Seeing that the presently-prevailing procedures around here would dictate that I simply post the entire text of the first several chapters, it is necessary to find an alternative. Further, many of the points I'd like to call attention to have found their way here via other authors, via things I already had reasoned my way to, and perhaps via cryptomnesia (I first read this book in 2015). One line which suggests itself immediately is to ask how Rank claims to know what he knows. [[it could be effective to present the preface material last]]
***socio-determinism***
[xiii] [the very first page!] the human urge to create does not find expression in works of art alone; it also produces religion and mythology and the social institutions corresponding to these. In a word, it produces the whole culture of which the works of art in a particular style-epoch have to be regarded as one of the expression-forms. We shall therefore avoid, as far as may be, the attempt to "explain" completely any one of these expression-forms in terms of another one, and shall rather consider all the expression-forms of human culture, however various, first in relation to their origins in the creative impulse, and thereafter in respect of their reciprocal action.
Here is one good reason to treat The Arts as a unit despite their technical diversity; but if this entails bringing the whole culture into the discussion, then the task of accounting for discipline-specific factors is made more urgent rather than less.
[xiv] the previous attempts to solve the problem of art one-sidedly—by cultural, ethnological, or stylistic standards—should warn us sufficiently against drawing premature conclusions as to the specific characterization of artistic creativity. On the one hand, the individual urge to create is by no means the only specific quality of the artist; equally, on the other hand, canons of style, evolved from the collective consciousness, can by no means be regarded as the true essence of artistic creation; the one individual factor represents merely the motive-power, while the other, collective, element provides the forms that are suited in the circumstances to its activity and utterance.
[xv] even though the various human civilizations may each arise from the combination of a certain environment and a certain type of humanity, all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul. By this we mean, not to say that the soul can be wholly explained in terms of modern psychology, as our mechanistic science would claim, but, on the contrary, to stress the autonomy of the spiritual, which not only works creatively in the religious, artistic, and social realms, but also determines the ideology which colours the psychology of the time.
This assertion of the autonomy of the spiritual is an effort to reestablish the dynamic quality of the art-ideology nexus, this against all manner of static, mechanistic accounts whereby one particular epiphenomenon dominates the picture. Adherents of static accounts are bound to find in the appearance of "autonomy" in the above passage a smuggling in of essentialism and/or absolutism ("all human problems..."). Yet in the fundamental conflict between individual and collective, Rank does seem to have found something broad enough to support such absolutism.
Such a borderline investigation of the various domains that surround the human creative impulse and its manifold forms of expression, it is therefore essential above all else to resist the temptation to accept any definite psychological theory as the principle of exegesis, remembering that the ruling psychological ideology itself appears to be as much in need of explanation as the other spiritual phenomena which it claims, either wholly or at least satisfactorily, to explain. For this satisfactory explanation, even if achieved, is often but a specious product resting on the ideological coincidence of the exegetical principle itself with the phenomenon to be explained.
In this book there are profound political implications pointed up at nearly every turn but precious few explicitly political discussions. The scope of the thesis and the occasional aspiration to universality both preempt the litigation of transient Current Events wherein the epiphenomenal can too easily be mistaken for the axiomatic. This is a great strength rather than a weakness.
Since the 1960s, the exegetical principle which is also the phenomenon to be explained has been the realization that Everything Is Political. I happen to agree with this statement as far as it goes, and I also think that it does not go all that far, i.e. in precisely the everything-and-nothing way Rank identifies above.
If Everything Is Politcal, this does not mean that Politics is Everything, nor that we can understand anything (that is, Everything) which happens to be Political via a narrow focus on its Politics. There is little gained and much lost when we make meaning from art based on that which art shares with Everything Else. And because art shares this Political quality with Everything Else, art's Political qualities are not all that remarkable unless they are uniquely and specifically its own; in other words, if they arise from the autonomous features of art rather than the features art shares with other cultural or social practices.
As Rank surely understands, the same caveats apply even to so broad a question as the individual versus the collective; to hold that some form of this conflict is endemic to the human condition is by no means to hold that all human conflicts can be explained by it. To establish the mere presence or absence of such a conflict as one among many when there may be no statements, no behaviors, no surface content in any work itself, which would advance the thesis, this is a daunting enough task already. To show causality is yet more daunting.
Writing a century ago, Rank can afford to be conciliatory on such matters. I, now, would not be: the critics and academics who inhabit this epistemological Wild West bear comparison to Taleb's economic forecasters, who grant the weakness of their models while at once insisting that "They're the best we've got." [[Taleb citation would be cool]]]
The analogy is inapt only to the extent that we find the Little White Lies of the critic indispensible rather than merely charming, necessary social fictions which smooth over social frictions. A commitment to radical honesty in the face of endemic myth-making seems to put rationality ahead of grace; it is also ungrateful for artists ourselves to demand the luxury of an honest appraisal when any appraisal at all betokens that publicity which cannot possibly be bad.
These things being as they are, I have yet to outgrow my adolescent hunch that the outright public misrendering of both art and artist is great enough to not just warrant but in fact require a certain ungraceful skepticism.
A fallacy of this sort can only be avoided if the various expression-forms of a cultural ideology are regarded primarily as parallel and equivalent phenomena of one and the same dynamic or organic process, which can only be comprehended through the whole process itself and are not explicable through one another. This being so, neither shall we expect that the artist's whole personality will be explained by his individual psychology. Rather do we hope, by a better understanding of the artist, as revealed by his artistic creativeness under the condition of the prevailing ideology, to throw some light
[xvi]
on problems of personality development which the scientific method of psychology by its very nature must fail to solve.
... Not that this book came into being through dissatisfaction with other art-theories and a desire to replace them by a better one: rather it is an organic growth rising out of an intensive struggle of many years' standing over a personal problem—a lived experience that ultimately took shape in the present work. The intention is, therefore, less to convince than to impress, the purpose in collecting this vast mass of material being solely that of giving an idea of the interlinkage and relationship of all the phenomena; but phenomena, as we know, may be interpreted in different ways...
[xviii] the ideological dependence, already alluded to, of the various competing sciences upon a dominating common culture. This ideological power, which appears to define, if not indeed to determine, the posing of problems (and even, to a certain extent, their solution) in all branches of scientific research within each particular cultural epoch, assumes, as is natural, different forms according to the world-outlook prevailing therein. But, consequently, an art-theory that is based on a particular philosophy or psychology, sociology or ethnology, has significance and useful-
[xix]
ness only insofar as these sciences, themselves relative, are not altered by new discoveries or actually displaced by some radical change of outlook.
[xxi] [the two "themes" which have "occupied" Rank in the 25 years since The Artist] The one theme is the individual-psychological development of personality which after an exhaustive study of this development in thwarted neurotics, I was finally able to base on a dynamic will-psychology. The second theme is that of collective creations, as we meet them in primitive art, particularly in the myth and its poetical offshoots, the fairy-tale, the saga, and the epic.
In regarding these studies...as preliminaries to a deeper grasp of the artist-problem, I should not omit to mention a certain negative
[xxii]
achievement: the fact that during all the years when I was constantly absorbed by problems, particularly those connected with poetry, I did not attempt a single biography (or pathography) of a famous artist. A sound instinct—for it was no deliberate purpose—seems always to have restrained me from this. For anything in the nature of psychographic material and view-points that I myself had to contribute invariably presented itself to me at once as something fitting into a larger frame, which, reaching out beyond the individual artist-personality, concerned either the study of motives, or the literary overhauling of traditional materials, or the social function of art. ...I propose to follow the line of reaching out beyond what is individual in the artist-personality and to show, or at least suggest, the collective aspect... ..my feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism of all life. I arrived at this conception by a concentrated psychological study of the two human types which most clearly reveal success and failure in this struggle to overcomes: the so-called neurotic type, and the creative.
[xxiii] whereas in my first book the sexual impulse (expanded to the libido-conception of Freud) and its repression had been taken to be the kernel of the creative impulse, in The Trauma of Birth I discerned the fact, which I later developed theoretically, that the creative impulse, which leads to the liberation and forming of the individual personality—and likewise determines its artistic creativeness—has something positively antisexual in its yearning for independence of organic conditions. Correspondingly, my conception of repression differed from Freud's; for to him it is the result of outward frustration, while I trace it to an inward necessity, which is no less inherent in the dualistic individual than the satisfying of the impulse itself.
[xxiv] This existence of an art which is (at least as far as we can tell) without artists [i.e. "primitive art" wherein "we find chiefly the social factor figuring as the main element in artistic production"] has its paradoxical parallel on the individual-psychological side. For if the neurotic type, who fails to synthesize his dualistic conflict, be studied from the therapeutic angle, the impression received is that of individuals who (psychologically speaking) represent the artist-type without ever having produced a work of art. ... In short, it would seem that the creatively disposed and gifted type has to have something in addition
[xxv]
before it can become a really productive artist, while on the other hand the work of the productive individual must also be added to before it can rank as a genuine work of art.
Neither the cultural and scientific history of art nor the aesthetic psychology of the artist has so far provided a satisfactory answer to this central question of the whole problem of art: namely, what constitutes the correlation between artist-type and the art-product; that is to say, the artistic creativeness and the art-form? And although it may seem evident that this common factor in the artist and the art product must be a super-individual, collective element, so obvious a conclusion at once raises a series of questions, the mere meaning of which is enough to show that they but make the real problem more acute. The first among such questions is likely to be: what does this collective factor, both generally and particularly in the creative individual, mean? Following directly upon this comes the next question: what is the characteristic which distinguishes the specific, artistic collectivity—subjective or objective—from others, such as religious, social, or national? In other words, why does the individual, endowed with this mysterious collective force, become now a popular leader, now the founder of a religion, and now an artist?
To contemporary sensibilities these are unfortunate analogies chosen to guide an investigation that is, nonetheless, more relevant than ever before. The balance of power among various collective elements having shifted since Rank's time, we might consider the technician, the technologist, and the entrepreneur as distinctive channelings of the creative impulse.
In science and enterprise alike there is a conceit to meritocracy, or, in other words, to the appointment of leadership or status on an explicitly rational basis which religions, nations, and yes, artists, usually cannot legitimately claim. Whether or not this conceit to rationalism has a basis in reality, I would conjecture that science and enterprise are good examples of extra-artistic collective elements which today the artist-type is most tempted by, and that the central place both reserve for the rationalistic conceit is a meaningful reflection of broad social changes since a time when Rank would emphasize leadership instead. (Was Ives not doubly of his time, then, first for being a hugely successful artist-entrepreneur, but moreover for the near-total compartmentalization of the one role from the other?)
The state of being rational is, among other things, highly-valued in the rhetorical realm.Human variability is such that rationalism splinters taste rather than unifying it, collective factors or not. Hence the suspicion of artists (sellouts) and politicians (populists/demagogues) alike who attract the widest followings. Thither Ideological Science, Shady Business Practices, and Artistic Compromise, the little white lies we tell ourselves when we simply must recover the thrill of our irrational collective past. (Just this once!) It is so thrilling, in fact, that more people will follow you in these directions than you could ever hope to attract to Disinterested Scholarship, Fair Trade, or Radical Honesty. Hence another mechanism of devolution which we have never been further from getting under control.
[xxvi] I made the first attempt to find, on social-psychological lines, a common spiritual root for the meaning and origin of collective ideologies. This root I conceived to be the belief in immortality, and this belief I regarded (if one can say so of any belief) as the original ideology, out of which, as it became increasingly untenable, there arose various others, more securely anchored in reality, but always animated by the same immortalization tendency. In religion this is of course obvious, but in the social ideologies too, with their political form and their national content, the tendency towards a collective conception of immortality is easily recognizable. In artistic creativity the same tendency is easy to detect, if one starts from the psychology of the individual artist and his inherent tendency to strive towards a goal. For whatever the artist acheives by his successful work is in actual fact immortality, a result from which we need only infer this intention in order to obtain an understanding of the individual will to art as a personal urge to immortality. In this sense, however, the feeling of immortality is not only the result of creating but actually the presupposition on which it rests.
take over the different art-forms, indeed, even to develop them, but also to break through, to overcome, these forms, to mix them with others, to supplant them by others?
The fact that this not only is possible, but does actually occur in the case of almost every great artist-personality, brings us back to our spiritual dualism and to the experience that at any rate the two tendencies—call them what one will—must be potentially present in the artist, even though both do not always find expression.
...
even cool-eyed art-historians are forced in the end to some such conception of the transmu-
[xlv]
tation of the laws of style.
Indeed, also the laws of determination by individual psychology, cultural conditioning, and biography. The widely-observable transmutation of these too-parsimonious explanations is here taken to rule them out tout court, axiomatically. They explain neither what artworks are nor what artworks mean. Yet the sheer persistence with which these explanations are offered and reiterated indicates that they do mean something, beyond the mere fact of recapitulating the most obvious conclusions drawn from the most superficial inquiries.
The if-then theory of art-history is merely the most respectable instance of what Sontag called "the revenge of the intellect upon art," whether or not the stamp of "intellect" is in evidence. Revenge upon art, and indeed upon artist too, for how to more effectively cut the artist down to size, to literally reduce the artist's achievement, than to deploy reductionist interpretation of their work, to reduce it to collective elements in which everyone shares, but without asking either of the next, best questions raised by this assessment:
what does this collective factor, both generally and particularly in the creative individual, mean?
what is the characteristic which distinguishes the specific, artistic collectivity—subjective or objective—from others?
As Rank's next-and-best questions suggest, Art History's house blend of socio-determinist reductionism is ultimately qualitative as well as quantitative. It turns equally on questions of meaning and characterics as on efforts to establish demonstrable social importance (or superfluity). It makes its way in disguise, not merely as something it is not but in fact the opposite of what it actually is. Great heaps of undue intellectual clutter are thereby generated and strewn about the rhetorical space immediately surrounding art and artist, usually attached to an explictly-stated altrustic conceit (audience outreach, provision of context, reclaiming of tradition,...); but the one-sidedness of the conceit is mirrored in one-sided analysis which can only ensure a narrowing of the field. The role of collective elements, e.g., is easily weaponized to make any artist look less exceptional, should one be sufficiently motivated to overlook the individual side which is similarly irreducible. The ideology of genius thereby dies a death by a thousand cuts. It may deserve to die, but not at this cost.
Sontag:
"To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.""
Rank:
the ruling psychological ideology itself appears to be as much in need of explanation as the other spiritual phenomena which it claims, either wholly or at least satisfactorily, to explain.
Neither the cultural and scientific history of art nor the aesthetic psychology of the artist has so far provided a satisfactory answer to this central question of the whole problem of art: namely, what constitutes the correlation between artist-type and the art-product; that is to say, the artistic creativeness and the art-form?
If this un-law of transmutation holds for all other faux-determinant factors as it does for style, then this indeed preempts the taking of such "revenge" (or at least it should), and that is quite the hopeful development for art and artist alike. But it is then to the same degree unfortunate that this un-law must in the same breath as it is issued also be qualified as applying only to great artists.
As ways of defining "greatness" go, this one is among the least bad. And, if occasional lapses into if-then thinking remain inevitable even here, we are consoled by the notion that "punching up" at the great is excusable whereas "punching down" at the weak is reprehensible. But then the weakest take priority in the defense against injustice, and socio-determinist reductionism is, to whatever degree, an injustice. If genius is no longer interesting to anyone, then this defense campaign ought to be.
[xlviii] a paradoxical phenomenon discloses itself, which will not startle the psychologist and indeed will facilitate our approach to the understanding of the spiritual dynamism in artistic creativity. The autonomous individualism of primitive man, as well as that of the lordly masters appears to be more dependent on Nature in its artistic creativeness than is the sedentary collective type of man, who, though depending to a great extent on nature's moods and his own environment (of commerce), can yet rise to abstractions in art which are quite independent of reality. We shall see presently how this compensatory function of the art-form brings the development of personality and its dynamic need of equalization into unison. Here I would merely point out...that in neither of the two art-forms is it a question of an absolute style-principle, but only of a more or a less, while at the same time both style-forms alike possess the tendency to reproduce something absent, which in certain cases happens to be a natural object, while in others it pictures an idea. The obvious purpose in this tendency is domination, whether this takes the form of a naturalistic representation of an animal as a hunting spell or of the symbolic representation of a human abstraction. Behind both there is the creative will of the personality, which only now and then manifests itself directly, and at other times reacts to the compulsion of collective society and gives expression thereto. Undoubtedly this second art-form...is more capable of development, not only for stylistic and aesthetic, but for psychological reasons as well. For the abstraction at the base of this mechanical art represents even in itself a rising above nature, and it can be still further intensified and varied, whereas in naturalistic or organic art the objects within a cultural environment are limited, so that the artistic effort to deal with them otherwise than in their natural setting does not find them very malleable. In a word, art consists in the latter case of arbitrary
[xlix]
re-creation (not copying) of the given objects; in the other, of the new creation of ever changing ideas. Nevertheless, for both we must assume a creative force in the individual himself, which has to be studied in its various forms before we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the art-forms produced by it.
[end of Introduction]
As profoundly as the above theory speaks to my own sensibilities and (self-)intuitions, I'm still not sure that a deeper understanding is what is needed. Why exactly is the problem of art a "problem" again?
In any case, one thing Rank has done by relegating biography to the margins of critical discourse is to reestablish a line (perhaps a barrier) between transmission and reception, a line that uncritical, self-projecting observers have tended to blur.
Rank's
feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism of all life.
The local forms taken by this process in this or that specific case, i.e. in the biography of this or that artist, are inessential, whereas the dualism of individual life and collective life is fundamental.
I see no reason why the audience cannot also be creating something through their participation, different and incommensurable as that something may be from what the artist has presented to them. Reception can be a (self-)generative act, a transformative act, or at the very least an act of consolidation, of renewing one's vows as it were. But I also see no reason why we should be obligated to ascribe these any of these things to the audience tout court. We should exemplefy rather than brag about these transformations in ourselves; similarly, experience permits us to be dubious when someone tells us offhandedly that a song or a movie or an installation "changed my life." Don't tell me, show me.
Without having as yet done all the necessary digging, it does seem to me that the writers most concerned with this specific question have focused almost exclusively on revealing transformation in nonelite audiences who are said by elites not to experience it; this as opposed to the far less valorous task of revealing its absence from somewhere it has previously been claimed to exist. As a result, the task of protecting the weakest now involves making both of these corrections rather than just the first.
If we go so far as to demand a properly scientific burden of proof on such matters, we will hardly ever be able to declare that art has transformed anyone in any way, and we will have to dispense with almost all of our existing conceits to having either experienced such transformations ourselves or observed them in others. I would agree that the truth is probably not so barren, but this is beside the point. To point, rather, is not to act as if we know things we cannot know.
III can't imagine that the dynamic need of equalization which Rank ascribes to the artist and to which he attributes much of the driving force behind artistic creation is a need unique to artists, though they may feel these compulsions in a unique and perhaps more acute way; and moreover, among artists, it cannot possibly be the exclusive domain of the great ones either. Rank is on the hunt for that mysterious collective force which differentiates artists both from non-productive personalities and from productive personalities whose production finds a different outlet. And again, this is a problem only in the sense of having an elusive answer. As a mere fact of life, I would insist that it is actually indispensible and very much in line with so many other indispensible human traits in being a kind of behavioral-level diversity which is salutary upon communities in the same way that genetic diversity is salutary upon species. But also in line with evolutionary metaphors, the needs of individuals and of species aren't always aligned. The proportion of artists in our midst who undeniably have an essential and original contribution to make is, if we are being brutally honest about fitness and ability, very close to the proportion of artists that a society really, truly needs: not many. Hence the proliferation of sub-genius-level artists betokens, on one hand, a certain democratization; on the other hand, much like the proliferation of junk food and cell phones, it is merely an overshooting of the target when considered from the community or societal level. It is an invitation to starve in the midst of plenty, simultaneously overfed and malnourished. This would seem to transcend social standpoint, if anything could.
How could it be that, on one hand, this proliferation must, if we are taking Rank at face value, betoken a mass act of equalization that everyone must be entitled to avail themselves of as a matter of justice; and, on the other hand, it can only result in a progressive destabilization of the system which can only drive individuals to ever more desperate attempts at seeking equilibrium? This would indicate that we are just not living in a healthy or sustainable way. Not exactly an earth-shattering assertion, this; which is precisely why I'm comfortable saying what I have said here, heartless and "elitist" as it may be taken.
IIIJohn Cage famously considered a work incomplete unless and until he could get it performed. He makes a poor proxy for the run-of-the-mill, equilibrium-seeking lumpenkunstler only when you ignore what a shrewd and calculating businessperson he was.
Few artists actually impose this on themselves quite so literally or absolutely (or make such a show of declaring so), but I suspect that by now most of us feel it in a very real way. It's obvious to anyone who has passed through the contemporary arts education juggernaut that it is in the ascribed therapeutic value of artmaking and not in commerical imperatives where Cage's criterion of (in)completeness most fully applies, despite the fact that in a time of total saturation there is no choice but to adopt a commerical orientation if one is to have any hope of accessing the full therapeutic effect. The point, in any case, is that merely creating the work is rarely sufficient for purposes of equalization. One could be forgiven, actually, based on strictly anecdotal observations, for thinking that the content of works is far less important than the attention they draw to their makers. "If it isn't posted to Facebook, it didn't happen. Facebook is recent, but this has been true forever. The social media are merely new conduits.
On this view, then, passive audiences have all the power. Even in mediums where works can be well-preserved and enjoy a noble posterity, it remains the case that a show without an audience never happened. Even the genius need not be neglected for very long before they are functionally leveled with the undistiguished. When equalization is what's at stake, a work is not complete until it is not only presented publicly but indeed until it has a public.
Ideally the artists and the recipients could land on a symbiotic relationship rather than the parasitic one we currently have with each other, all both generating and receiving in their own ways and, as Mumford would have it, in the right amount in the right place at the right time such that everyone's needs are met. Here again I would conjecture that the strictly numerical balance of these two macro-types in the proverbial wild is shockingly close to ideal and probably governed by the same sort of biological dynamics as is the sex ratio. What, then, accounts for the wildly unbalanced reality we actually live in? Quite literally everything else that humans, the social animal, have wrought for themselves, among which art itself must be counted as one example. But I don't think that renders this thought exercise pointless; rather, it is an ideal which ought to be considered explicitly in policy-making, an artifact of psychodiversity which is, unlike some other kinds of diversity, scalable rather than zero-sum on account of its central conceit to symbiosis.
IVOne glaring commonality between Rank's time and our own, and indeed also of both times with the entire so-called "romantic" epoch of art: artists simultaneously enjoy an elevated and a degraded social status. We are both respected and feared, pitied and envied, loved and hated. Each such valuation has both an affirmative and a negative avenue: that is, artists may be parsed either for what they are, or for what they are not.
Faced with the wider collision of formerly isolated cultures (including both "collective" cultures and individualist cultures-of-one), those of the affirmative outlook band together out of self-preservation, forming specialized institutions to look after the interests of their affirmative ideology of artisthood. To the world outside of these enclaves, meanwhile (which, it must be emphasized, certainly includes many who self-consciously identify as artists and have a noncontroversial claim to doing so, but perhaps are not of the affirmative outlook), this institutionalized art world can itself only be construed as Other, as an interest group, foreign, and if not malign then at least an Inessential Business in terms of the everyday economy. [[the Institutional Ideology as the/a contemporary art-ideology of note?? Did N. Carroll have a chapter on the "institutional theory of art"?]]
The central problem here for people who make art and care about art being made is to resolve a seeming paradox: institutionalization/formalization is the only thing allowing art to survive, and simultaneously is the singular motivation behind the most organized, persistent, and effective movements to destroy it. It is for the better that artists are no longer National or Religious figures; but then as we enter the Twilight of Sovereignty, the age of globalization and the mobility of capital, the interest group itself the only Nation many people have left, Nation taken in the broader, contemporary, socio-academic sense of the word; and this brings all manner of Darwinistic implications and existantial threats crashing down on all of us like a California landslide. Ditto religious affiliation: this institution famously harbors an unmoored contingent whose mystical beliefs, absolutist tendencies, and necessary hypocrisies all comport perfectly with the contemporary Religious gestalt, as well as a tiny irreducible minority of mundanely devout followers whose very devoutness is, if harmless, also less inherently respectable than it would be if taking the more comprehensive Judeo-Christian moral ideal, instead of the exceedingly narrow ideal of art, as its object.
It's easy to notice "style wars" raging and wonder just how some of the institutional outposts (university music departments, non-profit orgs, etc.) manage to function at all. Perhaps this is just one more indication that all of these style warriors indeed share something beyond style (or perhaps short of it); namely, a commitment to a particular institutional way of doing business which is self-preserving first and everything-else second.
When Worringer explains the incongruence of art-history and æsthetic by the fact that our æsthetic is nothing more than a psychology of the Classical way of feeling art, he is certainly right; but there will probably always be a similar incongruence between every ideology and its concretization, as indeed there actually is between our æsthetic and the corresponding intuitive (einfühlende) art, as also between the religious art of Egypt and mediæval Christianity and the works respectively produced by them.Pseudo-religious conceits will no doubt continue to circulate among artists, but functionally the institution of art is an interest group, and the interests served are, as my choice of this term seeks to indicate, their own, thus through deeds giving continual lie to so many words as fast as we can speak them. From that drawing of comparison with other such groups, what I ultimately want to argue is that there is a mundane but essential social function that art practices might serve but which art institutions cannot.
In addition to this natural divergence between an ideology and its concretization, there is in artistic creation yet another decisive factor which æsthetic would have to neglect entirely if it sought to make its laws absolute, and this is the personality of the artist, with his own system of ideology, which perhaps runs largely parallel with the general, but by no means coincides with it.
(p. 21)
Law Enforcement presents a fraught but topical illustration of this distinction between the ideal/essential contribution of a "practice" to society and the perversion of this mission by interest-group politicking; in other words, as police unions are to good policing, so the institution of art is to artistry, with very different consequences but nonetheless for the same reasons. And so it goes: just as Scott Walker's gutting of public sector union rights targeted teachers and excluded police, so orchestras program the weakest works of famous composers over the best works of obscure composers. I am not equating these two arenas, but I am unafraid of accusations from the occasional careless reader (of which I sometimes am one myself) that I am somehow equating them by availing myself of a rather callous analogy. This is the analogy, callous or not. Only having first accepted that reality can artists begin to imagine other ways.
And so, I think that Rank, in his nuanced, anti-mechanistic psychological approach, has a good claim to having identified precisely this "mundane but essential social function" of art which, subsequently, the institution of art, as today's guiding ideology of artistic creation, has completely abandoned simply in order to preserve the already-privileged positions of its most privileged exponents. If all this institution did was to constrain creation by channeling it into the areas it knows how to operate with, this would not be so comprehensively destructive; what it does in parallel to this, however, is to similarly constrain reception, to dictate to Others (more or less explicitly depending on the medium and the moment) exceedingly strict boundaries of self-construction via reception. Reception is not a generative activity, because artists' monopoly on this kind of generativity, on meeting this "dynamic need of equalization" in this peculiar way, is a monopoly on which they rely in obtaining money, sex and recognition, the trio of resources (one timeless, the other two of more recent vintage) which sustain them (or perhaps, in strict adherence to Rank's theory, best allow them to deny their own mortality).
Hence artists must cut ourselves down to size before the Other acts on its impulse to cut us into a thousand pieces. We may resolve our crisis of conscience and our crisis of survival via the same avenue; but it is an avenue which under present conditions requires rare courage and, probably, the disappearance-loss of so many vessels sailing into uncharted waters unless and until enough of them survive the journey that line of communication and a secure beachhead can be established. (Another unfortunate analogy that nonetheless feels unavoidable.)
When art-as-profession becomes about our "mundane social function," it will cease to be fetishized for what it is not, thereby achieving the exaltation of the affirmative over the negative image of art and artist; indeed, this is the same exaltation pursued by our sclerotic art institutions in a scorched-earth fashion, whereas as individuals we are free to pursue it more constructively.
To the extent that the twin pillars of "dynamic need of equalization" and the inessentiality of "biographical presentation" hold explanatory power, to that same extent do the Explanations come fast and furious. Post-ness or after-the-factness, trite as it is to say, then becomes even so the crucial element of the present epoch, and the reasons why incidentally explain why art, even "after the fact," has not ceased to be created, transmitted, or received: namely, that the fact after which we find ourselves situated is self-consciousness: of tradition, of other artists, of our membership (whether in our own eyes or others') in art, of all the things art is thought to do, what it actually does, what we only wish it would do, and so on. All of these are decisively collective factors, not individual(istic) ones, a point which is lost sight of only when the scale of historical maass-consciousness has withered to months rather than centuries.
the artist not only creates his art, but also uses art in order to create.
(p. 7)
Rank is largely content to demonstrate the inessentiality of biography and move on with his larger argument. Notably little is said about why biography has, in fact, held so much sway, undue or otherwise. In the introductory remarks, the preponderance of "mechanistic science" is given pride of place in this connection; I think there is much more to it, though, as is implied in the later, more detailed discussions.
Post-artists who are not merely aware of the biographical orientation but are in fact post-biographical in their mania for this as an essential element of both creation and reception can, like any other kind of artist, be seen as "reproducing what is absent:" that would be first and foremost themselves, who are not, as would be non-sensical, literally "absent" from the scene (though they cannot tolerate that either), but rather absent from the internal drama of the art-ideology of the time to which they are appealing. This is because really, no one is present in institutional art-ideology, because institutions are nonparticularistic. Some of us do not mind this about institutions, whatever our other misgivings. This nonparticularism may even be seen as art institutions' most salutary trait, comporting as it does so neatly with classical liberalism's ideal of an impersonal public order. Others, conversely, make it their first order of generative business (re)create themselves on the surface level of their artwork. What is further, any appeal to static rationalizations, such as balancing the (mis)representations of Others by creating countervailing (mis)representations of Self, runs aground on Rank's dynamic account of personality formation. The central implication of that account is simply that neither structure nor agency can be held exclusively responsible for personality formation, and, by extension, for artistic production; rather, responsibility for any given artistic production lies in a dynamic interaction between the two, creating an individual which is perhaps quite unique psychologically in some ways but in other ways just like the rest of us. Usually both things are true, and this enables faux-critics to pick and choose their critical framwork self-stylingly. And so biography is, for one thing, in these terms a mere static, one-sided, "mechanistic" account of Structure, devoid of Agency; and for another, it is by direct virtue of this static, literal quality a chilling restraint on reception, which is thus channeled into a far narrower range of acceptable response than is required for the audience, also comprised of sentient human beings with rights, needs, and aspirations, to be able to make use of the art work as a vehicle of self-equilibriation.
Thus the "biographical presentation" certainly can become, as so many of its armchair theorists would have it, a Confrontational orientation; indeed, a confrontation wherein one side has brought a rocket-launcher to a knife-fight. As an older teenager in my neighborhood who had fallen in with the wrong crowd once put it, "If someone wants to be a pussy and shoot me, that's on them." Settling of scores for more than a day at a time requires mutual vulnerability borne of commensurate ammunition; in that specific respect, the Political Artist who seeks to countervail existing power dynamics by reproducing them in negative is merely driving an SUV in the bike lane. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. At one time art may have appeared, like the Long March Through the Institutions, as a supreme end run of soft persuasion around this otherwise immovable obstacle; but after the fact, that is no longer either a radical thought or a workable strategy, but instead merely a commonly-offered platitude. There is no longer any hope of soft persuasion here, and the consolidation of hard persuasion (Confrontation) into an art-ideology in its own right has, besides committing the fallacy of staticizing the psychological workings of art, also begun to work against its stated purpose as audiences and artists alike have become desensitized to it.
I write this because I share that purpose, not because I oppose it. I hasten to add also that as an individual matter of self-equilibriation through artworks which are made For The Drawer, there need be many fewer constraints on what is acceptable. It is, rather, in what might be called the Distribution and Promotion of artworks (in other words, in who we show our work to, the terms on which we show it to them, and our related utterances about this showing, about the work, and about ourselves) where there is an urgent (because frequenly abused) ethical dimension. An extreme example: an older friend of mine who acted in a TV series that still has, decades later, a cult following, once showed me a piece of Fan Fiction that a Fan had sent her. This Fan quite clearly and explicitly was disequilibriated in a way that required this specific outlet; and as profoundly disturbing as this "outlet" was to me as a mere outside observer, it can only be that much more disturbing to its object, my friend, who thus finds herself, very much as herself, fictionally woven into the fabric of this severely disequilibriated person's writhing efforts to equilibriate. The content itself would be enough on which to base this evaluation, but the content need never have reached her; and indeed it should not have, not ethically at least, and not materially either given that she protects knowledge of her home address vigorously for precisely this reason. As I said, an extreme case in the qualitative sense, but not necessaily a quantitative outlier. I think this simply brings into higher relief elements of the status quo which rely on their seeming mildness in order to pass unquestioned. That is exactly where I would locate, against the backdrop of this extreme, any number of Distributional and Promotional artifacts of the postmodern art-ideology adhered to more or less explicitly by myriad professionals and by quite a few non-professionals too. (A good place to look for these more quotidian instances of high-functioning psychopathology is in your spam folder, where I have noticed the most overzealous of self-promoters in my immediate midst occasionally tend to land, even if they are old friends who have been in my address book for as long as I've had one, and even if they are writing on personal rather than professional matters.) These are patterns of behavior with which this so-called extreme example fits near-perfectly. And I would conjecture that if we could empirically sort these behaviors by personality, we would find Rank's theories of equilibration and "reproducing that which is absent" to be proven with a robustness that refutes almost everything else that artists working under the current art-ideology tend to say about themselves and their work. This too would cut artists down to size, and also elevate them in one fell swoop.
[6] for such an undertaking, which tackles the problem of art primarily from the psychological end, a different starting-point is required from that which is called for in a study of art from the stylistic or cultural-historical angle. Even if by art we understand, not the part played by the creator in the psychological sense, but the product, the work, or even the content of all art—at least for the particular period—we can for the time being sum up the relation of the artist to his art as follows: the artist, as a definite creative individual, uses the art-form that he finds ready to his hand in order to express something personal; this personal must therefore be somehow connected with the prevailing artistic or cultural ideology,
[7]
since otherwise he could not make use of them, but it must also differ, since otherwise he would not need to use them in order to produce something of his own. While this aspect brings us again to the dualism in the artist, there is, as we know already, a similar dualism at the bottom of the cultural ideology, as one of the manifestations of which the style of the age must be regarded. But the general ideology of the culture, which determines its religion, morals, and society as well as its art, is again only the expression of the human types of the age, and of this the artist and the creative personality generally are the most definite crystallization. The circular argument here is only apparent, for we may not disregard the creative process, which presents itself as an essential factor between the ideology of the art, the style, and the creative personality, the artist. We must admit, however, that we know almost nothing of this process in the artist, since here, more than anywhere, the hopes held out by modern psychology have proved delusive.
Well, if we know almost nothing of one essential factor in the overall equation, then it must be rather tenuous to say just what the most definite crystallization of the general ideology of the culture might be. What if art simply offers itself up most readily?
[7] The artist, as it were, takes not only his canvas, his colours, or his model in order to paint, but also the art that is given him formally, technically, and ideologically, within his own culture, this probably emerges most clearly in the case of the poet, whose material is drawn from the cultural possessions already circulating and is not dead matter, as is that used by the plastic arts. In any case we can say of all artistic creation that the artist not only creates his art, but also uses art in order to create.
