Richard Wagner: The Art-Work of the Future (1849): Chapter 5
Derrick Everett
Sway of Abstract Thought and Fashion
The first beginning and foundation of all that exists and all that is
conceivable, is actual physical being. The inner recognition of his
life-need as the common life-need of his species, as distinct from the
life-needs of nature and all her countless living species apart from
man, is the beginning and foundation of man's thinking. Thought is
therefore the characteristic faculty possessed by man, not merely
allowing him to sense the actual and physical from its external aspect,
but to distinguish all its parts according to their essence, and
finally to grasp and picture to himself their intimate connection. The
idea ("Begriff") of a thing is the image formed in thought of its
actual substance; the portrayal of the images of all discernible
substances in one collective image, in which the faculty of thought
presents to itself the picture of the essence of all realities in their
connected sequence, is the work of the highest energy of the human
soul, the spirit ("Geist"). If in this collective image man must
necessarily have included the image, the idea, of his own being too;
nay, if this his own prefigured being must be, before all else, the
artistic force that pictures forth the whole conceptual art-work: then
does this force, with all its joint portrayal of each reality, proceed
alone from the real, physical man; and thus, at bottom, from his
life-need, and finally from that which summoned forth this life-need,
the physical reality of nature.
But where thought casts aside this anchor in reality; where, after
doubled and again redoubled presentment of itself, it fain would look
upon itself as its original cause; where mind ("Geist") instead of as
the last and most conditioned, would conceive itself as the first and
least conditioned action ("Thätigkeit"), and therefore as the ground
and cause of nature, there also is the fly-wheel of necessity removed,
and blind caprice runs headlong -- free, boundless, and unfettered, as
our metaphysicians fancy -- through the workshops of the brain, and
hurls herself, in a raging stream of madness, upon the world of
actuality.
If mind has manufactured nature, if thought has made the actual, if the
philosopher comes before the man: then nature, actuality and man are no
more necessary, and their existence is not only superfluous but even
harmful; for the greatest superfluity of all is the lagging of the
incomplete when once the complete has come into being. In this wise
nature, actuality and man would only then have any meaning, or any
pretext for their presence, when mind -- the unconditioned spirit, the
only cause and reason, and thus the only law unto itself -- employed
them for its absolute and sovereign pleasure. If mind is in itself
necessity, then life is mere caprice, a fantastic masquerade, an idle
pastime, a frivolous whim, a "cartel est notre plaisir" of the mind;
then is all purely human virtue, and love before all else, a thing to
be approved or disallowed according to occasion; then is all purely
human need a luxury, and luxury the only current need; then is the
wealth of nature a thing to be dispensed with, and the parasitic growth
of culture the only indispensable; then is the happiness of man a
secondary matter, and the abstract state the main consideration; the
people the accidental stuff, and the prince and savant the necessary
consumers of this stuff.
If we take the end for the beginning, the satisfaction for the need,
satiety for hunger; then is all movement, all advance, not even
conceivable except in line with a concocted need, a hunger brought
about by stimulation; and this, in very truth, is the lifespring of our
whole culture of to-day, and its utterance is fashion.
Fashion is the artificial stimulus that rouses an unnatural need where
the natural is not to hand; but whatever does not originate in a real
need, is arbitrary, uncalled-for, and tyrannical. Fashion is therefore
the maddest, most unheard-of tyranny that has ever issued from man's
perversity; it demands from nature an absolute obedience; it dictates
to real need a thorough self-disownment in favour of an artificial; it
compels man's natural sense of beauty to worship at the shrine of what
is hateful; it kills his health, to bring him to delight in sickness;
it breaks his strength and all his force, to let him find content in
weakness. Where the absurdest fashion reigns, there must nature be
regarded as the height of absurdity; where the most criminal un-nature
reigns, there must the utterance of nature appear the fellest crime;
where craziness usurps the place of truth, there must truth herself be
prisoned under lock and bar, as crazy.
The soul of fashion is the most absolute uniformity, and its god an
egoistic, sexless, barren god. Its motive force is therefore arbitrary
alteration, unnecessary change, confused and restless striving after
the opposite of its essential uniformity. Its might is the might of
habit. But habit is the invincible despot that rules all weaklings,
cowards, and those bereft of veritable need. Habit is the communism of
egoism, the tough, unyielding swathe of mutual, free-from-want
self-interest; its artificial life-pulse is even that of fashion.
Fashion is therefore no artistic begetting from herself, but a mere
artificial deriving from her opposite, nature; from whom alone she must
at bottom draw her nourishment, just as the luxury of the upper classes
feeds only on the straining of the lower, labouring classes towards
satisfaction of their natural life-needs. The caprice of fashion,
therefore, can only draw upon the stores of actual nature; all her
reshapings, flourishes, and gewgaws have at the last their archetype in
nature. Like all our abstract thinking, in its farthest aberrations,
she finally can think out and invent naught else than what already is
at hand in nature and in man, in substance and in form. But her
procedure is an arrogant one, capriciously cut loose from nature; she
orders and commands, where everything in truth is bound to hearken and
obey. Thus with all her figurings she can but disfigure nature, and not
portray her; she can but derive, and not invent; for invention, in
effect, is naught but finding out, the finding and discerning of
nature.
