The relevance ofthe beautifulArt as play, symbol, and festivalI think it is most significant that the question of how art can be justified is not simply a modern problem, but one that has been with usfrom the very earliest times. My first efforts as a scholar werededicated to this question when in 1934 I published an essay entitled"Plato and the Poets."! In fact, as far as we know, it was in the context of the new philosophical outlook and the new claim toknowledge raised by Socratic thought that art was required to justifyitself for the first time in the history ofthe West. Here, for the firsttime, i t ceased to be self-evident that the diffuse reception and interpretation of traditional subject matter handed down in pictorial ornarrative form did possess the right to truth that i t had claimed.Indeed, this ancient and serious problem always arises when a newclaim to truth sets itself up against the tradition that continues toexpress itselfthrough poetic invention or in the language of art. Wehave only to consider the culture of late antiquity and its oftenlamented hostility to pictorial representation. At a time when wallswere covered with incrustation, mosaics, and decoration, the artistsof the age bemoaned the passing of their time. A similar situationarose with the restriction and final extinction offreedom ofspeechand poetic expression imposed by the Roman Empire over theworld of late antiquity, and which Tacitus lamented in his famousdialogue on the decline of rhetoric, the Dialogue on Oratory. Butabove all, and here we approach our own time more closely than wemight at first realize, we should consider the position that Christianity adopted toward the artistic tradition in which it found itself.The rejection of iconoclasm, a movement that had arisen in theChristian Church during the sixth and seventh centuries, was a decision of incalculable significance. For the Chur ch then gave a newmeaning to the visual language ofart and later to the forms ofpoetry4 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 5and narrative. This provided art with a new form of legitimation.The decision was justified because only the new content of theChristian message was able to legitimate once again the traditionallanguage of art. One of the crucial factors in the justification o~ artin the West was the Biblia Pauperum, a pictorial narration ofthe Bibledesigned for the poor, who could not read or knew no Latin andwho consequently were unable to receive the Christian messagewith complete understanding. . .The great history ofWestern art is the consequence o~ this de a -sion which still largely determines our own cultural consaousness. Acommon language for the common content of our self-understanding has been developed through the Christian art ofthe ~iddleAges and the humanistic revival ofGreek and Roman art and literature, right up until the close ofthe eighteenth century and.the gr~atsocial transformations and political and religious changes Wlth whichthe nineteenth century began.In Austria and Southern Germany, for example, i t is hardlynecessary to describe the synthesis of classical and Chri~tian subjectsthat overwhelms us with such vitality in the great surging waves ofBaroque art. Certainly this age of Christian art and the wholeChristian-classical, Christian-humanist tradition did not go unchallenged and underwent major changes, not least ~nder theinfluence of the Reformation. I t in tum brought a new kind of artinto prominence, a kind of music based on the participation of thecongregation, as in the work of Heinrich Schutz and Johann Sebastian Bach, for example. This new style revitalized the language ofmusic through the text, thereby continuing in a quite new way thegreat unbroken tradition ofChristian music that had begun with ~hechorale, which was itself the unity of Latin hymns and Gr egonanmelody bequeathed by Pope Gregory the Great. . . .I t is against this background that the question ofthe Jusnficanonof art first acquires a specific direction. We can seek help here fromthose who have already considered this question. This is not to denythat the new artistic situation experienced in our own century reallydoes signify a break in a tradition still unified until its last great representatives in the nineteenth century. When Hegel, the greatteacher ofspeculative idealism, gave his lectures on aesthetics first inHeidelberg and later in Berlin, one of his opening themes was thedoctrine that art was for us " a thing ofthe past."2 I f we reconstructHegel's approach to the question and think i t through afresh, weshall be amazed to discover how much i t anticipates the question thatwe ourselves address to art. I should like to show this briefly by wayof introduction so that we understand why i t is necessary in thefurther course of our investigation to go beyond the self-evidentcharacter of the dominant concept of art and lay bare theanthropological foundation upon which the phenomenon ofart restsand from the perspective of which we must work out a newlegitimation for art.Hegel's remark about art as " a thing of the past" represents aradical and extreme formulation of philosophy's claim to make theprocess through which we come to know the truth an object of ourknowledge and to know this knowledge ofthe truth in its own right.In Hegel's eyes, this task and this claim, which philosophy hasalways made, are only fulfilled when philosophy comprehends andgathers up into itselfthe totality oftruth as i t has been unfolded in itshistorical development. Consequently Hegelian philosophy alsoclaimed above all to have comprehended the truth ofthe Christianmessage in conceptual form. This included even the deepest mysteryofChristian doctrine, the mystery ofthe trinity. I personally believethat this doctrine has constantly stimulated the course ofthought inthe West as a challenge and invitation to t ry and think that whichcontinually transcends the limits of human understanding.In fact Hegel made the bold claim to have incorporated into hisphilosophy this most profound mystery - which had developed,sharpened, refined, and deepened the thinking of theologians andphilosophers for centuries - and to have gathered the full t ruth ofthis Christian doctrine into conceptual form. I do not want toexpound here this dialectical synthesis whereby the trinity isunderstood philosophically, in the Hegelian manner, as a constantresurrection ofthe spirit. Nevertheless, I must mention i t so that weare in a position to understand Hegel's attitude to art and his statement that it is for us a thing ofthe past. Hegel is not primarily referring to the end ofthe Christian tradition of pictorial imagery in theWest, which, as we believe today, was actually reached then. He didnot have the feeling of being plunged into a challenging wor ld ofalienation in his time, as we do today when confronted by the production of abstract and nonobjective art. Hegel's own reactionwould certainly have been quite different from that ofany visitor tothe Louvre today who, as soon he enters this marvelous collection ofthe great fruits of Western painting, is overwhelmed by the6 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 7revolutionary subjects and coronation scenes depicted by therevolutionary art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies.Hegel certainly did not mean - how could he? - that with theBaroque and its later development in the Rococo, the last Westernartistic style had made its appearance on the stage of human history.He did not know, as we know in retrospect, that the century of historicism had begun. Nor could he suspect that in the twentieth century a daring liberation from the historical shackles of thenineteenth century would succeed in making all previous art appearas something belonging to the past in a different and more radicalsense. When Hegel spoke of art as a thing ofthe past he meant thatart was no longer understood as a presentation of the divine in theself-evident and unproblematical way in which i t had been understood in the Gr e ek world. The r e the divine was manifest in the temple, which in the southern light stood out against the naturalbackground, open to the eternal powers of nature, and was visiblyrepresented in great sculpture, in human forms shaped by humanhands. Hegel's real thesis was that while for the Greeks the god orthe divine was principally and properly revealed in their own artisticforms of expression, this became impossible wi th the arrival ofChristianity. The truth of Christianity with its new and more profound insight into the transcendence ofGod could no longer be adequately expressed within the visual language of art or the imagery ofpoetic language. For us the work of art is no longer the presence ofthe divine that we revere. The claim that art is a thing of the pastimplies that with the close of antiquity, art inevitably appeared torequire justification. I have already suggested that what we call theChristian art ofthe West represents the impressive way in which thislegitimation was accomplished over the centuries by the Church andfUsed with the classical tradition by the humanists.So long as art occupied a legitimate place in the world, i t wasclearly able to effect an integration between community, society,and the Church on the one hand and the self-understanding ofthecreative artist on the other. Our problem, however, is precisely thefact that this self-evident integration, and the universally sharedunderstanding of the artist's role that accompanies it, no longerexists - and indeed no longer existed in the nineteenth century. I t isthis fact that finds expression in Hegel's thesis. Even then, greatartists were beginning to find themselves to a greater or lesserdegree displaced in an increasingly industrialized and commercialized society, so that the modern artist found the old reputation ofthe itinerant artist of former days confirmed by his own bohemianfate. In the nineteenth century, every artist lived with the knowledge that he could no longer presuppose the former unproblematiccommunication between himself and those among whom he livedand for whom he created. The nineteenth-century artist does notlive within a community, but creates for himself a community as isappropriate to his pluralistic situation. Openly admitted competitioncombined with the claim that his own particular form of creativeexpression and his own particular artistic message is the only trueone, necessarily gives rise to heightened expectations. This is in factthe messianic consciousness of the nineteenth-century artist, whofeels himself to be a "new savior" (Immermann) with a claim onmankind.3He proclaims a new message of reconciliation and as asocial outsider pays the price for this claim, since with all his artistryhe is only an artist for the sake of art.But what is all this compared to the alienation and shock withwhich the more recent forms ofartistic expression in our century taxour self-understanding as a public?I should like to maintain a tactful silence about the extreme difficulty faced by performing artists when they bring modern music tothe concert hall. I t can usually only be performed as the middle itemin a program - otherwise the listeners will