 228, 257; Cul¬
20, 50, 134, 234; and rational¬ tural; Contradictions of Capital¬
ism, 22; and objectivity, 25, 232; ism, 200-205
and sentiment, 45-46, 72, 112, Benjamin, Walter, 26, 75
130 Berkeley, George, 27, 54, 89
analogon rationis, 67, 69-72, 74 Boileau, Nicolas, 10, 22, 27, 33, 41,
Ancients, 8, 22; and moderns, 44, 45; Art poetique, 35-39;
44-45 critical of the baroque, 37—39;
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 207-8, 210, Satires, 36, 46
232, 233 Bonald, La Legislation primitive, 16
Arendt, Hannah, 251 Bouhours, Dominique, 33, 34, 39-
Aristotle, 249-52, 256, 257; 40, 112, 130, 186
Nietzsche on, 177 Boulez, Pierre, 223, 229
Art, 10-12; and artist, 184-85, Breton, Andre, 208
187; in Hegel, 122, 129, 131 —
32; Heidegger and, 188-89; for
Nietzsche, 151-53, 155, 177-78 Cassirer, Ernst, 33, 202; dispute
Aufklarer, 3, 236, 237 with Heidegger, 107, 109-111;
Authenticity, 204, 257-58, 260 on Hume, 54; on sentiment, 41;
Avant-gardes, 31, 47, 202, 228; clas¬ Castonadis, Cornelius, 241-45
sicism of, 223-25, 227, 231, Classicism, 20, 27, 51, 72, 85-86,
238; crisis of, 192-93, 195-96; 208; French, 33-34, 36, 45,
Nietzsche as forerunner, 158, 46, 187, 227; in David Hume,
191; origins of, 196-200, 208; 56, 59; Nietzsche and, 157-58,
public for, 243 184, 186, 188
Corneille, Pierre, 186
Baroque, 35, 37, 112 Critique of judgment (Kant), 10, 21,
Batteux, Charles, 36-37, 43; Les 43, 48-53, 72, 76, 108, 122-23,
Beaux-Arts . . . , 41—42 126, 261; antinomy of taste, 48-
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 19, 53, 88; communication, 96-97;
26, 27, 66, 71; Meditations, 73. judgment of taste, 91, 96, 98,
See also Aestbetica 107; reflective judgment in, 86-

273
INDEX

Critique of Judgment, (continued) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15,