And so the audience not only experiences the artwork but also uses art in order to experience.
[11] Primitive religion, as a belief in souls (as we know it), is originally so abstract that it has been called irreligious by comparison with higher religions, in which the gods have already assumed concrete form. But from a study of these abstract preliminary stages of religion, which are a matter of spirits and demons, we see also that the urge for abstaction in primitives is rooted in the soul-belief that, in the intellectualized form of the East, culminates in the absolute abstract of the soul. Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the abstractest form of art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most
[12]
definite naturalism in art is abstract when compared with nature.
Good point, re: relative qualities. Naturalists are trapped in abstraction much as Satanists are trapped in Christianity.
But the origins-of-religion stuff is hard to follow. If the gods have already assumed concrete form in higher religions, did the "lower" religions not project the god-force onto very concrete beings and objects? The omniscient Christian god seems ultimately abstract compared to myriad snake-gods whose abstract being may at least inhabit real snakes periodically.
[12] The urge for abstraction, which owed its origin to a belief in immortality and created the notion of the soul, created also the art which served the same ends, but led beyond the purely abstract to the objectivizing and concretizing of the prevailing idea of the soul. Everything produced objectively in any period by the contemporary ideas of the soul was beautiful, and the aesthetic history of the idea of the beautiful is probably no more than a reflection of changes in the idea of the soul under the influence of increasing knowledge.
The most illuminating demonstration that the source of the beauty-ideal lies in the contemporary ideal of the soul is found in the religious art of all times and peoples, but most conspicuously in the higher cultures, where the already unified idea of the soul was ideally embodied in the forms of their gods. Thus Anubis with his animal head was as much an ideal of beauty for the Egyptians as was Zeus with his leonine mane for the Greeks, or the tortured and martyred body of Jesus for the Christians. The concept of the beautiful, which inspires the works of art of a period, is derived, not from the abstract sig-[13]nificance of the soul-concept (in the way in which, for instance, the Romantics spoke of the "beautiful soul"), but from its concretization.
[13]
That is, the religious art portrayed the idea of the soul in concrete form for the men of the time, in the shape of gods, and so, psychologically speaking, proved their existence. It is precisely the concreteness of art as compared with the idea of the soul that makes it convincing; for it creates something visible and permanent in contrast to something which was merely thought or felt, which was at first handed down from one generation to another only by means of a mystic tradition and was only fixed in literature of religious form at a very late stage.
This close association, in fact fundamental identity, of art and religion, each of which strives in its own way to make the absolute eternal and the eternal absolute, can be already seen at the most primitive stages of religious development, where there are as yet neither representations of gods nor copies of nature. Almost all students of the art of primitive peoples get the unanimous impression that..."the intention of primitive art was far less towards the imitation of nature than towards the representation of particular ideas." [Franz Kugler, 1842] More than fifty years later...Leo Frobenius says the same of African art: "We cannot say that there was any direct extrovert effort at the attainment of some perfection of form. All the objects of art come only out of the need to give plastic expression to ideas." We shall show later in detail how almost all these "ideas" turn more or less on the idea of the soul, which itself arises from the problem of death. Here we need only note that the redeeming power of art, that which entitles it to be regarded aesthetically as beautiful, resides in the way in which it lends concrete existence to abstract ideas of the soul. Art, then—at least in its beginning—was not the
[14]
satisfaction of the desire of the individual artist to attain immortality for himself in his work, but the confirmation of the collective immortality-idea in the work itself as a picture of the soul. Thus primitive art must be, like the primitive idea of the soul, collective in order to achieve its aim, the continuation of the individual existence in the species. And it follows, too, that primitive art must be abstract in order to reproduce this abstract idea of the soul as faithfully as may be. Worringer was certainly right in denying that art began with the imitation of nature, or even had this object; but it was imitation all the same, though in a wider sense. The most definite representation possible of an idea is imitation, in the ideoplastic sense; and we might explain this very character of abstraction of primitive art by the fact that it faithfully represents an idea which is itself abstract. That is, the soul was depicted as abstractly as possible, in order that it might be like this abstract, and the further the divinizing of the soul in different personifications proceeded, the more concrete, or, as we should say, naturalistic, art became. If in this wise the obstinately defended theory of imitation (though not strictly in the sense of imitation of nature) is found to have a deeper significance in the soul, we may use the second disputed principle of the old aesthetic also to support our new structure. The accusation of aimlessness made against an art which exists only for beauty's sake cannot be sustained, either in respect of primitive art or in respect of the individual creative dynamism of the modern artist. Art unquestionably has an end, probably even a variety of ends—but the ends are not concrete and practical, they are abstract and spiritual.
...
[15]
***b+a*** There is no doubt that even in the historical times of art religion used it as a means to represent, in objective and concrete form, the contemporary idea of the soul; but not, so to say, "illustratively," as if mankind were too immature to form abstract ideas of the soul. It had to be made concrete, pictorial, and real, so as to prove its existence, and had to be presented in matter to demonstrate its indestructibility. Not only, therefore, have we in the art-form (style) the expression of a will that varies from time to time under the influence of changes in the soul-idea, but the same principle holds even of the content of art—so far as it is religious—and, indeed, it is religious from the start, if we may give this name to the supersensible, even where it has not condensed into the idea of a god. It is therefore not a defective faculty of abstraction which drives the concretization of the soul and its pictorial representation in the god, but the will to objectify it and thus to impart to it existence and, what is more, eternity.
Here we come to the interesting question to what extent the development of primitive art and its frank use by religion has itself contributed to the formation of a religion itself, and how far it was essential to it; in other words, whether the transition from animism to religion...was only possible through art, because in art lay the only mode of exhibiting the soul in objective form and giving personality to God. It seems certain that art was at one time more abstract, since its purpose was to give existence to the non-existent by the truest possible copying. In the course
[16]
of development it merely became more concrete, a destiny which it shares with all other ideologies, as I have shown elsewhere, and with the development of human institutions out of these ideologies. Its culmination came in the individual art-creation of the Classical style as we have it in Greek work. There man himself—in his full naturalness, yet in idealized beauty too—had become the vehicle of an immortal soul and was not, like the Oriental gods, a mere representative of the belief in the soul. In this sense not only did the development of the soul begin with art, but the process of humanization of the soul completed itself in art and not in religion. It was art, by its embodiment of man in lasting material, that finally gave him the courage to reassume the soul which, because of the transitoriness of its bodily form, he had abstracted into an absolute idea of the soul.
From a point of view such as this, art, though born from the same spirit as religion, appears not only as outlasting it, but actually as fulfilling it. If religion, as is hardly disputable, could only develop beyond soul-belief by the help of art, and if, moreover, as I would believe, the humanization of the soul, which implies the completion of religion, is accomplished by art, religion would almost sink to a transition stage of art. This is, of course, a matter of attitude—but it does seem certain that the development of art has always striven beyond religion, and that its highest individual achievements lie outside purely religious art, until in modern times it completely emancipates itself from that influence and even takes its place. But this tendency towards independence corresponds to an irreligiosity (or even an anti-religiosity) which is inherent and essential in all artistic creation, and which we must admit, in spite of its logically contradicting our own discussion, unless we are to sacrifice a decisive, and perhaps the most important, side of the creative impulse to a one-sided theory. Personal creativity is anti-religious in the sense that it is always subservient to the individual desire for immortality in the creative personality and not to the collective glorification of the creator
[17]
of the world. The individual artist of course uses collective forms, among which the religious, in the widest sense, take first place, so as to overcome his personal dualism by a social compensation. But at the same time he tries to save his individuality from the collective mass by giving his work the stamp of his own personality. Hence it is quite right that Rudolf Kautzsch...emphasizes the fact that on one side religion is a handicap on art; and we too have seen in our survey of prevalent theories of art that the periods of strong development of personality, or of constructive individualism like that predicated of the superman, have always been among the highest periods of artistic productivity.[[end b+a post]]
Among these periods of floraison [that is, "the periods of strong development of personality, or of constructive individualism like that predicated of the superman, have always been among the highest periods of artistic productivity"] we have mentioned the prehistoric art of self-dependent man, Classical Greek art, and the Renaissance. All these periods, which either are individualistic or are carried along by a definite cult of personality, show—in contrast to the abstract and rigid style of Egyptian, Christian, and to a certain extent even Gothic art—a vivid naturalism which is certainly no imitation of nature, but rather an organic vitalization of fossilizing art-forms. We have indicated in the Introduction the psychical significance of this antithesis and how it may be psychologically understood. Religion is the collective ideology par excellence, which can only spring from a powerful group-need and mass-consciousness, which itself springs from the need of the individual for dependence and implies his subjection to higher forces. Art also, which sprang organically from self-feeling, is then subordinated to the creator. Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual. The conflict between art and religion, which we can so easily trace in the individual artist, is thus ultimately a conflict between individuality and collectivity, the dualistic struggle within the creative artist of the two impulses of his own self. In this sense there is a reciprocal dependence between
[18]
art and religion, but, concurrent with it from the outset, an opposition between them. For, on the one hand, the artist has need of religion so as to make his own impulse towards immortality collective, while religion needs the artist in order to make concrete its abstract notion of the soul; on the other hand, the artist seeks to eternalize his individuality apart from the collective ideologies, while religion would deny the individual in favour of the community. Thus though art is in the the last resort anti-collectivist—in spite of the fact that it makes use of the various communal ideologies, especially of contemporary religion and the style dependent on it—it yet needs these collective ideologies, even if only to overcome them from time to time by the force of personality. This fact may perhaps explain why the present age, with its strong individualism, has failed to produce any great art like other periods marked by strong personality and consequent alienation from religion.
We'll see about that. Eventually.
It's not clear (yet) just why a profusion of micro-ideologies is not sufficient, in absence of one big one, to inspire artists to overcome one or more of them. It's also quite possible (for some of us, at least) to find the big fucked up outside world more or less of a piece with itself and therefore simply imagine a unified communal ideology where one does not in fact exist.
The only problem with these two suggestions is that they accept the terms of debate as above, which strongly imply that all of this minutely-detailed give and take between individual and collective takes place, as we say nowadays of our iDevices, "in the background," i.e. that we are not conscious of it, wherein so many problems of art arise as epistemological rather than functional problems.
[18] These other periods had strength in their religious and anti-religious currents, as well as other powerful collective ideologies, which our present-day society in its disruption lacks. Even if nowadays, with the decay of religious faith, the artist is immeasurably overvalued, this seems only a last effort at reestablishing a similarly decaying cult of the personality, of which we are just as incapable as we are of collective faith.
True, there was, probably, a time when the artist did play the part of the religious hero on earth, being the creative representative of a humanized god: the time, that is, when there arose content and concept of genius wherein dwelt the divine spark, the immortal soul. But if we want to understand the personality of the creative artist, we must turn for a while to the history of this idea of genius; for this idea has not always existed, though there were geniuses before it. The necessity for the birth of this idea, and its elaboration into a cult of personality, whose last stages only are known to us, seem to me to have arisen from the incessant conflict with, and final conquest of, these collective ideologies by a new type of humanity, which appeared first in Greece, but had to be reborn for west-
[19]
ern Europe in Italy. For Greece had, in spite of its extraordinary personality-culture, a strong national idea which defined the type, while in the Renaissance a new European personal consciousness arose which towered above religious and national boundaries and established a reign of humanism which could vie with collective Christianity.
The notion of genius as it grew up between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century was created by the artist as a new ideology, and henceforth it was as much a means towards production as had previously been the abstract idea of style derived from the collective belief in the soul. But this new "religion of genius," as Zilsel calls it, centred on a type and no longer on a collectivity; it was indeed individual and even psychological, in its emphasis, based wholly on the artist and no longer on art, on style. At the Renaissance, out of which genius was born, the Middle Ages were freed from the collective spirit of Christianity and fought through once more to personality. Now for the first time there appears the creative artist of the modern age, whose epigoni today produce their art without possessing either the collective ideology of earlier ages or the individual religion of genius which has produced the greatest of our great artists... Such men as these, being tied to their age, stand in sharp opposition to a collective art such as had still ruled in the Gothic. The are alone and unique—in spite of their countless imitators—for they are individual; and not only in their personality and the works born from it, but their whole ideology is individual, since it springs from the notion of genius and is only possible through it. These men who are for us the representatives of the type "genius" embody the same process and achievement, on earth and individually, which in its religious form we saw beginning with the image of God. The idea genius is, in its mythical origin, a representation of the
[20]
immortal soul, that part of the personality which can beget (gignere) what is immortal, be it a child or a work.
The idea of the "Genius" comes originally from early Roman times, when it means the personal protecting spirit, of man, as opposed to woman, where it is called "Juno" and corresponds to the Egyptian "Ka" and Greek "daimon." Without discussing this notion of a psychical double of man, which is represented in different forms in the different doctrines of the soul, let us note here that the Roman Genius, in keeping with the cultural idea of Rome which was built up on the right of the father, acquired the literal meaning of "begetter." But Otto is right in maintaining that the current explanation of Genius as a deified incarnation of masculine reproductive power does not fully explain the idea. Thus, Genius is also the god of one's birthday—and Otto concluded that the idea contains, as well as the notion of begetting, that of the descent also and indeed that of the continuity of all life. It is hard to see why philologists find this view so difficult, since it is precisely the stage of father-right that is characterized by the collectivizing of the personal reproductive impulse. And so the Roman idea of Genius contains from the beginning, in addition to the individual urge to reproduction, a collective element which points beyond the individual, in a way that is not true of the Egyptian Ka and the Greek daimon, both of which are purely personal. For this reason it was specially fitted to become a social conception of genius that should include both individual and collective elements. Still the artist's concept of genius is more personal than the collective and thus needs a new ideology. This could no longer be a personal peculiarity of style deduced from a collective idea of the soul, but had to become an aesthetic of feeling dependent on consciousness of personality.
[21]
Thus the eighteenth century, which was completely sterile of any collective art and was distinguished only by a few dominant artistic individualities, produced an æsthetic as abstracted from the art-products of earlier ages. This was not, however, the universally valid "science of art" that it was for so long supposed to be, but was itself a new ideology of art, which was to replace the now decadent religious collective ideology by a psychological artistic ideology corresponding to the new genius-type. Æsthetic is thus the psychological ideology of art, born from the notion of the genius-type and not from the collective—and religious—notion of style. Our Classicist æsthetic in fact directs its gaze much more to the individual art-product of Classical artists, while the abstract style of which Worringer speaks appears much more as a collective product. When Worringer explains the incongruence of art-history and æsthetic by the fact that our æsthetic is nothing more than a psychology of the Classical way of feeling art, he is certainly right; but there will probably always be a similar incongruence between every ideology and its concretization, as indeed there actually is between our æsthetic and the corresponding intuitive (einfühlende) art, as also between the religious art of Egypt and mediæval Christianity and the works respectively produced by them.
In addition to this natural divergence between an ideology and its concretization, there is in artistic creation yet another decisive factor which æsthetic would have to neglect entirely if it sought to make its laws absolute, and this is the personality of the artist, with his own system of ideology, which perhaps runs largely parallel with the general, but by no means coincides with it. These problems of the boundaries between psychology and æsthetics we will postpone till a later chapter; here we need only state that even Worringer underestimate the influence of the creative personality when he is dealing with art- and style-forms from the standpoint of their æsthetic effects, however he may emphasize the importance of abstract art as well as intuitive.
[22]
***prospective/retrospective***
True, in a summing-up which is perhaps the culminating point of his magnificent argument, Worringer says that the psychological victory over this æsthetic dualism is found in the demand for self-renunciation which lies at the root of all æsthetic experience and which is achieved now by intuition (Einfühlung), now by abstraction. But it is just these ultimate psychological problems of art that will trip us up if we have neglected or inadequately understood the creative personality, an understanding that is an inherent necessity in all æsthetic, however far it may advance into the domain of psychology. For æsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art, and it takes account of its creation by an artist only by arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator. But this conclusion, apart from its indirect nature, is a fallacy; for as we (or at least as I, myself) have been convinced by a study of the productive personality, there is between that and the unproductive type not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference. The quantitative difference, which is obvious, would be enough in itself to throw doubt on the soundness of thus arguing back from the receptive to the creative; and the qualitative demands a wholly new orientation to the problem, which we shall attempt to at least suggest in the chapter on the play impulse and æsthetic pleasure. But even at the outset it seems to me clear that the idea of intuition (Einfühlung) as fashioned by psychological æsthetic has been attained as from a view-point of reception, while the notion of abstraction which Worringer contrasts with it refers rather to the spiritual attitude of the creative artist. In any case there is here a vagueness of concepts, though it is not attributable to Worringer's unitary interpretation, but belongs to all æsthetic. Ever since Aristotle's day this seems to me to have begun with the tacit assumption that the artist intended to present the effect he aimed at in its phenomenal form, and that therefore there were involved in the creation, at least potentially, the same psychological experiences and psychical
[23]
processes as are to be observed in the contemplator of the work and especially in the æsthetic critic.
Without disputing that in some cases the artist does aim at a definite idea effect in his work, it is certainly not the rule, especially with the individual work of the creative artist, since here the work of art is essentially an expression of his personality. Nor need we doubt that the artist occasionally does find pleasure and satisfaction in his creation, though the confessions of great artists themselves generally tell rather of the struggle and suffering of creating it. But the fundamental difference in essence between the creative and the receptive types, which are psychologically complementary, is not affected by such evidences. While æsthetic pleasure, whether in the creator or in the contemplator, is ultimately a renunciation of self, the essence of the creative impulse is the exactly opposite tendency towards assertion of self. Here again, however, we must be careful not to set up this opposition, in the form in which we have to state it, as if it were absolute. There may be periods in which a strong individualism or a particular development of personality expresses its tendency towards a self-assertion in creativity as opposed to other periods of collective subordination which involve rather a self-negation. In other words, the dualism of the individual and the community, which we showed to be the fundamental conflict, appears here also in a psychological form and in its relation to various forms of art. Even though we found religion with its collectivizing tendency to be ultimately restrictive of art, this really means only that under its influence another art grows and flourishes in which the individual art-expression, being alien, is thwarted and that this again reacts to force collective art into new paths. All the same, it seems psychologically indispensible to set an impulse of self-assertion against that of self-negation if we are to understand the creative personality as it develops out of the idea of genius.
Though this artistic type, as such, was only born with the
[24]
Renaissance and developed from the idea of genius, yet it must have existed previously as a creative type in the sense of an urge to self-assertion, since otherwise no art, and least of all the strongly marked naturalistic art of prehistoric man, would have been possible. Our psychological knowledge of the type begins only with the Renaissance; and there already it denotes—artistically, sociologically, and psychological—something different, which we can only conjecturally assume in the artists of earlier epochs. Psychologically the notion of genius, of which we see the last reflection in our modern artist-type, is the apotheosis of man as a creative personality: the religious ideology (looking to the glory of God) being thus transferred to man himself. Sociologically, it meant the creation and recognition of "genius" as a type, as a culture-factor of highest value to the community, since it takes over on earth the rôle of the divine hero. Artistically, it implies the individual style, which indeed still holds on to the exemplars that later appear in æsthetic as formulated law, but which is already free and autonomous in its divine creative power and is creating new forms from out of itself. This artist, liberated from God, himself become god, soon overleaps the collective forms of style and their abstract formulation in æsthetic and constructs new forms of an individual nature, which cannot, therefore, be subsumed under laws. And so our Classicist æsthetic of the eighteenth century appears as a final attempt to save the Classical forms—if not wholly, at any rate in abstract formulæ—before they were shattered by individual Sturm und Drang effort of the self-creative personality. Æsthetic appears here as the last endeavour to find art's psychological justification in itself, which corresponds exactly to the self-justification of the artist in the psychological type of the genius.
Here begins the "art for art's sake" ideology, and here too is the source of all artistic psychology, both of which began with
[25]
the birth of the genius-notion. Psychology is, of course (at least as dealing with the problem of the personality), a young science, so that it will be best to start with its latest results that we may be clear as to what it has contributed to the elucidation of these problems and what still remains obscure. Now, the latest statements in this field show with astonishing frankness and unanimity that the psychology of personality has helped little or not at all to the understanding of genius or (as it is termed scientifically) the productive personality; moreover, that it probably never will contribute anything, since ultimately we are dealing with dynamic factors which remain incomprehensible in their specific expression in the individual personality. This implies that they can be neither predetermined nor wholly explained even ex post facto; as, indeed, we cannot understand, in my view, personality at all, even man as such, by a purely individual psychology. In any event, the notion of art had always proved too narrow to include under one aspect the varieties of productive personality of their manifold achievements; and on the other hand the psychological idea of the productive personality was far too wide to explain artistic production. For, psychologically speakinh, there are productive personalities which never produce a work of art, or indeed anything creative at all; and, again, the poet may be so different from the plastic artist, the musician, or the scientifically productive type that it is impossible to bring them all under one head.
The study of a certain neurotic type, which I had already regarded as "artiste manque" in my youthful work, gave me a new approach, on the basis of that analysis, to the problem of the creative personality. We have in such cases either individuals who, though they are really productive (since they
[26]
possess the productive force of dynamism), produce nothing, or else artistically productive men who feel themselves restricted in their possibilities of expression. Pure psycho-analysis of such types undertaken for the removal of inhibitions as indicated by Freud's therapy, did not help at all for the psychological understanding of the creative process, although it established a fair amount regarding their behavior as individuals. The only tangible statement which Freud's theory could give us about the artistic process was that which asserted that the impulse to artistic productivity originated in the sex-impulse. But it is easy to see that this explanation (which I myself accepted in my first work on the psychology of artists) takes us no further in reality, being a pure paraphrase of the individual meaning already obvious in the very concept of genius (gignere=to beget). But psychology could not explain how from the sex-impulse there was produced, not the sex-act, but the art-work, and all the ideas called in to bridge this infinite gulf—"compensation," "sublimation," etc.—were only psychological transcriptions for the fact that we have here something different, higher and symbolical.
Not the most interesting part of the chapter here...but it is a good example of Rank applying his skepticism of Total Explanations to some actual case studies; and at that, cases with which he is familiar enough to have developed a certain healthy contempt.
Dreams, too, which in the new interpretation of Freud seemed to promise so much for the elucidation of artistic creativity, proved, on a more careful comprehension of the problem, to be incapable of taking us beyond a superficial analogy. The fact that we all dream and, in dreams, are all (in the fine comparison of Schopenhauer) poets of the stature of Dante of Shakspere is sufficient by itself to force to our notice the fact that we do not know what it is which allows a Dante or a Shakspere to do in waking life what we all, according to Schopenhauer, do in our sleep. They all (as I expressed it) superadd, to their equipment and their creative dream-fantasy, a particular ideology of art. And so we are back at our question, what individuals are driven and able to do this and what psychological presuppositions make itSo, "hands off yourself" just won't work if we want to have any art at all. Here also is a major clue to how Rank claims to know what he knows, and it is, admittedly, not a particularly strong case and in any case not subject to much development or accumulation of evidence short of a time machine. [[this part is also relevant at a,a,i ]]
[27]
possible. If we approach the problem from the study of the productive neurotic type—that is, if we start with the artistic type living today—we arrive at the following condition for creative art. The neurotic, no matter whether productive or obstructed, suffers fundamentally from the fact that he cannot of will not accept himself, his own individuality, his own personality. On one hand he criticizes himself to excess, on the other he idealizes himself to excess, which means that he makes too great demands on himself and his completeness, so that failing to attain leads only to more self-criticism. If we take this thwarted type, as we may do for our purposes, and compare him to the artist, it is at once clear that the artist is in a sense the anithesis to the self-critical neurotic type. Not that the artist does not criticize himself, but by accepting his personality he not only fulfils that for which the neurotic is striving in vain, but goes far beyond it. The precondition, then, of the creative personality is not only its acceptance, but its actual glorification, of itself.
The religion of genius and the cult of personality thus begin, in the creative individual, with himself; he, so to say, appoints himself as an artist, though this is only possible if the society in which he lives has and ideology of genius, recognizes it, and values it. This leads straight to the realization that the productive personality, if it has once accomplished this self-appointment by the aid of his community's ideology of the artist, must justify this self-assertion under compulsion by its work and by ever higher achievement. And so the problem of the process of artistic creation, which is no more than a compulsory dynamic, shifts to its precondition, which is the glorification of the individual personality. At this point we have a fruitful parallel to the "absolute will to art" which Riegl talks of and Worringer defines as a lifting of the object out of nature and its eternalization in an abstract schematic form which reproduces the essential. We see that the very same process which at the primitive stage of the collective abstract style relates to the object takes place at the developed stage of individual art,
[28]
in relation to the subject; in other words, the individual raises himself from out of the community by his inclusion in the genius-type in just the same way as the object is torn from its natural surroundings by its artistic stylization. The individual, as it were, abstracts himself in the style demanded by the genius-ideology and so concentrates the essence of his being, the reproductive urge, in the genius-concept. He says, more or less, that he needs only to create and not to beget. The novelty of our present view lies, however, in this:***post to Artists, Agitators, Introspectors***
that we have good reason for assuming that this creativity begins with the individual himself—that is, with the self-making of the personality into the artist, which we have described previously as his appointment to the genius-type. The creative artist personality is thus the first work of the productive individual, and it remains fundamentally his chief work, since all his other works are partly the repeated expression of this primal creation, partly a justification by dynamism.
I regard it as the double advantage of this insight into artistic personality-development which is gained from a study of the modern type, not only that it is applicable to the understanding of all cultural genesis, but that, moreover (according to a theory of art which I only came across after the event), artistic personality appears to subsist already in the beginning of all artistic production. Certain modern art-historians assume that the origin of primitive art is to be found neither in the imitation of nature nor in the impulse to abstraction, but in bodily ornament. As far as I know, Ernst Grosse was the first, in the already cited book on the beginnings of art (1894), to insist on the priority of body-painting over ornamental decoration; and Adam van Scheltema particularly has tried to extend the idea even to prehistoric art... It is sufficient here to refer the reader to a later exposition and to quote the (to the best of my belief) latest author who cham-
[29]
pions this view; according to which we should be justified in saying that the tendency toward self-creation which is brought to light in modern artist-psychology is one of the essential components of artistic creation even in primitive times.
E von Sydow...accepts the view that "the beginning of art lay in its application to the body." He does not, however, mention his precessors, so that it is apparently psycho-analysis which led him to this idea. Yet, if this were so, the psycho-analysts interested in the problem of art would not have needed to wait for Sydow in order to introduce this principle of explanation into the history of art, and anyhow it would be a confirmation on their part of a view which is alien to them. For this view of art presupposes a voluntaristic psychology, which in my own case I was only able to reach after passing beyond the libido theory of Freud, and which takes Sydow also far beyond his sexualization of the artistic impulse.It is worth interjecting here that in a properly multicultural society, certainly, and perhaps in any merely ethnically diverse post-industrial society, the tribal marking which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community, and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others, this dual (dialectical?) aspect of such marking is greatly intensified.
Sydow, it is true, appeal to the deliberate interference with the natural form of the body in primitive tribes, which in some cases, although not always, is sexual in character; for instance, the deformation of the skull, the piercing of the ears, lips, nose, etc. But even in the artificial painting of the body and the tatooing which is to be found all over the world, the sexual explanation fails completely; and so Sydow's generalization looks more like an instance of our self-conscious impulse to creation than a proof that art in particular has a sexual origin. "Art rose, not in any isolated and self-contained work, but by the moulding of the human body, to a formative plasticity, urged thereto by an idealized instinct of will to style. It is true, indeed, that even at this stage the art-form, as it is found in nature, but impresses and enforces a dominant form on the natural material of bone, flesh, and blood, as an assertion of its own independence; so that art in this application of it to man himself achieves or seeks to achieve a truly new creation. It is only when the art of the body has been perfected that is separates
[30]
itself from the body and becomes self-dependent in a permanent work"... Yet again, to make this view sound, we must give a plausible explanation of why body-art passed over to ornament proper, a problem of which there have been some preliminary explanations, but which, if we assume the priority of "body-art," more than ever demands a clear psychological understanding of the development of personality—to which accordingly we must now pass.
Whatever the meaning of the much-disputed tatooing as the essential expression of body-art may be, it is at least certain that practical objects, such as hardening the skin or the attraction or repulsion of others, do not have a great bearing. The purely sensual interpreation of tatooing...has nowadays given place to the magic interpretation, as emphasized in Jane Harrison's well-known Ancient Art and Ritual and as has been admitted by W.D. Hambly in his most recent discussion of the subject. But there is no sort of consensus of opinion as to the real point of this magical painting of the body. We shall have opportunity later to give our own view; here it is enough to state the general conclusion that an artistic achievement is also part of the business. It seems, too, worth mentioning in this connexion that certain linguists connect the German word "malen" (to paint) with the drawing-in of body-marks (Mal) or signs, just as the Tahitian word "tatu" is derived from "ta", which means mark or sign. Among the American Indians as well as the Australians and other peoples, a typical form of painting is, in fact, the sign of the tribe, which indicates membership of a particular totem, and is therefore in a sense a collective badge of the individual which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community, and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others. Both would explain why tatooing follows on the puberty ceremonies at which the indi-
[31]
vidual becomes both a personality and a member of a community.
On the other hand, the belief held by the Fijians and the Eskimos alike that to remain untatooed is to hazard one's future happiness in the world beyond throws a light on the religious significance of tatooing, a significance that inheres also in membership of a particular totem-society. We have thus along with the enhancement of (and even emphasis on) the self its levelling-down by means of the collective symbol; so that in fact we should find the fundamental dualism of art ["personality" vs. "community"] even at the primary stage of human creative instinct. This discovery loses much of its strangeness and gains considerably in probability when we remember that the same thing is found in the mediaeval guild uniforms, and still exists today in the uniform of various professions, which marks out the individual above his neighbors, but makes him, as beyond himself, a member of a great professional group or class.We might also note that "expression" denotes an aspiration rather than a certainty, the highest- rather than the lowest- hanging fruit on the tree of modern art. And besides, we spiritual attitude that is based on an individual: individualism. Wouldn't it be both more honest and more enlightening to leave things there?
From this point of view, of course, we cannot admit it to be mere chance that the "Bohemian" artist of modern times, even as late as the close of last [the nineteenth] century, had a definite costume, even a conventional mode of doing the hair and the beard, which were to mark him out as a "genius." The proper artist, who had chosen art as his profession, had a special manner, almost a special life, laid down for him; and in actual fact he had to play a definite part determined by an ideology; so also, according to Dessoir, the actor nowadays represents this pristine type of artist, where object and subject coincide, and the body forms the material in which and through which the artist creates. So, even at this last stage of the "artist's art," we have the genius-type to which the artist tries to suit himself even in costume and manner, serving as an ideology for artistic creation; just as earlier aesthetic, and still earlier religion, had provided the art-ideologies of their various times and places. Yet, be it observed, these were ideologies of art—that is, collective style-laws, as in religious art, or psychological laws of feeling in aesthetes' art; but at this latest stage of individual artist's art we are concerned no longer with an
[32]
ideology of art, whether abstract or emotional, but an ideology of the artist; and this means a justification of art-creation in the creative personality itself that struggles for eternalization, and not a justification of art by some abstract impulse of the soul, as in religion, or in aesthetic of sensation, as in psychology.
Now, though Worringer quite rightly opposes linear art, which develops from the impulse to abstraction, to the Classical art which is intuitive, this is obviously not enough, for we have here a third type of art, which is as different from the other two as the one is from the other. If we want a word to set in parallel with "abstraction" and "intuition" as expressing the spiritual attitude of modern art, based on an individual, we may talk of an art of "expression"—in fact the word, as "expressionism," has been taken as their slogan by a group of modern artists... But since we are ourselves living in the midst of this art, it is doubly difficult to pass from a purely æsthetic judgment to a psychological valuation.
It is too tempting to look for a historical comparison and a cultural valuation of this "modern art"; Worringer, strangely enough, does not admit modern art to be the expression of any "will to form" of its own, but regards it rather as an expression of "inability," which he does, however, concede to the result of an excessive urge to equal—or to outdo—earlier epochs.That does seem to be part of it. And if so, then there is another one-sided reductionism which we can safely consign to the proverbial dustbin: modern art as pure negation, scorched earth, cultural vandalism, etc.
We shall have to discuss in a later chapter the reasons for which our present-day Culture had to come out at the art that it has done. At the moment it is more important to notice in these art-forms only the exaggeration (or, if you like, the distortion) of a quality common to all creative art, which entitles such an art as this to its place with the rest in the development of forms; in the same way as we tried to understand abstract and naturalistic styles not only as art-forms but as psychical expressions. Then we shall see that we have here to deal not with a third type of art, nor indeed with a type of art or a style at all, but with spiritual needs which at one time are abstract,
[33]
at another naturalistic, at a third individualistic. It is not our business to attempt an æsthetic judgment—least of all before we have studied the question how far the psychical basis of the modern artist can be traced up in the origins and development of Classical and abstract art. Yet it may be that the genesis of the creative personality, which is the problem that this book is seeking to unravel, will throw a new light on the form of art which is included under the æsthetic law of intuition (Einfühlung) and may even contribute to the elucidation of other, still obscure points in that abstract style of primitive art which so purely expresses the absolute will to form.
[37] [beginning of chapter] In spite of all "unconsciousness" in artistic production..., there can be no doubt that the modern individualist type of artist is characterized by a higher degree of consciousness than his earlier prototype: the consciousness not only of his creative work and his artist's mission, but also of his own personality and its productiveness. If...the instinctive will to art...has in this last stage of artistic development become a conscious will-to-art in the artist, yet the actual process which leads a man to become an artist is usually one of which the individual is not conscious. ... [yet] this purely internal process does not suffice to make an artist, let alone a genius, for...only the community, one's contemporaries, or posterity can do that.i.e. the audience holds all the power
[38] the fundamental problem of the relation between living and creating in an artist...the reciprocal influence of these two spheres. All the psychography and pathography (with its primary concern to explain the one through the other) must remain unsatisfactory as long as the creative impulse, which finds expression equally in experience and in productiveness, is not recognized as the basis of both. ...creativity lies equally at the root of artistic production and of life experience. That is to say, lived experience can only be understood as the expression of volitional creative impulse, and in this the two spheres of artistic production and actual experience meet and overlap. Then, too, the creative impulse itself is manifested first and chiefly in the personality, which, being thus perpetually made over, produces art-work and experience in the same way. ...one might put it that the artist does not create from his own experience..., but almost in spite of it.
[39] In creation the artist tries to immortalize his mortal life. He desires to transform death into life, as it were, though actually he transforms life into death. For not only does the created work not go on living; it is, in a sense, dead; both as regards the material, which renders it almost inorganic, and also spiritually and psychologically, in that it no longer has any significance for its creator, once he has produced it.
...
another factor must be reckoned with besides the original biological duality of impulse and inhibition in man; this is the psychological factor par excellence, the individual will, which manifests itself both negatively as a controlling element, and positively as the urge to create. This creator-impulse is not, therefore, sexuality, as Freud assumed, but expresses the antisexual tendency in human beings, which we may describe as the deliberate control of the impulsive life.
...