Fashion's invention is therefore mechanical. But the mechanical is
herein distinguished from the artistic: that it fares from derivative
to derivative, from means to means, to finally bring forth but one more
mean, the machine. Whereas the artistic strikes the very opposite path:
throws means on means behind it, pierces through derivative after
derivative, to arrive at last at the source of every derivation, of
every mean, in nature's self, and there to slake its need in
understanding.
Thus the machine is the cold and heartless ally of luxury-craving men.
Through the machine have they at last made even human reason their
liege subject; for, led astray from art's discovery, dishonoured and
disowned, it consumes itself at last in mechanical refinements, in
absorption into the machine, instead of in absorption into nature in
the art-work.
The need of fashion is thus the diametrical antithesis of the need of
art; for the artistic need cannot possibly be present where fashion is
the lawgiver of life. In truth, the endeavour of many an enthusiastic
artist of our times could only be directed to rousing first that
necessary need, from the standpoint and by the means of art; yet we
must look on all such efforts as vain and fruitless. The one thing that
mind cannot achieve is to awaken a real need: to answer to an actual
present need, man always has the speedy means to hand, but never to
evoke it where nature has withheld it, where its conditionments are not
contained in her economy. But if the craving for art-work does not
exist, then art-work is itself impossible and only the future can call
it forth for us, and that by the natural arising of its conditions from
out of life.
Only from life, from which alone can even the need for her grow up, can
art obtain her matter and her form; but where life is modelled upon
fashion, art can never fashion aught from life. Straying far away from
the necessity of nature, mind wilfully -- and even in the so-called
'common' life, involuntarily -- exercises its disfiguring influence
upon the matter and the form of life; in such a manner that mind, at
last unhappy in its separation, and longing for its healthy sustenance
by nature and its complete re-union with her, can no more find the
matter and the form for its satisfaction in actual present life. If, in
its striving for redemption, it yearns for unreserved acknowledgment of
nature, and if it can only reconcile itself with her in her most
faithful portrayal, in the physical actuality of the art-work: yet it
sees that this reconciliation can nevermore be gained by acknowledgment
and portrayal of its actual surroundings, of this fashion-governed
parody of life. Involuntarily, therefore, must it pursue an arbitrary
course in its struggle for redemption by art; it must seek for nature
-- which in sound and wholesome life would rush to meet it -- amid
times and places where it can recognise her in less, and finally in
least, distortion. Yet in all places and at all time, natural man has
thrown on the garment, if not of fashion, still of custom ("Sitte") The
simplest and most natural, the fairest and the noblest custom is
certainly the least disfigurement of nature; nay, her most fitting
human garb. But the copying and reproduction of this custom, -- without
which the modern artist can never manage to effect his portraiture of
nature -- is still, in face of modern life, an irreclaimably arbitrary
and purpose-governed dealing; and whatsoever has been thus formed and
fashioned by even the honestest striving after nature, appears, so soon
as ever it steps before our present public life, either a thing
incomprehensible, or else another freshly fangled fashion.
In truth we have nothing for which to thank this mode of striving after
nature, within the bounds of modern life and yet in contrast to it, but
mannerism and its ceaseless, restless change. The character of fashion
has once more unwittingly betrayed itself in mannerism; without a shred
of consequent coherence with actual life, it trips up to art with just
the same despotic orders as fashion wields on life; it bands itself
with fashion, and rules with equal might each separate branch of art.
Beneath its serious mien it shows itself -- almost as inevitably as
does its colleague -- in utmost ridicule. Not only the Antique, the
Renaissance and Middle Ages, but the customs and the garb of savage
races in new-discovered lands, the primal fashions of Japan and China,
from time to time usurp as "mannerisms," in greater or in less degree,
each several department of our modern art. Nay, with no other effect
than that of an insufficient stimulus, our lightly veering 'manner of
the day' sets before the least religiously disposed and most genteel of
theatre-goers the fanaticism of religious sects; before the luxurious
un-nature of our fashionable world the naïvety of Swabian peasants;
before the pampered gods of commerce the want of the hungering rabble.
Here, then, does the artist whose spirit strives to be reunited with
nature see all his hopes thrust forward to the future, or else his soul
thrust back upon the mournful exercise of resignation. He recognises
that his thought can only gain redemption in a physically present
art-work, thus only in a truly art-demanding, i.e. an art-conditioning
present that shall bring forth art from its own native truth and
beauty; he therefore sets his hopes upon the future, his trust upon the
power of necessity, for which this work of the future is reserved. But
in face of the actual present, he renounces all appearing of the
art-work upon the surface of this present, i.e. in public show; and
consequently he quits publicity itself; so far as it is ruled by
fashion. The great united art-work, which must gather up each branch of
art to use it as a mean, and in some sense to undo it for the common
aim of all, for the unconditioned, absolute portrayal of perfected
human nature: this great united art-work he cannot picture as depending
on the arbitrary purpose of some human unit, but can only conceive it
as the instinctive and associate product of the manhood of the Future.
The instinct that recognises itself as one that can only be satisfied
in fellowship, abandons modern fellowship -- that conglomerate of
self-seeking caprice -- and turns to find its satisfaction in solitary
fellowship with itself and with the manhood of the future; so well as
the lonely individual can.
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
======= Writing from 59°54'N 10°37'E =======
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/index.htm
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/wagnerfaq.htm