arrive later or leave early.This fact is symptomatic of a situation that could not have existedpreviously and its significance requires consideration. I t expressesthe conflict between art as a "religion of culture" on the one handand art as a provocation by the modern artist on the other. I t is aneasy matter to trace the beginnings of this conflict and its gradualradicalization in the history of nineteenth-century painting. Thenew provocation was heralded in the second ha l f of the nineteenthcentury by the breakdown of the status of linear perspective,which was one of the fundamental presuppositions of the selfunderstanding of the visual arts as practised in recent centuries.4This can be observed for the first time in the pictures ofHans vonMarees. I t was later developed by the great revolutionary movementthat achieved worldwide recognition through the genius of PaulCezanne. Certainly linear perspective is not a self-evident fact ofartistic vision and expression, since it did not exist at all during theChristian Middle Ages. I t was during the Renaissance, a time of a8 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 9vigorous upsurge of enthusiasm for all scientific and mathematicalconstruction, that linear perspective became the norm for paintingas one of the great wonders of artistic and scientific progress. I t isonly as we have gradually ceased to expect linear perspective andstopped taking it for granted that our eyes have be en opened to thegreat art of the High Middle Ages. At that time paintings did notrecede like views from a window with the immediate foregroundpassing into the distant horizon. They were clearly to be read like atext written in pictorial symbols, thus combining spiritual instruction with spiritual elevation.Thus linear perspective simply represented a historical and t emporary form of artistic expression. Yet its rejection anticipated morefar-reaching developments in modern art, which would take us evenfurther from the previous tradition of artistic form. He r e I woulddraw attention to the destruction of traditional form by Cubismaround 1910, a movement in which almost all the great painters ofthe time participated, at least for some time; and to the furthertransformation ofthe Cubist break wi th tradition, which l ed to thetotal elimination of any reference to an external object of the process of artistic creation. I t remains an open question whether or notthis denial of our realistic expectations is ever really total. But onething is quite certain: the naive assumption that the picture is a view- like that which we have daily in our experience of nature or ofnature shaped by man - has clearly be en fundamentally destroyed.We can no longer see a Cubist picture or a nonobjective painting at aglance, with a merely passive gaze. We must make an active contribution ofour own and make an effort to synthesize the outlines ofthe various planes as they appear on the canvas. Only then, perhaps,can we be seized and uplifted by the profound harmony and rightness of a work, in the same way as readily happened in earlier timeson the basis of a pictorial content common to all. We shall have toask what that means for our investigation. Or , again, l e t me mentionmode rn music and the completely new vocabulary of harmony anddissonance that i t employs, or the peculiar complexity it hasachieved by breaking the older rules of composition and the principles ofmusical construction that were characteristic ofthe classicalperiod. We can no more avoid this than we can avoid the fact thatwhen we visit a museum and enter the rooms devoted to the mostrecent artistic developments, we really do leave something behindus. I f we have be en open to the new, we cannot help noticing apeculiar weakening ofour receptiveness when we return to the old.This reaction is clearly only a question ofcontrast, rather than a lasting experience of a permanent loss, but it brings out the acute difference between these new forms of art and the old.I would also mention hermetic poetry, which has always been ofparticular interest to philosophers. For, where no one else canunderstand, i t seems that the philosopher is called for. In fact, thepoetry ofour time has reached the limits ofintelligible meaning andperhaps the greatest achievements ofthe greatest writers are themselves marked by tragic speechlessness in the face ofthe unsayable.5Then there is modern drama, which treats the Classical doctrine ofthe unity oftime and action as a relic ofthe past and consciously andemphatically denies the unity of dramatic character, even makingthis denial into a formal principle ofdrama, as in Bertolt Brecht, forexample. Then there is the case of modern architecture: what aliberation - or temptation, perhaps - it has be en to defy thetraditional principles ofstructural engineering wi th the help ofmodern materials and to create something totally new that has no resemblance to the traditional methods of erecting buildings brick uponbrick. These buildings seem to teeter upon their slender delicatecolumns, while the walls, the whole protective out e r structure, arereplaced by tentlike coverings and canopies. This cursory overviewis only intended to bring out what has actually happened and why arttoday poses a new question. Why does the understanding ofwhat artis today present a task for thinking?I would like to develop this on various levels. I shall proceedinitially from the basic principle that our thinking in this mattermust be able to cover the great traditional art ofthe past, as well asthe art of modern times. For although modern art is opposed totraditional art, i t is also true that i t has be en stimulated andnourished by it. We must first presuppose that both are really formsof art and that they do belong together. I t is not simply that no contemporary artist could have possibly developed his own daringinnovations without being familiar with the traditional language ofart. Nor is i t simply a matter ofsaying that we who experience artconstantly face the coexistence of past and present. This is not simply the situation in which we find ourselves when we pass from oneroom to another in a museum or when we are confronted, perhapsreluctantly, with modern music on a concert program or with modern plays in the theater or even with mode rn reproductions of10 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 11Classical art. We are always in this position. In our daily life we proceed constantly through the coexistence of past and future. Theessence ofwhat is called spirit lies in the ability to move within thehor iwn of an open future and an unrepeatable past. Mnemosyne,the muse of memory and recollective appropriation, rules here asthe muse of spiritual freedom. The same activity of spirit findsexpression in memory and recollection, which incorporates the artofthe past along with our own artistic tradition, as well as in recentdaring experiments with their unprecedented deformation of form.We shall have to ask ourselves what follows from this unity ofwhatis past and what is present.But this unity is not only a question of our aesthetic understanding. Our task is not only to recognize the profound continuity thatconnects the formal language of the past with the contemporaryrevolution ofartistic form. A new social force is at work in the claimofthe modern artist. The confrontation with the bourgeois religionof culture and its ritualistic enjoyment ofart leads the contemporaryartist to t ry and involve us actively in this claim in various ways. Forexample, the viewer of a Cubist or a nonobjective painting has toconstruct i t for himself by synthesizing the facets of the differentaspects step by step. The claim ofthe artist is that the new attitude toart that inspires him establishes at the same time a new form ofsolidarity or universal communication. By this I do not simply meanthat the great creative achievements of art are absorbed, or ratherdiffused, in countless ways into the practical world or the world ofdecorative design all around us, and so come to produce a certainstylistic unity in the world ofhuman labor. This has always been thecase and there is no doubt that the constructivist tendency that weobserve in contemporary art and architecture exerts a profoundinfluence on the design of all the appliances we encounter daily inthe kitchen, the home, in transport, and in public life. It is no accident that the artist comes to terms with a tension in his work be -tween the expectations harbored by custom and the introduction ofnew ways of doing things. Our situation of extreme modernity, asexhibited by this kind of conflict and tension, is so striking that itposes a problem for thought.Two things seem to meet here: our historical consciousness andthe self-conscious reflection of modern man and the artist. Weshould not think of historical awareness in terms ofrather scholarlyideas or in terms of world-views. We should simply think of whatwe take for granted when confronted with any artistic work of thepast. We are not even aware that we approach such things with historical consciousness. We recognize the dress ofa bygone age as historical, we accept traditional pictorial subjects presented in variouskinds of costume, and we are not surprised when Altdorfer as a matter ofcourse depicts medieval soldiers marching in "mode rn" troopformations in his painting "The Battle of I s sus " - a s i fAlexander theGreat had actually defeated the Persians dressed as we see himthere.6This is self-evident to us because our sensibility is historicallyattuned. I would even go so far as to say that without this historicalsensibility we would probably be unable to perceive the precisecompositional mastery displayed by earlier art. Perhaps only a person completely ignorant of history, a very rare thing today, wouldallow himselfto be really disturbed by things that are strange in thisway. Such a person would be unable to experience in an immediateway that unity of form and content that clearly belongs to theessence of all true artistic creation.Historical consciousness, then, is not a particularly scholarlymethod of approach, nor one that is determined by a particularworld-view. I t is simply the fact that our senses are spirituallyorganized in such a way as to determine in advance our perceptionand experience of art. Clearly connected with this is the fact - andthis too is a form of self-conscious reflection - that we do notrequire a naive recognition in which our own world is merely reproduced for us in a timelessly valid form. On the contrary, we areself-consciously aware ofboth our own great historical tradition as awhole and, in their otherness, even the traditions and forms ofquitedifferent cultural worlds that have not fundamentally affected Western history. And we can thereby appropriate them for ourselves.This high level ofself-conscious reflection which we all bring withus helps the contemporary artist in his creative activity. Clearly i t isthe task ofthe philosopher to investigate the revolutionary mannerin which this has come about and to ask why historical consciousnessand the new self-conscious reflection arising from it combine with aclaim that we cannot renounce: namely, the fact