Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
experience of the beautiful, that of the sublime presupposes the satisfaction of
material needs, in this case that for physical safety: “Just as we cannot pass judgment
on the beautiful if we are seized by inclination and appetite, so we cannot
pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid.” But paradoxically
physical safety allows us to respond (aesthetically, not practically) to the
thrill of danger viewed and therefore “to regard as small the [objects] of our
[natural] concerns: property, health, and life.” This appreciation of human
response to aestheticized peril reflects the esteem given by society to a person
“who does not yield to danger but promptly sets to work with vigor and full
deliberation.” This character is best exemplified by the warrior, so that “no
matter how much people may dispute, when they compare the statesman with
the general, as to which one deserves the superior respect, an aesthetic judgment
decides in favor of the general.” For “even war has something sublime about it,”
whereas peace, in contrast, “tends to make prevalent a mere[ly] commercial
spirit,” which brings with it “base selfishness, cowardice, and softness.” 70 In such
a passage we may recognize, in this student of Hume and Rousseau, the discourse
of civic virtue and its decline under the influence of commerce—here to
be countered by the transmutation of aristocratic (military) values into a spiritual
principle.
Since work, as wage labor, is marked by the anti-artistic character of mercenary
culture, it is not surprising that play will appear to incarnate the aesthetic
impulse. It was in Schiller’s Aesthetic Education that this theme received its fullest
development at the end of the eighteenth century. For Schiller too “the character
of our age” is established by way of “an astonishing contrast between
contemporary forms of humanity and earlier ones, especially the Greek.” With
the development of the division of labor, the unified human personality of the
ancients has been split into fragments, so that “we see not merely individuals,
but whole classes of men, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of
the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain.” 71 When a society
“insists on special skills being developed with a degree of intensity which is only
commensurate with its readiness to absolve the individual citizen from developing
himself in extensity—can we wonder that the remaining aptitudes of the
psyche are neglected in order to give undivided attention to the one which will
bring honor and profit [welche ehrt und lohnt]?” 72 It is the task of art, expression of
the drive to play, to reconstitute the fragmented human person, “to restore by
means of a higher art the totality of our nature which the arts themselves have
destroyed.” 73
70 Ibid., pp. 121–2.
71 F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and tr. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 31, 33.
72 Ibid., p. 37.
73 Ibid., p. 43.
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