[40] Unsatisfactory as it may be to express these dynamic processes in terms like "type," it remains the only method of creating an intelligible idea of them—always assuming that the inevitable simplification in this is not lost sight of. If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life, and according to whether this neurotic checking of the instincts is effected through fear or through
[41]
will, the picture presented is one of fear-neurosis or compulsion-neurosis. With the productive type the will dominates, and exercises a far-reaching control over (but not check upon) the instincts, which are pressed into service to bring about creatively a social relief of fear. Finally, the instincts appear relatively unchecked in the so-called psychopathic subject, in whom the will affirms impulse instead of controlling it. In this type...we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people...; the neurotic, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the weak-willed type, but wrongly so, for his strong will is exercised upon himself and, indeed, in the main repressively...
***a,a,i***
And here we reach the essential point of difference between the productive type who creates and the thrwarted neurotic... Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves.
[43] it does not take long to perceive that experience is the expression of the impulse-ego, production of the will-ego. The external difficulties in an artist's experience appear, in this sense, but as manifestations of this internal dualism of impulse and will, and in the creative type it is the latter which eventually gains the upper hand. Instinct presses in the direction of experience and, in the limit, to consequent exhaustion—in fact,
[44]
death—while will drives to creation and thus to immortalization. On the other hand, the productive type also pays toll to life by his work and to death by bodily and spiritual sufferings of a "neurotic" order; and conversely in many cases the product of a type that is at bottom neurotic may be his sole propitiary offering to Life. It is with reason, therefore, that from the beginning two basic types of artist have been distinguished; these have been called at one time Dionysian and Apollonian, and at another Classical and Romantic. In terms of our present dynamic treatment, the one approximates to the psychopathic-impulsive type, the other to the compulsion-neurotic volitional type. The one creates more from fullness of powers and sublimation, the other more from exhaustion and compensation. The work of the one is entire in every single expression, that of the other is partial even in its totality, for the one lives itself out, positively, in the work, while the other pays with the work—pays, not only to society (for both do that), but to life itself, from which the one strives to win freedom by self-willed creation whereas for the other the thing created is the expression of life itself.
[45] primitive art, the expression of a collective ideology, perpetuated by abstraction which has found its religious expression in the idea of the soul; Classical art, based on a social art-concept, perpetuated by idealization, which has found its purest expression in the conception of beauty; and, lastly, modern art, based on the concept of the individual genius and perpetuated by concretization, which has found its clearest expression in the personality-cult of the artistic individuality itself. Here, then, in contrast to the primitive stage, it is the artist and not art thatThis would seem to make the anti-modern slant explicit, unless "decline" is standing for an esoteric or untranslatable meaning.
[46]
matters, and naturally therefore the experience of the individual takes on the significance characteristic of the romantic artist-type. Here, obviously, not only do we see the tendency—in our view the basic tendency—of the artist-type to put oneself and one's life into one's creative work; but we see also how, in the eyes of this type, the problem of the relation between experience and creation has become and artistic (æsthetic) one; whereas it is really only a psychological one, which discloses, indeed, important points of contact with art (considered as an ideological conception), but differs from it in its essence.
For the romantic dualism of life and production, which manifests itself as a mixture of both spheres, has, as a typical conflict within the modern individual, nothing to do with art, although obliged like art to express itself creatively. This romantic dualism of life and creation, which corresponds to our psychological dualism of impulse and will, is, in the last resort, the conflict between collective and individual mortality, in which we have all suffered so acutely since the decay of religion and the decline of art.
The romantic type, flung hither and thither between the urge to perpetuate his own life by creating and the compulsion to turn himself and life into a work of art,So, the Wilde prescription with which Lasch took such issue is here rendered as (merely!) one side of the Romantic's inner conflict.
thus appears as the last representative of an art-ideology which, like the religious collective-ideology, is in the process of dying out. This does not prevent this final attempt to rescue the semi-collective "religion of genius" by taking it into modern individualism from bringing forth outstanding and permanently valuable works of art; perhaps, indeed (as Nietzsche himself, the ultra-Romantic, recognized), it requires that it should. On the other hand, it is just the appearance of this decadent type of artist which marks the beginning of a new development of personality, since the tendency to self-I wonder if Rank underestimates the degree to which contemporary personality-cults may be (or become) collective. By the latter term he seems to mean something more like "universal within a homogenous culture," whereas what might in the USA be called "mass" culture was, even/especially in McLuhan's specialized usage, to say nothing of the colloquial sense, never really close to "universal" even at its apex; and yet it strains credulity to say that mid-twentieth century "mass" culture was not "collective."
[47]
perpetuation is in the end transferred to the ego from which it originally sprang.
On this issue the romantic becomes identical, as a psychological type, with the neurotic—this is not a valuation, but merely a statement of fact—... We can thus understand the experience-problem of the individualist type of artist also only by studying the nature of neurosis,Here is a MAJOR epistemological anchoring point.
just as the therapy of the neurotic requires an understanding of the creative type. Now, the neurotic represents the individual who aims at self-preservation by restricting his experience, thus showing his adherence to the naïve faith in immortality of the primitive, though without the collective soul-ideology which supports that faith. The productivity of the individual, or of the thing created, replaces—for the artist as for the community—the originally religious ideology by a social value; that is, the work of art not only immortalizes the artist ideologically instead of personally, but also secures to the community a future life in the collective elements of the work. Even at this last stage of individual art-creativity there function ideologies (whether given or chosen) of an æsthetic, a social, or a psychological nature as collective justifications of the artist's art, in which the personal factor makes itself more and more felt and appreciated.At the risk of belaboring the point, note once again that there is another, prior question me might ask: why the desperate need to "explain"? The inevitable differences in inner dynamism between types of artists, and between artists and non-artists, these differences can be most but not all of the answer. Do a quick brainstorm of other areas of contemporary society where explanation is called for, either from the principal(s) or from outside observers working necessarily with incomplete information. There won't be many recreational or contemplative activities.
If the impulse to create productively is explicable only by the conception of immortality, the question of the experience problem of the neurotic has its source in failure of the impulse to perpetuate, which results in fear, but is also probably conditioned by it. There is (as I have shown) a double sort of fear: on the one hand the fear of life which aims at avoidance or postponement of death, and on the other the fear of death which underlies the desire for immortality. According to the
[48]
compromise which men make between these two poles of fear, and the predominance of one or the other form, there will be various dynamic solutions of this conflict, which hardly permit of description by type-labelling. For, in practice, both in the neurotic and in the productive type...all the forces are brought into play, though with varying accentuation and periodical balancing of values. In general, a strong preponderance of the fear of life will lead rather to neurotic, and the fear of death to production—that is, perpetuation in the work produced. But the fear of life, from which we all suffer, conditions the problem of experience in the productive type as in other people, just as the fear of death whips up the neurotic's constructive powers. The individual whose life is braked is led thereby to flee from experience, because he fears that he will become completely absorbed in it—which would mean death—and so is bound up with fear. Unlike the productive type, who strives to be deathless through his work, the neurotic does not seek immortality in any clearly defined sense, but in primitive fashion as a naïve saving or accumulation of actual life. But even the individualist artist-type must sacrifice both life and experience to make art out of them. Thus we see that what the artist needs for true creative art in addition to his technique and a definite ideology is life in one form or another; and the two artist-types differ essentially in the source from which they take this life that is so essential to production. The Classical type, who is possibly poorer within, but nearer to life, and himself more vital, takes it from without: that is, he creates immortal work from mortal life without necessarily having first transformed it into personal experience as is the case with the Romantic. For, to the Romantic, experience of his own appears to be an essential preliminary to productivity, although he does not use this experience for the enrichment of his own personality, but to economize the personal experiences, the burden of which he would fain escape. Thus the one artist-type constantly makes use of other life than his own—in fact,
[49]
nature—for the purpose of creating, while the other can create only by perpetually sacrificing his own life. This essential difference of attitude to the fundamental problem of life throws a psychological light on the contrast in styles of various periods in art. Whatever æsthetic designation may be applied to this contrast, from the spiritual point of view the work of the Classicist, more or less naturalistic, artist is essentially partial, and the work of the Romantic, produced from within, total. This totality-type spends itself perpetually in creative work without absorbing very much of life, while the partial type has continually to absorb life so that now he may throw it off again in his work. ... He needs, as it were, for each work that he builds, a sacrifice which is buried alive to ensure a permanent existence to the structure, but also to save the artist from having to give himself. The frequent occasions when a great work of art has been created in the reaction following upon the death of a close relation seem to me to realize those favourable cases for this type of artist in which he can dispense with the killing of the building's victim because that victim has died a natural death and has subsequently, to all appearances, had a monument piously erected to him.
The mistake in all modern psychological biography lies in its attempt to "explain" the artist's work by his experience, whereas creation can only be made understandable through the inner dynamism and its central problems.
Then, too, theThe audience? Or the "muse"? (I have written, "Groupies?" in pencil next to this line.)
[50]
real artist regards his work as more important than the whole of life and experience, which are but a means to production—almost, indeed, a by-product of it. This refers, however, to the Classical type only, for to the Romantic type his personal ego and his experience are more important than, or as important as, his work; sometimes, indeed, production may be simply a means to life, just as to the other type experience is but a means to production. This is why Romantic art is far more subjective, far more closely bound up with experience, than Classical, which is more objective and linked to life. In no case, however, will the individual become an artist through any one experience, least of all through the experiences of childhood... The becoming of the artist has a particular genesis, one of the manifestations of which may be some special experience. For the artistic impulse to create is a dynamic factor apart from the content of experience, a will-problem which the artist solves in a particular way. That is, he is capable of forming the given art-ideology—whether of the collective kind (style) or the personal (genius-idea)—into the substance of his creative will. He employs, so to say, personal will-power to give form or life to an ideology, which must have not only social qualities like other ideologies, but purely artistic ones, which will be more closely specific from the point of view of æsthetics.
The subjective character of modern art, which is based on the ideology of a personal type of artist, imposes also a special outlook in the artist towards his own creative power and his work. The more production is an essential means to life (and not just a particular ideological expression of it), the more will the work itself be required to justify the personality—instead of expressing it—and the more will this subjective artist-type need individuals to justify his production. From this point of view as well as others it is easy to see that experience, in its particular form of love-experience, takes on a peculiar significance for the Romantic artist, whose art is based on the personality-cult of the genius-concept. The primi-
[51]
tive artist-type finds his justification in the work itself; the Classical justifies the work by his life, but the Romantic must justify both life and experience by his work and, further, must have a witness of his life to justify his production.
The fundamental problem of the Romantic artist is thus the self-justification of the individual raised above the crowd, while the Classical artist-type expresses himself in his work—which receives a social justification by way of general recognition. But the Romantic needs, further, whether as contrast or as supplement to this social approval, a personal approbation of his own, because his feeling of the guilt of creation can no longer be allayed by a collective ideology any more than he can work effectively in the service of such an ideology. In this sense his artistic work is rather a forcible liberation from inward pressure than the voluntary expression of a fundamentally strong personality that is capable of paralysing the subjective element to a great extent by making collective symbolism his own. The artist who approximates more nearly to the Classical type excels less, therefore, in the creating of new forms than in perfecting them. Further, he will make much more frequent use of old traditional material, full of a powerful collective resonance, as the content of his work, while the Romantic seeks new forms and contents in order to be able to express his personal self more completely.Interesting to consider in this connection Supek's "ontlogical nominalism" vs. "ontological realism." That "realism" per which "society...is some sort of higher, organic, and closed entity" is indispensible to the collapsing of diverse individual behaviors into "the audience" or "my public," who can nowadays equally well serve as an individual "public" as a collective. This certainly permits of a taxonomy of artists along Rankian lines, but now taking better account of the commercial imperative, which is itself also highly dependent on this peculiar "realism."
Thus, as the artist-type becomes more and more individualized, he appears on the one hand to need a more individual ideology...for his art, while on the other his work is more subjective and more personal, until finally he requires for the justification of his production and individual "public" also: a single person for whom ostensibly he creates.
[52] If the poet values his
[53]
Muse the more highly in proportion as it can be identified with his artistic personality and its ideology, then self-evidently he will find his truest ideal in an even greater degree in his own sex, which is in any case physically and intellectually closer to him.
Greece, in particular, with its high development of purely intellectual ideologies in art and philosophy, was of course the classical country of boy-love; and there is nothing contradictory in this, particularly if we understand the boy-friendship in the Greek spirit. ... The master—whether philosopher or sculptor, or, in other words, artist in living or shaping—was not content to teach his pupil or protégé his doctrines or his knowledge: he had the true artistic impulse to transform him into his own image, to create. ...
[54]
... the state of being a pupil did not mean the mere acquiring of a certain discipline and the mastery of a certain material knowledge, as in the civilization of father-right, but the forming of a personality—which begins by identification with the master and is then "artistically" developed and perfected on the pupil's own lines. In this sense the Greek was creative before he arrived at creating works of art, or, indeed, without ever shaping anything but himself and his pupil. Socrates is the best known of many examples of this.
***a,a,i***
This educative ideology of the artistic Greek nation...brings up the question: did that Greek art, which may seem to us today the main achievement of the Greek civilization, perhaps represent to the Greek a mere by-product thereof, an auxilliary, in fact, to the education of the men, who as the real vessels of the culture were this enabled inter alia to practise art for its own sake? This brings us to another question: was not every great art, whether of primitive or cultivated peoples, bound up with some such cultured task, which lies beyond the bounds of æsthetics, but also beyond all individual artist-psychology? In any case, there are numerous literary proofs of the high degree to which the Greeks were conscious of this national importance of their art. They said that men should learn from works of art and try themselves to become as beautiful and perfect as the statues around them. This gives us an insight into the characteristic way in which the Greeks extended their own creation of individual personalities to include a whole nation, which was not content to produce works of art for their own sake but strove to create an artistic human type who would also be able to produce fine works of art. Seen in this light, boy-love, which, as Plato tells us, aimed perpetually at the improvement and perfection of the beloved youth, appears definitely as the Classical counterpart of the primitive body-art on a spiritualized plane. In the primitive stage it is a matter of physical self-enhancement; in the civilized stage, a spiritual
[55]
perfecting in the other person, who becomes transferred into the worthy successor of oneself here on earth; and that, not on the basis of the biological procreation of one's body, but in the sense of the spiritual immortality-symbolism in the pupil, the younger.
Christianity took over this ideal of personal character-formation in the symbol of the Exemplar-Master, but, in proportion as it became a world-wide religion of the masses, it was unable to carry it out at the personal level. The collective immortality-dogma, which became symbolized in Christ, relieved the individual of this task of personal self-creation...
Indeed, in many Christian interpretations this task of personal self-creation is forbidden, not merely elided.
...[55] It was not mere imitation of Classical Greece, but the expression of a similar ideology of personality that led the artists of the Renaissance to try to re-experience the Greek ideal of boy-love. We see, for instance, two of the really great artists, of entirely different social environment, expressing the identical spiritual ideology, with such far-reaching similarity that the notion that the mere accident of a personal experience produced both cases must be dismissed.Another epistemological anchor point.
They both, Michelangelo and Shakspere, found almost identical words in their famous sonnets for the noble love which each of them felt for a beautiful youth who was his friend. ...
[56]
...whatever the decision reached by zealous scholars concerning the identity of the person addressed...this "biographical" fact seems to me unimportant as compared with the psychological evidence that this glorification of a friend is, fundamentally, self-glorification just as was the Greek boy-love. In this sense, not only are the sonnets in fact self-dedicated—as is creative work of every description—but they reveal that peculiar attitude of the creative instinct towards the creative ego which seeks to glorify it by artistic idealization and at the same time to overcome its mortality by eternalizing it in art.
The fact that an idealized self-glorification in the person of another can take on physical forms, as in the Greek boy-love, has actually nothing to do with the sex of the beloved, but is concerned only with the struggle to develop a personality and the impulse to create which arises from it. This impulse is at bottom directed to the creator's own rebirth in the closest possible likeness...[which] will not only be found in the bodily form of his own sex, but also be built up with regard to the spiritual affinity, and in this regard the youthfulness of the beloved stands for the bodily symbol of immortality. ...
[57]
... Just as we know, from the psychology of the creative genius, that his impulse to create arises from precisely this tendency to immortalize himself in his work, so we can be in no doubt as to whose transitoriness it is that the poet deplores with almost monotonous reiteration. In these sonnets there is so complete a revelation of the meaning and content of the whole output of their authors, and indeed of the nature of the artist's creative instinct in general, that their high valuation and, no less, their intriguing ambiguity become comprehensible. ...
From this point of view, then, the biographical presentation, even when it can be done with certainty, seems to us inessential. We are by no means cast down when this method fails, for we can understand that beyond a certain point failure is unavoidable, since the creation of a work of art cannot be explained even by the reconstruction of an inspirer. Thus the factual and concrete biography of Michelangelo or Shakspere does not enable us to understand their work the better; rather we are left more amazed than before at their coincidence. Vasari, anyhow, declares that the one and only portrait by Michelangelo which was true to nature was that of his young friend Tommaso Cavalieri, "for he detested copying the actual appearance of anyone who was not completely beautiful." ...[similarly Shakspere] also has the conscious intention of immortalizing his friend's beauty at least in his verse, if time is bound to destroy his bodiliness. ...
[58]
... Not only is it evident from this self-immortalization in the work that the matter is at bottom one of the self-immortalization expressed in another (in the ideal), but both the artists have expressed with great clearness, and to the point of monotony, the idea of oneness with the friend. ...
This psychological solution of the much-disputed sonnet-problem shows how experience, and still more the whole attitude towards life, grows out of the struggle to create and so reduces the problem of experience to the problem of creativity. For the extent to which the artist succeeds in actualizing his love-ideal, in the service of his own self-immortalization, is of minor importance compared with the basic attitude that his work discloses—namely, one originating in dissatisfaction with artistic creation and so urging the creator in some form or other towards life—that is, towards the actual experiencing of his fundamental self. In any case his impulse to form man in his own image or in the image of his ideal inevitably brings him into conflict with real life and its conditions. These conditions are not artistic, but social, conditions, in which one individual has to respect another and is not permitted to remake him. Now, a certain measure of conflict is, of course, necessary to creative work, and this conflict is, in fact, one of the fields in which an artist displays his greatness, or, psychologically speaking, the strength of his creative will-power. By means of it he is able to work off a certain measure of his inner con-
[59]
flict in his art without entirely sacrificing the realities of life or coming into factual conflict with them. In any case, the destructive results of this ensemble of realities upon the neurotic, as we are able to observe them in his neurosis, show that what distinguishes him from the artist is that the latter constructively applies his will-power in the service of ideological creation. A certain type of artist, for whom Goethe may stand as the model, will learn to deal with his experiences and conflicts economically and in the end wisely, while another type exhausts his strength in chasing after stimulating experiences so that his conflict does not come out in production. For the artist himself the fact that he creates is more immediately important than what he produces, although we are inclined to make his classification as a particular type depend upon the result, his art-work. Here again we find ourselves at a point where art as the result of production must be sharply differentiated from the artist as a creative individual. There is, in fact, no norm for the artist as a type, although we are constantly tempted to set up more or less precisely formulated norms both for art and for the individual work of art. Production is a vital process which happens within the individual and is independent at the outset from the ideology manifested in the created work. On the other hand, the work can show an equal independence towards the artist who has created it, and can in favourable instances be compared with other works within the categories of art; but it can never be compared with its author or with the artist as a psychological type. Between the two—artist and art—there stands Life, now dividing, now uniting, now checking, now promoting.
[71] Whereas primitive art is perpetuated through abstraction, and Classical art achieves immortality through idealization, Romantic art rounds off this immense transformation-process of spiritual development in making vivification its chosen mode of overcoming that fear of death from which the immortality-idea and urge to eternalization first sprang. ... modern art, with its dynamic of expression, differs from both these style-forms; neither starts from an abstract of the living nor aims at an ideal conservation of it, but its style-form consists in a vivification of the essence of the actual. This can, however, only be achieved at the cost of real life.This of course cries out for consideration of "artists" who not only embrace the spirit of the age but (self-)consciously aim to "express" or "reflect" this in their "art."
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The three art-ideologies, as we thus differentiate them—the abstract, the æsthetic, and the realistic—are based therefore on varying attitudes to life itself, and these attitudes, although determined by the prevailing collective ideology, will still be found to vary in the different individuals of the same epoch. Now, it is my belief that a non-contemporary outlook on vital problems is always essential to the artist, an outlook
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which deviates more or less from the prevailing ideology and its art-style. In other words, I believe that the artist's personality, however strongly it may express the spirit of the age, must nevertheless bring him into conflict with that age and with his contemporaries; and this again explains why he is obliged, in his work, to convert the collective ideology into one of his own.
In this sense not only does a work of art represent unity of form and content, but it achieves also a unification of personal and collective ideologies of immortality.
[76] The tendency to concretize arises out of the individual-immortality concept, while the craving for abstraction corresponds to the collective-immortality concept. Modern art on the other hand is based on no such consoling idea of immortality, whether of a collective or individual nature. Its compelling motive is fear of life and experience, and this motive it carries over into the creative sphere, in the course of which process the individual will binds the biological driving force in the art-form in order to conserve
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it. It must be confessed that not only is the unity of the modern work of art (which it shares with art in general) the result of a reaction on emerging victorious from a struggle, but its dynamic vitality is also a reaction to the fear of life characteristic of the modern individual; for since the decay of our collective ideologies relative to religion and state, we suffer from this fear more than any previous generation has done.
Not only is primitive art at one with life as an essential part of it, but the artist is, if not wholly in harmony with the collective ideology, yet far more so than is the case, or even can be, in our modern society. Beginning with the Classic art of the Greek floraison, through the links that join it to our modern art-developments, and right into the latter, we find in increasing measure that it is just the very highest work that the productive artist achieves in response to pressure from the most diverse influences, so that this work, though certainly the typical expression of his individuality and epoch is, over and above this, that of other cultures and alien ideologies. It is this fact that raises to the timeless sphere of pure of art.
[80] the question as to wherein the collective element of mythic and epic poetry consists has become a central problem in scientific literary criticism ever since the Romantic period. It is probable that various individuals—even, perhaps, races and nations—participated in the beginning and particularly in the oral handing-down of these poems. And equally we may suppose that this collective genesis also corresponds to a collective content of that which was transmitted. A race or nation appears as the victorious hero of the story, mostly in the figure of an individual champion as representative and carrier of the race's interests. In every case the hero and his fate are the main thing, and not the poet, in whom we should take little interest if we did know him. For the motive of his song
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and saga was, at this stage, certainly not individual, but collective or, as we should call it today, "national." The individual author of modern times differs from the collective creators of folk-epic, not only through the personal nature of his theme, but also because he himself, his individual ego, is the real hero of his story. In lyric poetry, with its reflection of fleeting moods, this is plainly and admittedly the case, but it also applies to a great extent to novels and even to dramas.
Gee, d'ya think?
(It absolutely does apply to music too, but the respects in which this is true are different enough to confound most direct comparisons of music with literature.)
It is as if the personal artist-ideology, which we have taken as the foundation of modern art, comes in the individual poet to consciousness of itself. Hence the favoured position, the high cultural significance indeed, of the author as censor of morals, philosopher of life, and education of mankind in our world of today. In attaining this position of general responsibility he has, however, left the sphere of pure creativity, which, from now on, he represents only in his ideology.Notice what is gained and what is lost this way.
He is now himself the work of art, but as such he can represent either a good or a bad one, according to whether and how he suceeds in shaping his life. Goethe remains, in this regard also, the unparalleled model of a universal genius of the modern age; for he was able to balance the destructive elements in him creatively, by absorbing them into his poetry and his various other constructive activities, and thus to shape his life as an artistic-constructive whole. Other great writers have failed to achieve so complete a harmony, either ruining the artistic build of their lives by Romanticism or leading a philistine existence in order to have enough vitality left over for creation.Think of the Davis Love III commercial: "Do your hands know how it feels to hit a golf ball 330 yards?"
This fact confronts us again when we come to deal with the problem of the individual artist-personality as expressed in the relation between experience and creativity. No single causal relation appears to exist between the two phenomena—certainly not the one favoured by psychography, which purports to explain creativity by experience in general or by special experiences. It seems likely that the reverse is more possible, since the creative will which underlies them both manifests itself more clearly in the created work than in
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experience. On the other hand, creativity itself is, of course, a special form of experience and one peculiar to the artist, and all depends in the last resort upon whether the individual is capable of restoring harmony, or at least a temporary balance, between the two forms of experience—artistic and vital—and to what extent he succeeds.
This does not by any means signify that the person who better adapts himself to, or succeeds in, life must needs be the better artist. In this respect Goethe forms signal exception in the whole long line of really great men whose lives have been swallowed whole by their work. Croce maintains that this was the case even with Goethe, but in reality the man Goethe has come to be more important to us than his work, which we are inclined to regard as more interesting from a psycho-biographical than from a purely artistic standpoint. Goethe himself looked upon his work as "fragments of one great confession," as "life's traces," and it looks as if this had been more or less consciously the artist's general attitude towards his work. His work is not only his particular expression of life: it both serves him and helps him to live, and his worth as an artist comes second—or even plays no special part at all. A mediocre work, acceptable only to a small circle, may yet satisfy the artist more and mean more to him than the undying world-fame of a poem that has grown into a folk-song, the author of which most people are quite at a loss to name.Note well that this small circle satisfaction is particularistic while undying world-fame without name-recognition is universalistic; and this confounds certain contemporary trope-ideologies, especially the greater association of women with popular music.
Again, we must admit that the psychology of a productive personality gives no clue to the understanding and appreciation of art. The Romantic who, having adopted the attitude that I once called "artist-mania" and now call art-ideology, neglects or sacrifices or even destroys his life has often achieved more in art than the genius who allows the human being in him to come to fruition also. What makes Goethe the highest type of artist in our eyes is not really his work, any more than it is his civic life—which served rather to protect him from his own genius than to enhance it. Where he is great is in his attitude to art and life, his conception of their relation to each
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other, which he only bought—and dearly enough—after long wrestling. As Bahr so excellently puts it, his achievement lay in having "put down the revolution by which he had risen" and "in recognizing that art's freedom lay in its submission to the law." This explains his aversion from all Romanticism, which meant, at bottom, from the Romantic within himself; for the Romantic stands at the other end of the scale of artistic development as the pioneer and earliest specimen of the individual artist-type, whose art-ideology is the cult of personality with its idea of liberty. Not only is he an individual-revolutionary in creation, but he confuses life with art: he is dramatic or lyrical, he acts the piece instead of objectifying it, or rather he is obliged to act it as well as merely objectify it. His art is as chaotic as his life, whereas the pure art-ideology is based on order, law, and form—in fact, on traditional and therefore collective ideologies. Now, Goethe wished to reestablish this pure art epistemologically, and therein lies his greatness as an artist-type. First, however, he had to curb the individual Romantic in himself, and this he succeeded in doing, though only at the expense of his productive power, which exhausted itself in the conscious and deliberate transformation of the Romantic type represented by him into a Classical artist-type, and which nevertheless he never completely achieved in his work.
If Goethe's importance lies rather in his representing the purely Classical ideal, as against the personal artist-ideology of Romanticism, than in his actual creative work, he is perhaps the first example—and at the same time the highest possible type—of the poet who becomes a universal genius. Also, in our own day, such a type could express himself as an essayist, a cultural critic, or a first-class journalist. As we have already pointed out, our modern author has become conscious of the personal art-ideology that is within him; but the first result of the process has been to project this intuitively recognized artist-ideology on to the history of art and to misinterpret the whole of its development in the light of its latest phase. We
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have seen how the establishment of a will-to-form (originally impersonal) as the real creative element had an essentially progressive and deepening effect on the study of art as a problem, and we shall find that the extended application of this theory to the genius's personal, and the modern artist's conscious, will-to-art has thrown new light on the whole question of art and artist. At the end of our first section we left it an open question whether an understanding of the individual artist-type with its personal will-ideology—working itself out primarily in the artist's ego—might not clear up certain methodological ambiguities in Worringer's æsthetics. However abstract we imagine the primitive will-to-art that is supposed to produce simple art-forms of crystalline structure, it still retains a tinge of anthropomorphism—even in Schopenhauer's philosophical interpretation of it. For the will is a human phenomenon, and we cannot assume offhand that Nature and all her creatures possess it, even in the form of "unconscious willing." Certainly, in our view, the individual will is a derivative of the biological life-impulse, but it is a purely human derivative, though, again, it is in a prime mover of Nature that we find the biological premiss; this differentiation between life-impulse and expression of will, which psycho-analysis has ignored, seems to me to be the basic human problem par excellence since it comprises both the dualism of ego and species, of mortality and immortality, that is inherent in the individual, and all those creative tendencies which go beyond the mere function of propagation.
Chapter Four
THE PLAY-IMPULSE
AND ÆSTHETIC PLEASURE
[91] Worringer has very rightly objected that art has up to nowWe might just as well say, "...which may be interpreted, at one time directly..., and at another indirectly..."
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been studied far too much from the standpoint of the æsthetic effect of the finished product, in the case of the Classical above all. The catchword of this method of criticism was "intuition (Einfühlung)," a word minted by Theodor Lipps, which, according to Worringer, stops short at the psychology of Classical art. To this intuitive æsthetic of Classical art he opposes the abstraction-character of primitive art, which produces pure style-forms where the craving for "feeling oneself into" leads to naturalism. But valuable as this critical demarcation of the Classical art-feeling may be, Worringer's application of his psychology of style to the problem has not enabled him to grasp the spiritual part played in the forming of style by the individual's urge to artistic creativity. ... That abstract form is evolved, psychologically, under the influence of a fear that drives men to seek safety in the eternal (and, I might add, in the self-willed) seems to me correct. But to regard this as being also the beginning of all artistic creativity is, I feel, an unjustified and also unnecessary piece of "historicization," quite apart from the fact that it ascribes to the primitive a "prime fear" which I should take to belong rather to our own psychology than to his world-outlook. ...
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... The collective ideology underlying abstract art-forms is undoubtedly based on a sense of fear; but the first product of this is a belief in the soul—in fact, religion—and not, at that stage, artistic creativity, which appears to arise only out of an individual self-assertion against that fear. It is this individual need for expression that is overlooked by all æsthetic, including Worringer's. Yet this exists in the individual of every age just as definitely as does the frightened feeling of dependence which leads to collective immortality-ideologies, whereas art, how much it may employ collective style-forms, is derived from the personal urge to immortalization. Only at certain times and in certain situations this feeling of terrified dependence gains the upper hand and urges the creative individual to make use, like the rest, of the collective forms produced by the religious and social ideologies of such periods as a means to express his personal urge to immortalization. On the other hand, periods of superlative self-confidence produce a naturalistic art-form as a manifestation of command over nature. And even if both style forms are based, as Worringer maintains, on the need for self-renunciation, yet we must not overlook the equally strong tendency to self-affirmation which may express itself, at one time directly as supremacy over nature, and at another indirectly as an ideological freeing from her dependence.
In naturalistic art, which is born, not of fear, but of man's sense of superiority (whether imagined or justified), man rises to an imitative command of his world-around; on the contrary, in abstract art, which is born of a sense of dependence, he appears as self-creative.
But this creative self-affirmation is as little the specific essence
[94]
of artistic creativity as self-renunciation is that of æsthetic experience. For, as Worringer himself suggests, abstraction and intuition are not specifically characteristic of artistic experience, but are general psychological attitudes towards the world, and they also manifest themselves in correspondingly varied art-forms and artistic expressions. What, then, is this art-form-in-itself, which the will creates, now by abstraction, now by naturalistic introjection, and now again by self-projection into nature? To answer this question we must turn again from the æsthetic criticism of style to psychology on the one hand and to philosophy and the genetics of Culture on the other. ...
...[the "primitive"] magical conception of the world. We know now that not only his art but his whole attitude towards life is abstract, based as it is on a naïve belief in the soul. With the primitive, therefore, art cannot be detached from his supernatural conception of the world, for it remains—as, for that matter, even in highly developed communities—as an essential and inseparable part of
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the collective life as a whole. It is only not so for us, whose whole world-picture is realistic and becomes from day to day more concrete, and for whom art (side by side with the scanty shreds of religious feeling that remain to us) is only a last remnant of that super-real world which it formerly objectified and of which it was a part. In this magical world-picture [of the "primitive"], to which art also belonged, the need for self-renunciation, as we understand it, had no place; for it only appears when there is a dualism of two worlds to promote a desire to flee from one into the other. This urge of ours to the renunciation of self, which finds its æsthetic satisfaction in art, we have already contrasted with the religious and the erotic renunciations of the self which are achieved respectively through collective and through individualistic ideologies. The æsthetic self-renunciation, similarly, is founded on what we may call a "social" ideology, since the work of art, for all its personal dynamic expression, always strive to make an effect on others, whether it adopts more or less collective style-forms for the purpose.
But the central question of all æsthetic is: how does the artist achieve this effect, that enables so many others to identify themselves with the work? The older æsthetic answered this by referring it to nature-imitation. The creative artist, one was told, identified himself so extensively with nature that he was able to imitate it, and this human imitation of nature, again, made it possible for the non-productive person to identify himself at least with this imitated nature. But the explanation is so unsatisfactory and presumes so many psychological improbabilities that it could not survive the critical analysis of modern æsthetics, and already it is considered as definitely refuted. Once it had been established, however, that art had nothing to do with imitating nature, a new theory of its aims became necessary. For to the nature-imitation theorists art must have seemed an aimless pastime, an ideal vision—as the Classicist æsthetic tried to define it—soaring above all utilitarian criteria. Today we know, for instance, that the aims of primitive art
[96]
were, though definite, not directly practical; they began by being ideal aims and only thereafter, through religous ritual and wonder-working magic, decisively influenced man and his destiny. The first formula that we found for primitive art followed from our view of it as a concrete presentation of the abstraction underlying the magical world-outlook, of which the essence is the soul-concept. Here art still coincides almost completely with religion, but this means, not that it is identical with the transcendent, but that—now as later—it is the objectification thereof. If belief in the soul may be taken as religion, or at any rate as the preliminary stage of it, we must admit that art was at first, and for a long time to come, the handmaid of religion. Its "aim" was to prove the existence of the soul by concretizing it, and it achieved this by presenting the abstract in abstract form—that is, by imitating as faithfully as possible, not reality, but unreality. Thus we can detect both the imitative instinct of artistic creativity and the practical aimlessness of art even in these primitive stages. The imitation, however, concerns the unreal, which later becomes steadily more naturalized and humanized, while the aimlessness concerns reality—a fact which æsthetics has, strangely enough, inverted by looking for imitativeness, vis-à-vis reality, in which domain it has no purpose—and so being led to deny that art has any aim except that of æsthetic gratification.
[98] In his famous letters: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, Schiller places the individual between the two worlds of the senses (reality) and the will (moral), to which he ascribes, on the one hand, the material-instinct, and, on the other, the form-instinct. The play-instinct gives expression and life to both in harmonious union, and the result is beauty. From this height of æsthetic-philosophic contemplation it only remains to flash a light into spiritual abysses, as did Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy, or to descend oneself into the depths of psycho-biological processes, after the manner of the psycho-analytical treatment of art. But today what even Classical antiquity, which produced so many masters, says to us about art is meaningless, be it Socrates' moral identification of the beautiful or Aristotle's conceptual separation of these categories, wherein he asserts an abundance of will in the beautiful, but ascribes to it a direct pleasurable effect; or, yet again, other views such as those of Plato or Plotinus which, like the utterances of the Delphic priestess, sound mystical and profound,
[99]
but only reveal their profundity if one can interpret them aright—or, indeed, interpret them at all. Least of all shall we glean anything from the intellectual æsthetic of Baumgarten, the spiritual father of the imitation theory, to say nothing of the philosophical speculations of Romanticism.