that everything wesee stands there before us and addresses us directly as i fi t showed usourselves. Consequently I regard the development of the appropriate concepts for the question as the first step in our investigation.First, I shall introduce in relation to philosophical aesthetics the conceptual apparatus with which we intend to tackle the subject in ques-tion. Then I shall show how the three concepts announced in thetitle will pl aya leading role in what follows: the appeal to play, theexplication ofthe concept ofthe symbol (that is, ofthe possibility ofself-recognition), and finally, the festival as the inclusive concept forregaining the idea of universal communication.I t is the task of philosophy to discover what is common even inwhat is different. According to Plato, the task of the philosophicaldialectician is " to learn to see things together in respect ofthe one."7Wha t means does the philosophical tradition offer us to solve thisproblem or to bring it to a clearer understanding ofitself? The problem that we have posed is that of bridging the enormous gap be -tween the traditional form and content ofWestern art and the idealsof contemporary artists. The word art itself gives us a first orientation. We should never underestimate what a word can tell us, forlanguage represents the previous accomplishment of thought. Thuswe should take the word art as our point of departure. Anyone withthe slightest historical knowledge is aware that this word has had theexclusive and characteristic meaning that we ascribe to it today forless than two hundred years. In the eighteenth century it was stillnatural to say " the fine arts" where we today would say " a r t . " Foralongside the fine arts were the mechanical arts, and the art in thetechnical sense of handicrafts and industrial production, which constituted by far the larger part ofhuman skills. Therefore we shall notfind our concept of art in the philosophical tradition. But what wecan learn from the Greeks, the fathers ofWestern thought, is precisely the fact that art belongs in the realm of what Aristotle calledpoietike episteme, the knowledge and facility appropriate to production.s Wha t is common to the craftsman's producing and the artist'screating, and what distinguishes such knowing from theory or frompractical knowing and deciding is that a work becomes separatedfrom the activity. This is the essence of production and must beborne in mind i fwe wish to understand and evaluate the limits ofthemodern critique ofthe concept ofthe work, which has been directedagainst traditional art and the bourgeois cultivation of enjoymentassociated with it. The common feature here is clearly theemergence ofthe work as the intended goal ofregulated effort. Thework is set free as such and released from the process of productionbecause it is by definition destined for use. plato always emphasizedthat the knowledge and skill ofthe producer are subordinate to considerations ofuse and depend upon the knowledge ofthe user oftheproduct.9In the familiar Platonic example, i t is the ship's masterwho determines what the shipbuilder is to build.to Thus the conceptofthe work points toward the sphere of common use and commonunderstanding as the realm of intelligible communication. But thereal question now is how to distinguish " a r t " from the mechanicalarts within this general concept of productive knowledge. Theanswer supplied by antiquity, which we shall have to considerfurther, is that here we are concerned with imitative activity. Imitation is thereby brought into relation with the total horizon ofphusisor nature. Art is only "possible" because the formative activity ofnature leaves an open domain which can be filled by the productionsofthe human spirit. Wha t we call art compared with the formativeactivity of production in general is mysterious in several respects,inasmuch as the work is not real in the same way as what i t represents. On the contrary, the work functions as an imitation and thusraises a host of extremely subtle philosophical problems, includingabove all the problem ofthe ontological status of appearance. Wha tis the significance ofthe fact that nothing " r e a l " is produced here?The work has no real "us e " as such, but finds its characteristicfulfillment when our gaze dwells upon the appearance itself. Weshall have more to say about this later. But it was clear from the firstthat we cannot expect any direct help from the Greeks, i f theyunderstood what we call art as at best a kind ofimitation of nature.Of course, such imitation has nothing to do with the naturalistic orrealistic misconceptions ofmodern art theory. As Aristotle's famousremark in the Poetics confirms, "Poetry is more philosophical thanhistory."l1 For history only relates how things actually happened,whereas poetry tells us how things may happen and teaches us torecognize the universal in all human action and suffering. Since theuniversal is obviously the topic of philosophy, art is more philosophical than history precisely because i t too intends the universal.This is the first pointer that the tradition of antiquity provides.A second, more far-reaching point in our considerations of theword art leads us beyond the limits of contemporary aesthetics."Fine a r t " is in German die schone Kunst, literally "beautiful a r t . "But what is the beautiful?Even today we can encounter the concept ofthe beautiful in variousexpressions that still preserve something of the old, original Greekmeaning of the word kalon. Unde r certain circumstances, we tooconnect the concept of the beautiful with the fact that, by es-12 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 13tablished custom, there is open recognition that some things areworth seeing or are made to be seen. The expression die schOne Sittlichkeit - literally "beautiful ethical life" - still preserves thememory ofthe Gr e ek ethico-political world which German idealismcontrasted with the soulless mechanism of the modem state(Schiller, Hegel). This phrase does not mean that their ethical customs were full ofbeauty in the sense of being filled with pomp andostentatious splendor. It means that the ethical life of the peoplefound expression in all forms of communal life, giving shape to thewhole and so allowing men to recognize themselves in their ownworld. Even for us the beautiful is convincingly defined as something that enjoys universal recognition and assent. Thus i t belongs toour natural sense ofthe beautiful that we cannot ask why i t pleasesus. We cannot expect any advantage from the beautiful since i tserves no purpose. The beautiful fulfills itself in a kind of selfdetermination and enjoys its own self-representation. So much forthe word.Whe r e do we encounter the most convincing self-fulfillment ofthe essence of the beautiful? In orde r to understand the effectivebackground of the problem of the beautiful, and perhaps of art aswell, we must remember that for the Greeks i t was the heavenlyorder of the cosmos that presented the true vision of the beautiful.This was a Pythagorean element in the Gr e ek idea ofthe beautiful.We possess in the regular movements of the heavens one of thegreatest intuitions of order to be found anywhere. The periodiccycle ofthe year and ofthe months, the alternation ofday and night,provide the most reliable constants for the experience of order andstand in marked contrast with the ambiguity and instability ofhuman affairs.From this perspective, the concept ofthe beautiful, particularly inPlato's thought, sheds a great deal of light on the problem withwhich we are concerned. In the Phaedrus Plato offers us a greatmythological description ofman's destiny, his limitations comparedwith the divine, and his attachment to the earthly burden ofthe sensuous life ofthe body.12 Then he describes the marvelous processionof souls that reflects the heavenly movement of the stars by night.The r e is a chariot race to the vault ofthe heavens l ed by the Olympian gods. The human souls also drive their chariots and follow thedaily processions of the gods. At the vault of the heavens, the trueworld is revealed to view. There, in place of the disorder andinconstancy that characterize our so-called experience of the worlddown here on earth, we perceive the true constants and unchangingpatterns ofbeing. But while the gods surrender themselves totally tothe vision of the true world in this encounter, our human souls aredistracted because of their unruly natures. They can only cast amomentary and passing glance at the eternal orders, since theirvision is clouded by sensuous desire. Then they plunge back towardthe earth and leave the truth behind them, retaining only the vaguestremembrance of it. Then we come to the point that I wish toemphasize. These souls who, so to speak, have lost their wings, areweighed down by earthly cares, unable to scale the heights of thetruth. There is one experience that causes their wings to grow onceagain and that allows them to ascend once more. This is theexperience of love and the beautiful, the love ofthe beautiful. Platodescribes this experience of growing love in a wonderful andelaborate fashion and relates i t to the spiritual perception ofthe beautiful and the true orders ofthe world. It is by virtue ofthebeautiful that we are able to acquire a lasting remembrance ofthe true world. This is the way of philosophy. Plato describes thebeautiful as that which shines forth most clearly and draws us toitself, as the very visibility of the ideal.13In the beautiful presentedin nature and art, we experience this convincing illumination oftruth and harmony, which compels the admission: "This is t rue . "The important message that this story has to teach is that theessence of the beautiful does not lie in some realm simply opposedto reality. On the contrary, we learn that however unexpected ourencounter with beauty may be, i t gives us an assurance that the truthdoes not lie far of f and inaccessible to us, but can be encountered inthe disorder of reality with all its imperfections, evils, errors,extremes, and fateful confusions. The ontological function of thebeautiful is to bridge the chasm between the ideal and the real. Thusthe qualification of art as "beautiful" or " f ine " provides a secondessential clue for our consideration.A third step leads us directly to aesthetics as i t is called in the history of philosophy. As a late development aesthetics coincided,significantly enough, with the process by which art prope r wasdetached from the sphere oftechnical facility; and with this emancipation i t came to acquire the quasi-religious function that i tpossesses for us now, both in theory and practice.As a philosophical discipline, aesthetics only emerged during the14 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 15age of rationalism in the eighteenth century. I t was obviouslystimulated by modem rationalism itself, which was based upon thedevelopment of the constructive sciences of nature in the seventeenth century, sciences which, by their breathtakingly rapidtransformation into technology, have in tum come to shape the faceof our world.Wha t l ed philosophy to tum its attention to the beautiful? Theexperience of a r t and beauty seems