88, 98, 107, 111; the sublime, 21,29, 113, 190, 196; art and
99-107; sympathy, 94-95 philosophy, 114-16; classical
Croce, Benedetto, 14 art, 135—37; and historicity, 116,
Crousaz, 9, 10 118, 121, 128-31, 133, 139;
Cubism, 201, 208-9, 220-21; 146-47, 170, 173; Lectures on
theory of, 214-15, 223, 225-27 Aesthetics, 122, 129-47, 261;
and nature, 123-26; Phenome¬
Deconstruction, 107, 148, 168, 169, nology of Spirit, 116, 119, 128,
191, 236, 238, 240, 259 180, 261; romanticist art, 137-
Heideggerian, 163, 178; Nietz- 39; and Schelling, 114-15;
schean, 180 Science of Logic, 121; and sen¬
Deleuze, Gilles, 148, 157, 173, 183, sible world, 119-20; symbolic
184 art, 134—35
Descartes, Rene, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24, Heidegger, Martin, 15, 30, 95, 195,
36, 236; aesthetics, 184; and 230, 236, 243, 260; Kant and the
cartesianism, 26, 72, 76, 130, Problem of Metaphysics, 108-
155, 171 11; on Kantian ideas, 82-83,
Difference, 148, 207, 230-31, 234, 154; on Nietzsche, 30, 177,
258; in Kant, 95, 97, 99, 107; 181-82, 187; “The Origin of the
in Nietzsche, 158, 166, 184, Work of Art,” 188-91; “Over¬
188-89 coming Metaphysics,” 153—55
Dubos, abbe, 42-44, 46-47, 54, Hinton, Charles Howard, 211, 218
56,57, 130, 186 Historicism, 13, 23, 24, 46, 51, 146,
Duchamp, Marcel, 195, 211, 215, 240; in Hegel, 174; in Nietzsche,
219-20, 223 157-58, 173, 175, 178, 180;
for avant-garde, 199, 234
Ethics, 4; ancient, 249-53; modern, Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 18
253-57; contemporary, 257—60 Hugo, Victor, 186
Humanism, 2, 107-8, 236, 259;
Ferry, Luc, 7-8, 174, 240, 259 Kantian, 108 — 11
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 184 Hume, David, 10, 25, 53-61,
Foucault, Michel, 14, 24, 148, 157, 170, 177, 178; and empiricism,
234; on interpretation, 175 94-95
Fourth dimension. See Space, non- Humor, 112, 127
Euclidean Husserl, Edmund, 77, 82
Francastel, Pierre, 206, 208-9 Hyperbodies, 211, 213-14
French Revolution, origins of, Hyperclassicism, 158, 182, 184,
16-18 187, 227, 231,234
Futurism, 209, 223
Ideas of reason, 44, 50, 78-80, 182;
Genius, 10, 29, 36, 40, 198, 242, in Kant’s Prolegomena, 83-84;
246; for Kant, 126, 145 and beautiful objects, 92-94, 98;
Gracian, Baltasar, 14 and history, 147; and the sub¬
lime, 100-102, 105
Harmony, preestablished, 52, 60- Imagination, 91-92, 94, 102-3,
61, 86, 89, 119, 122 108-9

274
 INDEX

Incoherents, 197 Malebranche, Nicolas de, 36

Individualism, 3, 7-8, 19, 27, 30, Malevich, 201-2, 207, 231
173; in avant-garde, 199, 221, Marx, Karl, 24, 166, 195, 201-2,
223-24; and modernity, 122, 205,245
199-200, 205-7, 259-61; post¬ Meier, Georg Lriedrich, 67, 69
modern, 176, 178, 181 Mendelssohn, Moses, 67
Intelligible world, 28, 63, 66, 70, Metaphysics, critiques of, 24, 77-
112; Nietzsche on, 151-52, 79, 81; in Kant, 107, 144; in
168-69; and sensible, 28, 63, Heidegger, 153-54, 163; Nietz¬
76, 80, 120, 122, 170 sche’s, 153, 157, 170, 172,
Intersubjectivity, 49, 52, 85, 95-97 179
Metzinger, J., 208, 210-11, 214-
Jarry, Alfred, 218, 219 15, 220-21, 223, 226-27, 229
Jencks, Charles, 235, 238-39, 240 Modernity, 3, 4, 19, 25, 201, 241;
Jouffret, E., 211-12 as individualism, 201-2, 205-7,
228; morality of, 253-55; Nietz¬
Kandinsky, Vasili, 11, 197-200, sche on, 161
205, 207, 229, 233 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat,
Kant, Immanuel, 10, 21, 28, 30, 44, Baron de, 9, 23
48—53, 173, 189; categorical im¬ Music, 91, 193-94, 229-30, 239;
perative, 107, 110; conception of in Hegel, 141
space, 84; Critique of Practical
Reason, 107—8; Critique of Pure Nietzsche, Lriedrich, 1, 4, 9, 11, 12,
Reason, 21, 77-82, 86, 90, 98- 21, 24, 25, 31, 146; Beyond
99, 101, 106, 109, 120; and En¬ Good and Evil, 179; The Birth
glish gardens, 107; and finitude, of Tragedy, 148; The Gay Sci¬
77, 81, 83-85, 101, 109; and ence, 160, 168, 169, 175, 232;
morality, 254-57; and nature, genealogy, 148-49, 152-53,
124-26; ontological argument, 159, 169-70, 175, 179, 188;
78-79; Prolegomena, 83. See “grand style,” 185, 187, 234-35;
also Critique of Judgment; Ideas against Hegel, 148-50, 170; and
of reason individualism, 157-59, 161-68,
176, 179; and sensible realm,
Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 21, 69; 29—30, 144; on Socrates, 150-
Phenomenology, 62, 66 51, 186; Twilight of the Idols,
Leibniz, 15, 18, 21, 27, 173; influ¬ 80, 172, 186; The Will to Power,
ence on Hegel, 119-20; Kant’s 12, 156, 159, 161-65, 172, 177,
criticism of, 80-82, 88; and 183-85
Nietzsche, 156, 169-71, 233; on
sensible world, 62-66; on types Orphism, 207
of representation, 73-74, 90
Leibowitz, Rene, 229-30 Panofsky, Erwin, 22
Liberalism, 166, 244-45, 259 Pascal, Blaise, 221
Lipovetsky, Gilles, 206 Paulhan, Jean, 222, 226, 231
Lyotard, Jean-Lranqois, 95, 189, Pawlowski, Gaston de, 218-20, 222
229, 230; on Kant, 107, 110-11; Paz, Octavio, 196
on postmodernism, 236-38 Perspective, 205, 206, 217, 233;