***play***
The newer art-theories, with their anthropological orientation, assign...a special rôle to the variously interpreted play instinct...[yet without it] becoming much more intelligible from the æsthetic standpoint. Spencer himself regards play as the outlet for superfluous energy; Lazarus, as recuperation after the fatigue of real life; Groos, as exercise preparatory to these... If we applied this to art, therefore, we should find ourselves back at the theory of aimless imitation, whereas the unsoundness of that theory...was the very starting point of our discussion. It only shows, once more, that all our anthropology, sociology, biology—yes, and psychology—do not at bottom get beyond reality as the ultimate explanatory principle and can only understand even a make believe action (Spencer), such as play represents, as an imitation of a real activity.
[100] I have already, in another connexion, starting from the psychology of the neurotic and discussing psychotherapeutic possibilities of curing him, emphasized the therapeutic and indeed absolutely vital character of illusions in contrast to Freud, who regards them (even from a historical point of view) merely as infantile wish-fulfilments which we have to outgrow. I believe, however, that everthing that is consoling in life—that is, everything therapeutical in the broader sense—can only be illusional, and even the therapeutic effect of analysis I have tried to explain in my latest "technical" work by the unreality of the analytical situation. To understand the work of art in its specific import, then, we have not only to advance, in our search for an explanation of creative imagination, from the wish fulfilment theory to will-psychology, but also to get hold of the negative aspect of the immortality-ideology in the fear-problem of the neurotic. Now, I have always regarded the neurotic as a failed artist. In other words, to the eternalizing tendency of the individual will...there must be superadded a particular kind of overcoming of fear; and this we can certainly study better in the"Society's?" Or the "community's?" There's a Laschian dimension to this. Also Supek's nominalism-realism distinction.
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failed neurotic with his thwarted productivity than in the creative artist. For the artist overcomes this isolating fear socially, by getting society's sanction for his personal immorality-symbolism,
whereas the neurotic fails to overcome his mortal fear because he has nothing to compensate it, either individually (in love), collectively (in religion), or, least of all, socially. Now, the study of neurotic fear, in whatever form we encounter it, cannot be handled and explained as a problem of reality, but at bottom represents an irrational phenomenon. Herein, incidentally, lies the very pardonable error of the Worringer concept of fear, which is far too realist to explain the abstract urge to art.Previously the sense of "abstract" as used herein by Rank has been opposed to "concrete" rather than to "representational" or "narrative," making some of these passages tricky to parse. But even this is a bit odd, at least regarding art practices which result in a concrete artifact. And if he means by this "abstract urge" the entire psychological edifice of unreality, animism, cosmic parallelism, and the like, then I'm not sure I agree with pushing the theory to quite this all-encompassing scope and scale. At some point an artwork is not a religion is not a cosmology is not a therapy.
For external fear no more leads to compensatory artistic activity than the real sex-impulse does so. ... Fear is, in contrast to fright, not a real phenomenon: it cannot be traced to and explained (as psycho-analysis has attempted to explain it) by any real danger, even such an internal danger as one might postulate, for example, in the individual's own insistent impulses (Freud). For every adequate cause of fear that we find, without or within, merely gives it the impress of fright, without touching the prime phenomenon of human fear of the unreal and irrational. Indeed, the linking of this prime fear even with the notion of death—unreal as this must be to our ignorance, and peculiarly close as it stands to the prime fear—seems a sort of tacking-on by way of afterthought. The prime phenomenon itself I characterized in another connection...as "life-fear," because seemingly it is something given along with the life-Indeed, and yet pretty much everyone seems to (think they) know exactly how all of this works. This is a major source of "illusion" in the world. It is precisely the kind of illusion, actually, that Rank and Becker say is essential to a sane human existence. I have not managed yet to notice where or if there is any distinction made by either author between material facts and social facts; or, better put, material illusion and social illusion. The point being, in Psy+Soul Rank also lands on a certain throwing-back of "psychology" upon "ethics and epistemology," which seems to be quite the obstacle to simply accepting a given level of endemic "illusion" in (at least) the social world, if less obviously the material one. In other words, one must ask: is precisely this type of "illusion" not what lies at the very root of so many breaches of "ethics and epistemology"? More simply: are we not, in fact, hurting only ourselves this way but rather also hurting others?
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process itself and working against the individual's fear of losing himself in life.
In so far, therefore, as the negative-inhibitive fear of life, as well as the positive will to perpetuation, acts in the creation of ideologies (including artistic ideologies), we have to deal with a second unreal factor. To put it in another way, the fear that urge toward perpetuity is precisely as unreal—or, shall we say, illusory or fantastic—as the positive will-to-art that builds up for itself a second reality next above, parallel with, or inside the first. But neither of these two tendencies alone is capable of constructing an ideology, be it of a religious, an artistic, or a social character; it requires the two together, cooperating according to the needs of the moment, to do that. Yet they are not one, they are not causally connected in a such a way that the fear of death leads to the will to eternalization, or the complete achievement of the will to eternalization leads to the fear of life. This may seem to happen, or actually happen, even at a later stage in that which I have called the creative sense of guilt; but also it may only emerge from the attempt to overcome this fundamental dualism in the individual. Originally the positive will to eternalization seems to have led by itself only to actions of a predominantly magical order which, in the course of ritual development, became pre-artistic expressions of a "practical" sort (dance, and eventually instrumental music and song), while the restraining fear led solely to magical hush-ceremonies which we meet later in religious (like neurotic) ceremonial. Only a combination of the two—in other words, a volitional grip on, and conquest of, the fear-phenomenon—leads to the creation of ideologies in which the will to eternalization satisfies itself (in the first instance) collectively, and individual fear is suspended or at least temporarily mitigated. Yet not only is the unreal character of these ideologies obvious, but (after what has been said) their unreal origin also: that is, the unreal motivation which they have in the individual.
Thus, at the very commencement of human development—
[103]
then, indeed, in far greater measure than subsequently—we have the unreal element as the decisive factor which led to expression in art. But if religion is originally unreal, and the (psychologically speaking) equivalent love-experience at the other end of the scale is predominantly real, art stands in the middle, realizing the unreal and rendering it concrete. In so doing, it merely follows a universal law of development which I have formulated in my Seelenglaube und Psychologie: namely, that human development consists in a continuously progressive concretization of phenomena that were originally purely ideal or spiritual. In this sense the whole of cultural development is an artistic, or at least artificial, attempt to objectify human ideologies. Nevertheless, art does stand out from the general line of development by the fact that it retains a substantial element of the original unreal character. Indeed, in certain artistic tendencies, and, for that matter, in its general development, it even emphasizes the unreal and spiritual element in contrast to this universal concretization-tendency and tries to protect itself against being pulled down to the levels of actual use. Herein, we may fairly say, lies one of the motives for the æsthetic theory of the "purposelessness" of art: art in fact should represent this unreal ideality in an increasingly concretized world; while, on the other hand, the imitative principle (as we shall see) appears as a reaction of the creative sense of guilt, driving the individual out of his unreal world and back to nature.
Throughout the steady concretization-process of the super-real ideologies—which become ever more earthly and end by actually humanizing the creative god in the artist—art conserves the irrational principle which finds expression in the individual creative will on the one hand and the æsthetic immortality-concept on the other. It refuses to conserve the human being by imitating nature and man; neither does it console by offering substitutes for what is unattainable or has been renounced, in reality: what it seeks is to prove by objectification the emotional reality of what has never been real and can never
[104]
be made real. This psychic actuality is not, however (as analysis would have it), a precipatate of the real, but an idealism a priori anchored beyond all reality, which the will to eternalize objectifies in the artistic immortality-concept. This specifically artistic immortality-ideology renders its creator immortal along with his work, by putting, on a work which expesses the prevailing collective ideology, the stamp of the individual artist-personality. This intermediate character of the work of art, which links the world of subjective unreality with that of objective reality—harmoniously fusing the edges of each without confusing them—has been superbly turned to account by the play-instinct, as Schiller æsthetically conceived it. The only question is whether the æsthetic play-instinct, which transfers a conception taken from play to art and artistic productivity, really produces the latter or merely accounts for its pleasurable effect. For play, after all, differs not only conceptually, but factually, from art. It has in common with art the combination of the real and the apparent; yet it is not merely fancy objectivized, but fancy translated into reality, acted and lived. It shares with art the double consciousness of appearance and reality, yet it has more of reality, while art is content with the appearance. Here we are reminded of Plato's definition, or, rather, poetic description, of art—which is really but the reflection of his whole picture of life; for does he not explain daily life as the shadow of an actual reality, which he calls the Idea, and does not art therefore naturally represent for him only a shadow of that shadow, a copy of a copy? Had he meant that this artificial image of our shadow reality might have caught something of the original idea underlying it in the process, his conception would be so far removed from his ascription of an imitative character to art that we should be able to accept that conception. It would not appear to be so, however. For art to him is imitation, and play, which for the Greeks was such an outstanding cultural factor, he seems to have regarded, quite generally, as just such a copy of real life.
[105]
***against reverse engineering***
But as we shall discuss in a later section the origin and significance of human play, as a problem of folk-psychology which is allied to, but by no means identical with, artistic creativity, we will now return to the pleasure-giving character that is common, as it seems, to art and play. It seems to us that Schiller in his treatise contributed more to this purely æsthetic problem of satisfaction or pleasure than to the problem of artistic creativity proper—particularly in that he was able to regard the notion of the beautiful, which so greatly exercised æsthetic, as the result of the harmonization between the material-instinct and the form-instinct. But the contemplation of the beautiful aroused, satisfaction, or liking, and the central problem of scientific æsthetic is to find out why and how this happens. This, however, takes it for granted that the artist creates the beautiful that thereupon arouses pleasure in the enjoyer, a conclusion which seems an arbitrary assumption based on the effect of the work of art upon us. In other words, it is assumed in æsthetic that the artist desires to create the beautiful and, in so doing, enjoys a pleasure corresponding to that of the spectator or listener. Yet that is just what we do not know, so that we can only say that we call a work beautiful when we get some pleasure-value or other out of it.
Herein perhaps is to be found the origin of Socrates' ranking of the beautiful on a level with the good and the useful, and of Plato's identification of it with the true—in the sense of his doctrine of Ideas, which leads him to interpret the soul's intuition of a self-beauty as the recollection of its prenatal existence. And so we find the link with our previously outlined explanation of the beauty-concept as a derivative of the soul-concept, and also the relation with the immortality-concept, by bringing the prenatal—that is, a supernatural—state into the account."Appearance" is FAR preferable to "illusion," because appearance can still be honest and known, as in "ethics and epistemology." But they are not interchangeable, though sometimes they get interchange-d. One wonder if that is not the case here, and if so whether by author, translator or both at once?
At this point we can consider also the psychological
[106]
significance of æsthetic pleasure in the beautiful, whether felt by the artist himself or put into the work by the enjoyer. In spite of the difference between art and play, there is this element common to both, that they operate on a plane of illusion, which has its setting and its pattern in our own soul-life. Analysis of the modern human type, moreover, has taught us to understand the emotional life (Gefühlsleben) as such an inner plane of illusion on which all experience is played out more or less potentially, without actual happening (Technik, III). [[footnote here recommends also Alexander Bain, "The Emotions and the Will"]] This provides us in principle with an internal phantom existence without actualized experience, but one in which the individual does not necessarily become conscious of its illusory nature. It is only by looking at the matter thus that we can understand dream-life as an artificial phantom life on the illusionist plane of the emotions ("life is a dream"). In play and in art the individual is able, by the aid of a collective or social ideology, to find such an illusory plane, whereon he can live potentially or symbolically without doing so in reality. The pleasure that he finds in this phantom life on an illusory plane lies in the fact that it enables one to avoid the expenditure of real life, which is, basically, in the escape that it provides from life itself and, behind all, from the fear that is inseparable from real life and experience.
Freud was the first to recognize the saving of energy as essential to the pleasure derived from wit and, eventually, to all æsthetic pleasure, but his view of energy as libidinous prevented him from extending this conception to the nature of pleasure generally, the purest form of which is, from a philosophical point of view, æsthetic pleasure. But if, as Schopenhauer
[107]
was perhaps the first to recognize, pleasure is not only nourished from positive sources but may even be just a condition characterized by the absence of fear or guilt, then the belief in the sexual origin of all pleasure, commonly assumed with the scientific support of psycho-analysis, becomes at least questionable. Actually I have already dealt with the problem of pleasure and non-pleasure in its relation to the time factor in my Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit, where I suggested that the essence of pleasure lay in a certain brevity, and that of non-pleasure in the prolongation of any state, even one that was at first pleasurable. If we combine this factor of temporariness with the quantitative principle of economy, it would seem that pleasure is not only relatively short, but also relatively small—in fact, partial. From this view of æsthetic pleasure we should thus arrive at a general formula: pleasure is the result of a successful "partialization," in which avoidance of fear, which element would necessarily be present in a totality of experience, acts to enhance pleasurable emotions. Every pleasurable feeling would therefore include, besides positive satisfaction (successful partialization), a being-spared (from fear, totality, life, and so on). And this again brings us to the view that æsthetic pleasure is not sexual, but that, on the other hand, sexual pleasure may also be termed "æsthetic" in so far as it is momentary and partial—two qualities which seem to us to sum up every pleasurable emotional experience. The greater the economy, the greater the pleasure—provided always that this saving can be made in a relatively short space of time, for the neurotic, too, goes cautiously with life and seeks to conserve vital strength, only he is always saving and his mere hoarding gives him no pleasure. Æsthetic pleasure is the highest or purest form of pleasure just because it supposes reception and gain, but not giving. But this clearly applies only to the one who enjoys the work of art and not to the creative artist. For him, therefore, a different psychology from the
[108]
æsthetic must be found. For the artist is also sparing of life in that he substitutes creation; but then, again, he also wastes as he creates and this brings him new conflicts, from which again he seeks to escape by living. In this sense all doing and feeling which fall within the province of sublimation, from the purely æsthetic to the simple emotional, would not be substitutes for real life and experience imposed from without—no consequence of deprivation, that is—but the deliberate creation of a plane of illusion, on which there is the possibility of a seeming life, entailing less expenditure and therefore less fear, and therefore again a surplus of pleasure. Here the theory of the draining-off of superfluous energy in play is inverted: since now it is the play—that is, the attitude of make-believe—that releases forces which are set free by the saving of life.
With this we have found the key to a fundamental problem of life, to understand which is of far-reaching importance also for the psychological and ideological significance of artist and art. I have discussed this problem of partial and total experience in another connexion (Technik, III): namely, in relation to the hinderance of fear which thwarts the neurotic equally in his life and his work. The productive aspects of this conflict I was only able to touch upon briefly, but in any case the neurotic presented itself to me as a type predisposed to total experience and hindered only by fear—which to him is also total—from productively and constructively following up this tendency. The result is, not only that he checks all manifestatons of life because their totality would let loose fear (that is, fear of death), but that the check is excessive (because total), and he only creates more fear, which manifests itself as fear of life. His only thought, one may say, is to save life and life-force, but this saving brings him no æsthetic pleasure, but neurotic dissatisfaction, because it dreads every sort of spending, even spending on a plane of illusion. From the therapy of such cases it has emerged that the neurotic must first learn to live playfully, illusorily, unreally, on some plane of illusion—first of all on the inner emotional plane. This is a gift which the artist,
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as an allied type, seems to possess from the outset, and in an even higher degree than the average person possesses it. For the artist too is a totalist type that, unlike the average, cannot live in perpetual "partialization," but is forced to totalize every act of life. And on the artistic plane of illusion, in the act of creating—which is at once appearance and reality, a part and a whole—he finds it possible to conquer creatively this fundamental human dualism and to derive pleasure therefrom.
For when he creates, the artist uses the whole of himself without being in danger of losing that self therein, for it is certain that the work itself, from his point of view, represents only a part of his ego, although it does in fact represent the whole artist and his personality. It is just, like every good symbol, a pars pro toto solution, in which, however, the artist does not go charily with his life, like the neurotic, but positively spends it as he creates. This again he does not actually, but essentially—that is, he puts into it his being, his "soul," as we say—and this then stands for the whole living ego, just as the abstract soul in primitive and later immortality-beliefs represents not only the whole individual, but even more than that: his essence, and with it the essence of man and of humanness in general. Once more we find art expressing the same thing as the abstract-soul concept, only in an objectified form, which we call beautiful precisely in so far as it is unreal, more than earthly.If so, then this explains the "artifact," and it demands explanation of LRJ's setting up of Black music in opposition to it.
For this very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends, and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance. The self-renunciation which the artist feels when creating is relieved when he finds himself again in his accomplished work, and the self-renunciation
[110]
which raises the enjoyer above the limitations of his individuality becomes, through, not identification, but the feeling of oneness with the soul living in the work of art, a greater and higher entity. Thus the will-to-form of the artist gives objective expression, in his work, to the soul's tendency to self-eternalization, while the æsthetic pleasure of the enjoyer is enabled, by his oneness with it, to participate in this objectivization of immortality. But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.
Chapter Five
MICROCOSM AND
MACROCOSM
...
[114] although there is no sign with the primitives of a developed system of human-astral relations, corresponding to that of culture-peoples, the world-outlook of the uncivilized is founded on the same identity with the universe, which goes beyond even the specifically astral parallelism of the heavenly picture and the earthly life. It will become still clearer in the course of our investigations that the old Oriental world-picture does merely represent an ideological formulation of the primitive identity-with-the-universe on a cultural plane which we can best describe as intellectual (or pre-scientific); it was only a question of a particular ordering principle of life, founded on astronomical observation. The primitives' working-out of the principle was rather terrestrial, whereas the progress of culture seems to be characterized by a "celestializing" of pure human egocentricity. And as the world picture of the ancient East, with its pre-scientific ideology, lies somehow nearer to us than does the magic world-unity of the primitives, we prefer to start from the developed macro-micro-cosmic system of the Babylonians,...
[120] It seems to me...that the linking-up of heterogenous conception in the primitive world-picture, which seems to correspond to our mental process of causal association, rests primarily on a special articulation of the universe which alone renders these strange linkages intelligible. This articulation of the universe is done primarily from a purely egocentric point of view which classifies things of the outer world, psychologically speaking, into those belonging to the ego, and therefore forming a part of it, and those not belonging to the ego, which are therefore foreign or hostile to it.
In this division of the world into good and bad, to which the ego and non-ego naïvely correspond, experience of useful and harmful things appear to play a part, if not a decisive one. Otherwise it would be impossible to understand how the Australian or Indian, whose totemistic world-idea is based on some
[121]
world-classification of this kind, regards a particular tree as belonging to his ego, and a certain other as hostile to it. Supposing, then, as I for my part believe, that to every good thing there must correspond some bad thing, we are brought back to the more important question, what does such a partitioning of the world mean at all? To my mind, it is the same necessity as that which has led us to the causal world-view: that is, the desire to reach the good and avoid the evil by predetermination. The extent to which our intellectual-scientific causality takes account of this necessity is clear enough. But in the primitive, experience, which for want of a scheme of causal connexions he cannot have, is replaced by a naïve pre-classification which enables him to characterize one group of things as good and clean, and another as unclean, forbidden, or tabu. ...[hence] the difference between the primitive and civilized world-pictures. In the first the notion of dividing appears to me to be what lies at the root of the whole world-outlook; and in the second the principle of uniting. The latter is not, indeed, absent from the primitive world-picture, but it is only a result of the avoidance of certain things dangerous to the ego, while in the civilized world-picture causal linkage stands in the foreground, with avoidance as a result.
In any case, since the appearance of Durkheim's great work we have no excuse for regarding the totemism of the primitives as a mere principle of the social structure, but must see in it a universal principle of world-partition. "...
...
[122] ... Not only the members of the clan, but the whole universe...is articulated, by the totemistic form of thought... All things, animate or inanimate, are eventually swept into this structure in some way or other" [E. Cassierer] Yet Cassierer himself remarks that Durkheim's explanation of this division of the world according to the divisions of human society is unsatisfactory. The truth is, we cannot arbitrarily pick out any one section from this universal classification of the world for the purpose of explaining the rest by it until we have realized the significance of the system as such. ...[as it is] we should be postulating the applicability of a scale of world-values that is not adequate for the primitive system and seems rather to be an importation into it from our own.
...one fundamental difference between his thought and ours. This is the notion, arising from the naïve immortality-belief that death can be avoided, provided that one knows and avoids the forces threatening the "I" and, at the same time, knows how to use the helpful and strengthening forces to one's advantage. The essential means to this end is the individual will, which must either be strong enough to fight and control the evil that threatens in the world or good
[123]
enough to evade or ward off the bad influences. This world-outlook, which perhaps finds not only its finest but also its clearest expression in the Germanic Baldur myth, can best be described as "magic," because it presupposes that natural happenings can be influenced by human forces of will and does not merely aspire thereto, as is the case in our practical-technical world-scheme. The magic world-classification would thus, at bottom, rest on a distinction (not experimental, but volitional) between death-bringing and life-furthering objects, with the consequent tendency to avoid the former and keep the latter favourably disposed.
[125] The reconstruction of the old Oriental world-picture, though it has made our present outlook on human cultural development much broader by compelling us to recognize the spiritual as well as the material factors, has in particular cases rendered it difficult to decide where the starting-point for this relating of earthly and heavenly is to be placed. The only certainty seems to be that cultural development has advanced by way of the cosmic, and that in particular the artistic working-out of a culture remains inexplicable unless we posit a macrocosmization of the earthly. In any case, we should beware of naïvely projecting our own practical-technical mentality into the so-called primitive culture, which was in a sense more spiritual than the present civilization. Whatever may have been projected into heaven from earth, it is more important for the understanding of a culture that (as has now been proved) certain celestial processes had to be imitated in cult-form on earth in order that man's cosmic identity, and with it his immortality, might be assured. For choice,
[126]
the actors in these celestial dramas were the king and his family. The original kingship—traces of which are preserved even in the few surviving and constitutional monarchies of today—was a divine kingship: that is, the ruler's whole mode of life was prescribed, down to the smallest details, by the cosmic laws which it was the very business of the astral doctrine of the time to establish. This order of things clearly survived in the Incas of Peru, in the mikado of Japan, and in many other instances of which traces are seen in the pre-Aryan Dravidian culture of India, the pre-Babylonian Sumerian empire, and the related South African culture. Without the knowledge of this "cosmic" idea of the state, which obliged the king to be a living proof of the immortality-principle for his subjects, we should still be unable to comprehend how and why the original exercise of art was, in these "celestial" cultures, devoted almost exclusively to the religious service of myth-cults connected with the disposal of the dead. It would appear, from the discoveries of archæology, that only the king, as vessel of the immortality-principle, was buried according to a prescribed cult-ritual; even so, the assistance of art would be still more necessary on that occasion to produce the desired cosmic identity than for his service during his "artificial" life-course.
Enough has been said, without entering at present into the detail of tomb-art, to show once again the fundamental meaning of artistic creativity—the art, that is, of rendering concrete by pictorial representation that which is thought and is spiritually real—in fact, to prove its existence. This pictorial representation of something thought, whatever its objective content or its style, must necessarily be in the nature of creation, because in it man is macrocosmizing himself and thereby rising above his nature. And if there is, in artistic creativity as such, a tendency towards cosmic perpetuation (which has only become individualized in modern art), we may go a step further and regard the belief in the soul which led to artistic creation
[127]
as man's first creative achievement. For the original idea of immortality, before it had anything spiritual about it, was a primitive transformation-belief—though no doubt the germ of the later belief in the soul was latent in it—a belief in certain individuals that they possessed an active power of returning to life, of (in a way) reproducing themselves by self-creation. In the earliest culture-stratum to which we have had access, only the kind, whose life-course, even so early, had to be "cosmic," was believed to have this immortality of the "soul"; and it may well be, as Woolley suggests, that the human sacrifices buried with the royal corpse were selected from those who were found worthy to share the king's immortality, to which as ordinary "mortals" they would have no claim.
[134] What makes the evolution of the soul-concept, therefore, so important in an analysis of the art-problems is the fact that not only does it form the hypothesis and incentive for all creative work, but this evolution is seen to be in parallel with the origin and expression of the creative urge itself. Whereas in the beginning the soul-concept was concerned only with the keeping of something given—that is, with the conservation of life—the essence of creativity lies first in the ability to regenerate something lost and eventually in the triumph of new-creating something that had never existed. On the basis of this formulation it is easy to fix the point at which the sexual ideology became important to man, attaining a significance which it had never before possessed and was subsequently to lose. After all, it can neither be used to preserve man's own life (being, on the contrary, regarded as hostile to the ego), nor can it make possible the new creation of that which never existed; its sole use lies in the re-generation of what has been lost; and therefore, at a particular stage of development that has not yet reached real creativity, it becomes a symbol of human—namely, of reproductive—power. Those theories which have made out that artistic creativity is the expression of the sexual impulse have only made use of a transition phase of man as creature to secularize the conception of man as creator. Indeed, this latter conception itself, as manifested in the idea of God, amounts to nothing less than an objectifica-
[135]
tion of a creative urge that is no longer satisfied with self-reproduction, but must proceed to create an entire cosmos as the setting of that self.
[140] whereas house-building is generally agreed to have been in the first instance a matter of the protective cave, which is clearly recognizable as the chthonian womb-symbol, architecture begins, like all "higher" development, with elevation above the ground, but also with the remaking of the house from a mere covering (the mother's body) into the symbol of the whole man himself—and, what is more, of the creative ego and no longer of the protective
[141]
mother. We see, then, at work in the development of a single branch of art (which assuredly belongs to man's earliest creations) the selfsame principle that psychologically we have had to take as the basis of every artistic creation: namely, the creative self-representation by means of which the individual frees himself from his dependence on a biological mortality in order to immortalize himself in durable material.
[144] the varying attitude of man towards the animal at different culture-stages serves as one of our most enlightening fossil guides to the reconstruction of the history of man's rise from creature to creator—which means, from religion to art.
...
[145]
...whereas originally the earth's interior was regarded as equivalent to the human interior (abdomen), from which all life springs and to which it appears to return, in Christianity the earth itself became the underworld, while heaven became that upper world which, to the Greeks, was still an earthly life
[146]
within this world. In this respect, as also in the reinstatement of the great mother of the gods, Christianity stands nearer to the ancient East, and particularly to Egypt, than to Greece. Egypt was a land of the dead, not only ideologically (in its religion), but even in its earthly life, which was regarded as a preparation for life beyond in the underworld. The Greeks were the first, and perhaps the only, people to live really on earth and in the light of the sun—hence their sharp dividing-line between the upper world and the under, in which the dead led a bloodless, soulless existence. But it was not in the vague Beyond that the Greek looked for the immortality that his earthly life, for all its charm, denied him, but in a spiritual and yet still human upper world wherein the Classical art and the Classical philosophy found an imperishable expression. While the Egyptian lived below the earth, and the Christian above it, the Greek, with all his spiritual requirements, stood firmly planted upon it; and yet for him the culture-forming link with the under and the upper world did not petrify into mere formalism. In the case of Rome, with its exclusively worldly orientation, it did so.
[155] I must leave for another occasion the extraction of the historic kernel of the Troy saga from its mythological overgrowth and confine myself here to estimating the art-historical significance of the linkages which have been thus revealed. In these I believe myself to have discovered a principle of form which should prove to be of basic importance, especially in the development of constrained religious art into free creative art—as we see it taking its course from the old Oriental to the Greek culture. This principle is that of an aestheticizing extroversion. In the place of the inner entrail-spirals which were still the dominant ornament in the Cretan culture-zone, there appears not only the stylized animal body itself (the horse), but also the human being as he works himself gradually loose from his animal base, emerging eventually as the idealized figure of the Olympian who has triumphed over the chthonian-animalistic principle. This idealization-process we are able to follow step by step in the general development of Greek art... [e.g.] the animal head of the Egyptian gods changes into the human upper body of the Sphinx- and Centaur-figures, whose lower parts (back portions), on the other hand, have become animal; and this is quite in keeping with the development we have described
[156]
from the culture of the belly to that of the head. Thus the victory of the artistic (æsthetic) over the Dionysiac-animalistic (goat), and its advance to the divine-Apollonian,...stands as the imperishable cultural achievement of the Greeks. And simultaneously with this they abstracted from their predecessorts' materialistic and totemistic conception of rebirth that purely human conception of the soul, which not only was worked out in thought for the first time by their philosophers (Plato), but also lives on immortally in their works of art.
Next, the Christian ideology raised this human idea of the soul—already far removed from the soul of the dead—into a purely spiritual sphere (though without at first endowing it with divinity), and at the same time it democratized the immortal soul, which before had been the prerogative of kings, heroes, or creative people (artists). This democratization of the soul-concept had a great share in the flowering of Christian art, which expanded over more than a thousand years, and this was because it had again become essential—as in the beginnings of abstract artistic creativity—to objectify the human substrate of this abstraction for the world at large, to concretize it in figures of Christ, Mary with the Child, and so on. Everything had to have happened really and truly as it was said to have done, and what Church art put forth, therefore, was the tangible figuration of a soul-ideology which was becoming more and more cosmopolized and whose human qualities would soon have disappeared but for the saving influence of Christian art. As it was, Christian art—which, in contrast to Christian dogmatics, remained the layman's—became permeated again by the human element, particularly in the mother-and-child relation, which was here represented spiritually by heavenly love, whereas in the be-
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ginning what had been symbolized was its animal underworld significance. Gradually this underworld was transferred to the Christian hell, which thereafter represented terror and the negation of all hope of rebirth. Yet even in the everlasting flames which condemn to incessant torment the sinner who clings to carnal rebirth we can recognize the yearning for immortality. In this sense hell not only is the symbol of animality, but becomes that of everything earthly and of a final forcible separation of this from the intellectual and spiritual. Those artists, however, who, like Dante or the Breughel type of hell-painters, chose to depict it in terms of an earthly life banished to the underworld were actually only giving us a copy of life on earth as this presented itself to Christianity—that is, as a preparation for the higher life in heaven.
Chapter Six
HOUSE-BUILDING AND
ARCHITECTURE
...
[162] This self-creative trend, already visible in the building of a tomb, though this has merely to provide a permanent resting-place for the soul of the dead, becomes still clearer at the stage of building the house which is to provide a dwelling-place for the living soul, the human being on earth, and it finally soars above all animal and chthonian ties in the building of the temple for the shelter of the immortal, the divine,
[163]
soul. This gives us, at any rate for the field of architecture, a three-stage scheme of development, objectivized by the tomb (soul of the dead), the house (soul of the living), the temple (soul of God); and it may quite well be that the same scheme has a significance for art-ideology in general, corresponding, we are more than tempted to think, to the three art-ideologies that we have called religious, social, and personal. The parallel, in fact, suggested itself to me quite spontaneously, some time ago, at the mere sight of the complete output of one of the greatest modern artists. In Rodin's complete works, to which we shall return later, we see, in the form and content of what is represented, first, man, growing out of the womb of the earth, then his emancipation from the animal (the centaur-woman, already alluded to), and finally, in the expressive portrait busts, the crystallization of the purely spiritual, released not only from the mass of earth, but from the body itself. The artist has symbolized the final result of this very development-process in his "Penseur" and in the female "Pensée," just as in "The Hand" he identified his creative organ with that of the universe's creator. Without wishing to anticipate my further investigations into the modern artist-personality, I may say here that I believe every great artist has to go through this process of development, at least potentially, within himself, even if all the stages of it do not always materialize artistically. It may be that just those sketches and lower-rated creative products of a great artist throw a keener light on the struggle of the two sould in his breast than the completed masterpieces which have entered into immortality and are explicable only as the products of the higher self's triumph over the lower.
[169] As Burckhardy has pointed out, the Greek temple was the prototype of the whole of Hellenic architecture, and it can only be understood through the collective ideology of Greek culture, which was in essence human and microcosmic in contrast to the macrocosmic ideology of the East. Just as the Greeks developed the purely human soul-concept by banishing the dead below the earth, and the gods to above it, so also did they create the first geocentric world-picture, which may have been physically incorrect but was culturally an immense advance. The proverbial saying that Socrates had fetched down philosophy from heaven so that he could philosophize from the standpoint of humanity applied equally to the whole Greek culture, which, according to another saying, made man the measure of all things. The great architectural buildings, for instance, were no longer, as in the East, macrocosmic reflections of heavenly designes, but extended microcosms: that is, not only enlarged, but elevated, human beings. But with this ideological principle there is bound up a second, of æsthetic significance, which becomes intelligible only through the investiture of man with his earthly rights. That is, inasmuch as man himself becomes a macrocosm, a standard for all things, each part of him must necessarily be a separate and complete microcosm: an idea of which the liver mantic had been a concrete, and the idea of the human soul was an abstract, expression. And so it comes about that one of the most important art-principles of the Classical style of beauty is to reproduce the whole by a miniature of its essence so that each individual part really continues, ideologically, to express the whole. In the Oriental—macrocosmic—style of architecture, on the contrary, the building is indivisible and purports to reproduce in reduced, earthly, proportions a much greater heavenly conception.
[172] as Vitruvius goes on to explain, female slenderness was taken as a model for the pillars of Diana's temple, the diameter of which represented one eighth of their length. "...in the two styles of column that they invented, the one was copied from the naked, unadorned figure of a man, the other from the dainty figure of an unadorned woman. Those who came later, with a more critical and finer taste, preferred less massiveness and accordingly fixed the height of the Doric column at seven and of the Ionic as nine times the diameter."
This pretty story, even if we do not regard it as authentic, but only as a late interpretation of Classical traditions, evokes nevertheless two comments of cardinal importance for the theory of artistic creation. The one concerns the question of sexual significance in artistic creation, which the "female" column again brings to the fore; the other, the sister problem of the "imitation of nature," on which Vitruvius bases his whole interpretation. It is a fact that our conception of creative dynamism in the individual leaves no room to doubt that the two problems are closely associated or that the sexual theory of artistic creation stands and falls by the conception of art as an imitation of nature. For the sexual impulse as such could not, even in its "sublimated" form, bring forth anything but
[173]
simply nature, while the urge to create, as we have tried to show, aspires from the first to be independent of nature and to reach out beyond its premisses. In this sense we need hardly look for the proof of our view, beyond the single fact that, so far, in all our material we have come across no purely sexual motive. Indeed, one positively has the impression that the representation of the purely sexual (the act as well as the organs) is avoided in art. Stephan, too, finds it "most puzzling that woman herself and everything that could remind one of her sex are completely absent from art, in all the widely dispersed regions of the Bismarck Archipelago"... The fact is that...mortal origin through the woman is repudiated in favour of one or another immortality ideology, and these lead ultimately to the self-creative shaping of man that is manifest in art as in other ways. Wherever we find unequivocal sexual representations in any considerable,
[174]
or even excessive, quantity, we are dealing with late cultures of what I call the "age of sexuality," which is characterized by recognition of the patriarchal principle and in consequence embraces the phallus cult. In this connexion we have the worship of the Lingham in the Late Indian civilization, and the over-emphasis of the phallus in the Etruscan decadence, [etc.] ...the myths in which the origin of fire is attributed to the sexual act, which seem to have been handed down to us from India and Africa, should be only interpreted in the sense of a first creative transmutation of that which is given into that which is generated. By general agreement it was only a question originally of preserving (or, at most, controlling) fire, which had appeared in a natural way, no doubt as lightning from heaven; there is certainly no question whatever of its being generated as the result of the observation and artificial imitation of the friction-heat engendered in coition. If nevertheless the generating of fire came in fact to be connected, mythically and linguistically, with the sexual act, the notion could only arise from a comparison of the two acts of generation, which in turn supposes that the sexual act was already exalted from a natural function to a symbol of the male creative strength. One is almost tempted to say that the sexual act was made "creative" by comparison with the generation of fire, and not that the generation of fire needed to be sexualized.