to be a realm of utterly subjective caprice compared with the rationalist's exclusive orientationtowa rd the mathematical regularities of nature and its significancefor the control ofnatural forces. For this was the great breakthroughofthe seventeenth century. Wha t claims can the phenomenon ofthebeautiful have in this context? Our recourse to ancient thought helpsus to see that in a r t and the beautiful we encounter a significance thattranscends all conceptual thought. How do we grasp this truth?Alexander Baumgarten, the founder of philosophical aesthetics,spoke of a cognitio sensitiva or "sensuous knowl edge . " 14 This idea is aparadoxical one for the traditional conception ofknowledge as i t hasbe en developed since the Greeks. We can only speak ofknowledgeprope r when we have ceased to be de t e rmined by the subjective andthe sensible and have come to grasp the universal, the regularity inthings. Then the sensible in all its particularity only enters the sceneas a particular case ofa universal law. Now clearly in our experienceof the beautiful, in nature and in art, we neither verify our expectations, nor r e cord what we encounter as a particular case of theuniversal. An enchanting sunset does not represent a case ofsunsetsin general. It is rather a unique sunset displaying the " t r agedy oftheheavens." And in the realm ofa r t above all, it is self-evident that thework of art is not experienced in its own r ight i f i t is only acknowledged as a link in a chain that leads elsewhere. The " t ruth"that is possesses for us does not consist in some universal regularitythat merely presents itselfthrough the work. Rather, cognitio sensitivameans that in the apparent particularity of sensuous experience,which we always attempt to relate to the universal, there is something in our experience ofthe beautiful that arrests us and compelsus to dwell upon the individual appearance itself.Wha t is the relevance of this fact? Wha t do we learn from this?Wha t is the importance and significance ofthis particular experiencewhich claims t ruth for itself, thereby denying that the universalexpressed by the mathematical formulation of the laws of nature is16 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 17the only kind of truth? It is the task of philosophical aesthetics tosupply an answer to this question.IS And i t is useful to ask which ofthe arts is likely to provide the best answer. We recognize the greatvariety and range of artistic activities that stretches from the transitory arts ofmusic and spoken language to the static arts like painting and sculpture and architecture. The different media in whichhuman art finds expression allow its products to appear in a differentlight, but we can suggest an answer to this question i f i t isapproached from a historical point of view. Baumgarten oncedefined aesthetics as the ars pulchre cogitandi or the " a r t of thinkingbeautifully."16 Anyone wi th a sensitive ear will immediately noticethat this expression has be en formed on analogy wi th the definitionofrhetoric as the ars bene dicendi or the " a r t ofspeaking we l l . " Thisrelationship is not accidental, for rhetoric and poetics have belongedtogether since antiquity, and in a sense, rhetoric took precedenceover poetics. Rhetoric is the universal form of human communication, which even today determines our social life in an incomparablymore profound fashion than does science. The classic definition ofrhetoric as the " a r t ofspeaking we l l " carries immediate conviction.Baumgarten clearly based his definition of aesthetics as the " a r t ofthinking beautifully" on this definition. The r e is an important suggestion here that the arts oflanguage may well pl aya special pa r t insolving the problems that we have set ourselves. This is all the moreimportant since the leading concepts that govern our aesthetic considerations usually start from the opposite direction. Our reflectionis almost always oriented toward the visual arts, and i t is in thatrealm that our aesthetic concepts are most readily applied. The r e aregood reasons for this. It is not simply on account ofthe visible presence of static art, in contrast to the transitory nature of drama,music, or poetry, which present themselves only fleetingly. It issurely because the Platonic heritage permeates all our reflectionsupon the beautiful. Plato conceived true being as the original image,and the wor ld of appearance as the reflected image, of this exemplary original.I7The r e is something convincing about this as far asart is concerned, as long as we do not trivialize it. In orde r to unde r -stand our experience of art, we are t empt ed to search the depths ofmystical language for daring new words like the Ge rman Anbild - anexpression that captures both the image and the viewing ofit.IS Fori t is true that we both elicit the image from things and imaginativelyproject the image into things in one and the same process. Thusaesthetic reflection is oriented above all towa rd the power ofimagination as the human capacity of image building.I t is here that Kant's great achievement is to be found. He far surpassed Baumgarten, the rationalist pre-Kantian founder of aesthetics, and recognized for the first time the experience ofa r t and beautyas a philosophical question in its own right. He sought an answer tothe question of how the experience in which we " f ind somethingbeautiful" could be binding in such a way that i t does not simplyexpress a subjective reaction of taste. He r e we find no universali~comparable to that of the laws of nature, whi ch serve to explamindividual sensuous experience as a particular case. Wha t is this t ruththat is encountered in the beautiful and can come to be shared? Ce r -tainly not the sort oft ruth or universality to which we apply the conceptual universality of the understanding. Despite this, th~ kind oft ruth that we encounter in the experience of the beautlful doesunambiguously make a claim to more than me r e ly subjectivevalidity. Otherwise it would have no binding t ruth ~or us. When. Ifind something beautiful, I do not simply mean tha t It pleases me mthe same sense that I find a meal to my taste. When I find somethingbeautiful, I think that i t " i s " beautiful. Or , to adapt a Kantianexpression, I "demand everyone's agreement."19 This presumptionthat everyone should agree with me does not, however, im~ly th~t Icould convince them by argument. Tha t is not the way m whichgood taste may become universal. On the contrary, each individualhas to develop his sense for the beautiful in such a way that he comesto discriminate be twe en what is beautiful to a greater or lesserdegree. I t does not come about by producing good reasons or conclusive proofs for one's taste. The realm of art criticism that tries todevelop taste hovers be twe en "scientific" demonstration and thesense of quality that determines judgment wi thout becoming pure~yscientific. "Cr i t i c i sm" as the discrimination of degrees of beauty ISnot really a subsequent judgment by means ofwhi ch we could subsume the "be aut i ful " scientifically unde r concepts or produce acomparative assessment ofquality. Rather i t is the experience ofthebeautiful itself. I t is significant that Kant uses primarily naturalbeauty rather than the work of art to illustrate the " judgment oftaste" in which the perception ofbeauty is elicited from appearancesand demanded of everyone. I t is this "nonsignificant beauty" thatcautions us against applying concepts to the beautiful in art.20I shall here simply draw upon the philosophical tradition ofaesthetics to help us wi th the question that we have posed: how canwe find an all-embracing concept to cover both wha t a r t is today andwhat it has be en in the past? The probl em is that we cannot talkabout great a r t as simply belonging to the past, any more than wecan talk about mode rn art only becoming "pur e " a r t through therejection of all significant content. This is a remarkable state ofaffairs. I fwe reflect for a moment and t ry to consider what i t is thatwe mean when we talk about art, then we come up against aparadox. As far as so-called classical a r t is concerned, we are talkingabout the production of works whi ch in themselves were notprimarily understood as art. On the contrary, these forms wereencountered within a religious or secular context as an adornment ofthe life-world and ofspecial moments like worship, the representation of a ruler, and things ofthat kind. As soon as the concept of arttook on those features to which we have become accustomed andthe work of art began to stand on its own, divorced from its originalcontext of life, only then did a r t become simply " a r t " in the"mus eum wi thout walls" ofMalraux.21 The great artistic revolutionof mode rn times, which has finally led to the emancipation of artfrom all of its traditional subject-matters and to the rejection ofintelligible communication itself, began to assert itself when a r twished to be a r t and nothing else. Art has now become doubly problematic: is it still art, and does it even wish to be considered art?Wha t lies behind this paradoxical situation? Is art always a r t andnothing but art?Kant's definition ofthe autonomy ofthe aesthetic, in relation topractical reason on the one hand and theoretical reason on the other,provided an orientation for further advances in this respect. This isthe point ofKant's famous expression according to which the joy wetake in the beautiful is a "disinterested delight. "22 Naturally, "disinterested delight" means that we are not interested in what appears orin what is " r epr e s ent ed" from a practical point ofview. Disinterestedness simply signifies that characteristic feature of aestheticbehavior that forbids us to inquire after the purpose served by art.We cannot ask, "Wha t purpose is served by enjoyment?"I t is true that the approach to art through the experience ofaesthetic taste is a relatively external one and, as everyone knows,somewhat diminishing. Nevertheless Kant rightly characterizes suchtaste as sensus communis or common sense.23Taste is communicative;i t represents something that we all possess to a greater or lesser18 Part IThe relevance of the beautiful 19degree. I t is clearly meaningless to talk about a purely individual andsubjective taste in the field of aesthetics. To this extent it is to Kantthat we owe our initial understanding of the validity of aestheticclaims, even though nothing is subsumed unde r the concept of apurpose. But what then are the experiences that best fulfill the idealof " f r e e " and disinterested delight? Kant is thinking of "naturalbeauty," as in a beautiful drawing of a flower or ofsomething likethe decorative design on a tapestry which intensifies our feeling forlife by the play of its pattern.24The function of decorative art is toplay this ancillary role. The only things that can simply be calledbeautiful without qualification are either things of nature, whichhave not been endowed with meaning by man, or things of humanart, which deliberately eschew any imposition of meaning andmerely represent a play of form and color. We are not meant tolearn or recognize anything here. The r e is nothing