REPOST: The Art-Work of the Future - Part 1 Chapter 5
Derrick Everett
because of propagation problems with the previous posting. Some
participants in the group have reported that they did not receive
all of the parts. I apologize to anyone who receives them twice.
Part I - Chapter 5. The Art-antagonistic Shape of Present Life, under
the 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 individual, 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
Richard Partridge
following:
[snip]
>
> 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.
[snip]
As has been said before, would that we could trade all of Wagner's writing
for one more opera!
Dick Partridge
Derrick Everett
Sometimes when reading Wagner -- with difficulty -- in the original
German, I am reminded of Mark Twain's remarks about turning over page
after page, in a German newspaper, looking for the verb. One might also
recall that Wagner read Bulwer-Lytton, although probably only in German
translation, by which the latter's prose must have been improved; the
complexity of Wagner's sentences, I think, exceeds on average even those
of the author of 'Rienzi, Last of the Tribunes'.
--
Derrick Everett