[176] In Classical art, as we have particularly observed in connexion with Greek temple-building, man holds a harmonious intermediate position. He has arrived at creating his own microcosmic world and also the earthly heaven—the temple—in his own image! But he still has to support the heaven above him. He is an Atlas, beginning to groan under the weight of this macrocosmic burden, as the Greek hero suffered through his godlikeness, and at the summit of his creative elevation—the Greek hybris—his consciousness of guilt throws him
[177]
back into the inferior human rôle. This explains the trend towards imitation which later students of æsthetic have thought to detect in the Greek art-ideology; it betokens something like a rueful return to nature after too arrogantly rising above her, a self-imposed limitation on the individual presumption of creator. The imitation theory is, therefore (like every other æsthetic, for that matter), in itself an ideology arising out of the cultural situation, and not an explanation of the artistic style. Such a conception of nature-imitation as is represented by the Classical æsthetic is, to me, the expression of an abnegation of man's own creative force, caused by a sense of guilt in creation which forces man's return to the recognition of a higher creative force of which he himself is simply a creature, and even a mere tool of reproduction. This dualism of creature and creator Christianity subsequently drove to extremes in both its aspects: on the one hand, by the completeness with which its deity "became man," and, on the other, by its sublimely spiritual concept of God.
[185] to trace the way from the subterranean tomb and its heavenly counterpart, the sacral edifice, back to earth and earthly dwelling-places, we must again have resort to an ideological motive of microcosmization, the significance of which for the whole of cultural development has already been mentioned. This is the ancient conception of an earth-centre, the figuration of which as the earth's "navel" expresses a humanization of the cosmos such as was necessary if practical-technical development was likewise to find its ideology. For it is not only religious and mythological conceptions which are linked with the idea of the Omphalos. Scientific technics (for example, geodosy and the measurement of distances), practical undertakings such as the lay-out of towns and roads, and world-moving ideologies like state and nation have issued from the macrocosmic broadening out of man to earth-scale. We cannot here explore these special domains,which are too remote from the art-problem, but the recognition of these important connexions does prove to have a bearing, if an indirect one, on the understanding of art; for it discloses the paradoxical fact that the way from the human to the earthly was not a direct one, but followed a roundabout route through heaven and the world-as-a-whole. In other words, everything that the earthly
[186]
culture has produced in material values lies between the microcosm and the macrocosm, but was only enabled to come to fruition through ideological relationship between the two. How this influence may have operated we cannot therefore discover by way of ethnological or sociological study of the man-created reality, but only through the spirit which brought them forth, which is manifested most purely in religious traditions and objectified in artistic creation. It is of the specific quality of art that, even here, it adopts a middle course, or, rather, an intermediary rôle, in that it not only works out the prevailing ideology, but formally objectifies this development-process itself. The paradox of the art-problem lies, therefore, in the fact that the nature of a particular prevailing art-style can only be detected from the other cultural achievement parallel with it and in connexion with their ideological traditions; while these, again, can only be derived from an understanding of the nature of art. This apparently insoluble dilemma we are here endeavoring, by simultaneous and alternating treatment of all effective factors, to solve as nearly as is possible in the case of so complicated a problem as human creativity.
[199] This age-old custom [building-sacrifice], still practised by many primitive peoples, may be traced right into our own architectual ornamentation: it consisted in immuring living human beings—new-born children for choice—under the foundation-walls of new buildings. No clue is found to the origin of this custom in any traditions. Rudolf Kleinpaul refuses to regard these built-in persons as "sacrifices" in the true sense, on the ground that there would not at that stage be any protecting demons and gods in the new building who would require victims; the intention, he holds, was to create spirits, to make a beginning. In the deeper sense of creative force these "house-spirits" may resonably be called victims, however, as they embody the idea that every created thing, if it is to be capable of life, owes its existence to some life destroyed. Whichever way one looks at it, the building-sacrifice affirms once more the dualistic nature of the problem of architecture, and, in principle, of all other art-creation. Above all, it throws a flood of light on the house as mother-symbol, but also as a burial-place in which the child is bedded so that it may rise to new life within the building itself. But the custom further reveals the fact that the building is not intended as a mere copy (imitation) of natural processes, but represents a spiritual re-creation, and this is made possible by the death of the walled-in person, which sets free his spirit to animate the building.
[202] the idea of sacrifice...in its deepest sense: it is the dead, the decaying, that assures to the living the possibility of existence and creative fruition. And if today we speak only metaphorically of the spirit or soul that lives in a work of art, the artist is often only too well aware that in fact a life has to be sacrificed so that it may live on immortally in the work. Only, in the beginning, in the course of natural processes, this was another's life—our actual building-sacrifice—whereas the modern artist can as a rule only produce durable work at the cost of his own life. ...the mortal "double" must be sacrificed if the immortal ego is to live on in the work. Seen in this light, Cain's fratricide, as described in the Bible, appears as the condemnation of human presumption which uses for self-glorification the life given by God. And therefore, in founding the city—which as its building-sacrifice claimed Abel in the pride of his youth—Cain does not name it after
[203]
himself, but after his son Enoch, in accordance with the tribal ideology of the Jewish race.
Thus we find ourselves again in touch with the primary principle, already formulated, underlying all artistic creativity, and manifested ideologically in the old Oriental culture, æsthetically in Greece, and religiously in Christianity: the creation, namely, of material and spiritual values—the values of culture, art, and religion—not as an imitation of nature, but as a macrocosmization of man, pointing him towards a new spiritual reality that is created out of himself and exists only through him. The essential in this process is the roundabout path that mortal man must tread through the imperishable cosmos (the constellations) in order to create out of himself on the humanized earth immortal cultural values which survive him. To this end, however, he must sacrifice part of his actual life, his possibilities of earthly happiness, creating a spiritual cosmos analogous to the heavenly one; and thus he becomes himself a maker of worlds, but, at the same time, his own world-stuff out of whih and by which he creates. This...is the meaning of all mythology—that it melts human (earthly) and heavenly (cosmic) motives into an indissoluble unity. But this betokens no more and no less than that man starts from heaven to conquer the earth—a conquest that found its most perfect expression in the Greek cultural ideology with its humanized myths. Thus, man must first be the mythic creator of the cosmos, after which he becomes the creator of everything earthly—and therefore of the human culture that finds its objective expression in art.
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Chapter Seven
MYTH AND METAPHOR
***compare with sontag on "irony"***
... The peculiarity of the myth in this is that—in varying degrees, it is true—it not only presents the ideology, so to say, in theoretical form, but simultaneously interprets it, so that it appears as a forerunner of the poetic art, to which it is in any case allied by its narrative form. In the myth, however, which a people tells of its heroes or saviours the hero's creative activity appears as an activity of doing (or suffering), while the individual poet of later times finds his true creativity in the making of the story itself.
[210] The question may remain open whether the primal creation occurred as a result of self-sacrifice or of being sacrificed and dismembered; all we need now is to emphasize that idea which is common to all these versions of creation and which we met with in the building-sacrifice—namely, that the construction of the world also, apparently, demands a living sacrifice, and later traditions, which survive right into our nursery and drawing-room games, will show that not only mythical battles and games-contests but real wars have at bottom turned on the question of who the sacrificial officiator is to be. At any rate these Indo-Germanic versions of the Creation show that we are dealing with an makanthropic phenomenon which makes man, actively or passively, into the creator of the world. These myths therefore show us not only the first, but the most gigantesque type of artist, who creates the world not so much in his own image as from out of himself. But having regard to the most primitive immortality-ideology already discussed, which makes the process of decay into one of (animal) rebirth, I should like to maintain that the sacrificing of man for the creation of the world has its origin in the same feeling of imperishableness, and that the becoming a victim, as it still survives in Christianity,Hmm...
is only a voluntary acceptance of this
[211]
interconnexion of dying, decay, and resurrection. Naturally men try to divert this self-sacrifice on to others or to represent it as punishment; but the basic question is how men ever came to the idea, which rejects sexual generation in favour of the belief in metamorphosis and thus makes of death only a change of form. These myths too, therefore, contradict the superficial conclusion that there is immanent in man a biological creative urge that has its origin in sex. For the genital organs themselves, which are the essentials in human reproduction, have no part in the Creation; even where they are mentioned (chiefly in the cosmologies of highly developed Oriental civilizations), it is a negative happening: that is, the male reproductive organ is cut off, the god is robbed of his masculine reproductive power, he is castrated.
[230] I should think it possible that the whole orientation of man in the world is connected with the two sides of the body (front and back), which still have an important place in all cosmologies: for instance, the earth-goddess on her back, and the god of heaven bowed over her. My purpose here, at any rate, is to emphasize the fact that higher cultural development goes pari passu with the higher development of language, and,more, that the self-creative development of language seems to be a precondition of higher culture. One of the first and most essential steps of this higher development of language is the macrocosmization of the (already named) parts of the body—that is, their transference not only to the surrounding objects of nature among which man lives and with which he comes into contact, but also to the heavens and the universe, the linguistic identification being accompanied by a psychic one, tending to assimilate man to the cosmic immortality. Primitive man, as totemism in particular teaches us, remained at a materialistic level of personal immortality, which was symbolized, as our earlier study has shown, in the animal. In the higher cultures men have to use their growing knowledge of anatomy, etc., to get away from this now intolerable idea and seek a new, super-terrestrial, macrocosmic immortality. But for this language was the precondition—since the names of the parts of
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the body were to be transferred to the world—and this macrocosmic extension of language was subsequently justified, proved, and, so to say, made true by the creation of myths. In this sense the creation-myths we have discussed, especially the rise of the world from the members of a giant or demigod, are only grand linguistic metaphors for this projection of the parts of the body on to the whole universe.
[235] In one point modern research is more or less unanimous: that the most vital elements in our culture—the making of fire, agriculture, domestication of animals, measurement of time, observation of the stars—originate in the satisfaction not of practical, but of religious, supersensible, and ideological needs. The same seems to be true of language, as to which recent study more and more rejects the obvious theory that it arose in the need to make oneself understood.
[239] the imitation in sound of something unheard must be regarded as a creative achievement. In so far as it is imitation of something seen or
[240]
thought, it can have only the same intent as every other kind of imitation: namely, to identify itself with what it imitates, but, more than that, to dominate it and make itself independent of it. This is, however, the formula for all creating, which, fundamentally, aims, not at a duplication, but at a substitution. By creating, mean makes himself independent of that which exists, or at least he makes a very considerable effort to do so;...
If it is hard to accustom oneself to the idea that language did not proceed from the imitation of natural sounds or (probably) from anything earthly at all, it is still harder to swallow the notion that it did not originate as a means of making oneself understood. Yet many philologists, and Mauthner most unequivocally, have come out at this view. But if this is true, then language was not originally something collective, but a purely expressive and individual function—in a word, an art, which at first (like primitive body-ornament) helped the ego to magnify itself and to dominate its world-around. W. von Humboldt was, I think, the first to attempt a scientific justification for the view that language is an artistic expression, and for this purpose he invented the now famous idea of the "inner speech-form"—by which he understood, in contrast to the outer sound-form of the various languages, the peculiar way in which language does adapt itself formally to its purpose of expressing
[241]
ideas. More recently Karl Vossler has characterized the individually artistic aspect of language-formation in the proposition that language as such undergoes no development, but is produced anew and in every case differently, by everyone who gives expression in language to a mental impression. According to this view, the forms of expression in language must be studied without regard to the practical aspect, as creation or art—in a word, æsthetically. In so far as language does become a practical medium of intercourse between individuals, it is no longer an individual but a collective work, which takes empirical reality into account and is rigid or mutable according to the cultural needs of the language-community. In this second sense, which Vossler distinguishes sharply from the first, we have no longer a creation, but something that we must regard as development. This view, together with the religious origin of language, would give a good explanation of a fact which has caused the philologists much trouble: namely, the repeatedly observed fact that the meaning of words undergoes a gradual deterioration—as may, indeed, be observed right into the latest development of a language.
[244] I am disposed to assume, in conformity with the general view adopted in this book, that what we have to deal with is not a growth of language out of sex-acts or sexual activity, but a comparatively late sexualization of language as a manifestation of the human creative urge which gradually usurps the parenthood of everything by bringing sexual connotations into its nomenclature....
... It is very tempting...to adduce the existence of genders in almost all modern languages as evidence of the sexual origin of language; but such a conclusion is so superficial that even Sperber, in his attempt to prove that sexual origin, scorns it and argues against it in the form of one of its chief exponents... This rebutting argument of his proves for our living languages what Powell had already established as a result of his thorough in-
[245]
vestigation of Indian languages: "The student of linguistics must get entirely out of his head the idea that gender is merely a distinction of sex. [In certain instances]...gender is also a classification-method." We find the classification of "higher" and "lower" being, that presently became one of "male" and "female" in the Semitic languages, which, even thus early, breathe the moral outlook of the East. Here too the primitives disclose to us the deeper sources, for (according to Powell) the main principle of their classification is to divide the animate and inanimate objects.
... Opposed to the two-gender system of Semitic and Hamitic languages and the three-gender system of the Indo-European, we have the Indian classification that we have just been discussing, based chiefly on the distinction of "soul" and "no-soul" (living and non-living), though, it is true, there attaches itself to this a certain valuation in the distinction of masculine and feminine. Most interesting of all are the transitional languages which show the beginning of the sexualization side by side with the old basis of classification. ...[And elsewhere] we have an overlying new system with only four headings: persons, things, big, and small, whence, as the big pass into the class of persons, and the small into that of things, a twofold system is developed, corresponding to our division into masculine and feminine. This gives us a glimpse into the
[246]
valuation-principle which eventually identifies persons, living, big, and important things with man, and non-living, small, and unimportant things with woman. This gives us an exact parallel to the totemistic system, discussed earlier, which does not stop with the prohibitions regarding certain women (exogamy) or animals (totem), but assigns values to everything in the world by division into good and bad. The only problem here is: why does woman always some into the class of the evil, the dangerous, and the less valuable? As I have explained, this arises from the individual's urge to externalize himself personally, an urge which is threatened by sexual propagation, of which woman is the representative; and so woman passes into what I have called the Not-I class, which includes dangerous as well as unimportant (and neutral) things.
Sexuality, then, seems to have come into the formation of language comparatively late,... Not only in children, but also in primitive man, the mouth, rather than the sex-organs, plays the most important part in language-development. The mouth, as has already been mentioned, is used not only as an instrument of speech, but as a mimetic organ of gesticulation, which carries us from the movements of crying and sucking to the formation of sounds and words. Sound-gesture therefore belongs to a very early stage of development, because it is already determined in part by natural life-functions and leads very soon to a general gesture-language in which the individual expresses himself
[247]
at first, physioplastically, without even wishing to be understood;... But we cannot follow these oral sound-gestures to the stage of language-formation without having first referred to a second bodily organ which has played as great, in primitive times perhaps a greater, part: namely, the hand. ... Without having to decide here if the hand—"the human organ of culture"—is a new acquisition of man or an original possession which the other primates lost, there can be no doubt that it was the archetype of the implement, any more than that it is the most important organ for the language of gesture.***mumford***
Both ideas have been worked out...[in] Paul Alsberg's Das Menschheitsrätsel, in which he sees the characteristic quality of the development of man, as man, in an ever-increasing "elimination of the body," accompanied by a simultaneous replacement of the eliminated part by one or another tool. In this process of development, which affects the spiritual as well as technical achievement of man, the hand, at least to start with, played the most important part. Alsberg maintains that its development into an implement, as in throwing stones, even precedes the upright gait and certainly the perfection of the brain. But the later appearance of word- and idea-formation, too, Alsberg regards, like the elimination of the body, as the creation of an instrument; for the word and the concept, which are the basic elements of language and intelligence, are also extra-corporeal (artificial) means towards that elimination.
***b+a***
[253] We mentioned above that the things which the hand grasps are also carried by it to the mouth, which takes them up and copies them. In this sense the individual sound-formation corresponds more or less to an incorporation of the indicated objects by the mouth, while the collectivizing of language to serve as a medium of understanding is more like a giving-out, or throwing-out of what has been previously taken in—as indeed the accompanying hand-gesture often shows. This double character of language as a subjective means of expression and a collective medium of understanding occurs again in the highest form of language and, in fact, is the essence of art-work in general.
...there is also a special group of myths in which, as it seems to me, the conflict between the individual and collective use of language is depicted. ... Almost all these language-myths deal less with the origin of language than with that of the difference of languages...and in particular with the complete loss of language as the penalty of some sin of man. This sin seems to me everywhere to relate to an individualist separating-off which the myth, being a collective product, punishes by the loss of common intelligibility; on the other hand, these mythical stories show the resistance that the individual puts up against the profanation of language into a medium of communication, since here, as always, the individual, in profiting by collectivization, has to sacrifice also certain personal advantages.
[255] do not the ideologies, which include at an early stage the belief in a soul and later the macrocosmic immortality-myths, owe their existence to the word and are they not made possible only by language? For language was not only the first physioplastic creation of man, but his first self-creative achievement in a truly artistic sense. All other creativity was, if not imitation in the naturalistic sense, at any rate a deliberate follow-up of something already existence for the purpose of controlling it. But in language man made something new which had creative force in itself, and it was this something that in fact transformed the world in a human sense. And not only that, but it brought forth a new world, that of ideology.
[273] in this Old Testament idea of a word-creative God, as subsequently spiritualized (by way of the Greek Pneuma-Logos doctrine) in Christianity, it is the individual creative power of language that is exalted: a power of new creation by speech is vouchsafed to every individual. It is only later that the poet comes to perform it for the rest, and he does so by the harmonious fusion of the individual and collective forces, for though it is a language of his own, and therewith a world of his own, that he builds, it is yet such that it conveys something to others and helps them to build a world for themselves. In the most perfect conditions poetry, which came into being in a personal language and for a personal construction, becomes as much a collective possession as the language, equally an individual creation, had already become. Language is, then, not only an individual artistic creation which copies some element of some ideology (and, by objectifying it, dominates it), but is probably the prime form of all artistic activity, which
[274]
urges us to speech. ... [e.g., one scholar who] sees in the artificially systematized voice...the purest expression of the inner form and the formation of language which has as yet nothing to do with communication-needs but is just self-expressive. Thence he arrives at the self-relatedness of all language-formation, which we ourselves have found to be its essence from another point of view. Yet if language was originally not a means of communication, and if the formation of the voice and of sounds, articulation, and speech are in their truest nature individual objectification of an artistic sort, it follows of necessity that the poet only becomes understandable at the collective level of language development, even though he may have indulged in "singing and saying" for himself alone, in prayer or song, long before that.
Two peculiarities of the artitic creation of language, which are particularly manifested in the poet, are this satisfactorily explained by the dual character of language as an individual creation and a collective medium of communication. The one is the much-discussed question of the relative shares of the conscious and of the unconscious in poetic creation... The same process...concerns also the linguistic side of poetry, in which language appears on the one hand as something self-creative and on the other as something created by the poet, who is thus its master. For the self-creative urge inherent in language is expressed for the poet himself in the feeling of unconscious creation; but that means the tendency of language in itself, independent of his conscious will, which threatens to carry him away again and which he can only check by linguistic means of his own, which also are special to himself. Among these, apart from the individual word-formation
[275]
which harks back to the very creation of language, are not only the personal peculiarities of style, but also the collective forms of rhythm, rhyme, and other laws, which are received by poetry as ideologies.
So the poetic process divides more or less clearly into two separate phases, which have been called the conscious and the unconscious, but really correspond to the two processes of language-formation, the individual creative expression of an experience, and the collective communication of it. In the first phase, which might be called roughly that of conception, the poet react to an experience which, judged externally, may be very trivial; but his reaction is in the form and manner of language—in the widest sense—which means, and this indeed is the essence of the poet's gift, that every emotional experience forms itself for him speakably. But in this forming he has not yet mastered, still less finished with, the experience; on the contrary, it probably presses on him more and more, but it does so in a specific way, that of verbal expression, and thenceforward he has to shape consciously—that is, to bring into a form which is collectively intelligible. That is the second, conscious phase of poetic production, the real constructive process, and so at least he comes to the complete mastery and settlement of the experience.
These two more or less definitely separated phases of the poetic art were already observed by the Greeks, who could point to indications of it even in Homer. But the dual process, through one-sided emphasis of the conscious and the unconscious respectively, very soon led to two opposing theories, whose champions stretch in sequence from Plato and Aristotle right up to Freud and his opponents.
[279] language represents not only the material in which the poet works but also the form in which he works. In other words, the poet receives his material ready formed, at least as raw material, and has only to give it a second definitive form. But this process, as we have seen, cannot be simply split into two phases, since in each of the two phases the individual and collective elements both mingle and oppose each other. It seems to me to be one of the most complex of all psychological problems to decide in what way this reciprocal action between the individual and the collective, which is inherent in language, comes out in poetic creation; but, in conformity with our earlier discussion, we may suppose the process to be somewhat as follows: In an individual who reacts in language, a personal experience first of all finds its rough form in the traditional language-stock, which is thereby permeated by the personality and individually vitalized. On the other hand, the second stage, the verbal shaping proper, is, as it seems to me, a fresh collectivizing of what was originally expressed personally, with communication and understanding as its object. Put shortly, the first would be the expression of an individual state of feeling in the collective raw material of inherited language, the second a personal infusion into this linguistic raw material, necessitated by the social urge to communication. The two historical phases of language-creation, as we have found them in the individual copying and mastering of an ideological force and then in the surrender of this word-magic for the sake of general understanding, are thus still at work in the poet, even if no longer in their historical order. For the personal creative force, as affecting language-formation, seems only to become active in the second phase of social understanding, whereas the poet, in the first rush of feeling, gropes instinctively after the collective forms already available to him in the existing stock of language. This almost complete reversal of the historical process in the individual
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poet comes, however, from the fact that he has at hand a rich, perhaps even a poetically fashioned, vocabulary, and that not only has he to use it as his material and medium of communication, but it turns his creative powers from language to other elements of his productivity. In a word, the poet has no longer to create language; in fact, he can only use his creative energy within certain limits of style and occasional new coinages.
[282] the poetry of all times gives us incidentally a history of the poet such as we
[283]
should never obtain from biography alone;...
[284] the creative word not only brings forth the mythical or legendary story—myth means simply story—but leads also to the proper action by which what has been said is carried out in deeds.
In this sense not only the world, as we saw, but man also is created by the word; and he now seeks to do everything which he can say, as formerly he had to do all that he thought. Thus, merely to give one example for the moment, it is probably that the triple undertaking of the same deed in a story arose from a repetitio of the original magical words, which were to give effect to the action in a magical way and so had to be repeated. ...what he [Hamlet] really expresses is just this characteristic word-magic of the hero. ...what Hamlet expected from his "play" and from his tirades against his mother or Ophelia, the poet himself also apparently hoped would be the effect of his play on the English court, whose corruptness he lashed with words. It was only when words proved ineffective that Hamlet was driven to action; since his words could not kill like daggers, he had to turn to real
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weapons. The demand for action in a drama is satisfied by very few plays which can lay claim to any artistic form, and finds itself fulfilled far more on the films, or in their predecessor the melodrama, than in Classical tragedy and its imitations. Even Greek tragedy was far more a matter of speaking than of doing, of philosophizing about action and its conditions than of action itself: only the actions are so vividly depicted and so well supported by the actors that we have an impression of actual events even where we are dealing with accounts of long-past incidents and reflecting though about them. The same is still truer of the classicism drama of a Racine or a Schiller, whose qualities of language and though we admire, as well as of Ibsen, in whom there is nothing but talk.
Shakspere, here too, holds a peculiar position. He took a number of subjects which had hitherto been treated, if at all, only novelistically in narrative, and brought them on the stage in the fullness of their action and actuality. But he accompanies the action with words, and interprets it in a way which is characteristic of our view of the drama. Just as Hamlet regrets that words can no longer kill, so Macbeth is a hero rather of words and thoughts; he is no murderer who rushes to his aim, but a dreamer of glory and kingship, driven to action by his fancies, which the witches put into words for him. He also, like Hamlet, at first kills in words and thoughts, before he has recourse to the dagger; to which he is driven as much by the witches of his fancy as by the concrete Lady Macbeth, who rebukes him as a mere mouth-hero.
Shakspere's drama represents, then, at once the beginning and the culmination of heroic action as opposed to dramatic narrative; and we find, the further we go back in history, that the drama is proportionately less rich in action—as is shown even by Greek tragedy, which really amounts to a philosophical discussion between the hero and the chorus.
[289] we have emphasized in various passages of this book to what extent the poet also, and the artist in general, sacrifices his life to gain immortality. How far this is a necessary precondition of artistic production, for whose purposes life must be spent, and how far it is a more or less conscious self-sacrifice of the man to his work, is one of the deepest problems in the whole psychology of productivity. And that is why we have found the problem expressed as early as the creation-myths from the double point of view—on the one hand the world made by a violent, on the other by a voluntary, sacrifice of man. ...Ugghhhh...
[290]
...in the mysteries ["The Oriental mystery-religions"] the god becomes man and suffers the fate of mortality, while in Christianity man again becomes god... In the late Roman Mithras cult,...we have an immediate precedessor of Christianity, with its strong democratic cast. A close bond of intimacy united all members of the cult into an all-embracing brotherhood in which the lowest slave could receive the highest initiation. In the development of this democratice principle which allows every individual to become god...lies the world-historical significance of Christianity, but at the same time its difference from the collective soul-beliefs of the primitives. These also allow all to share in the immortality of the tribe, as members of the whole. But thereafter man had passed through a period of individualization which culminated in the Greek hero and his tragic death, and so at last Christianity came with its theory of individual immortality according to which everyone could, by living a in certain way, become hero and god and thus participate in resurrection after death.
This change—not produced, but only clothed in religious symbolism by Christianity—from the active wilful man repre-
[291]
sented in the ancient hero, to the passive sinful mankind that Christ symbolized, brought about a change also in the general ideology of art. All productivity thenceforth was consciously set to the service of religion, just as originally it had been an unconscious expression of the religious belief in the collective soul. The artist became God's servant and no longer, as he had been in Greece, his rival. And so he remained till the Renaissance, which was a rebirth, not merely of Classical art-style, but of Classical man, or, more correctly, of his heroic ideal, the strong man of will. What the Classical artist had represented in poetry and sculpture—namely, the heroic idea of the individual as such—was actually lived by men of the Renaissance, whereas it was only a brief life to which its art reawakened the Classical art-ideology and its individualism of personalities. Thus, as we have seen, the Renaissance produced the individual artist-type who sought to express in Classical form, no longer the religious content of, but the pure humanity induced by, Christianity. ...Christianity was itself a vast dramatized tragedy of the heretic individual, and it not only fixed the artistic ideologies of nearly two thousand years, but was also itself an ideology, transformed into action, of the tragic man, the prototype of the drama whose weak echo is all that was
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achieved by the religious plays, religious painting, and religious sculpture right down to the Gothic.
Only then did man rediscover his self-creative power. Though his activity was still for the honour and service of God, yet here for the first time he was able with his heavenward-striving cathedral to accomplish the bold enterprise of the Tower of Babel, and that because artists were united by a universal Christianity. But "the limitless will of Gothic humanity," which Schaeffer sees in the heaven-storming cathedrals, is only intelligible as the result of the contemporary revolution in the individual, who had once more learned to will, after leaving his will to God for so long. Yet in the first instance this art was dumb, like all sculpture and plastic art, though at the same time, like all great art, it was in the highest sense dramatic
or, rather, dynamic.PHEW!
For Gothic is nothing but "plastic art in architectural form." "When the Gothic spirit had exhausted its passion for the Beyond, it withdrew from the arts of form and poured itself forth in music, in the souls of Bach, Handel, and Mozart; what remained on this side split up into many parts and became Romantic, in the sense of the Klopstock-to-Hölderlin epoch. . . . But so far as that deman for the plastic asserted itself—unconsciously and in the depths of its essence—it entered into the poetry of language and produced the noble art of Greek corporeality in Goethe's and Hölderlin's odes."Becker mentions this.
Here we see the urge of all essentially "dramatic" art towards life and the living, which can express only in drama and culminates in the Shaksperian form. For in the drama man does not create life in language only. The actor performs it before our eyes in real, bodily, human form and so leads art back again to the life from which it had started. All that the painter wanted to copy or create in pictorial, or the sculptor in plastic form, found in the word a purely human and in the humanized drama of Shakspere a dramatic, dynamic, and vivid expression. But the prime drama of all European art was Christianity itself, at least in its significance as a new ideology of
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sacrifice, corresponding to the death and rebirth cycle of the ancient world. The only difference is that Christianity, out of the man sacrificed (crucified) for an idea, created the ideology of a willing self-sacrifice of one who dies for all others and precisely for that reason is himself immortalized. But this only represents a supreme spiritualization of the primitive myth in which the individual sacrifices (dismembers) himself so as to produce the world from his body: an ideology which we have seen to be the prototype of all impulse to artistic production. We shall return in the last chapter to this problem of artistic renunciation; here our interest lies in the course of the development from the primitive human sacrifice, to the spiritualized renunciation of the creative artist.
The fundamental idea is that for all created things there is needed not only a creator, but a piece of life, life itself, which is somehow withdrawn from its proper destiny of death and fixed in an intransient existence. The basic question, then, is: whence is this life taken which creates and gives life to the work of art? From the creator, or from someone else, who offers himself as a sacrifice either voluntarily or by compulsion or through the lot falling upon him? The whole problem of artistic renunciation is contained in the acceptance and knowledge that the creator must give a part of life—in fact, his own life—in order to make it eternal in his work of art. The sacrifice of another life is only a sham sacrifice which does not save him from self-sacrifice, though it may be the immediate instinct of self-preservation to find a substitute.
This, too, is the whole primitive idea of a sacrifice, whether of man or of animal; in every case there is the identification of sacrificial victim and priest, and beyond this again the original identity of all living and dead things, which of course was what gave rise to the notion of a kingdom of the dead corresponding to that of the living. And on this identity of the living and dead the whole world-outlook of primitive man, with its collective soul-concept, is built up. Death demands
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a victim; but to the collective ideologism of primitive society it is immaterial who dies; one is as good as another, in dying as in living. It is only later that each one seeks to maintain his personal individuality, and only then that the killing becomes a sacrifice; but not a sacrifice to any god (unless, indeed, the god the individual thus distinguished from the mass is himself reputed to be this god). The sacrifice itself is thus at the same time its own real object—an object negative rather than positive, and definitely not an "I." At this stage already we have the cheating of death, or of nature, out of its tribute—an idea which did not exist in the original killing of man or animal. For when a basic identity makes one as good as another, death in any case receives its tribute. It was only when it became a matter of a particular individual, and of the finding of a substitute victim for him, that the element of deceit crept in—an element which we find inseparably associated not only with sacrifice, but with games, of which, as we shall see in the next chapter, gambling with fate and competing with the rival are characteristic elements.
At this point there enters the Oracle. At first sight it appears as if its object was for destiny to settle who was to be the particular sacrifice. But already magic is inevitably in the field as a ethod of righting fortunes, and this shows how little serious men were in subordinating themselves to the decisions of fate. Had they done so, the whole business of oracles would have been unnecessary—it may indeed have been only an ex post facto justification for a sacrifice already consummated, as is suggested, for instance, by the fact that at least in the case of entrail-augury the animal had first to be killed before it could be settled whether the victim approved of the sacrifice or not. Anyhow, even this inspection of entrails, that strikes us as so primitive, appears to presuppose a complicated process of justification whereby a man must excuse the deceit of vicarious sacrifice by obtaining the sanction from the victim. The fact
[295]
that this justification afterwards takes on the form of a prophesying of the future only confirms our view, for does not the sacrifice take place in order that the sacrificer may have a future himself—that is, remain alive?
Such a substitution-sacrifice, however, is at bottom a drama, in looking at which we not only feel the tragedy of all human fate because of our identification with the hero, but, quite as strongly, the consolation that in this case it is not we but another that is the victim—
a motive which probably guides the poet in his choice of historical material and in his poetically representing sufferings of his own in others. Here again we must recognize that Christianity represents a universal drama of world-history, which, in spite of all archaization in the Greek sense or modernization in the individualistic, still does represent the universal human quality of this ideology of sacrifice. For tragedy also, like every other art-form, has passed through an ideological development, which, in spite of all external similarity of forms, discloses varieties of spiritual and intellectual meaning.
Greek tragedy was a symptom of the collapse of Greek humanity, which the mythic hero, as prototype of the hybrid individual, interpreted with grand gesture as a fate which he could accept because he willed it. In post-Christian drama the death of the hero is merely a consolatory warning, which shows how the Greek or the Roman or the Macbeth or the Wallenstein is the victim of his own fate—which we can avoid if we would draw the right moral. The Classical drama-hero is thus different in essence from the modern, for the latter has an intrinsic individuality, whereas the Classical hero is only an individual consciously and for the occasion elevated above the people, which is represented by the chorus. The poet who sings and laments in drama the hero and his sufferings—which epic had shown as his deeds—thus becomes the heir of the hero in whose place he is put or puts himself; while the sculptor or painter is in this respect the heir rather of the god
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who creates men, like Prometheus, the symbol of Greek artistic creation.
Modern drama, of which Hamlet may still be regarded as the type, thus also shows us the passive hero—which means the poet himself—who is not guilty as the Classical hero is because of his overweening actions, but because of his rejection of the heroic rôle in the fulfilment of which he is hindered by a predisposing feeling of guilt. Thus the hero, who had originally been the exemplar of the poet, gradually assumes his qualities—a process which has found so unique an expression in Shakspere's Hamlet because this drama shows us the heroic ideology transforming itself into the poetic. The merely biographical question, how far the passive hero shows the qualities of his particular poet, is, in my view, secondary to the far more important fact that the hero represents the poet himself as a type; and this at a stage of development when the magic power of the word begins to fail in face of human passions; when, therefore, the individual is already checked in his willed actions; once more the creative power of the word shines in all its poetic beauty, but it achieves nothing more than the momentary lightening of the poet's heart.
This decay of the magic power of one man's word is connected with increasing individualization, which is also reflected in the transformation of the hero and his character. In Shaksperian drama the hero no longer stands as in the Greek drama over against the chorus, which represented the whole people, nor other typical dramatis personae, but a whole series of equally individual characters, of whom each one is a hero in his own way, and in this sense speaks his own language. That all the characters in modern drama also speak the language of their poet as a collective language is not irreconcilable with this; we saw it equally in Homer's epic mixture of languages which bridged the national difference of his heroes. But while, in the heroic epic which reflects the exhaustive struggles of the Migrations, we saw the poetic attempt to save the individual,
[297]
in the form of national hero, from his submergence in the flood of the masses, we recognize in the tragedy which developed in the hour of the people's victory the ruin of a hero reborn from the mass, who perishes not because of the people's overweeningness, but his own. Tragedy shows him as freeing himself from the mass, symbolized in the chorus, only to fall a victim to the fate consequent on his own greatness. This second hero is no longer leader of the masses—their head, as it were—but he stands over against the crowd as an overdominant individual. The last modern struggle of this type we find in the already almost comic heavy tragedian, in whom the poet who would depict his own personal conflicts on the stage finds a mere megaphone.