worse than anobtrusive wallpaper that draws attention to its individual motifs aspictorial representations in their own right, as the feverish dreams ofchildhood can confirm. The point about this description is preciselythat the dynamic of aesthetic delight comes into play without a process of conceptualization, that is, without our seeing or understanding something "as something." But this is an accurate descriptiononly of an extreme case. I t serves to show that when we takeaesthetic satisfaction in something, we do not relate it to a meaningwhich could ultimately be communicated in conceptual terms.But this is not the question at issue. Our question concerns whatart is. And certainly we are not primarily thinking here of thesecondary forms of the decorative arts and crafts. Of course,designers can be significant artists, but as designers they perform aservice. Now Kant defined beauty proper as " f r e e beauty," which inhis language means a beauty free from concept and significant content.25Naturally he did not mean that the creation ofsuch beautyfree from significant content represents the ideal of art. In the caseof art, i t is true that we always find ourselves held between the pureaspect of visibility presented to the viewer by the "in-sight"(Anbild), as we called it, and the meaning that our understandingdimly senses in the work of art. And we recognize this meaningthrough the import that every encounter has for us. Whe r e does thismeaning come from? Wha t is this additional something by virtue ofwhich art clearly becomes what it is for the first time? Kant did notwant to define this additional something as a content. And indeed, aswe shall see, there are good reasons why i t is actually impossible todo so. Kant's great achievement, however, lay in his advance overthe mere formalism of the "pur e judgment oftaste" and the overcoming of the "standpoint of taste" in favor of the "standpoint ofgenius. "26 I t was in terms of genius that the eighteenth centuryexperienced Shakespeare's work and its violation of the acceptedrules oftaste, which had been established by French classicism. Lessing, for example, opposed the classicist aesthetic of rules derivedfrom French tragedy, although in a very one-sided fashion, and hecelebrated Shakespeare as the voice ofnature realizing its own creative spirit through genius.27And in fact, Kant too understood geniusas a natural power. He described the genius as a "favorite ofna tur e "who thereby, like nature, creates something that seems as though itwere made in accordance with rules, although without consciousattention to them.28Furthermore, the work seems like somethingunprecedented, which has be en produced according to still unformulated rules. Art is the creation ofsomething exemplary which isnot simply produced by following rules. Clearly this definition ofart as the creation of genius can never really be divorced from thecon-geniality ofthe one who experiences it. A kind offree play is atwork in both cases.Taste was also characterized as a similar play of the imaginationand the understanding. I t is, with a different emphasis, the same freepl aya s that encountered in the creation of the work of art. Onlyhere the significant content is articulated through the creativeactivity of the imagination, so that it dawns on the understanding,or, as Kant puts it, allows us " to go on to think much that cannot besaid. "29 Naturally this does not mean that we simply project concepts onto the artistic representation before us. For then we wouldbe subsuming the perceptually given under the universal as a particular case ofit. Tha t is not the nature of aesthetic experience. Onthe contrary, it is only in the presence of the particular individualwork that concepts " come to reverberate,"30 as Kant says. This finephrase originated in the musical language ofthe eighteenth century,with particular reference to the favorite instrument ofthe time, theclavichord, which created a special effect of suspended reverberation as the note continued to vibrate long after being struck. Kantobviously means that the concept functions as a kind of soundingboard capable ofarticulating the free play ofthe imagination. So far,so good. German idealism in general also recognized the ap-20 Part 1The relevance of the beautiful 21The concept of play is of particular significance in this regard. Thefirst thing we must make clear to ourselves is that play is so elementary a function of human life that culture is quite inconceivablewithout this element. Thinkers like Huizinga and Guardini, amongothers, have stressed for a long time that the element of play isincluded in man's religious and cultic practices.31I t is worth lookingmore closely at the fundamental givenness of human play and itsstructures in orde r to reveal the element ofpl aya s free impulse andnot simply negatively as freedom from particular ends. When do wespeak ofplay and what is implied when we do? Surely the first thingis the to and fro of constantly repeated movement - we only have tothink of certain expressions like " the play of l ight " and " the play ofthe waves" where we have such a constant coming and going, backand forth, a movement that is not tied down to any goal. Clearlywhat characterizes this movement back and forth is that neither poleofthe movement represents the goal in which it would come to rest.Furthermore, a certain leeway clearly belongs to such a movement.This gives us a great deal to think about for the question of art. Thispearance of meaning or the idea - or whatever else one chooses tocall i t - without thereby making the concept the real focal point ofaesthetic experience. But is this sufficient to solve our problem concerning the unity that binds together the classical artistic traditionand modem art? How can we understand the innovative forms ofmodem art as they play around with the content so that our expectations are constantly frustrated? How are we to understand whatcontemporary artists, or certain trends of contemporary art, evendescribe as "happenings" or anti-art? How are we to understandwhat Duchamp is doing when he suddenly exhibits some everydayobject on its own and thereby produces a sort of aesthetic shockreaction? We cannot simply dismiss this as so much nonsense, forDuchamp actually revealed something about the conditions ofaesthetic experience. In view of the experimental practice of arttoday, how can we expect help from classical aesthetics? Obviouslywe must have recourse to more fundamental human experiences tohelp us here. Wha t is the anthropological basis of our experience ofart? I should like to develop this question with the help ofthe concepts of play, symbol, and festival.freedom of movement is such that i t must have the form of selfmovement. Expressing the thought of the Greeks in general, Aristotle had already described self-movement as the most fundamentalcharacteristic of living beings.32Whatever is alive has its source ofmovement within itself and has the form of self-movement. Nowplay appears as a self-movement that does not pursue any particularend or purpose so much as movement as movement, exhibiting so tospeak a phenomenon of excess, of l iving self-representation. And infact that is jus t what we perceive in nature - the play of gnats, forexample, or all the lively dramatic forms of play we observe in theanimal world, expecially among their young. All this arises from thebasic character ofexcess striving to express itselfin the living being.Now the distinctive thing about human play is its ability to involveour reason, that uniquely human capacity which allows us to set ourselves aims and pursue them consciously, and to outplay this capacityfor purposive rationality. For the specifically human quality in ourplay is the self-discipline and orde r that we impose on ourmovements when playing, as i f particular purposes were involved -jus t like a child, for example, who counts how often he can bouncethe ball on the ground before losing control of it.In this form of nonpurposive activity, i t is reason itself that setsthe rules. The child is unhappy i f he loses control on the tenthbounce and proud of himselfi f he can keep i t going to the thirtieth.This nonpurposive rationality in human play is a characteristic feature of the phenomenon which will be of further help to us. I t isclear here, especially in the phenomenon of repetition itself, thatidentity or self-sameness is intended. The end pursued is certainly anonpurposive activity, but this activity is itself intended. I t is whatthe play intends. In this fashion we actually intend something witheffort, ambition, and profound commitment. This is one step on theroad to human communication; i fsomething is represented here - i fonly the movement of play itself - it is also true to say that theonlooker "intends" it, just as in the act of play I stand over againstmyself as an onlooker. The function ofthe representation of play isultimately to establish, not jus t any movement whatsoever, butrather the movement of play determined in a specific way. In theend, play is thus the self-representation of its own movement.I should add straightaway: such a definition ofthe movement ofplay means further that the act ofplaying always requires a "playingalong wi th. " Even the onlooker watching the child at play cannot22 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 2324 Part IThe relevance of the beautiful 25possibly do otherwise. I f he really does "go along with i t , " that isnothing but a participatio, an inne r sharing in this repetitive movement. This is often very clear in more developed forms of play: forexample, we have only to observe on television the spectators at atennis match cricking their necks. No one can avoid playing alongwith the game. Another important aspect ofplayas a communicativeactivity, so i t seems to me, is that i t does not really acknowledge thedistance separating the one who plays and the one who watches theplay. The spectator is manifestly more than jus t an observer whosees what is happening in front of him, but rather one who is a partof i t insofar as he literally "takes pa r t . " Of course, in these simpleforms ofplay we have not yet arrived at the play ofart. But I hope tohave shown that i t is only a step from ritual dance to ritual observances taking the form ofrepresentation. And from there, to the liberation of representation in the theater, for example, which emergedfrom this ritual context. Or to the visual arts, whose decorative andexpressive function arose out ofthe context ofreligious life. All theforms merge with one another. This continuity is confirmed by thecommon element in pl aya s we discussed it earlier: namely, the factthat something is intended as something, even i f i t is not somethingconceptual, useful, or purposive, but only the pure autonomousregulation of movement.I think this point is enormously significant for the contemporarydiscussion of modern art. Wha t ultimately concerns us here is thequestion ofthe work. One of the basic impulses of modern art hasbeen the desire to break down the distance separating the audience,the "consumers," and the public from the work of art. The r e is nodoubt that the most important