275
INDEX

Perspective, (continued) Space: Euclidean, 158, 191, 211,

avant-garde critique of, 221—22, 216, 224—26; non-Euclidean,
225—27; in Nietzsche, 146, 156, 206, 209-10, 212-18, 222-27,
167-68, 171-72, 188 231
Philonenko, Alexis, 50 Spinoza, Benedict, 36
Picasso, Pablo, 200, 215, 224, 227 Strauss, Leo, 11, 21, 25, 167,
Plato, 8-9, 20, 21, 28, 156, 171, 173-74
224; Nietzsche on, 169, 175, Subject, 1-3, 17-18, 89, 171-72;
181-83, 185 fracture of, 168, 175, 188, 233
Poggioli, Renato, 197 Subjectivity: metaphysics of, 4, 26,
Poincare, Henri, 211, 212, 214, 111, 144, 154, 178-80; history
217, 224 of, 28, 32, 176, 206, 240; mo¬
Postmodernism, 11, 31, 167, 176, nadic conception of, 44; absolute,
234; as decline, 241—44; and 146
representation, 236-37; as re¬ Subjectivization, 9, 14—16, 19; of
turn, 238—39; as supersession, taste, 47; of truth, 223
239-40; as ultramodernism, Surrealism, 227
235-36
Princet, Maurice, 214-15, 225 Taste, 14, 242; judgment of, 33, 98;
transcendence of, 54, 56, 60
Rationalism, 78, 86, 94, 112, 236 Theosophists, 218, 220
Renaut, Alain, 2, 3, 240 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 3, 18, 165-
Romanticism, 88, 184, 187, 261 66, 202, 242, 248
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 96-97,
201 Ultraindividualism, 158, 187, 227,
232-34
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouv-
roy, Comte de, 196-97 Voltaire, 23, 42
St. Peter’s cathedral, 104
Schonberg, Arnold, 11, 198, 200, Wagner, Richard, 186
229-30, 233 Weber, Max, 202—3
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 178, 186 Wellmer, Albrecht, 240
Sensus communis, 27, 28, 85, 94- Weltlosigkeit, 12, 19, 245-47
95, 97, 112, 145, 173 Wolff, Christian, 62, 69, 71, 74, 93;
Severim, Gino, 225-26, 228 Ontology, 64

276
 DATE DUE / DATE DE RETOUR

“O'
-

rtftl
)EC l 0 w

0\\\\
UL
n ft
U ^ 1QQQ
1777

\nt\
UG l 8 21 rau

w JTTTZff 12

CARR MCLEAN 38-297

 RSITY

i
164 0419828 9