[end of chapter]
[301]
Chapter Ten
GAME AND DESTINY
It is only after this vast detour through humanity's macrocosmic world-picture—which has shown us art as not a copy of nature, but a replica of a cosmos created on a macrocosmic scale—that we can return to the problem of play: not in order to discuss æsthetic pleasure resulting from the play-impulse, but to come nearer to the comprehension of that impulse itself. Here, too, it is not sufficient to explain matters on the basis of individual psychology without having regard to the spiritual-collective intentions which originally led to the activity of play. Already in the æsthetic discussion of the play-impulse we have had to refer to the difference, so important for art, between the psychological attitudes of the creator and the receiver, which does not exist in games—unless it is that the defeated party in games is somehow forced into the passive rôle of receptivity. The pleasure experienced by the creative artist may approach the pleasure of play to this extent, that in both cases the activity is one which in the artist is at least potentially a motor activity and in play really does take effect in action. On the other hand, art as it is in the primal practice, the ritual dances and ceremonies of primitive peoples, and in the cult actions of higher cultures, has, from the psychological point of view, an affinity to play in that, when the whole community participates, there is no rigid distinction between creative and receptive.
[303] This brings us from what is a representation, religious or profane, of the calendar myths in processions or shows, to what is a real doing in the competitive games alike of children and grown-ups, who—in contrast to the actor—are no longer conscious of the mythical part they are playing. The competitive character of games, too, seems to be primitive, though playing to win a prize is a very late development. The original victor in the competition, long before the days of the palm, did not content himself with honour alone: what he won was life, which the defeated rival usually forfeited. Nor is this only the
[304]
case with the fighting-game; it survives into such late traditions as the legend of the "Singers' contest on the Wartburg," which according to Winckler is a typical New Year legend. "Five singers—whom he interprets as being the five planets—vie with each other, and the defeated are to fall to the executioner Heinrich von Ofterdingen sings best, but, by a trick, is declared beaten." In the same way, in the Arabian account of the race of the five horses, the winner is cheated of the prize. This ineradicable cheating in a game, this "corriger la fortune," seems deeply rooted in the instict of self-preservation—as are all those strong feelings and emotions which games can produce in otherwise cold-blooded people. The game is originally neither a pastime nor a means of enrichment, but a matter of destiny; and that is why it is deeply rooted in cosmological and astral symbols, so that even comparatively recent inventions like card games are entangled with them.
[319] Originally this representation [of the "Greek hero type"] was purely ritual, so that the part was not only played but lived and the hero was actually killed. The festival play which was performed by actors with a specially composed text belongs to a much later time, in which the poet, as the heir of the hero, interprets the whole business humanly. He puts before us in metaphorical form the vanished ages of man's first ascent above nature and reminds the present of it by admonitory examples. The poet (especially the Greek) must not therefore identify himself wholly with the hero and his destiny, but only with the spirit of the old myth, regardless of the particular hero who exemplefies it. Greek tragedy, whose heroes are types and not individuals, deals with man's pride and its fall; a theme which concerned not only the individual Greek or his poetic representative, but the whole Hellenic people, which had risen from trivial and obscure beginnings to a spiritual height at which no pause was possible—and also no progress, but only a tragic collapse.
Connected with this, probably, is the fact that the great athletic festivals of the Greeks, like Greek art itself, attained
[320]
their highest significance and perfection with the rise of the city-state, the Polis, and decayed under the petty jealousies of the various cities and races and their general political collapse. For the Greeks made even their games and sports a national concern in which everyone took active part, whereas the sensation-loving Romans found more pleasure in watching professional gladiators. The Greek games therefore had far more the character of sport and competition, and therefore of chance, than the Roman shows, in which the end could be foreseen and only the desperate death-struggle fascinated. This was no longer a game, nor competition, but mass-slaughtering. The circus games, on the other hand, which were to be seen in the great ludi (based on an Etruscan model), still give indication of old macrocosmic linkages. The wooden tower in the circus, the "fala," with the seven egg-shaped figures, "ova," is connected with the course of the planets, which was symbolically copied in the circus, and which is still definitely expressed, according to Winckler, even in Byzantium.
[323] even primitive man, is, by virtue of his sex, already in a way the controller of nature-forces, as we can see, for example by continence of Indians or Australians before important undertakings. As we have already shown with reference to various fertility rites, the immediate object is a cheating of nature of her tribute, for that is what death ultimately is; though he is manifested also sexually as partial death and thereafter transformed into sacrifice.
Though this cheating of the original opponent has left a strong tendency to "corriger la fortune" in games, yet in its higher development it represents a transition from deception to domination, a raising of the cosmic phenomena from the realm of necessity into that of freedom. In this sense play in no instinct, and the games of animals which are adduced as evidence...cannot, in my opinion, be compared at all with human games, because the motive of the original deception, and the later domination, of nature are entirely absent. Even chidren's games cannot really be brought into evidence, because the toys which children (even among primitives) receive are given by grown-ups and thus represent an early education of the impulse and capacity for control. The first step in that control seems to be the conquest of fear, for when an Indian child is given to a totem-doll to play with or a Negro child some primitive demon-carving, the purpose is probably to make the familiar with the object of religous faith and lose their fear of these "black men"... Play is thus rather a prelude to art, as Freud regards it, than a prelude to life, as Groos thought. Only, at a primitive stage there was no difference between the two worlds of reality and super-reality, so that the control of the one in play at the same time guaranteed control of the other by magic. Both, however, primitive magic and later art, have the same impulse at bottom, the element of control which developed out of the original deception of nature.
This process of development appears in the gradual trans-
[324]
formation of the cult or sacral festival game, with its purpose of deceiving nature. The sham manœuvre which we call play appears to us then as the survival of a once very important and serious cult-activity, which also exhibits the increasing sphere of human influence in man's passage from deception to control of nature: a process which seems to be repeated in children's games, wherein we were formerly disposed to see only an occupation imposed by grown-ups, or a means to distract children, whereas in reality play is as serious for a child as cult was for primitive man. In every case play, by diminishing fear, liberates energy which can ultimately express itself creatively. Not every child that plays becomes an artist—a fact which makes play as useless for the explanation of creative art as the other infantile experiences which all children share in common. Through dominating his toys a child does gain confidence, and play does liberate stored energy, but whether it is to express itself in art or not depends on the particular use made of it. Domination may easily lead to destruction, as we see in the way that many children treat their toys; and whether this is followed by the creation of a new or the destructio of another seems to depend on general conditions over which we have little control. The "young scientist" who must needs examine the inside of his toy, its mechanism and its works, by "analysis" is very early differentiated from the artist who makes himself a splendid doll out of a chip of wood. In one case, clearly, the destructive, in the other the constructive, predominates; and closer study would probably show that in the artist-type the impulse to create is subjectively attached to the ego, while the other appears to exhibit a stronger objectivity of relations.
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[327]Wow!
Chapter Eleven
BEAUTY AND TRUTH
... Originally play was a matter of very serious and significant ceremonies which had to be held at definite occasions if the life and well-being of the community were not to be endangered. Therefore at these pre-religious ceremonies neither the life nor the blood of the individual was spared to compel the favour of destiny in the community. If we contrast with this the character of the games which developed out of it, we see that their freedom amounts to a liberation from the compulsion of nature, and the attainment of pleasure to the feeling of superiority that is its outcome.***lasch sport***
We have almost to invert the usual view of the "excess"-theory of play and say that instead of play originating in excess of force, it produces this force or, more exactly, sets it free. Man sees that he need not continually sacrifice life to nature; he separates the ceremony from natural process and the idea of tribute, so that he can enjoy it freely as a triumph over nature.***ditto***
Play is therefore not a ceremony which has sunk to a mere show, but one which has been raised to freedom—indeed, it is only as such an expression of man's increasing domination over nature that we can explain the change of ceremony into play; so far from being meaningless or interpretable only as a survival, the activity thereby acquired a
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higher sense. On the other hand, our explanation also makes intelligible the pleasure which the individual gets from this sham activity, in that we regard this as a saving of vitality and, indeed, of life.
Here, obviously, lies also the origin of art, which, for all that it is supposed to be derived from an "art for art's sake" attitude, in reality, as we have seen, from the beginning subserved spiritual purposes of a magical or religious sort. Art, like play, passes from the condition of being a compulsory activity necessary for life into the realm of freedom—even if (again as in play) this liberation can never be wholly successful. Hence we have the explanation of the two types of artist: that which creates from an inner need and that which does so from an inner surplus. But in both cases the greatest part of creative force can come only from an excess that arises during and out of the actual creation, just as in play the playing itself is needed to liberate the energy in the individual. The productive process itself, combined with the incessant struggle for individual freedom against the bonds of the data (collective ideology or material), sets free excess forces with a greater accompaniment of pleasure the further its successful progress continues. This cumulative excess of force in the process we shall study separately in the next chapter, in its effect on the creative artist. At present we will begin by trying to make use of the art-ideological element in the understanding that we now have of play. For the ceremony, in rising from the compulsory sacrifice to nature into the realm of pleasure by the individual's liberation from nature, acquired not only the psychical quality of play, but its æsthetic quality also. When it is still tied to nature, the ceremony is more or less an imitation thereof, whereas the freedom of play tends rather towards stylization—the one being, even in the deeper sense, nearer to truth, and the other to beauty.
When I say "in the deeper sense," I mean that man's acceptance of his dependence on nature is more honest, while freedom-ideology, beyond a certain point, presumes the negation of
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that dependence and is therefore, also in a deeper sense, dishonest.
This fundamental dishonesty towards nature then comes out as the consciousness of guilt, which we see active in every process of art, and which is not wholly absent from play. This feeling of guilt, of human hybris—of which the Greeks were the first to become conscious—also allows neither play nor the exercise of art to rise wholly from compulsion to freedom; nay, the more strongly man feels his freedom and his independence, the more intense on the other hand is the consciousness of guilt, which appears in the individual partly restrictive, partly creative, but in the community is accompanied by the gradual growth and formation of another analogy, that of truth, which acts paralysingly on the freedom of the ideology of beauty. This scientific ideology born of the feeling of guilt therefore appears first in Greece, where the idea of artistic beauty also attained its greatest freedom. This is the profound reason for Plato's exclusion of artists from his ideal republic; for in their extreme type, the poet, he saw the truth-falsifying element, which his scientific ideologism condemned as lying. Owing to this scientific guilt-feeling in the Greeks, the only art-ideology permitted to their philosophers was one that had to be content with the imitation of nature, whereas their real works represent a much higher spiritual truth.While reserving (always) the option to be skeptical about what artworks might represent, here is in any case a pretty striking proposal of slippage between the ideology and its realization.
And so the Greek identification of the true with the good and the beautiful appears as the effort of a man, nervous of his likeness to god, to reconcile the freedom-ideology of art with the guilt-ideology of science.Well okay, here is one big hint about the challenge in reconciling post-ancient art with a commitment to honesty vis-a-vis scientific knowledge.
But this latter also leads to "hybris," since its over-valuation of the intellectual faculties of knowledge in man is only possible by the denial of his animal nature. The artistic ideology of the "head," which, as we have seen, rose from the chthonian mother earth to the majesty of self, never in fact escaped from this mother earth entirely: the animal content was but changed into an æsthetic form. The scientific ideology of the "head," on the other hand, is formal and phenomenological, and the thought-processes regard it as beneath their dignity to occupy themselves with the animal content. This latter comes but
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gradually, and it found its clearest expression in the materialistic outlook of the last century which culminated—and collapsed—in psycho-analysis. In Classical Greece we can watch this struggle of the two ideologies, on which even today every controversy still turns, growing out of humanity's own development. The truth of the dependence of man on nature, which play and art deny, reappears out of this guilt-feeling as the impulse to scientific knowledge; nay, more, as a compulsion not only to admit but to profess it.
But art itself is influenced by it, so that we find it, when at its highest point, already infected by scientific ideas, and particularly with the laws of geometric proportion (in architecture and sculpture) and of mathematics (in music and metre). But far more important than these special influences—which in fact had already begun in the East, in Egypt and Babylon—is the general influence of the scientific idea of truth on the æsthetic idea of beauty.Another aspect of the "challenge" above: this scientific aesthetic did perform a certain reconciliation, but it does seem now like a wrong turn.
For it was not science that was born in Greece, but only the type of scientific man, just as Greece was the cradle, not of art, but of the artistic type.
[332] In Sophocles' Œdipus—which therefore psycho-analysis is quite right in taking as its
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example—we see the new truth-ideology victoriously attacking the æsthetic laws of dramatic action. The Œdipus gives us an action developed in reverse order, which is as much as to say that it provides a psychological genesis for the destiny theory; thus a direct path leads thence to Ibsen's Wild Duck, which was the product of the materialistic science of the nineteenth century. Œdipus pays for the solution of the Sphinx's riddle, if not directly with his life, at least with his happiness; but the impulse to penetrate to the truth behind appearances is stronger than any other ideology. Sophocles' Œdipus is no longer a tragic hero who, like Æschylus' Prometheus, atones for a deed of sin, but an intellectually arrogant man who crashes because of his mere striving for knowledge, so that it is unimportant what he wanted to discover. What is not unimportant, however, is that this impulse to discover discloses itself more or less as a confession of faith; that is, that it is psychological rather than philosophical. The Œdipus of the Sophoclean age could no longer be a hero, even if he went through the same process of development as his heroic predecessor; he was so far sicklied over by the paleness of thought that he could no longer act, but only examine introspectively the psychological motives of his potential actions. He is thus not only the distant ancestor of Ibsen's Gregers Werle, who tries to cure men by showing up their life's lie, but the patron saint of psycho-analysis, which makes the same attempt in the name of a scientific ideology, but only succeeds therapeutically in so far as it is untrue. Between Œdipus and Gregers stands their spiritual kinsman Hamlet, who, however, is not the pattern for the truth-seeking healer, but the godfather of the thought-obstructed neurotic.
But however far the influence of scientific ideology on art may go, art always remains interested in the representation of the type, though it has to exemplify the type individually, and if possible by something real. Science on the other hand
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is interested primarily in the study of the special case and the profound knowledge of individual variations, and only in the end may it perhaps reach its general formulations. Thus not only Œdipus, but Hamlet and Gregers too are types, as is every true poetic figure, regardless of how much or how little we know of its creator. It does not make the Œdipus Rex less intelligible that we know so little of Sophocles; indeed, the few facts we do know might rather mislead us than otherwise in the understanding of his work. And the type-symbolism of The Wild Duck gains nothing from the scanty biography of Ibsen, who all his life-time was more of a sober pharmacist than a great poet. And that we cannot even be sure in Shakspere's case of the actual author is reckoned by Hermann Bahr as an invaluable advantage which the English poet possesses over Goethe, about whom every schoolboy can quote the facts which are supposed to explain the growth and meaning of his work . In this sense the modern "psychological" biography represents the latest intrusion of the ideology of science into that of art.
This conflict between the ideologies of truth and beauty, which only worked its way into the full consciousness of mankind in Greece, is actually as old as humanity itself, because in last analysis the root of it is the dualism between mortality and immortality. For, in our view, even the most primitive art consists in the attempt to make the abstract idea of the soul "true" by making it concrete; that is, æsthetically satisfying, or, in other words, beautiful. The question whether primitive likenesses were portraits or of symbolic character could therefore become prominent in art-history only as and when truth and beauty fell apart, as they have increasingly done in the European spiritual culture from the time of the Greeks onwards. For primitive artists the question was quite meaningles, for their truth was not realistic, but spiritual. Historians of primitive art are in fact unanimous in taking the first pictures of men to be those of the dead, symbolizing their continued existence; not real portraits, but a pictorially concrete repre-
[338] It might be said that until the Greeks living man was never the subject of artistic, certainly not of plastic, representation, but only the dead; that is, the soul that lived on after death. What enabled the Greeks, however, to override this tabu, which is still held among savages, and to represent living men as well, was the fact that they had in the mean while achieved a philosophical notion of the soul through their ideology of scientific truth and so had disembarrassed themselves of the one great problem, which had always exercised the artist hitherto, that of the concrete representation of the soul. When the Greek idea of the soul became that of the Psyche, man acquired living that soul which earlier had been something into which death changed him, and thereafter the art of human portraiture more and more depicts the soul of the living. This artistic freedom in the representation
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of the living soul found its highest expression in portraiture, which does not represent the actual, but the essential, man—that is, the soul. But whereas in pre-Greek art the dead man's soul could only be represented abstractly, and not as living, the representation of the living soul, which reached its culmination in portraiture, required a living soul for its very purpose of giving the picture life. And thus finally the living soul was no longer taken from the object depicted, but "added" by the working artist himself, of whom we then say that he has put his soul into" the work and given it both life and immortality .
The beginning of this development came in Greek portraiture of the Late Classical period, in which we admire—and for that matter the Greeks themselves admired—not the realistic likeness, even if it were photographically true, but the artistic ideology which made such work possible and, apart from the portrait-likeness, disclosed the spirit of the poet or the philosopher. Even if the artist aimed at an individual likeness or induced this effect, nevertheless the work in its spiritual expression was collective, since it showed in some indefinable way the ruling ideology of art or philosophy in the heads of the artist or philosopher. From Egypt, too, we have pictures and masks which seem to have been good likenesses, but no one will put these portraits, which served the purpose of the cult of the dead, higher than the ideal portraits of Classical Greece because the latter had less likeness and more spirit. To reproduce a likeness is not yet art—or no longer art. For the Egyptians the dead man had to live on in the Beyond just as he was, and so his portrait had to be as like as possible. But the Greek philosopher or poet was actually exchanging his material for an ideal immortality, and therefore that portrait was best which gave the purest expression of this spirituality: it was beautiful, while the other was only true. In order to show how far the realistic representation in art depends on belief in the
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dead and the cult of the soul, and only in that context aimed at the true reproduction of nature, we need only refer to the Egyptian ka. The ka is a life-principle, different from body and soul, which protects and blesses man and after death becomes the real representative of his personality. The body has to be preserved out of regard for the ka, so that it may at any time resume possession of it. "The ka has to be looked after with food and drink, which are put on the altar-table of the grave. If this were forgotten, the dead man might be driven to such a pass that, tortured by hunger or thirst, he would have to drink of his own urine and eat of his own dung—the most awful idea which could occur to an ancient Egyptian." Soon, however, it was only at the actual funeral and on memorial days that food and drink from one's own meal were set at the grave, and the everyday food, bread and beer, were painted on the table (the dead also being depicted as sitting at the entrance of the tomb), and so the nourishment which was necessary for continued existence was made external.
[348] it emerges, too, that the art-ideology is always collective and spiritual even where, as in portraiture, it uses an individual appearance for the expression of the general and typical. We can understand, therefore, how it is that the ideology of the beautiful can never be explained by individual psychology, for it is collective and its collective content is the quality of soul which is expressed artistically in beauty and religiously in faith. The concept of truth, on the other hand, in spite of its ideological elaboration in science, remains in the last resort qualitatively subjective (as I have shown in Truth and Reality), and consequently psychology is the most subjective of all the sciences and, basically, only the intellectual heir of the old soul-concept (Seelenglaube und Psychologie).
We can perhaps have no better example for the study of the mutual infuence of the scientific soul-ideology on art, and of the artistic ideology on science, than Greek music—which, moreover, will serve to lead us up to the form-problem as the art-problem par excellence. The influence of Greek mathematics, especially of the Pythagorean theory of numbers, on the development of Greek music is of course undisputed; and there is equally little doubt as to the artistic ideologizing of the physics of the cosmos, which is expressed most distinctly in the "music of the spheres" and the revolutions of the planets. Music also was originally a pure body-art, and its essential quality of rhythm followed from the spontaneous movements of the body, long before the Greeks gave it a mathematical foundation. This mathematic itself, however, as we have seen, was not so purely scientific as it seems to us nowadays, since it rested in the main on the hebdomadal system, and the origin of the latter was undoubtedly mythic (and therefore macro-microcosmic) in kind. Not only are the seven yowls of the voice, to which later the seven notes of
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the scale corresponded, pre-mathematical—and in all probability purely microcosmic (see above)—but the seven strings of the lyre and the seven stops of the oldest syrinx, which corresponded to the seven Muses (only later increased to nine) and the seven-membered chorus, seem to have been definitely mythic in origin. The doctrine of the seven tones of the heptachord and the associated harmony of the spheres are Pythagorean in origin—indeed, the interconnexion of the ideologies of music and physics is a characteristic of his general doctrine.
We must content ourselves here with this mere reference to the growth of a scientifically established music from an original rhythm of the body—not failing to note that the intermediate link is once again a macrocosmic extension: namely, the harmony of the spheres. The driving motive seems to have been, here too, the creative guilt-feeling which followed from the strict application of the rule that man is the measure of all things. The projection of this human measure on to the universe—which (as the pseudo-Hippocratean treatise on the heptad shows us) holds for the Greek culture as for others—gives the conscience-stricken individual a cosmic and no longer a divine justification and so leads straight to the scientific ideology. For man can thus again find his place in the workings of nature, and now at a higher ideological level where the nature is what he himself makes it, or as he himself interprets it—subordinating himself to it at the same time, even if only in appearance.
The fundamental problem to which this whole discussion of the conflict of the different ideologies, the æsthetic and the stientific—with all its effects in religion, philosophy, and art—leads is the problem of form. We saw how the older art-ideologies grew out of the religious concepts of the peoples and their chthonian background; and the justifiable question now presents itself: in what ways has the scientific ideology, first appearing in Greece and culminating in modern realism
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and verism, influenced the art-ideology of the West. As far as we at present can see from the purely phenomenological point of view, science manifested in the affirmative sense the same natural and primitive content of which the denial had led to an æsthetic creation of art-forms. In other words, the truth-ideology of science arises from the need to rediscover that nature which had been formally denied in the ideology of religious art. In science, truth is a problem of content; in art and its ideology, beauty a problem of form. But what happens when, as in Greece, the ideology of truth intrudes on art, and that of beauty on science?
To answer this question we have to go rather further afield and, for a start, to link up with what we have so far been able to say on the form-problem. The various kinds of metaphor, which survived from mythical prehistory and its micro-macrocosmic world-view to be the ornamental symbol of a general identity and to figure even in our own poetry as simile, throw back a light on to the most primitive forms of art: ornament and music. Both of these have rhythm as principle of form, which is manifested in music as temporal and in ornament as spatial repetition. Music we may therefore regard, analogically, as a pure temporal metaphor, and ornament as an extreme instance of spatial metaphor. In their developed forms they display still more clearly than the metaphorical speech the fundamental essence of metaphor: namely, extension into the infinite. For while metaphors of speech only succeed in retaining and recalling some past by association with the present, rhythmic ornament, in drawing or music, tends to connect the whole past as such, in abstract form, with the future, since a rhythmic line or a tone-succession can in principle be continued to infinity. We may perhaps at this point deal more precisely than we have done in our previous discussion with the differences in the forms of speech-metaphor, in relation to the particular past which they revive. The space, metaphors of Homer aim at fixing a collective pristine age of his people, and consequently, even in form, they adhere most
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closely to the strict rhythm of primitive abstract art: consider, for instance, the balance of the hexameter, which yet never becomes monotonous. The temporal metaphor of Proust tries to recall a personal past of the individual, and therefore it does not employ the ready-made language of poetry, but creates a mode of expression which is personal to the point of peculiarity and, even beyond that, arbitrariness and has been not unfairly compared to the twisted thought-paths of the victim of neurosis. Shakspere's dynamic metaphor is, in this respect too, half-way between the two others, in that the author seeks to connect his personal problems with those of his nation and of history. This explains his predilection for mythical and historical material, in which at times he is a nodding Homer and regardless of periods. But this confusion of times is not because of any negligence in the poet, but an essential quality of poetry, which enhances rather than disturbs the poetic effect—unless we insist on using the unfortunate poet as a historical source. The anachronisms of Macbeth or those of the Hermann battle in Kleist have hitherto not upset any spectator.
Returning from this digression to the rhythmic prototype of metaphor which we find in music and ornament, we see that the potential extension to infinity which is common to these primitive art-forms expresses the eternalizing impulse par excellence. Ornament in line and melody in music are not only abstractions of what is seen or felt in space and time, but abbreviations of the infinite, in spatial form in the one case, in temporal in the other. The fragment of wave-line or meander represents an infinite series of the same kind, and the monotonous rhythm of primitive instruments expresses it temporally, like Wagner's "infinite melody"; such representation of an infinite totality by a partial symbol which is spatially or temporally limited corresponds to the biological distinction of individual and species and the cosmic relation of microcosm and macrocosm; and the same is true of the word also, which in
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point of content condenses the changes of meaning that have taken place in the course of many generations or ages, and in point of form symbolizes the primal cry of the animal as sublimated in the human voice.
[355] Applied to the spiral, which is one of the earliest as it is the most widespread of ornaments, this would give a startling confirmation to our cultural-psychological view that out of the least permanent part of the body—namely, the intestines—the process of a creative transformation eventually makes an abstract picture of the immortal soul. And in this creative transformation artistic forms do not play an ancillary or merely illustrative part, but are the actual source of production, since without them the concretization of the prevailing idea of the soul would be impossible. Here, then, we have our linkage between this order of ideas and the view which we reached psychologically in our study of the modern artist-type: namely, that artistic productivity, not only in the individual, but probably in the whole development of culture, begins with one's own human body and ascends to the creation and artistic formation of a soul-endowed personality.
From the colour-painting of the body or its adornment with animal attributes—feathers, shells, etc.—a direct path leads to decoration in the narrower sense, the development of which is a very interesting part of cultural history. Whereas fixed body-ornament makes its effect immediately as an emphasis of the actual body, ornaments which are hung or applied serve merely decorative purposes. Even this decoration, however, has a symbolic meaning, in which the primitive purpose survives in fusion with the equally old ideology. But apart from the practical object of body-painting, which Scheltema has
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proved so decisively, what interests us here is the ideological importance, which will no longer cause us any trouble, as far, at least, as the addition of animal ornament is concerned; for the animal dances of the Indians and the hunting ceremonies of the Bushman prove clearly enough that the object to be achieved by ornament, of frightening an enemy or of attracting friends, involves total or partial identification with the animal. But this identification, again, has not a mere external aim, to acquire strength or superiority, but depends on a pre-animistic identity with the animal which it imitated in the ceremony or the disguise. If this is certain in the case of the feathers or skins of other adornment, we are justified in asking how far the artistic painting of the body in tattooing represents the same principle at a higher level, at which man is trying to liberate himself from the animal at least to this extent, and to become independent in the self-creative adornment of his own person. If this were so, this primitive painting (of which the traces survive in the feminine world even today) would be the origin of artistic activity not only in the sense assumed by the pragmatic and mimetic theories, but also in the psychological sense of a self-creative liberation of man from his dependence on nature and her purposiveness.' If we add that music too, in its origins in song and dance, was a pure body-art which only later and under the influence of mathematics developed into an abstract practice of art, we find here again the path leading from the rhythmically continuous repetition of the body andFOOTNOTE 1Clothing, which replaces tattooing in harsher climates, has obviously the aim of making man independent of nature. This is presumably the meaning of Joest when he says: "The less a man clothes himself, the more he tattoos, and the more he clothes himself, the less he tattoos." ...
...
[358] If our view is correct, there must be a connexion between the two cultural lines of development which we have found to determine that of the different art-ideologies also. First, there is the development from the chthonian underworld or belly-culture which grows essentially out of architecture, to the heavenly upper world or head-culture which produces the true arts of the Muses—speech, poetry, and music. Secondly, there is a line through the spatial and the dynamic form to the temporal. The real problem of form occurs within the first, which changes an ugly and rejected content into an admired and beautiful form, manifested spatially, dynamically, or temporally as the case may be. These last form-categories (in the Kantian sense) are, however, already given in the cultures: for example, in Egypt we have the perfection of dumb, static space and in Greece of eloquent, dynamic time. The actual artistic form, however, which arises from the spiritual victory over the (lower) content, is a psychological problem in the narrower sense. Form seems to represent the spontaneous objectification of inner processes, which make use of an external object in order to achieve material expression of that inner form . In other words, the form comes first, as an expression of a change in the inner attitude of man towards life, as for instance in the denial of nature (of the animal, for example); this denial produces (or presupposes) a new psychic dynamism which is "functionally" adapted to the form in which objects are now
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seen and presented: thus the serpent no longer represents the intestines, but the sun-spiral. The form is thus determined by the collective will-ideology, the content by the partially independent will-psychology, the content by the partially independent will-psychology of the creator . Intimately as form and content may be united, especially in the finest work, this unity seems to be the result of a harmonious unification of two contraries: not merely in the sense that form is given collectively in style, while the content is in every case a matter of free selection (and therefore, amongst others, in that of the subjective choice of the artist himself), but also since a strong and powerful form often compensates a weak content and vice versa.
The view which we have reached by an analysis of the genesis of art-forms—namely, that the form is the spontaneously given expression of the particular human ideology prevailing at the moment—finds its anticipation and support in the view of certain historians of art...that body-ornament is prior to that of decorative gear, and that the latter only took over its art therefrom. The discovery of æsthetic forms by cultural ideologies, then, is the continuation and elaboration of the same subjective process at a higher objective level. In the body-art, form and content were still largely one, while at the other end, in our highly differentiated modern art, we have an unending conflict between the two: a struggle between the artist and his material to reduce it to form, or a struggle for new forms which are to dominate the material in some new way . Here we come to a point where the rôle of the individual artist again acquires significance for us; we have already analysed the psychological genesis of the human impulse to create and shown it to be common to all culture and have seen that the particular forms which grew from it and the ideologies associated with it are collective. In primitive art both the cultural urge to creation, as ideologically manifested in the form principle, and also the content, which is a matter of religion and cult, are collective. The practice of such art is spontaneous, but it is of vital interest: a truly effective cultural factor, without which not merely further development but [360] further life would be impossible. If we take modern art as a comparison ready to hand, we find that both, form as well as content, are becoming more and more individually subjective, and that the impulse to create, which is still fundamentally the same, is more and more a matter of consciousness in the artist. But there is a certain limit to subjectivity which the most individual of artists cannot pass; and for two reasons: because the creative impulse, which is fundamentally always the same, implies a similar principle of form, or, better, impulse to form ; and secondly because, if the work is to have some general influence, it must manipulate some collective content of general human significance. Thus, subjectively, there does exist in the artist the creative impulse which in the individual, as arising from the conflict between the lower and the higher self, corresponds to what in the history of culture we have traced out as a gradual defeat of the animal by the spiritual principle. This impulse includes those elements of the conflict which strive towards the voluntary control and domination of the lower by the higher self; the actual victory comes, in art, from the will-like impulse to form, which at first aims at no more than a cessation of the conflict by delimiting and ordering it. This impulse to form seeks, and at first finds, collective traditional forms, which had been produced by similar conflicts in the course of cultural development, and which in many cases carry with them their particular content. These collectively transmitted or dominant forms constitute what in their totality we call style, by accepting which (in whatever degree) the artist does subject himself to a principle outside his individual self. And though it may be collective, it is yet a man-created collectivity, and not one prescribed by nature. Here too our earlier formulation of the imitation-ideology fits into its place, for while we allowed imitation its full importance, we showed besides that it is no matter of simply copying nature, but of representing nature as already altered or interpreted by man in his own sense (macrocosm-microcosm).
The artist, then, represents the type in which the primeval
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conflict between the lower and higher self is still so intense pat he cannot merely fall back for a solution upon the collective forms which are ready to hand, but were created by past generations in relation to their religious, artistic, and (games, sport) social institutions. He certainly uses these forms to some extent, but actively as an individual, not passively as one of the crowd. In his inner conflict, then, which corresponds potentially to that of earlier cultures, he looks instinctively—later, perhaps, consciously—for collective forms to justify and to liberate himself, but he also looks for a collective (material) content, so that he may achieve simultaneously personal freedom and collective effect. This explains the religious content of Egyptian and partly even of Greek art (though already the and in general the choice of historical subjects. With this view of the genetics of culture, it becomes clear not only that the individual artist, at any rate the great artist, must (at least potentially) recapitulate in himself the whole evolution from collective to individual art in its separate, though perhaps not necessarily chronological, stages, but that it is only by the subjugation in himself of these collective forms and contents that the really mature works of great masters are created. Moreover, the value set on great artists depends on the predominant ideology of their time; if it is still collective, that artist will be regarded as the greatest of his time, and the finest representative of it in the future, who has expressed the collective elements in their purest and most vigorous form. If on the other hand the general ideology is interwoven with individualistic tendencies, as at the Renaissance and in the succeeding "age of genius," the greatest artist will be he who embodies this individualized collective ideology in the purest form—which means, who has most definitely impressed on traditional forms the stamp of his personality, or (speaking in collective terms) individualism. The highest type of artist is he who can use the typical conflict of humanity within himself
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to produce collective values, which, though akin to the traditional in form and content—because in principle they spring from the same conflict—are yet individual, and new creations of these collective values, in that they present the personal ideology of the artist who is the representative of his age.
[370] The human individual must have at his disposal from the start some sort of ideology, even if of the most primitive kind (such as the notion of good and evil), not only that he may find his place in the society which is built up on these ideas, but also that he may find relief from the inner conflicts which would otherwise compel him to create for himself some ideology for the objectification of his psychic tensions. This ideologization of inner conflicts manifests itself in the individual in a form which psycho-analysis has called that of "identification"—with parents, teachers, and other ideal patterns—without being able to explain the process thereby. I have shown in another place that the motive of these identifications is the individual's root fear of isolation, and that their result is that the individual masters his conflict himself, independently of the persons who mediate and represent these ideologies. But this inward independence of teachers and educators as such, which is gained in the first instance by accepting the collective ideology that they offer, turns—usually about the time of puberty—against these collective ideologies themselves, under which the growing individual feels just as dependent and as restricted as he had previously been vis-à-vis their individual representatives.Indeed, it would be better if this is what "we" actually meant by this saying; as opposed to the artist's identity itself being right on the surface.
This liberation of the ego, as we should expect, occurs in the artist also, but with the difference that in his case no time is lost in taking up the artistic ideology, in preference to the general social. But this brings us back to the question: what is it that favours such a preference for the artistic ideologies in particular individuals and not in others? To make any progress on this question we must state the problem more narrowly, for we must remember that the general social ideology is made a specific in other people besides the artist, by their choice and practice of professions, so that the turn from general to special ideology is not a specifically artistic problem, but one of voca-
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tional psychology. As to this, I will refer the reader to what I have said in other works already mentioned, and only emphasize, in the present context, the formulation there proposed, which is that, compared with the average professional man, the artist has, so to say, a hundred-per-cent vocational psychology. That is (as I have said earlier in an introductory fashion), the creative type nominates itself at once as an artist (or, in certain circumstances, as scientist or otherwise)—a periphrasis which we are now in a position to replace by the formula that in the artist-type the creative urge is constantly related, ideologically, to his own ego, or at any rate that this is so in a higher degree and fuller measure than in the average man, so that one can say of the artist that he does not practise his calling, but is it, himself, represents it ideologically. For whereas the average man uses his calling chiefly as a means to material existence, and psychically only so far as to enable him to feel himself a useful member of human society—more or less irrespective of what his calling is—the artist needs his calling for his spiritual existence, just as the early cultures of mankind could not have existed and developed without art.