creative artists of the last fifty yearshave concentrated all their efforts on breaking down jus t this distance. We ne ed only to think ofthe theory of epic theater in Brecht,who specifically fought against our being absorbed in a theatricaldream-world as a feeble substitute for human and social consciousness ofsolidarity. He deliberately destroyed scenic realism, the normal requirements of characterization, in short, the identity ofeverything usually expected of a play. But this desire to transformthe distance ofthe onlooker into the involvement ofthe participantcan be discerned in every form of modern experimentation inthe arts.Does this mean that the work itself no longer exists? Tha t isindeed how many contemporary artists see the situation - and so toothe aesthetic theorists who follow them - as i fi t were a question ofrenouncing the unity of the work. But i f we jus t think back to ourconclusions about human play, we discovered even there a primaryexperience ofrationality in the observance ofself-prescribed rules,for example, in the very identity of whatever we t ry to repeat.Something like a hermeneutic identity was already at play here -something absolutely inviolable in the play of art. It is quite wrongto think that the unity ofthe work implies that the work is closed of ffrom the person who turns to i t or is affected by it. The hermeneuticidentity ofthe work is much more deeply grounded. Even the mostfleeting and unique of experiences is intended in its self-identitywhen it appears or is valued as an aesthetic experience. Let us takethe case of an organ improvisation. This unique improvisation willnever be heard again. The organist himself hardly knows afterwardsjus t how he played, and no one transcribed it. Nevertheless,everyone says, "Tha t was a brilliant interpretation or improvisation," or on another occasion, "Tha t was rather dull today." Wha tdo we mean when we say such things? Obviously we are referringback to the improvisation. Something "stands" before us; i t is like awork and not jus t an organist's finger exercise. Otherwise we shouldnever pass judgment on its quality or lack of it. So it is the hermeneutic identity that establishes the unity of the work. To understand something, I must be able to identify it. For there wassomething there that I passed judgment upon and understood. Iidentify something as it was or as i t is, and this identity alone constitutes the meaning of the work.I fthat is true - and I think everything is in favor ofi t - there cannot be any kind of artistic production that does not similarly intendwhat it produces to be what i t is. This is confirmed by even the mostextreme example of an everyday object - like a bottle-rack - whensuddenly exhibited as a work of art to such great effect. It has itsdeterminate character in the effect it once produced. In all likelihood, i t will not remain a lasting work in the sense ofa permanentclassic, but i t is certainly a "work" in terms of its hermeneuticidentity.The concept of a work is in no way tied to a classical ideal ofha r -mony. Even i f the forms in which some positive identification ismade are quite different, we still have to ask how i t actually comesabout that the work addresses us. But there is yet another aspecthere. I fthe identity ofthe work is as we have said, then the genuine26 Part 1 The relevance of the beautiful 27reception and experience ofa work ofart can exist only for one who"plays along," that is, one who performs in an active way himself.Now how does that actually happen? Certainly not simply throughretention ofsomething in memory. In that case there would still beidentification, but without that particular assent by virtue ofwhichthe work means something to us. Wha t gives the work its identity aswork? Wha t makes this what we call a hermeneutic identity?Obviously, this fUrther formulation means that its identity consistsprecisely in there being something to "unde r s t and, " that it asks to beunderstood in what it "says" or " int ends . " The work issues achallenge which expects to be met. I t requires an answer - an answerthat can only be given by someone who accepted the challenge. Andthat answer must be his own, and given actively. The participantbelongs to the play.We all know from our own experience that visiting a museum,for example, or listening to a concert, sets a task requiring profoundintellectual and spiritual activity. Wha t do we do in such situations?Certainly there are differences here: in the one case we are dealingwith a reproductive art, and in the other nothing is reproduced - theoriginals hang on the wall immediately in front of us. And yet aftergoing through a museum, we do not leave it wi th exactly the samefeeling about life that we had when we went in. I f we really havehad a genuine experience of art, then the world has become bothbrighter and less burdensome.This definition ofthe work as the focal point ofrecognition andunderstanding also means that such an identity is bound up withvariation and difference. Every work leaves the person who r e -sponds to i t a certain leeway, a space to be filled in by himself. I canshow this even with the most classical theoretical concepts. Kant, forexample, has a remarkable doctrine. He defended the view that inpainting, form is the vehicle of beauty. Color, on the othe r hand, issupposed to be simply a stimulus, a matter ofsensuous affection thatremains subjective and thus has nothing to do with its genuine artistic or aesthetic formation.33Anyone who knows anything ofneoclassical art - that of Thorvaldsen, for example - will indeedadmit that as far as such marmoreally pale neoclassical art is concerned, line, configuration, and form stand in the foreground.Kant's view is obviously historically conditioned. We should neveradmit that colors affect us merely as stimuli. We know perfectly wellthat it is quite possible to construct with colors, and that artistic composition is not necessarily restricted to line and contour as used indrawing. We are not interested here in the one-sidedness of suchhistorically conditioned taste. The interesting thing is what Kant isclearly aiming at. Wha t is i t that is so distinctive about form? Theanswer is that we must trace it out as we see i t because we must construct. it actively - something required by every composition,graphic or musical, in drama or in reading. The r e is constant cooperative activity here. And obviously, it is precisely the identity ofthe w~rk that invites us to this activity. The activity is not arbitrary,but directed, and all possible realizations are drawn into a specific schema.Let us consider the case of l i t e r a tur e . I t was the merit ofthe greatPolish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden to have been the first toexplore this.34What, for example, is the evocative fUnction of astory? I shall take a famous example: The Brothers Karamazov. 35I cansee the.stairs d~~ which Smerdjakov tumbles. Dostoevsky gives usa certam descnptlon. As a result, I know exactly what this staircaselooks like. I know where it starts, how it gets darker and then turnsto the left. All this is clear to me in the most concrete way and yet Ialso know that no one else " s e e s " the staircase the way I do. Butanyone who is receptive to this masterly narrative will " s e e " thestaircase in a most specific way and be convinced that he sees it as itreally is. This is the open space creative language gives us and whichw.efill out by following what the writer evokes. And similarly in theVIsual arts. A synthetic act is required in which we must unite andbring. together many different aspects. We " r e ad" a picture, as wesay, like a text. We start to "de c iphe r " a picture like a text. I t wasnot Cubist painting that first set us this task, though i t did so in adrasti~ally radical manner by demanding that we successivelysupen~pose upon one another the various facets or aspects of the~ame thing, to produce finally on the canvas the thing depicted in allIts facets and th~s in a new colorfUl plasticity. I t is not only whenconfronted by Picasso and Braque and all the othe r Cubists of theperiod that we have to " r e ad" the picture. It is always like this.Someone who, on admiring a famous Titian or Velazquez depictingsome mounted Habsburg ruler or other, thinks, "Oh, yes, that's~?arles V, " has not really seen anything ofthe picture at all. Rather,It IS a question ofconstructing it, reading i t word for word as i t were,28 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 29so that after this necessary construction i t comes together as a pictureresonant with meaning. It portrays a world ruler upon whose empirethe sun never sets.So what I should basically like to say is this: there is always somereflective and intellectual accomplishment involved, whether I amconcerned with the traditional forms of art handed down to us orwhe the r I am challenged by mode rn forms of art. The challenge ofthe work brings the constructive accomplishment of the intellectinto play.For this reason, i t seems a false antithesis to believe that there is anart ofthe past that can be enjoyed and an art ofthe present that supposedly forces us to participate in it by the subtle use of artistictechnique. The concept of play was introduced precisely to showthat everyone involved in play is a participant. It should also be trueof the play of art that there is in principle no radical separation be -tween the work of art and the person who experiences it. This iswhat I meant in claiming emphatically that we must also learn howto read the more familiar classical works of art laden as they are withtraditional meaning. However, reading is not jus t scrutinizing ortaking one word after another, but means above all performing aconstant hermeneutic movement guided by the anticipation of thewhole, and finally fulfilled by the individual in the realization ofthetotal sense. We have only to think what it is like when someonereads aloud a text that he has not understood. No one else can reallyunderstand what is being read either.The identity ofthe work is not guaranteed by any classical or formalist criteria, but is secured by the way in which we take the construction ofthe work upon ourselves as a task. I fthis is the meaningof artistic experience, we might recall Kant's achievement when hedemonstrated that there is no question here of bringing or subsuming a work in all its sensuous particularity unde r a concept. The arthistorian and aesthetic theorist Richard Hamann expressed this oncewhen he said that it is a question ofthe "autonomous significance ofthe perceptual content. "36 By this he meant that perception here isno longer simply embedded within the pragmatic contexts ofeveryday life in which i t functions, but expresses and presents itselfin its own significance. Naturally we must be clear about what pe r -ception means i fwe are to realize the full and prope r meaning ofthisformulation. Perception must not be understood as i f the "sensibleskin of things" were all that counted aesthetically - a view stillnatural to Hamann in the final period ofImpressionism. To perceivesomething is not to collect together utterly separate sensoryimpressions, but is