theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Ideas 1 1
less tangibly, less overtly formulated attitudes and ideas. It is less
in danger of isolating and reducing the contents of a work of art
to mere prose statement, a mere formula.
The study of these attitudes has led some German philos-
ophers to speculate about the possibility of reducing them to a
few types of Weltanschauung> a term which is used widely
enough to include both philosophical ideas and emotional atti-
tudes. The most well-known attempt is that of Dilthey, who in
his practice as a literary historian has constantly stressed the dif-
ference between an idea and an experience (Erlebnis). He finds
three main types in the history of thought: 2i positivism, which
derives from Democritus and Lucretius and includes Hobbes,
the French encyclopedists, and modern materialists and positiv-
ists; objective idealism, which includes Heraclitus, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Schelling, Hegel ; and a dualistic idealism, or "Idealism
of Freedom," which includes Plato, the Christian theologians,
Kant, and Fichte. The first group explains the spiritual by the
physical world, the second sees reality as the expression of an
internal reality and does not recognize a conflict between being
and value, the third assumes the independence of spirit against
nature. Dilthey then associates specific authors with these types:
Balzac and Stendhal belong to the first type; Goethe to the sec-
ond; Schiller to the third. This is a classification not based merely
on conscious adherence and pronouncements, but deducible, it
is supposed, from even the most unintellectual art. The types
are also associated with general psychological attitudes: thus
realism with predominance of the intellect, objective idealism
with the predominance of feeling, the dualistic idealism with the
predominance of will.
Hermann Nohl has tried to show that the types are also ap-
plicable to painting and music. 25 Rembrandt and Rubens belong
to the objective idealists, the pantheists; painters like Velasquez
and Hals to the realists; Michelangelo to the subjective idealists.
Berlioz belongs to type I, Schubert to type II, Beethoven to type
III. The argument from painting and music is important, since
it implies that these types can exist also in literature without any
overtly intellectual content. Unger has tried to show that the
differences will hold good even of small lyrical poems by
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