For the artist, therefore, his calling is not a means of livelihood, but life itself; and this explains not only the difficulties of his existence, since his main object cannot be the earning of money, but his struggles in love and life, which in the productive type spring from the impulse to create, and not vice versa. This conflict arises from an intensification in him of the general human dualism, but it is soon transformed from the purely dynamic conflict between impulse and will into an ideological conflict between art and the artist. The first stage in the growth of an artist is that which we have described as his "nomination" and which marks the subordination of the individual to one of the prevailing art-ideologies, this usually showing itself in the choice of some recognized master as the ideal pattern. In doing so, he becomes the representative of an ideology, and at first his individuality vanishes, until, later, at the height of his achievement, he strives once more to liberate
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his personality, now a mature personality, from the bonds of an ideology which he has himself accepted and helped to form. This whole process of liberation from a personal or ideal identification is so particularly intense and therefore difficult in the artist (and the productive type generally), not only because he has a stronger personality, but because this needs stronger identification for its artistic ideologizing; the process of liberation being thus particularly complex, and exposing the artist to those dangerous crises which threaten his artistic development and his whole life. These conflicts, which the "madness" theory of Lombroso and the pathological literature based on it try to explain rationalistically as neurosis, can only be understood ideologically; and when we so regard them, our insight into them is the deeper. In this creative conflict it is not only the positive tendency to individual self-liberation from ideologies once accepted and now being overcome that plays a great part. There is also the creative guilt-feeling, and this opposes their abandonment and seeks to tie down the individual in loyalty to his past. This loyalty again is itself opposed by a demand for loyalty to his own self-development, which drives him onward, even to strive beyond his own ego and artistic personality. So the struggle of the artist against art is really only an ideologized continuation of the individual struggle against the collective; and yet it is this very fact of the ideologization of purely psychical conflicts that marks the difference between the productive and the unproductive types, the artist and the neurotic; for the neurotic's creative power, like the most primitive artist's, is always tied, to his own self and exhausts itself in it, whereas the productive, type succeeds in changing this purely subjective creative process into an objective one, which means that through ideologizing it he transfers it from his own self to his work . The artist is helped, moreover, by another dynamic difference which not only enables him to construct a valuable ideology but to transform it into actual artistic achievement.
A deep study of neurosis has shown me that a characteristic
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quality of both the productive and the thwarted, marking off these excess and deficiency types from the average, is an over-strong tendency towards totality of experience. The so-called adaptability of the average man consists in a capacity for an extensive partial experience such as is demanded by our everyday life, with its many and varied problems. The non-conforming type tends to concentrate its whole personality, its whole self, on each detail of experience, however trivial or insignificant; but as this is not only practically impossible but psychically painful (because its effect is to bring out fear), this type protects itself from a complete self-exhaustion by powerful inner restraints. Now, the neurotic stops at this point in the process, thus cutting himself off from both the world and experience, and, thus faced with the proposition "All or nothing," chooses the nothing. The artist, however, here also, in spite of many difficulties and struggles, finds a constructive, a middle way: he avoids the complete loss of himself in life, not by remaining in the negative attitude, but by living himself out entirely in creative work. This fact is so obvious that, when we intuitively admire some great work of art, we say the whole artist is in it and expresses himself in it.
This, however, holds good for different kinds of artists in different degrees—a point to which we shall return later. Some artists persistently partialize themselves and thus leave a greater complete work unaccomplished; others pour themselves out wholly in every partial work. The same seems to be true of whole periods, or rather epochs, of style, which are, after all, only the expression of psychical and spiritual ideologies. The best example of a complete style seems to me to be Gothic, not only since it strives after an all-embracing whole, but because, more perhaps than any other style-tendency, it expresses, and insists on expressing, the spiritual-in-itself. This, however, is no longer the purely abstract spirituality of primitive art, but a world-embracing "pantheistic" dynamic of the spiritual. Hence, as Worringer rightly saw, it is not merely "a phenomenon of its age, but the great irreconcilable antithesis
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to the Classical, which is not limited to a single period of style, but reveals itself in ever new clothing throughout the centuries." Now, wherever one manages to find this opposition of Classical and Gothic, it seems to me to correspond to that eternal dualism which lies at the root of all art and all artistic creation, and precisely because it is something inherent in the individual. I believe that I have found one of the fundamental aspects of this primary individual dualism in the total-partial conflict, and in this sense Gothic would be the total and Classical the partial—a partial, it is true, which always gives the whole in the detail, the psychic dynamism expressing itself æsthetically as the beauty of proportion which was the Classical ideal. Gothic, on the other hand, does not try to symbolize the whole in a part, but rather aims at a dynamic picture of the whole in its actual totality.
In what we call Classical or Gothic, then, these two spiritual principles have been æsthetically objectified, and each presents itself to the individual artist as an external compulsion of form which he must accept as artist but fight against as individual. But we have also gained some further insight into the inner processes of the creative artist, which make it possible for him fully to express his own personality at the same time that it yields precedence to the art-ideology of the work. We must, further, return to the difference between a total and a partial experience, which is basic for the attitude of all such individuals. In the ceaseless struggle for liberation of the self from the moral, social, and æsthetic ideologies and the people who represent them, the individual goes through a disjunctive process of which I have regarded the process of birth as the prototype. But the process, though similar in principle to, is not a simple repetition of, the trauma of birth; it is, broadly, the attempt of the individual to gain a freedom from dependence of any sort upon a state from which it has grown. According to the stage of development, this separation will take
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the most varied forms and symbols, whereas the basic conflict is always the same: the overcoming of previous supporting egos and ideologies from which the individual has to free himself according to the measure and speed of his own growth, a separation which is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because the victory is always, at bottom and in some form, won over a part of one's own ego. We may remark here that every production of a significant artist, in whatever form, and of whatever content, always reflects more or less clearly this process of self-liberation and reveals the battle of the artist against the art which expresses a now surmounted phase of the development of his ego. In some artists the representation of a process of personal development seems to be the chief aim of their work, by which I do not mean the accidental biographical material, though this is itself (as we said above) an objective expression of the same inner conflict. Finally, there are artists, especially among the poets, for whom not only is this self-representation the essence of their work, but who are conscious to a very considerable extent of the process and have studied it "philosophically." Goethe and Nietzsche are perhaps the most conspicuous examples of this type, which is becoming more and more common nowadays and in which we can notice an ever-increasing preponderance of the psychologically disintegrating over the artistically formative ego. This process of the increasing extension of consciousness in humanity, which psycho-analysis has fostered so enormously in the last decades—but not entirely to the advantage of mankind as a whole—was prophesied by me in my Künstler in 1905 (at the time of my first acquaintance with Freud) as likely to be the beginning of a decay of art . In this early work I not only foretold the collapse of art through the increasing consciousness of the artist, but observed and established the manner of it in the nascent state.
[379] One of the radical mistakes made by most ordinary biographies and by psychography is the notion of a parallelism between experience and creation. This certainly exists, if not causally, at least phenomenally connected. [sic] Quite as important, however, or even more so, is the opposition of life and creation, which has been emphasized, but not understood, since this is impossible without taking account of the creative feeling of guilt. It is significant that many of the greatest artists (though by no means all) have a strong bourgeois tinge, and Kretschmer, in his study of men of genius, declared that genius needs a strong touch of conventionality. Many whose work is of the highest value and who live wholly in their art lead a very simple, ordinary life, and this purely human side often comes to the surface in their work, in contrast to the divine quality of genius. The Muse, too, whose idealization by the poet himself and whose apotheosis in the mother-principle by the psychographer look so fine, often comes off badly enough in real life. Not only that sheWell okay! But there are "scientists" and then there are scientists...
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has to endure, even enjoy, the moods of the divinely inspired master, but she very often becomes for the artist a symbol of an ideology that is no longer adequate, which she may have helped him to create, but which he has now to overcome and throw overboard. In that case we have that conflict in the artist, with which the psycho-analyst so often deals- since the artist is both unable to create without her and prevented by her presence from any further creation. His inclination may be to let her go, along with the earlier ideology, but his guilt-feeling will not allow it. This feeling is, however, not only ethical and concerned with the loved companion, but inner and psychical, since it concerns his own development and his loyalty to himself.
Not only will the artist who finds a creative issue from this conflict show its traces in his work, but his work will often enough be purely the expression of the conflict itself, whose solution has to be justified as much as the failure to reach a solution would have to be. As the artist, during this process of liberation from the ideology, has to include in what he surrenders the person or persons who were connected with it, he has to justify this action, which is usually done by magnification. That is, he will either really create something greater, in order to justify his action, or in the effort to create this greater he will be impeded by a still more enhanced feeling of guilt. In the first case he will use the guilt-feeling directly for creation; in the second even his previous creative power will be impeded. But if the artist takes the step forward in a purely ideological sense, without the need of concrete figures for the resolution of his creative conflict, his tendency will be to lessen his work, even if in fact it has become greater. This minimizing tendency also is due to the feeling of guilt, but, on the other hand, this has already worked itself out creatively in the artist, and it is only humbler second thoughts that are obliged to lessen the splendour of creation. A splendid instance of this is Rodin's life-work; no outsider, regarding it uncritically, would imagine that in masterpieces like the "Thinker" or even
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the mythological groups he sees only fragments of a never-completed work, called by Rodin himself the "Porte d'Enfer." Even though the artist was convinced and permeated by the greatness of his work, and expressed it directly in Works Like the "Hand of God" or the "Thinker," the aim which he set up and never attained of a vast and ideal achievement (on a par with the whole creation) represents a minimizing of the actually achieved, only intelligible by the creative feeling of guilt. This type—of which Goethe also is an instance, with his Faust trailing ever in his hands as his magnum opus by the side of which everything else was meant but as "fragments" of one great confession—has its opposite in another type of artist, who not only gives and fulfils himself in every work, but whose whole production is one vast justification of his impulse to create. Of this type Shakspere seems to me to be the best instance—and precisely because we know so little of his actual life and even doubt his authorship. Shakspere's work and the biographical material which has been gathered about the Stratford butcher's son have just as much psychological connexion as have the Homeric poems and our scanty information about the blind Ionian singer. Even if we did discover that Shakspere and Homer1 were neither of them responsible for the work assigned to them, yet the psychological types thus designated are just as much masterpieces of a people's creation as are the poems and dramas which bear their name. I mean that Shakspere's work requires an author who because of his creative impulse would give up home and family and all the life of an ordinary citizen in order to justify a foolish and irrational migration to the metropolis by brilliant achievement there. His success is the measure of his greatness. But even if an English noble or gentleman were the author of the dramas, I am sure that folk-fantasy would have been compelled to invent such
1 It is worth mentioning that a life of Shakspere by Nicholas Rowe (1709) is the first modern poet biography, and also characteristic that a life of Homer (probably the pseudo-Hesiodic life) provided the pattern. Thus fictitious biography, which essentially constructs the life from the work, is the real ancestor of all biographical literature.
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antecedents for him—which means, would have invented a Shakspere who happened to exist in Stratford or was transplanted there. The same has happened with greater world-historical ideas, such as Christianity, which certainly needed a Jesus from Nazareth, and it can hardly be chance that the greatest creations of the human spirit, such as the New Testament, the Homeric poems, and Shakspere's plays, should, on the one hand, have been centres of academic disputes as to authorship and, on the other, should have inspired the imagination of whole centuries in favour of one author. Even Goethe, who could hardly dispute his own authorship, felt himself compelled to describe his whole creation as a collective work which only happened to bear his name. This feeling of the poet that he is the mouthpiece of his age or, for that matter, of all humanity, explains not only why he has to ascribe his work to a Muse and thus connect it with his personal life and give it concrete form; it also throws a light on the fact that, and the degree to which, the art-ideology affects the poet's life. There is thus an influence of personal experience on creation and a reciprocal influence of creation on experience, which not only drives the artist externally to a Bohemian existence, but makes his inner life characterologically a picture of his art-ideology and thus once more calls forth the individual self in protest against this domination by that ideology.
Let us take the case of Shakspere once more. His life may just as well have been invented to suit his work as it may have been lived by the poet in a deeper sense to suit his ideology. Paradoxical as this sounds, yet we quite habitually in simpler circumstances take this adaptation of a man to his profession as self- evident. Between a night-watchman who has to adapt his external life very differently from that of his fellows and the poet whose personal life is an ideological expression of his artistic production, there is a difference only of degree, not of quality. When modern biography and psychography attempt to explain a man's work and production from his personal experience, the
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effort must remain not only incomplete, but also superficial, as long as the influence of the art-ideology on life and experience is not included. But this is not as simple as it is with the night-watchman and will not fit the same stereotyped formula, as most even analytical psychographers try to make it do. For the impulse to create puts itself into life and into work alike, and the great artist will in himself experience his own creation at the same time as in his work he will shape what he has experienced: for here too form and content are once more one, as they were in primitive art.
This brings us to the real problem of biography. Biography is as little an objective science as history is, even when it endeavours to be so, and would never fulfil its purpose if it were. The formative process of the biography begins long before the actual attempt to picture the life of the artist; after all, the main purpose is the picture of the creative personality and not merely of the man of actuality, and the two portraits can naturally never be wholly identical. The effort to make them so is, however, the avowed or unavowed tendency not only of the biographer, but of the artist himself and of his public, present and future. If there is plenty of biographical material, as in the case of Goethe, we do look in his life for the experience which would explain his work. But we never find it; though masses of material are accumulated in a futile attempt to find an experience which can explain the creative work, it cannot as a matter of principle be intelligible on that basis alone. In other cases, of which we have cited Shakspere as the type, creative biography has an easier task in constructing a life to fit the work. But always the starting-point in the formation of a biography is the individual's ideologizing of himself to be an artist, because thenceforward he must live that ideology, so far as reality allows him to do so; and so far as it does not, the artist makes for himself the experiences that he needs, searches for them and gives them forms in the sense of his ideology. Nowadays we quite naturally give the lives of certain
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types of poet a definite dramatic and novelistic form, since this is the only form adapted to the shaping of a biographical legend. That in every age the poet's life should be revalued and re-edited to suit the ideology of that age is only natural, though this does not exactly lessen the complexity of the problem.
Before we deal with this process of biographical legend-formation, which is set going by the artist's own ideologizing experience, in terms of its effect on success and permanent reputation, we must see how the process bears on our immediate question, that of the artist versus his art. With the partial experience of his own artistic ideology the artist is in conflict a priori, fighting for his life, and in the event (as we have shown) he achieves the compromise in his ideological experience which allows him to enjoy both his life and his productivity, instead of having to attain the one at the cost of the other. On the other hand, we must never forget that creation is itself an experience of the artist's, perhaps the most intense possible for him or for mankind in general. Nor is this true only of the unique instant and act of creation; for during the creation itself the work becomes experience and as such has to be surmounted by new actuality of extension and formation. This cumulative dynamic character of creativity, which marks it as an experience, can as a rule be reconstructed only genetically, since it is rarely the object of direct observation. Hence it is more easily observed in the arts of time and rhythm like poetry and music, which in their temporal succession and extension often show the development of this vehement dynamism during the process of creation, while we cannot see it in the fine arts except in sketches and studies. But it is almost typical for great artists that at the beginning of a work they are not quite clear about its formation, working-out, and completion; even in spite of a clear original concep-
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ion, the work turns during production into something other than the artist had originally planned. This process also is only intelligible through a realization of the specific dynamism of creativity, which must operate on the potential life plane if it is to liberate his energy and not consume it, as we have explained in the case of play.
We have said above that the artist-type, with his tendency to totality of experience, has an instinct to flee from life into creation, since there to a certain extent he can be sure of matters remaining under his own control; but this totality tendency itself, which is characteristic of the really productive type, in the end takes hold of his creation also, and this totality of creaton then threatens to master the creative artist as effectually as the totality of experience. In short, the "totality function" of the artist-type in the end makes all productivity, whether in itself or in a particular work, as much a danger for the creative ego as was the totality of experience from which he took refuge in his art. Here the conflict of the artist versus art becomes a struggle of the artist against his own creation, against the vehement dynamism of this totality-tendency which forces him to complete self-surrender in his work. How the artist escapes this new danger, after he had previously avoided that of the total experience, is one of the obscurest and most interesting problems of the psychology of creative artists. There will of course be special modes of escape for each artist or artist-type, which are decided for him by his personality and circumstances. But I think that certain ways are universally accessible, of which I will mention a few that are typical. One means of salvation from this total absorption in creation is, as in ordinary life, the division of attention among two or more simultaneous activities; and it is interesting in this connexion to note that work on the second activity is begun during work on the first just at the moment when the latter threatens to become all-absorbing. The second work is then often an antithesis in style and character to the first, though it may be a continuation at another level. This can, of course, only happen with
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artists who have various interests and capacities; thus Goethe indulged his scientific, and Schiller his philosophical, studies at periods apparently of weakness in poetic creativity, but really, according to our view, of danger to the poet when he had to find respite from that creativity. If a second sphere of interest of this sort—which is frequently a second form of artistic achievement—is lacking, periods of disappointment, depression, and even illness are likely to occur, which are then not so much a consequence of exhaustion as a flight from it.
This brings us to a second means of escape for the artist from his own creation, which in this case is not put on to another level, but simply set aside for the time being. The creative process, with its object of totality, always contains in any case a time conflict, which expresses itself in the difficulty the artist finds both in beginning and in finishing his work. Just as he can escape from threatened domination in the midst of his creation, so he can hold back instinctively as long as possible from the beginning of it; but this so overstrains the inner dynamism that delays of various sorts must be intercalated later, so that he may not be carried off by the violence of the productive experience. The inhibitions, then, of which most artists complain, both during creation and in its intervals, are the ego's necessary protections against being swallowed by creativity, as is the case, for that matter, with the inhibitions of normal or neurotic types. This form of protection may naturally in some cases have a disturbing (pathogenic) effect. But the retardation of, or refusal to complete, some work may have another, deeper reason. The restraint which holds the totality-tendency in check is basically fear, fear of life and of death, for it is precisely this that determines the urge to eternalize oneself in one's work. Not only, however, has the completed work the value of an eternity symbol, but the particular creative process, if it involves an exhaustive output, is by the same token a symbol of death, so that the artist is both driven on by the impulse to eternalization and checked by the fear of death. I have elsewhere shown that this restriction between the two poles of fear
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—fear of life and fear of death—is one of the fundamental processes of life; the artist seems to experience it in a similar intensified fashion to the neurotic, but with the difference that in the neurotic the fear of life predominates and so checks all expression in life, while the artist-type can overcome this fear in his creation and is driven by the fear of death to immortalize himself.
This conflict of the artist, first against his art and then against the dynamism of his own work and finally against its actual accomplishment, finds a peculiar expression in modern artists—clearest perhaps in the poets, but unmistakable also in plastic and pictorial artists. This is the diversion of creation into knowledge, of shaping of art into science and, above all, psychology. Naturally, spiritual self-representation in the work is always one essential element in artistic creativity and in art, but it is only in modern artists that it becomes a conscious, introspective, psychological self-analysis. But we are not concerned with those artists of the day whose work claims to represent a psychological confession as such and no more. though in point of fact it is something more. Here we are discussing the far more interesting half-way type, which, whether in the course of an ensemble of creation or even within the compass of a single work, passes suddenly from the formative artist into the scientist, who wishes—really he cannot help himself—to establish, or, rather, cannot help trying to establish, psychological laws of creation or æsthetic effect. This diversion of artistic creation from a formative into a cognitive process seems to me to be another of the artist's protections against his complete exhaustion in the creative process. We have here the ideological conflict of beauty and truth, which we have already studied from the general cultural point of view, reappearing as a personal conflict in the creative artist. But we also better understand how far the artistic form is in itself a necessary protection of the artist against the dynamism of a conflict which would destroy him if he failed to put it into form. In this sense, in the need, that is forced on him by that
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dynamism, for putting order, meaning, and control into the psychic chaos into which his totality-urge drives him, the artist, even if he is never conscious of the fact, is always a bit of a scientist. Conscious reflection about creativity and its conditions and about all the asthetic laws of artistic effect is only a continuation of the process at a fully conscious level which ensues whenever the artistic formative power is inadequate to control the chaos—that is, when, instead of being a protection, it becomes a danger to the survival of the ego.
Seen thus, the development of modern art and the modern artist is a manifestation of the same general development of Western art-ideology, as this resulted from the Greek conflict between the notions of beauty and truth. There is a rescue of the immortal soul by the æsthetic idea of beauty, and a controlling of the psychic chaos by the artistic form, with its eternal material. This was followed by the disruption of the form by individuality in the modern genius-art, the overflow of the ego beyond the form in a romantic "Sturm und Drang," and finally the flight from that loss of the ego which would be involved in a total creation or a total experience, into psychology. This cultural development-struggle between art and the ideologies of art has to be gone through by modern artists—burdened as they are with the whole weight of Western culture, both in their personal development and in their individual growth as artists—in themselves and with themselves. And if one of the leading art-historians of the day, Worringer, some ten years ago delivered before the Munich Goethe Society a funeral oration over modern Expressionism, contrasting our generation's will-to-art with its formative capacity, we must balance this view with some understanding of the artists' struggle if we are to avoid passing prematurely from the establishment of a fact to its valuation. Worringer is certainly right in his warning to modern artists to be satisfied with the last flicker and echo on the fringes of our culture and to avoid the great mistake of promising us, because we possess an in-
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creased insight into the essence of what art was at creative periods, an equal increase in the decaying vigour of our own uncreative epoch. That is easier said than done; not because real resignation is always harder than a struggle, but because the problem that is touched is the deepest problem of artistic creation, and it can never be solved by conscious deliberation and decision, however correct and sincere. As long as there is in man an impulse to create, he seeks and finds artistic expression in the most varied ideologies, and yet these have always been in some way traditional and collective. Nietzsche was therefore quite right when, long ago, in Human All-too-human he warned us against " revolution" in art and saw in its break with tradition its end. For unless it has some collective or social basis—for instance, in religion or, later, the "genius-religion"—artistic creation is impossible, and the last hopeless effort to base it on a psychological ideology not only leads away from art into science, but, even so, fails on points of principle. Education or art can no more be supported on psychological ideologies than religion can be replaced by psychology. For psychology is the individual ideology par excellence and cannot become collective, even if it is generally accepted or recognized. But modern humanity, through its increasing individuation, has fallen ever deeper into psychology and the ideologies thereof, precisely because the justify its individuality and its conciousness of it. But this individual ideology—as I declared in my first book in 1905 and have since sought to prove from the examination of world-outlooks—is an impossibility for art and has brought us to our present pass, which we may regret, but cannot alter by comparative studies of culture. So that Worringer's "funeral oration" really applies to art as a whole and not its present form of expressionism.
If, however, we regard the whole culture of a people or of an age as being not merely a means for the production of art, but as the expression of a particular form of life, within which a particular art-form plays a part, great or small, we may reach a
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less pessimistic position. As I have already hinted in my Künstler, we shall perhaps have to be content with cutting down the claims made for art and, further, shall have to sacrifice the artist-type as it has hitherto existed. Modern art, as Worringer complained, does suffer from the claims of modern artists to be put on a level with creative artists of other ages, and the artist-type suffers also, since he has to put this modern ideology of art for art's sake in the place of every other. The modern artist attempted to maintain the vanished art-ideologies of earlier ages at least in his personal ideologies, even if he could not transform them into productivity. But this draping of the modern individual in the ideologies of earlier ages was bound to lead, in such individuals, to a conflict between their real selves and the self adopted as an ideal—like the fundamental struggle of the neurotic. The conflict between the idealistic and realistic aspects of all art, which we have described as the struggle of the notion of beauty against that of truth, is duplicated in the modern artist as a conflict between his true self and an ideal self, in which he tries to conserve the art-ideologies of past ages. But it is not only modern art that (as opposed to Classical) is realistic, but the modern artist also, which means that he is oriented towards truth and not beauty, and this not only in his pseudo-naturalistic art-ideology, but in his whole psychological attitude towards himself and his art. His aim is not to express himself in his work, but to get to know himself by it; in fact, by reason of his purely individualistic ideology, he cannot express himself without confessing, and therefore knowing, himself, because he simply lacks the collective or social ideology which might make the expression of his personality artistic in the sense of earlier epochs. This individual realism, however, which reveals itself as a search for truth in art and life, only intensifies the conflict in the person of the artist. The more successful his discovery of truth about himself, the less can he create or even live, since illusions are necessary for both. The clearest representative of the modern artist-type seems to me to be Ibsen, who was still just capable of
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an artistic elaboration of this destructive problem—and he too sometimes came suspiciously near didactic, doctrinaire psychologism.
Thenceforward nothing was possible but a frank breach of all artistic forms and restraints, and the door was opened to a purely personal psychology of self-confessing and self-knowing in art, especially in poetry. Poets at first seemed to find some support in psycho-analysis, which they hoped to be able to transform into a new artistic ideology. But, for the reasons mentioned, this proved impossible, and, further, psycho-analysis has rather used the modern artist as an object of study than helped him to a psychological ideology of art. Thus from both alike, from the side of art and that of science, the way seems to be prepared for the decisive crisis, in the midst of which we stand—but also for its solution, which I foresee in a new structure of personality. This will be able to use in a constructive form the psychological insight which is so destructive when it exists as introspection, and the individual impulse to creation will turn positively towards the formation of its own personality, as indeed it did, and actively, in the earliest phases of primitive art. This is the goal which has hitherto been vainly sought by the so-called neurotic; in earlier ages he was occasionally able to achieve creatively, thanks to some collective art-ideology, but today all collective means fail and the artist is thrown back on to an individual psycho-therapy. But this can only be successful if it sees its individual problem as one conditioned both by time and by culture, whereas the modern artist is driven by the unattainability of his ideology into that neurosis out of which the neurotic vainly seeks a creative escape—vainly, because the social ideologies are lacking which could fulfil and justify his personal conflict. Both will be achieved in a new formation of personality, which can, however, be neither a therapy of neuroses nor a new psychological art-ideology, but must be a constructive process of acceptance and development of one's individual personality as a new type, of humanity, and in order to create the new it will have to give
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up much that has been received from tradition and become dear to it. This new must first of all be a new personality-type, which may thereafter perhaps find a new art-form suited to it, but in any case will not feel any compulsion to justify its personal impulse to create by starting from the ideology of long-surmounted art-forms. [[end of ch. 12]]
[395]This is provocative but also disconcertingly un-Rankian. Or perhaps merely pre-McLuhanian and pre-Beckerian. What the public is to do is one thing; what is done to them is quite another. The need to feel that we have been the ones who have done the doing, this is where all sorts of things go wrong, starting with the likelihood that we have it perfectly backwards from the start (McLuhan), and digressing from there (Becker).
Chapter Thirteen The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse, and even against his own work shows itself also in his attitude towards success and fame; indeed, these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which we saw beginning in subjective form with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with this self-nomination to be an artist and concludes in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies—one might almost say, two personalities of the individual—are throughout in continual conflict: the one which wishes to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other which wants to spend itself in ordinary life—in a word, the mortal man and the immortal soul of man. This universal human conflict, which was resolved through many thousands of years by religion and the art which rested upon its ideology, has become more and more acute and difficult with the growth of individual art, until with modern artists it has taken on a form very like that of a neurosis. The conflict was always particularly intense in the artist, and this of course is one of the reasons why he was obliged to seize hold of ideological means for its settlement. For because of its "totality-tendency" the creative type is inclined, in this struggle between life and creation, to give up the one wholly in favour of the other, and this naturally intensifies the conflict rather than solves it.
SUCCESS AND FAME
We have already discussed in detail how this conflict spreads itself over experience and production. I should like to add, in
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outline at least, how the same fundamental conflict is reflected in that most remarkable relation between achievement and success, which are often indeed in the harshest opposition. This problem falls within the bounds of our present investigation in point of subject—seeing that it concerns the artist and his creativity—but even in method it does not go beyond them, since we are once again concerned with interaction of individual and society. Nevertheless, I can only deal with it in outline because, whereas the history of religion and art provided a basis for the arguments in our earlier chapters, in this case the collective phenomenon which stands opposed to the individual—namely, the group or community—has been very inadequately studied hitherto. There is in fact no really useful social psychology which deals with the relation of the individual to the group, and vice versa, in a way which we could draw upon for the study of the special relation of the artist to his public and of the attitude of posterity to his work. We should therefore have ourselves to lay the foundations of a social psychology before we could apply it to our special problem; and this is obviously far beyond the scope of this investigation, which is, indeed, only a preliminary towards a social psychology.
The problems of a group, of the crowd and its leader, with which we are here concerned, have been so inadequately treated hitherto that even Lange-Eichbaum, who, so far as I know, has provided the best collection of material, complains equally that he can find no basis of social psychology for his chapters on the effect of works of art and on the fame of the artist. Independently, in my book Modern Education, I had found myself compelled to give a sketch of a psychology of leadership, because in the very little literature existing I found nothing of use. In fact, there is a complete lack of a fundamental study of social psychology, which has always been one-sidedly treated as art has, either by the psychologists in terms of the individual or by the ethnologists and sociologists in terms of the group; and there is no real common ground. Even these one-sided studies are of course useful as preliminaries, but they cannot be turned
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to account here, since they are merely peripheral and we have to study the particular relation of the artist to the world around and after him—though this study itself may of course provide another stone for the edifice of a future social psychology, which will have to take the relation of the individual to the group as its basic principle.
We shall therefore begin by trying to show, in the light of our own study and without any regard for the ordinary views of social psychology, what seems to be the relation of the artist to his public and to posterity, and their attitude to him and his work. It seems to be quite certain that primitive art, in contrast to modern, was collectivist—though doubt begins immediately with the conclusion that Hirn draws, that the driving power of primitive artistic creation was not individual but social: namely, the imparting of pleasure. We are the less in a position to say this in that we know nothing of the individuality of primitive artists; while it does appear on the contrary that primitive body-ornament, which is the preliminary to art and artistic creation, indicates strong subjective motives and forces. Probably both tendencies, the individual and the social, have always been at work, though naturally in different measure and with different emphasis. For just as primitive body-ornament indicates subjective tendencies in the otherwise collective view of primitive man, so also we find in the most subjective and egocentric modern artist a need to communicate himself, to rouse applause or at least to make an impression on others—in a word, to win success. This very rough schematization of the development-history has further to be toned down by the fact that artists emphasize the one or the other aspect, according to the times, from personal motives; and we must not be misled by the fashionable generalizations and slogans of the day concerning the artist's exhibitionism and the like into forgetting that almost every productive type is also possessed of an opposite tendency to secrecy, which can in some cases be just as pathological a tendency as exhibitionism is in others Even in judging this exhibitionism we must be
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careful not to take it at its face value, for what the artist exhibits in this apparently frank way is not his real, certainly not his whole, self, of which he only gives away part that he may keep the rest the more secretly for himself. Nor is it even simply that the artist always shows us his best side, in order to conceal his weakness and deficiencies. Experience has shown that man often has the opposite tendency to show his worst side and keep the best for himself.
Without going here into the deeper individual-psychological reason for this attitude (for it is far from being explained by the concept of "self-punishment) I should like to show here how this parsimony of oneself may affect actual creation and influence both success and fame. We can naturally study only the one side, that tendency in the artist which we have called the struggle of the artist against art, his work and success, and must ignore for the present the opposite tendency to want effect and success. From this one-sided standpoint the artist obviously creates for himself; we do not mean this in a narrow egoistic sense, but as primitive art was part of collective life, so modern artistic creation is an expression of individual life. The artist creates in the same way as he eats and breathes; that is one of his forms of life-expression, which—by chance, one might almost say—results in a work which happens to be of significance for others. But here begins in the history of the work a sort of second chapter, which we might call the discovery of the work of art: not by patrons or dealers, but by the artist himself, who discovers to his surprise that what he is producing has asthetic qualities and artistic value. The attitude of the artist towards this discovery is of course determined by his personality, but in its turn it decides, to a considerable extent, the destiny of the work and therefore that of its creator also. For the creation was a liberating process of life, a bringing to light—a birth if one likes—which, though of great, is not of final significance for the future of the child. The next problem which confronts the artist is that of giving on his part, and of accepting on that
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of the public. Obviously I do not mean supply and demand in the market, but a purely spiritual problem, which is one of the deepest there is; the problem, that is, how far the artist is willing and capable of "weaning" this work which he created by and for himself, and how far he tends to keep it for himself, or at least refuse to impart it to others.
We must leave aside here the important economic and practical motives which force the artist to overcome his opposition to public demand, though they may often be so strong or so emphasized that they overshadow all others. Indeed, many artists feel in this regard that they only produce for the public. This of course is true in part of successful artists; but psychologically what they do is to use the fact to justify their own need to create. But however the artist may settle this problem of publishing his work, the decision, coupled with other motives, affects his future creation. Whatever the admitted or hidden incentive, one motive for further creation is certainly the need to keep something for himself which others do not yet possess. That this work is meant to be something better is due not only to obvious artistic ambition, but to the already mentioned egoistic tendency to keep something better for oneself alone, to keep it away from others. For from the moment when the work is taken over and recognized by the public, or even merely offered to the public, it ceases to be the possession of the artist, not only economically but spiritually. Just as the artist created it from his own needs, the public accepts it to alleviate its own wants, and, whatever they may make of it, it never remains what it was originally; it ceases to be the personal achievement of the individual and becomes a symbol for others and their spiritual demands. This "misunderstanding," which the artist feels, is inevitable and the price at which fame is bought.
While we have here an important motive of the struggle against fame, which is to him almost a depersonalization, we can trace in the artist an opposition to success which is perhaps still stranger. The artist or his circle may complain unceasingly
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of lack of success and yet they will often reveal motives which impede or delay that success. We have already mentioned one such in what we said above about fame: the retention of individuality, which is meant here not only ideologically, but personally. Achievement and success are seen to be psychologically representative of the two basic tendencies that struggle against one another in the artist, the individual and the social. Achievement is ideological, success is personal; and the more the artist achieves in idea, the less disposed will he be to follow this up by personal success; we might say, indeed, the less need also, since the great achievement finally transforms itself into success without the help of the artist. Our interest here is in the psychological attitude of the artist-type which has diverted the creative impulse away from its own person into art and its ideology. Here we come upon the same antagonism which lies at the root of life and creativity; for success, even when it is won by artistic means, implies a personal success in life and is thus that very life from which the artist had originally fled to art as a refuge. Gustav Ichheiser therefore is quite right to distinguish, in his subtle study: Kritik des Erfolges (Leipzig, 1930), between "achievement-competence" and "success-competence, though he does not go far enough beyond the social phenomena. He comments tellingly on the fact that with many individuals social success is automatically ascribed to personal achievement, whereas it implies rather that a man is skilful at "putting a thing across" than a really productive activity.