rather, as the marvelous German word wahrnehmen itselfsays, " to take something as t rue . " But that means thatwhat is presented to the senses is seen and taken as something. In thebe l i e fthat we generally employ an inadequate and dogmatic conceptofsensory perception as an aesthetic criterion, I have chosen in myown investigations the rather elaborate expression "aesthetic nondifferentiation" to bring out the deep structure of perception.37Bythat I mean i t is a secondary procedure i fwe abstract from whatevermeaningfully addresses us in the work ofart and wholly restrict our -selves to a "pur e ly aesthetic" evaluation.Tha t would be like a critic at the theater who exclusively tookissue with the way the production was directed, the quality of theindividual performances, and so on. Of course, it is quite right thathe should do so - but the work itself and the meaning i t acquired forus in the actual performance does not come to light in this way. Theartistic experience is constituted precisely by the fact that we do notdistinguish between the particular way the work is realized and theidentity of the work itself. Tha t is not only true of the performingarts and the mediation or reproduction that they imply. It is alwaystrue that the work as such still speaks to us in an individual way asthe same work, even in repeated and different encounters with it.Whe r e the performing arts are concerned, of course this identity invariation must be realized in a twofold manner insofar as the reproduction is as much exposed to identity and variation as theoriginal. Wha t I described as aesthetic nondifferentiation clearlyconstitutes the real meaning of that cooperative play betweenirhagination and understanding which Kant discovered in the " judgment oftaste." It is invariably true that when we see something, wemust think something in orde r to see anything. But here i t is a freeplay and not directed towards a concept. This cooperative interaction forces us to face the question about what is actually built up inthis process of free play between the faculties of imagination andconceptual understanding. Wha t is the nature of this significancewhereby something can be experienced meaningfully and is soexperienced? It is obvious that any pure theory of imitation or reproduction, any naturalistic copy theory, completely misses thepoint. The essence of a great work of a r t has certainly never consisted in the accurate and total imitation or counterfeit of "Na tur e . "30 Part IThe relevance of the beautiful31As I showed with reference to Titian's "Cha r l e s V, " it is doubtlessalways the case that a specific stylization is accomplished in the construction of a picture.38The horse has that particular quality thatalways recalls the rockinghorse ofone's childhood; then, too, the r e -splendent background and the watchful gaze of the military commander and emperor of this great kingdom: we see how i t allinteracts, how the autonomous significance ofperception arises hereprecisely out ofthis cooperative play. Obviously anyone who asked,for example, "Is the horse a success?" or even "Ha s he caught thisruler, Charles V, and his particular physiognomy?" would be overlooking the real work ofart. Perhaps this example will show that thisproblem is extraordinarily complex. Wha t then do we really understand? How does the work speak and what does i t tell us? He r e weshould do well to remember, as a first defense against all theories ofimitation, that i t is not only in the face of art that we enjoy thisaesthetic experience, but in the presence of nature as well. This isthe problem of "natural beauty."Kant, who worked out most clearly the autonomy of aesthetics,was primarily oriented toward natural beauty. I t is certainly notwithout significance that we find nature beautiful, for i t is an ethicalexperience bordering on the miraculous that beauty should manifestitself in all the fecund power of nature as i f she displayed he rbeauties for us.39In Kant a creationist theology stands behind thisunique human capacity to encounter natural beauty, and forms theself-evident basis from which he represents the production of thegenius and the artist as an extreme intensification ofthe power thatnature, as divinely created, possesses. But i t is obvious that whatnatural beauty expresses is peculiarly indeterminate. In contrast tothe work ofart, in which we invariably seek to recognize or to interpr e t something as something - even i f perhaps we are compelled togive up the attempt - nature speaks meaningfully to us in a kind ofindeterminate feeling ofsolitude. A deeper analysis ofthis aestheticexperience ofnatural beauty teaches us that, in a certain sense, this isan illusion and that in fact we can only see nature wi th the eyes ofmen experienced and educated in art. We remember, for example,how the Alps were still described in travel diaries ofthe eighteenthcentury as terrifYing mountains whose ugly and fearful wildness wasexperienced as a denial of beauty, humanity, and the familiarsecurity ofhuman existence.40Today, on the othe r hand, everyone isconvinced that our great mountain ranges represent not only thesublimity, but also the exemplary beauty of nature.I t is obvious what has happened here. In the eighteenth century,we saw through the eyes ofan imagination educated in the school ofrational order. Before the English garden style introduced a newkind oftruth to nature or naturalness, the eighteenth-century gardenwas constructed geometrically as an extension into nature ofdomestic architectural construction. Thus in fact we see nature, as theexample shows, with sight schooled by art. Hegel rightly graspedthat natural beauty is a reflection ofartistic beauty,41 so that we learnhow to perceive beauty in nature unde r the guidance ofthe artist'seye and his works. The question ofcourse remains how that helps ustoday in the critical situation of modern art. Unde r the guidance ofmodern art, i t would be extremely difficult to recognize naturalbeauty in a landscape with any success. In fact, today we mustexperience natural beauty almost as a corrective against the claims ofa perception educated by art. Natural beauty reminds us once againthat what we acknowledge in a work ofart is not at all that in whichthe language ofart speaks. I t is precisely indeterminacy ofreferenceth~t addresses.us ~n modern art and that compels us to be fully consoous ofthe slgmficance ofthe exemplary meaning ofwhat we seebefore US.42Wha t is the point ofthis indeterminate reference? I shalldescribe i t in terms of the " symbol , " a word whose meaning hasbeen decisively influenced by Goethe, Schiller, and the tradition ofGerman classicism.I IWha t does the word "symbol" mean? Originally i t was a technicalterm in Gr e ek for a token ofremembrance. The host presented hisguest with the so-called tessera hospitalis by breaking some object intwo. He kept one ha l f for himself and gave the other ha l f to hisguest. I fin thirty or fifty years time, a descendant ofthe guest shouldever enter his house, the two pieces could be fitted together again toform a whole in an act ofrecognition. In its original technical sense,the symbol represented something like a sort of pass used in theancient world: something in and through which we recognize someone already known to us.In Plato's Symposium there is a beautiful story which I think givesan even more profound indication ofthe sort ofsignificance that arthas for us. In this dialogue, Aristophanes relates a story about thenature of love that has continued to fascinate up to the present day.He tells us that originally all human beings were spherical creatures.32 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 33But later, on account oftheir misbehavior, the gods cut them in two.Thereafter, each of the halves, which originally belonged to onecomplete living being, seeks to be made whole once again. Thusevery individual is a fragment or a symbolon tou anthropou.43Thisexpectation that there is another ha l fthat can complete us and makeus whole once more is fulfilled in the experience oflove. This profound image for elective affinity and the marriage of minds can betransferred to our experience ofthe beautiful in art. Clearly it is alsothe case here that the significance that attaches to the beautiful workof art refers to something that does not simply lie in what weimmediately see and understand before us as such. But what sort ofreference is this? The proper function of reference is to direct ourview toward something else that can be experienced or possessed inan immediate way. I fthe symbol were referential in this sense, thenit would be what has come to be called allegory, at least in the classical use ofthe term. On this view, "allegory" means that what weactually say is different from what we mean, although we can ~l~osay what we mean in an immediate way. As a result ofthe.claSSlClstconception ofthe symbol, which does not refer to something othe rthan itself in this way, allegory has unfairly come to be regarded assomething cold and unartistic. In the case of allegory, the referencemust be known in advance. In the case of the symbol, on the othe rhand, and for our experience of the symbolic in general, the particular represents itself as a fragment ofbeing that promises to complete and make whole whatever corresponds to it. Or , i~deed, thesymbol is that other fragment that has always be en sought m order tocomplete and make whole our own fragmentary life.. The "mea.ning" of art in this sense does not seem to me to be ned to speClalsocial conditions as was the meaning given to art in the laterbourgeois religion ofculture. On the contrary, the experience ofthebeautiful, and particularly the beautiful in art, is the invocation of apotentially whole and holy orde r of things, wherever i t may befound.I fwe think along these lines for a moment longer, we see that thesignificant thing is precisely the variety ofthis experience, which.weknow as a historical reality as much as a contemporary one. Amidstthe variety of art, this same message ofthe whole addresses us ove rand over again. Indeed, this seems to provide a mor e precise answ~rto our question concerning the significance of art and beauty. Thismeans that in any encounter with art, i t is not the particular, butrather the totality of the experienceable world, man's ontologicalplace in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcendshim, that is brought to experience. But i t does not mean that theindeterminate anticipation ofsense that makes a work significant forus can ever be fulfilled so completely that we could appropriate itfor knowledge and understanding in all its meaning. This was whatHegel taught when in a profound statement he defined the beautifulin art as " the sensuous showing ofthe Idea."44 The Idea, which normally can only be glimpsed from afar, presents itselfin the sensuousappearance ofthe beautiful. Nevertheless, this seems to me to be anidealistic temptation that fails to do justice to the fact that the workspeaks to us as a work and not as the bearer of a message. To expectthat we can recuperate within the concept the meaningful contentthat addresses us in art is already to have overtaken art in a verydangerous manner. Yet this was exactly Hegel's guiding conviction,which led him to the problem of art as a thing ofthe past. We haveinterpreted this as a fundamental Hegelian claim, since everythingthat addresses us obscurely and non-conceptually in the particularsensuous language ofart was to be recuperated by philosophy in theform of the concept.However, that is an idealistic temptation which is rejected by allartistic experience. Contemporary art in particular explicitly forbidsus to expect from the creative art of our own time any meaningfulorientation that could be grasped in the form of the concept. Inopposition to this, therefore, I propose that the symbolic in general,and especially the symbolic in art, rests upon an intricate interplay ofshowing and concealing. In its irreplaceability, the work of art is nomere bearer of meaning - as i f the meaning could be transferred toanother bearer. Rather the meaning ofthe work ofart lies in the factthat it is there. In orde r therefore to avoid all false connotations, weshould replace the word "work" by the word " c r e a t ion. " Thismeans, for example, that the transitory process in which the flow ofspeech rushes past comes to stand within the poem in a mysteriousfashion and becomes a creation.45Above all, this creation is notsomething that we can imagine being deliberately made by someone(an idea that is still implied in the concept of the work). Someonewho has produced a work of art stands before the creation of hishands in jus t the same way that anyone else does. The r e is a leap be -tween the planning and the executing on the one hand and the successful achievement on the other. The thing now "stands" and34 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 35thereby is " the r e " once and for all, ready to be encountered by anyone who meets it and to be perceived in its own "qua l i ty. " This leapdistinguishes the work of art in its uniqueness and irreplaceability.Walter Benjamin called it the aura of the work of art.46We ar~ a~familiar with this from the sense ofoutrage that we feel over artistic"sacrilege." The destruction of a work of art always has somethingof the feeling of religious sacrilege about it.These considerations should help us to appreciate the farreaching implications of the fact that art achieves more tha~ themere manifestation ofmeaning. We ought rather to say that art IS thecontainment ofsense, so that i t does not run away or escape from us,but is secured and sheltered in the ordered composure ofthe creation. We owe the possibility of escaping the idealistic conception ofsense to a step taken by Heidegger in our time. He enabled us ~operceive the ontological plenitude or the truth that addresses us mart through the twofold movement of revealing, unconcealing, andmanifesting, on the one hand, and concealing and sheltering, on theother. He showed that the Gr e ek concept of concealment (aletheia),only represented one side of man's fundamental experience of ~heworld.47 Alongside and inseparable from this unconcealing, therealso stands the shrouding and concealing that belongs to our humanfinitude. This philosophical insight, which sets limits to any idealismclaiming a total recovery of meaning, implies that there is more tothe work of art than a meaning that is experienced only in anindeterminate way. I t is the fact that a particular thing such as thisexists that constitutes the "additional something." As Rilke says,"Such a thing stood among men. "48 This fact that. i t exists, its f~cticity, represents an insurmountable resistance agaInst any supenorpresumption that we can make sense ofi t all. The work of.art compels us to recognize this fact. "The r e is no place which fails to seeyou. You must change your life."49 The peculiar nature of ourexperience of art lies in the impact by which it overwhelms us.50Only when we have recognized this can we proceed to anappropriate conceptual clarification of the question of the propersignificance of art. I should like to pursue more deeply the conce~tofthe symbolic as taken up by Schiller and Goethe and develop ItSown profound truth. The symbolic does not simply point toward ameaning, but rather allows that meaning to present itself. The symbolic represents meaning. In connection with this concept ~f re~resenting one should think of the concept of representation msecular and canon law. He r e "representation" does not imply thatsomething merely stands in for something else as i fi t were a replacement or substitute that enjoyed a less authentic, more indirect kindof existence. On the contrary, what is represented is itselfpresent inthe only way available to it. Something ofthis kind ofrepresentativeexistence applies to art, as when a well-known personality with ahigh public profile is represented in a portrait. The picture that isdisplayed in the town hall or the ecclesiastical palace or wherever, issupposed to be a part ofthat presence. In the representative portrait,the person is actually there in his or her representative role. We consider that the picture is itself representative. Of course, this hasnothing to do with idolatry or the cult ofimages. I t means that in thecase of art, we are not simply concerned with a memorial token of,reference to, or substitute for the real existence of something.As a Protestant, I have always found especially significant thecontroversy over the Last Supper, which raged in the ProtestantChurch, particularly between Luther and Zwingli. I share withLuther the conviction thatJesus' words "This is my body and this ismy blood" do not mean that the bread and wine signifY his body andblood. I believe that Luther appreciated this quite clearly, and that,in this respect, he clung to the old Roman Catholic tradition,according to which the bread and wine ofthe sacrament are the fleshand blood of Christ. I am simply making use of this problem ofdogma to claim that, i fwe really want to think about the experienceof art, we can, indeed must, think along these lines: the work of artdoes not simply refer to something, because what i t refers to isactually there. We could say that the work ofart signifies an increasein being. This is what distinguishes i t from all man's productiveachievements in the realm oftechnology and manufacture where thevarious appliances and devices of our socioeconomic life have beendeveloped. For it is obviously a characteristic of such things thateach one we produce merely serves as a means or a tool. When weacquire a household appliance, we do not call an article ofthis kind awork, for such articles can be produced indefinitely. Since they areconceived in terms of a specific function, they are in principlereplaceable.The work ofart, on the other hand, is irreplaceable. This remainstrue even now in the age of reproduction where we can encounterthe greatest works of a r t in reproductions of exceptionally finequality. For photography and recording are forms of reproduction36 Part I The relevance of the beautiful 37rather than of representation. The unique event that characterizesthe work of art is not present in the reproduction as such (even i fi t isa question of a recording of a particular interpretation a.s a uniqueevent, itself a reproduction). I f I find a be t t e r reproductIon, I shallreplace the one I had before, and i f I mislay the one I have, I sh~llobtain a new one. Wha t is this additional something still present mthe work of art that distinguishes i t from an article that can beindefinitely reproduced at will?Antiquity gave an answer to this question, and i t only needs to beunderstood once again in its proper meaning. In every work of artwe encounter something like mimesis or imitatio. Naturally mimesishere has nothing to do with the mere imitation ofsomething that isalready familiar to us. Rather, i t implies that something is represented in such a way that it is actually present in sensuous abundance. In its original Gr e ek sense, the mimesis is derived from thestar-dance ofthe heavens.slThe stars represent the pure mathematical regularities and proportions that constitute the heavenly order.In this sense I believe the tradition is justified in saying that " a r t isalways mimesis," that is, i t represents something. When we say this,however, we must avoid being misunderstood. Wha t eve r comes tospeak to us through representation cannot b~ ~rasped or ev~n cometo be " the r e " for us in any othe r way. ThIS IS why I consIder thedebate about objective versus nonobjective painting to be nothingbut a spurious and short-sighted dispute within the politics of art.For we must admit that there are very many forms ofartistic production in which something is represented in the concentrated form of aparticular and unique creation. However different from our everyday experience i t may be, this creation presen:s itsel.f as a pledge oforder. The symbolic representation accomplished m art does n~thave to depend directly on what is already given. On the ~o~tr~ry, Itis characteristic of art that what is represented, whe the r It IS nch orpoor in connotations or has none whatsoever, calls us to dwell uponit and give our assent in an act ofrecognition. We shall have to showhow this characteristic defines the task that the art of past and present lays upon each of us. And this means learning how to listen towhat art has to say. We shall have to acknowledge that learning tolisten means rising above the universal leveling process in which wecease to notice anything - a process encouraged by a civilization thatdispenses increasingly powerful stimuli.We have asked what is communicated in the experience of thebeautiful and, in particular, in the experience of art. The decisiveand indispensable insight that we gained was that one cannot talkabout a simple transference or mediation ofmeaning there. For thiswould already be to assimilate the experience of art to the universalanticipation of meaning that is characteristic of theoretical reason.As we have seen, Hegel and the idealists defined the beautiful in artas the sensuous appearance of the Idea, a bold revival of Plato'sinsight into the unity ofthe good and the beautiful. However, to goalong with this is to presuppose that truth as i t appears in art can betranscended by a philosophy that conceives the Idea as the highestand most appropriate fonn for grasping truth. The weakness ofidealist aesthetics lay in its failure to appreciate that we typicallyencounter art as a unique manifestation oft ruth whose particularitycannot be surpassed. The significance of the symbol and the symbolic lay in this paradoxical kind of reference that embodies andeven vouchsafes its meaning. Art is only encountered in a form thatresists pure conceptualization. Gr e a t art shakes us because we arealways unprepared and defenseless when exposed to the overpowering impact of a compelling work. Thus the essence of thesymbolic lies precisely in the fact that i t is not related to an ultimatemeaning that could be recuperated in intellectual terms. The symbolpreserves its meaning within itself.Thus our exposition of the symbolic character of art returns toour original considerations concerning play. The r e too we noticedthat play is always a kind of self-rep