In artistic success or fame the process at work is indeed usually the reverse; for the artist's competence is credited with,
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or directly associated with, his "deserved" success. In other words, the gaining of fame does for the artist what he cannot or will not do for himself: it hands back creative power from the ideological work to the individual, who can indeed nominate himself to be an artist, and even ideologically make himself one, but whose power of achievement does not include that of imposing himself. In this the artist, with all his opposition to pushing and publicity, is dependent on critics and dealers, who usually represent the complementary type of success-competence without exhibiting any particular achievement-competence. This successful type, which is usually centred on personal effectiveness, is in other ways too the psychological counterpart to the artist, whose only desire, indeed, is to achieve indirectly through his work. It differs from the artist par- ticularly in the fact that his "identification" faculty remains concentrated on persons and does not extend to ideologies as it does with the creative type; it is thus from this point of view much more personal than the artist-type, just as it is more personal, direct, and immediate in the assertion of its own ego.
This brings us, however, to an essential quality of the public in general, which is also decisive for its attitude to the creative type and his work. The average man has great difficulty in dealing with ideologies; he needs concrete personifications in religion, for instance, or myths or leadership—and his preference for a definite concrete person is something that even such spiritual movements as Christianity cannot evade. It is here, and not merely in a curiosity and sensationalism, that the origin of the public's interest in the person of the artist lies. This interest, moreover, cannot be satisfied with the usually dull facts of the artist's external life, for his personality is inquired into, not for human or psychological reasons, but in order that he may be made the concrete representation of his work. In this also the public completes the process of artistic self-creation which the artist alone cannot achieve and would not if he could. For the residue of human nature which lies between his person and his work is his life in actuality, and it
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disturbs the harmonious unitary picture of work and creator which the hero-worshipping public demands. And we see at once the similarity between this and the creation of a god, a process which has been so magnificently successful because the god could be abstracted from the creation without even a cinder being left.
But though the artist, at least at the summit of his ideological development, is far less dependent on concrete personalities than the masses, yet he cannot wholly dispense with them and is therefore dependent on men for a link between his artistic creations, however vital, and real life. In this need to make real and actual, humanly and through the public, the unreality of his creation and of the immortality impulse which is its symbol lies the deepest root of his striving after success and fame—since it is they that give his individual and ideal creation a completion in accord with reality and the truth of life—and it is this necessity that enables him to overcome the individual resistances, of which we have spoken, to the fame which collectivizes him. Here again we have the two root tendencies, individual and collective immortality, of which the second is seen to be the only permanent form and to which the first must be surrendered. But such a collective immortality is no longer religious, but social, however many religious elements may infiltrate into the psychology of fame and success.
We must now deal with the relation of achievement and success, but particularly that of success and fame. Without committing ourselves to definitions of these very vague terms, I should like to refer success to the living and fame to the dead, or, more loosely, to understand by success something which means something actual to the creative artist (I do not mean merely material gain)—whereas fame, like work itself, has a more ideological significance and concerns the work rather than the artist. No matter how far this distinction is justified, it at least opens up the possibility of approach to the actual psychological problem, which is what chiefly interests us here. Fame, which we have taken as a collective continuation of the artistic
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creative process, is not always, certainly not necessarily, connected with the greatness of a work; it often attaches to an achievement whose chief merit is not its high quality but some imposing characteristic, sensational either in itself or in its topical circumstances. Putting it roughly, we might say that an achievement marked by supreme quality tends to bring success, and one marked by something other than this quality to bring rather fame, both then and thereafter; not only because the masses are probably inaccessible to the supreme quality and can only be gradually educated up to it, but because the qualitatively supreme achievement leaves nothing for the public to do—at most, to imagine another equally perfect creator.
The one-sided or (psychologically speaking) compensatory work is more amenable to the catch-phrases of a fashion or movement, but to attain to such importance it needs certain favourable circumstances, whereas the supreme work can wait in peace, since the valuation it awaits will always supervene. In the other case, what the work lacks to make it complete is added to it by the social acquisition of fame. After all, society and posterity are far more concerned in this than in the original creator and his work, which is only more or less annexed by some collective need, as a means of giving concrete expression to some general trend, and at the same time to invest it with the sanction of genius.Good idea sticking to effects when it comes to the social and cultural of it all. But even here, firm knowledge of effects on contemporaries has proven elusive, no?
Seen thus, fame not only is a hollow thing, because it is almost a depersonalization, but is transitory, since it is dependent on definite circumstances which give it birth and with which it often perishes, even though later ages may give it a new life for other purposes. Fame seems to attach itself to men and
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achievements which we call "epoch-making," but when a creation of the moment is recognized and rewarded with fame, it is really conditioned by an epoch already in course of growth. Again, fame seems to come to men and achievements which do in some sense make history, or help to make it, exercise (or are subject to) some practical influence; in a word, act on life immediately and more directly than the higher artist-type who creates purely ideologically, whereas the epoch-making artist is something that the masses can develop further themselves, since this type stands nearer to life and practical success. I do not mean necessarily actual practical success, but the ultimately practical success of a whole movement, to represent which he has been summoned by the masses. For there would appear to be another contradiction here, between actual personal success and the renown attaching to epoch-making, just as a man who is personally very successful is often ideologically higher and draws no practical advantage from being recognized. Men whose work has been epoch-making and who have later become famous, whose work has had great practical influence, have often been dreamers and phantasts—and all the better material for the formation of legends (Columbus). It almost seems as though there were an economic law that only one party can extract something from a great achievement, either the man himself or others, either his contemporaries or posterity. From this it is clear that the chances for the creator to get something for his work are one against three, and that even the first possibility is never perfectly fulfilled, because he must in any case share his success and fame with others, and thus has to give up a share not only in his work but of his own self, for collective valuation in terms of success and fame.
These last remarks lead us once more to the actual problem of artistic success, which we have unwillingly lost sight of in this discussion of success and fame as social phenomena. Artis-
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tic success, concerned with essentially ideal values—which indeed are ultimately the only epoch-making values, or at least used to be—is less disputed than success in other social spheres, and the person of the artist, in spite of all the public interest, vanishes to a very large extent behind his work. The building up of fame is a collective creation of the community, and thus the artist, with his work, becomes the material for a new creative achievement of the community. In the course of this process the individual work is incorporated socially in a particular community-group, which may in some cases extend to the whole of humanity, and in any case is oriented towards a common assertion of the immortality of the individual artist. When contemporaries or posterity grant an artist immortality, they participate in that immortality, just as burial in a royal tomb or a similar-intentioned burial in the church (as the grave of Christ) gives the ordinary mortal a share in divine immortality.
The artist, therefore, not merely creates collective values from his individual need, but is himself finally collectivized, since out of the totality of his existence the community makes a new collective work, which survives as posthumous fame. From this point of view art is unintelligible without a consideration of its effect on its contemporaries and posterity—meaning thereby not its asthetic but its social and cultural effect.
The continued existence of art through successive generations shows that the individual creative process, even its actual product in work, is no more than the precondition of collective creation, which selects and transforms whatever in individual work can maintain itself as an expression of the contemporary general ideology. The artist in himself provides in his work the raw material which the community uses in the creation of biographies and fame as an expression of its own general ideology—especially when we consider that this process
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always begins in the lifetime of the artist, who often anticipates this collective transformation by adapting his creation to a great extent to the needs of the community. This obviously does not mean in the case of great artists a concession to the masses, but something of a deeper kind, a strong sympathy with the spiritual ideals of his public.
On the other hand there is always a distinct reaction of the artist not only against every kind of collectivization, but against the changing of his own person, his work, and his ideology into an eternalization-symbol for a particular epoch. This resistance of the artist to his absorption into the community will show itself in more than his objection to success and fame; it will also influence his further activity so far as the assertion of his own individuality is concerned, and become a strong stimulus to further creativity in general. Certainly this will be the case with the great artist, who always tries to escape this collectivizing influence by deliberate new creations, whereas the weaker talent succumbs to a conscious concession to the masses or becomes mere raw material for the collective perpetuation instinct. These diverse outcomes of the struggle of the artist against success and fame explain, too, why many of the greatest geniuses only attained fame after their own time, and, on the other hand, why mediocre gifts enjoy a seemingly undeserved success. A strong-willed creator lends himself far less to collective influence than a merely talented artist, whose work may easily be made the material for a mass creation that genius opposes.
But we see too in this matter of success and fame that the struggle of the artist against the art-ideology and his own creative dynamism is objectified and becomes a struggle of the artist against the community of living men and against posterity. The struggle is carried on on both sides and is so obstinate because it is at bottom again that opposition of individual and community which was the original source of all artistic productivity. The individual artist wants to free himself by his own creativity from the spiritual immortality-idea of the
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community, while the recognition of his achievement, mani fested as fame, amounts to an incorporation of his own per- sonality in that of the community. Thus general recognition of the artist and his work is the spiritual counterpart to his own asserted claim to be an artist; the latter is a gesture of inde- pendence, whereas fame, which is something granted to him, again makes him dependent.
Success stands, in a sense, half-way, since it is both deserved and won by the self, but leads easily to the fame which must be bestowed by others. This brings us also to the positive side of the whole problem, which we have hitherto kept in the background, because it could only be understood after considering the artist's disinclination to fame. The assumption that the artist seeks only success and fame originates with the unproductive type, who may not only be eager for it himself, but also be actuated by a belief that the artist wants to become famous, whereas really he himself wants to make him famous so as to participate in his immortality. It would be an exaggeration, of course, to deny that the artist is attracted by success and fame, but his motives are other than the motives of those who grant it to him. For the artist, success is a way of returning to life when the work is completed, and fame is a sort of collective after-existence which even the greatest cannot dispense with, since there is no more individual after-existence. The tragedy lies in the fact that the collective continuation of existence which every individual aims at extends in the artist's case to a complete depersonalization in his work, or at least to its radical transformation into a collective product: in any case, leads far beyond the goal that the artist himself aimed at. Success gives him both, the individual justification of his work and its collective recognition, whereas fame stamps both himself and his work as a creature of the community.
These observations indicate that the desire for success and fame may at first act as a stimulus to the creative impulse, but that later, when the artist approaches success or has attained it, other social ideologies must take its place. In any case this
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change in the social relation of the artist decisively affects his art-ideology, and the success-fame motif turns from a stimulus to creation into the material of creation and may thereafter as such determine the artist's life as well. It would be fascinating to follow out in art—and especially in literary history—the relations between the personal success of the artist and the representation of success as a theme in his work, as well as the effect which the success attained has, not only on his creation, but on his life. The successful artist will evolve a quite different personal and artistic ideology from that of those who are not a success during their own lives. Many artists return, artistically or at least spiritually, to an earlier period of their struggle for success, as we can see from the well-known dreams of great poets and other successful artists, in which they seem to be set back in their modest beginnings. Here there is obviously a rejuvenation-wish , for fame has a flavour of death, and immortality is only distinguished by two small letters from the arch-evil they dread.
But fame not only threatens the personal immortality of the artist by making it collective; it is moreover directly hostile to life, since it forces the artist to stay officially in the groove that he has chosen for himself. This is seen in success, of which we said above that it was a sort of "return of the artist to life." It is a return which disappoints the artist because it does not give him freedom of experience, but compels him to further artistic creation. Success is therefore a stimulus to creativity only so long as it is not attained —which means, as long as the artist believes he can regain life by his success and so free himself from the bondage of creating. Bitterly, then, he finds out that success only strengthens the need for creating, and that fame, which is the end of it, leads to depersonalization during his lifetime and is of no use for life if it comes after death. The artist does not create, in the first place, for fame or immortality; his production is to be a means to achieve actual life, since it helps
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him to overcome fear. But he cannot get out of the bypath he has once trodden, which was to lead him back by means of his work to life. He is thus more and more deeply entangled in his creative dynamism, which receives its seal in success and fame.
But along with all these expressions of the opposition of the artist to art-ideology, to the dynamism of creation and the final absorption of his individual immortality by the community, there must exist other, and even stronger, tendencies of surrender, self-renunciation, and self-sacrifice. These seem to be just as necessary for the artist as the tendencies of self- assertion and self-eternalization; and, indeed, we have had to assume that what is perhaps the most decisive part of creative dynamism originates in this conflict of opposing tendencies and their settlement in the harmony of the work. This conflict between self-assertion and self-surrender is a normal phenomenon in human psychical life, which in the artist is extraordinarily intensified and reaches gigantic, one might say macrocosmic heights. As the strong creative personality is driven to destroy a pre-existing ideology, instead of a mere individual, as his "building-sacrifice" before he may eternalize himself in a new one, the conflict between surrender and assertion, which otherwise takes place in relation to a person, is here manifested with society and its whole order as the player on the other side.
The individual may, by his nomination to be an artist, have asserted his independence of the human community and rooted himself in self-sufficient isolation; but ultimately he is driven by the work he has autonomously produced to surrender again to that community. This creative self-sufficingness which generates the work out of oneself alone has misled us into thinking of the artist, at least spiritually, as a bisexual combination of the male and female principles, which create the work as it were hermaphroditically. But this view, which the artist himself often shares, is contradicted not only by the existence of definitely masculine or feminine types among artists, but by the
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complete lack of creative power in many hermaphroditic or homosexual types. In any case this explanation seems to me to be rather a metaphorical illustration of a much more complicated fact. I believe that we have here a deliberate denial of all dependence—in other words, a primary expression of an antisexual creative impulse which seeks to bring forth the world and itself from itself and without help. This tendency towards a self-sufficing independence brings the individual into conflict with sexual life, of which the very essence is creation or generation by the help of another. But even the autonomously functioning artist, who may produce his work himself, is ultimately dependent on others for recognition, success, and fame, and even more so than the average man is dependent on his sexual partner. The artist therefore has to give himself the more and the more intensively and exhaustively in his work because he has created it the more independently of others. This seems almost a compensative justice, but is really only the result of a violent dynamism which wilfully alters a natural dependence of the individual into an apparent freedom in creation. Success and fame then supervene to assure the artist that for all his lordliness he is still dependent on the collective forces that he seeks to escape by autonomous creation. From our point of view, according to which an artist is made by the individual's raising himself above nature and making himself eternal in his work, we might put it in this way: that success and fame make him once more a collective being, take him from his divine creative rôle and make him human again; in a word, make him mortal. However much he may like to return to earth and become human, he cannot do it at the price of his own immortality; and the paradox of the thing consists in the fact that success and fame, which make him collectively immortal, make him personally human once more and restore him to mortality. His work is taken from him by the community, as the child is taken from its parents, and in place of it he receives his title to fame, rewarded like a mother by a state hungry for soldiers. The artist, too, looks for this reward, but
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he hopes to return by his success to life, whereas fame condems him often enough to spiritual death.
If success is the result of an irresistible dynamism which gives success to that artist who achieves it, fame is in the same way the result of an irresistible dynamism in a community which is always hungry for material for its own eternalization. Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an "individual" impulse for eternalization, which manifests itself in, the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes. Yet this is impossible without the productive achievement of outstanding individuals, who then become the pioneers and victims of this collective immortality, whether they will it or not. In this sense success is a measure of the extent to which the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse; and fame might then be taken as an expression of regret on the part of the community which has annexed this man and his work as its own. In spite of this guilt-feeling, however, the community really only takes back what genius, by using collective ideology, had previously taken from it—magnified, it is true, by the personal achievement of the creator. And this is the more important since the community annexes the man and his work, depersonalizes him, and thus really robs him of the fruit of his work—in return for which he is offered the distinction of fame. Success and fame thus complete not only the work of the artist, but, far more than that, a vast circle in the eternal conflict between individual and group. The individual tries, by taking over a collective ideology which he creates anew in the personal sense, to assure his own immortality, and this is manifested in success; but the community, by the bestowing of fame, annexes for itself the immortality which had really been won by an individual, makes itself eternal in the work, and offers the artist in return its collective glory.
[415]One might expect this mechanistic explanation to receive a fuller Rankian interrogation. But unfortunately, for even Rank himself, it is certain .
Chapter Fourteen The last chapters have brought us back to the narrower problem with which we started, the relation of the artist to art; but permit us now to formulate it from the standpoint of the artist, whereas at first we had to do so from that of art. We started with the primitive art-forms of ornament and noted that their abstractness yet contained an element of the concrete which alone really made them works of art. For if they were nothing but abstraction, we should value philosophical ideas more highly than art and so return to the position of Greek thinkers, who identified beauty and truth and saw their ideal in the wise man and not in the inspired artist. The essence of art, however, lies precisely in the concrete representation of the abstract; and we tried to show why such a representation was thought beautiful and roused asthetic pleasure. In order to understand primitive ornament we adduced, in addition to the personal and social motives of the "artist," the general ideology within which these forms were necessary or possible, and thence we found the first deduction of the concept of beauty from the concept of the soul. The primitive world-outlook rests on a collective ideology of the soul, which must in its nature be abstract to attain its object of supporting the belief in immortality. Primitive art is abstract, because it wants to, or must, represent this abstract idea of the soul as like as possible, in order that its actual existence may be proved by concretization. Whereas, then, primitive (and even later) religion
DEPRIVATION AND
RENUNCIATION
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supports the belief in immortality by a collective soul-ideology, art proves the existence of this abstract conception of the soul by its concretization in symbolical form.
We traced the development of art from its primitive beginnings to the personal masterpieces of Classical, Renaissance, and modern times, until we finally found in the individual artist himself a representative of the same ideology of immortality. Not only does his work become the most concrete proof that the individual can live on in spirit for centuries; but the last chapters have shown us how the artist is under a sort of organic compulsion to transform his art-ideology into experience. In this he makes reality of the unreal to just the extent that it represents the concretization of the soul-concept in the work. In other words, the artist must live his ideology so that he, as well as others, may believe in it as true; on the other hand, this ideological experience acts both as a means to make artistic productivity possible and as a means to live a real life. For we have seen that the basic conflict of the creative personality is that between his desire to live a natural life in an ordinary sense and the need to produce ideologically—which corresponds socially to that between individuality and collectivity and biologically to that between the ego and the genus. Whereas the average man largely subordinates himself, both socially and biologically, to the collective, and the neurotic shuts himself deliberately off from both, the productive type finds a middle way, which is expressed in ideological experience and personal creativity. But since the artist must live as a human being and yet feels compelled to make this transitory life eternal in an intransient work, a compromise is set up between ideologized life and an individualized creativity—a balance which is difficult, impermanent, and in all circumstances painful, since creation tends to experience, and experience again cries out for artistic form.
In this sense the general problem of the artist—not only in its psychological, but in its human aspect—is contained in the two notions of deprivation and renunciation. The psychological
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point of view, as it culminates in psycho-analysis, always emphasizes only the deprivation, from which artists seem to suffer most in themselves; the philosophical view, to which a few artists like Goethe or Ibsen attained at the height of their achievement, emphasizes renunciation. But the two aspects are complementary, like outer and inner, society and ego, collectivity and individuality. The great artist and great work are only born from the reconciliation of the two—the victory of a philosophy of renunciation over an ideology of deprivation. From this point of view discussions about life and creativity, the conflict of various modes of life and ideas of creativity, seem superficial. An artist who feels that he is driven into creating by an external deprivation and who is then again obstructed by a longing for life can rise above these conflicts to a renunciant view of life which recognizes that it is not only impossible but perilous to live out life to the full and can, willingly and affirmatively, accept the limitations that appear in the form of moral conventions and artistic standards, not merely as such, but as protectiye measures against a premature and complete exhaustion of the individual. This means the end of all doubt as to whether he is to dedicate his whole life to art or send art to perdition and simply live; also of the question whether he is to live a Bohemian life in accordance with his ideology or live an ordinary life in despite of his art; and in the end his creativity is not only made richer and deeper by this renunciatory attitude, but is freed from the need to justify one or the other mode of life—in other words, from the need for compensation.
But this justifies a question as to whether such a human solution of the creative conflict may not have an unfavourable influence either on the urge to create or at least on the quality of the work. A study, psychological and ideological, of the artist and the history of art certainly gives the impression that, as we said above, the great artist and his work are due to a forced justification or a strained over-compensation; but also that only the greatest artists at the end of this struggle reach a
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renunciatory philosophy. The "at the end" is important, for it would indicate that their chief work dated from the period before this achievement and therefore came into being out of the still unresolved conflict of life and creation. It is certainly clear that a thoroughly satisfied bourgeois existence would give no stimulus for creation; it is equally clear on the other hand that the creative genius must approximate to such a life if he is not to sacrifice the one to the other and so possibly land himself again in sterility. We often see the artist, and the neurotic, who vacillates in a similar conflict, manufacturing the conflict (or intensifying it if it already exists) just so that he may resolve it. For the neurotic this is a test which he fails; he remains neurotic and proves to himself that he must do so. For the artist these self-created conflicts are also ultimately tests, but, in contradiction to the neurotic, they prove his capacity to create, since he masters the conflict, in form and content, by giving it æsthetic shape. This tendency, which is especially marked in the Romantic, to dramatize this experience does not, then, come from a mere wish to make oneself interesting, but is deeply connected with the general problem of artistry. On the whole we may say that the great artist —and most admirably in the Classical type—can free himself from the parallelism between his life and work, while the Romantic is more dependent on the dramatization of his experience on the lines of his ideology, since his creativity has definitely a compensatory character.
Here too we must pass, in the case of the individual artist and his work, if we are to judge it rightly, beyond this classifcation, since the same artist may in the course of his life develop from Romantic to Classic. It seems, indeed, from our previous observations, that the mature artist can only be born from victory over the Romantic in himself, irrespective of whether this Romanticism has come out in actual work at an early period, as with Goethe, or whether the artist only emerges at the fullness of life, as a complete Classic, as did K. F. Meyer. Here, too, as in an ordinary professional career, the spade-work
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will find its reward in magnificent masterpieces. This view of the development of the artistic personality and his work is only now beginning to appear in the study of art and has so far no solid principles on which to build. I will mention as characteristic, and as far as I know as the best, examples two works which deal respectively with the work of maturity and of youth. The one is A. E. Brinckmann's lucid work on the Spätwerke grosser Meister (Frankfurt, 1925), the ripe humanity of which work is manifestly and admittedly conditioned by the author's entry into his fifth decade; the other is the contrary: Die Frühvollendeten; in Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte—a study of artists who reached maturity young, in which the author, Guido Brand, puts before us a series of poets of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries who died prematurely, so that he may find the typical connexion between early maturity and early death. He can naturally not avoid touching, at least in an introductory way, on the borderland problem between masterpieces produced in youth and mature works of age; and rightly feels that "works of youth and of age should be regarded as a new theme which should explain to us by the help of psychology and phenomenology the psycho-spiritual attitude of youthful and the older creative types and thus describe the spheres within which the one grows up through the intuition of origin, the other from the experience of long life. Critique of language and philosophy of style would reveal the hall-marks of a creativity which is, inwardly, fundamentally different in the two cases."
In my book on incest (1912), which was conceived essentially as a basis for the psychology of poetic creation, I included, together with some remarks on the decisive periods of change in great poets (for example, Schiller; op. cit., second edition, P. 106, n. 49), a chapter on the psychology of youthful poetry and attempted a psychological valuation of the "fragments and outlines" (chapter vii) of greater and uncompleted works. In many cases the youth has nothing in common with the old man except the name; sometimes also, though not always, he
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has a favourite theme, which he uses at various periods in such different ways that it might be the work of more than one artist with more than one ideological attitude. In the sphere of this study come the works of pupils, which—especially in painting—are hardly to be distinguished from the masters, and the whole problem of schools of art, both plastic and poctic. Schiller's Räuber is as much a poem of the "Sturm und Drang" as it is an individual work, and several of its motifs can only be grasped ideologically and not psychologically. I had once intended to deal with this problem under the title of "Schiller's Brother" and to point out, in connexion with the ideas already treated in relation to the incest theme, that the motif of fraternal hate which in Schiller lasts right up to the Braut von Messina, might lead a biographer—supposing he had to construct the picture of his author from the pattern of his work and had lived in a less exact philological age—to assume a quarrel between brothers in Schiller's family, which, as is well known, contained no brother. But I did show, in my incest book, how Schiller, thanks to his "Sturm und Drang" ideology, made a brother out of his brother-in-law, called him so, and used him so. This same motif of fraternal hatred, which is one of the typical requisites of dramatic poetry from the time of Greek tragedy (see chapter xv in that book), is to be found very often in Shakspere, of whose family life we are less well informed, but of whom we do know that he, or the author of his plays, lived during the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and she was regarded on many sides as a usurper of the English throne, which she ruthlessly withheld from the rightful heir, her "sister" Mary Stuart. If an English court-poet wanted for some reason or other to refer to this idea, which was afloat among the people, he would not only have to use a historical or mythological dress , but would be well-advised, in view of the
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proximity of the Tower, to make the feminine rivals into masculine rivals of two royal families—which indeed is the case in the main plot of Hamlet and is the chief motif in many other plays. Whether he had really quarrelled in childhood with a brother about his toys or for his mother's love or a father's notice is of very little importance when we remember how common such things are and how often they are absent in the childhood of other poets. Indeed, the facts which are so well known in Schiller's case, and may be assumed with probability in Shakspere's, should warn us against drawing over-hasty conclusions on the strength of some superficial relation in the biographical material. For the artist is either born as such, in which case his attitude to his family involves almost a priori a sort of Hamlet tragedy, or else his experiences make him an artist, in which case again we cannot be concerned with those universal childhood impressions which are in no way different in his case from those of others.
This does not mean, of course, that such childhood influences are not among the important ones in the work of great artists, nor that psycho-analysis has not done a service in definitely emphasizing them; the question is simply that of the value to be ascribed to them, and their importance for the understanding of the artist and particularly of his work. The undoubted over-emphasis which psycho-analysis lays on this fact of artistic biographical method has various reasons, and these will lead us in their discussion back to our proper theme. First there is a confusion, or at least a certain want of distinction, between the development of personality in general and that of the artist in particular; but even in the former case, in which infantile influences are undeniable, psychoanalysis over-estimated their effect and neglected the individual will, which interprets these influences in its own way. This is still more the case if the personality is one in which the will is strong and shows itself not
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only as dominant but as creative. Childhood influences therefore do not build up the personality by themselves, and decidedly not the artistic type, which, after all, distinguishes itself very largely by its surmounting of everything traditional. A second reason takes us deeper into the psychology of the development of personality in general and of that of the artist in particular. The aim of psycho-analysis, indeed, in its interpretation of childhood influences was to emphasize, not the rôle of these as such, but that of the unconscious in general in artistic creativity. This was not new—what analysis did contribute to the subject was the scientific proof of this influence in some particular childhood impressions which the individual had repressed, yet which forced their way upward and manifested themselves later in his work.
On the other hand, there are two points to be taken into consideration. Firstly, childhood impressions are not so unconscious, in either the artist or the neurotic, as is so eagerly assumed. Indeed, most neurotics suffer from conscious recollections of their childhood—of which, try as they may, they cannot rid themselves—and we have very complete childhood memories in the case of poets particularly, who provide more, and more interesting, material than we can ever get from the analysis of neuroses (Goethe, Rousseau, Tolstoy, etc.). Secondly, exacter observation has shown us that artistic creation is far less unconscious than the psycho-analyst, or even the artist himself, believes. From Schiller, who was both artistically productive and psychologically interested, down to the modern æsthetics, such as Oscar Wilde, there is a long series of facts which prove the part played by consciousness in artistic and especially in poetical creation, which I traced in its main stages in my incest book, though I then put the unconscious too much in the foreground. The part played by the latter is undeniable; but ever since the time of the Greek poets it has been so much emphasized, especially by the productive artist, that it was
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necessary to give its due to the consciousness or, as I prefer to say, to the conscious artistic will. The question, too, of the greater or lesser part played by the unconscious or conscious cannot be taken as a problem only of the individual artist, though there are certainly types in which one or the other predominates. How could it be possible otherwise that, in spite of all individual differences, two poets like Goethe and Schiller, subject to the same contemporary ideology, could express such contrary views on this question? We can understand, too, that the difference of ideologies would account for the fact that the æsthetic philosopher, who is somewhat akin to the scientist, would as a rule agree with the poet here, but—from Aristotle to Baumgarten—regards the poetic art as teachable and learnable. But how can we understand that the singer of the Homeric poems calls to the Muse for inspiration and then produces a masterpiece of political history, in the logical development of which his memory failed him far less than it did in his incidental digressions—which also were perhaps intentional?
This example, which is possibly too far away from our theme, is meant to show that the invocation of the Muse, the demand by the poet himself for unconscious inspiration, is perhaps not infrequently a pretext—a poetic licence even—for a more unrestrained expression of himself. If he is inspired by poetic frenzy, he is less responsible for what he says; and, remembering our previous remarks about Shakspere, it seems to me not improbable that the inspired poet portrayed himself in the Danish prince, so that he might with impunity utter high treason. It does not seem to me improbable, for example, that the participation of Hamlet in his entrapping play might be explained from the fact that powerful opponents of Elizabeth did really use the poet as a means to attack her and stir her conscience. In this case we should have a reflection, in Hamlet's editing of the "play," of the part which important friends of the poet actually had in his work. Anyhow the invocation of the Muse, which we have seen to be the effect of the guilt-feeling, and the emphasis by the poet himself on the
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unconscious impulse to create must not blind us to the part played by the conscious in creation; the reference of creation to the unconscious, if nothing else, is a conscious act. If, then, for example, Goethe and Schiller were different artist-types, it might well be that for that very reason the one worked more unconsciously than the other, but also that one exaggerated the part played by the conscious, and the other that played by the unconscious, in his own observation of himself. The over-valuation of the unconscious would then be explained by a more or less strong feeling of guilt, such as is felt by every productive type; and the over-valuation of the conscious would be due to a desire to magnify and exalt oneself—as the other is due to the already mentioned tendency to minimize.
From these observations we arrive at a similar view of the value of artistic psychology as we did previously in the case of asthetic as a science. We came to regard aesthetic as a scientific ideology which changes with the contemporary art-ideology so that it justifies, positively or negatively, the dominant art-ideology, as we explained in the illustrative instance of the nature-imitation. Similarly the psychology of the artist that is fashionable at the moment, though naturally more individually conditioned, represents an ideological justification of the creative artist. In our account, which penetrates to the roots, in cultural history and in individual psychology, of the creative feeling of guilt, there was no room for an asthetic which laid down laws for art, nor for an artist's psychology in the ordinary sense, which would always have to resort to values, whether like Lombroso's mania theory or the psychoanalytical justification of creative lordliness in the unconscious. We tried to understand all these phenomena, included under the label of "art," in their psychical and historical genesis, as the expression of the individual's impulse to create, and to understand this in turn from the ineradicable belief of man in immortality. This impulse, however, produces both the work and the artist, and ultimately the ideologies necessary for artistic creation and tor the artist's psychology—which are neither true nor false
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that is, have no eternal validity—but change with the development of collective and individual ideas and thus fulfil their real purpose, their extension to infinity.
But the more conscious the creative process becomes in the artist, the more the creative tendency is imperceptibly and unnoticed being pushed back from the work to the artist himself from whom it originated. Only, primitively this self-creative tendency showed itself, as we saw, corporeally in body-ornament, whereas in the modern artist it ends with the psychical will- to-experience, his own art-ideology in full. This is, of course, impossible and brings the artist into all the conflicts—which we may describe as neurotic, but which are not any the more intelligible for being so called. For these difficulties of the creative type show also that his true tendency is always towards actual life; as is shown also in the so-called realism or verism of modern art. This, therefore, discloses itself as the counterpart to the tendency, which has been mentioned earlier, to mould life in accordance with an artistic ideology, since the idea is now that art is to be made wholly true to life. But in this wise the boundaries between art and life are obliterated; each is to replace the other, whereas formerly each complemented the other. In both spheres the movement from art to life is clear; but the creative men of our time are not capable of going the whole way and accepting the development of their personality as the truly creative problem. What hinders them is the same individual feeling of guilt which in earlier times was able, owing to the counter-force of religious submissiveness, to work itself out creatively, but nowadays limits both complete artistic creation and complete personality-development.
For artistic creation has, in the course of its development, changed from a means for the furtherance of the culture of the community into a means for the construction of personality. But the more successful this is, the greater is the urge of this personality away from art towards life, which yet cannot be fully grasped. Our Western art has thus lost its old function in proportion as this movement (beginning perhaps with the
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Renaissance) from the collective to the individual increased. But similarly it has had to give up its new function as soon as its purpose of personality-development was attained. This historical process, which we can trace from the Renaissance through the "Sturm und Drang" into Romanticism, has become an individual process which runs its course in the modern artist's life. The productive individual of today tackles artistic production under the influence, which still operates, of the original art-ideology, which promised immortality to the individual in the form of success and fame, but he does not possess, socially or spiritually, the attitude inherent in that old ideology. In this sense the "art for art's sake" movement was justified at least psychologically, for art had lost its old collective function and had not yet discovered the new one of personality development.
Now, however, this last function of art having worked itself out as far as is psychologically possible, the problem of the individual is to put his creative force directly into the service of this formation of personality, without the assistance of art. The more an individual is driven towards real life, the less will traditional art-forms help him—indeed, they have for the most part already been shattered individualistically. Especially in poetry, which of course represents in general this conscious level of artistic creation, this permeation by the personal psychology of the poet and the psychological ideology of our age is almost completed. Even the last element of art which poetry retains, language, is becoming more and more an echo of realistic talk or a psychological expression of intellectual thought, instead of being a creative expression of the spiritual. But the reality which modern art seeks to reproduce cannot be represented in language, and other traditional forms are suited only to the creative form of the spiritual and not to a realistic expression of the actual. That is why the film and talking film have become the most popular art, because this art reproduces the real faithfully, and the more so, the more it progresses.
I would not deny, however, that there are still great artists
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in all spheres of artistic activity, who have succeeded either in preserving the old art tradition and ideology a while longer into our times or have breathed a new spirit into old forms. But in both cases I feel that the modern artist has to buy his success too dearly, since he feels either like a believer among unbelievers or like the founder of a new religion who is persecuted and scorned by the members of the old religion. This comparison with religious conflicts comes naturally to us; for just as there is a continuous increase in the number of the irreligious and at the same time an enhanced need for substitutes for the old belief in the gods, so the art-manias of modern society, with their over-valuing of the artist, indicate a decline of real artistic vigour, which is only speciously covered over by the last flicker of a snobbish enthusiasm. It is certain that artists nowadays do not create for the people, but for a few exclusive groups, particularly of intellectuals who feel themselves artists.
With an increasing individualization art-forms also must become more individual so that they suit the ideology of a few small groups, and no attempt to exalt artists into national heroes can conceal the fact that there are ever fewer artists of really national importance and still fewer of international.
On the other hand, this individualization of art-forms and art-creation leads not only to the break-up of the collective function of art, but to its democratization, which is the direct opposite of the aristocratic religion of genius that constituted the last effective art-ideology. From the Renaissance on, a man felt himself driven to, but also chosen for, artistic expression; nowadays, with individualism so common, art is looked upon as a means to develop personality. Every strong individuality feels nowadays that a potential artist lies somewhere within him, which is prevented from growth and expression only by the external decay of a materialistic and mechanistic environ- ment. And though it is true that a strong personality is necessary for the creative artist, it is a fatal confusion to assume that every strong personality must express itself artistically if it is to develop. Furthermore, as we have seen, artistic creativity
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does not, after a point, favour the personality, but impedes it, since it forces on the artist a professional ideology which more and more penetrates the human self and finally absorbs it.
It is certainly not, however, merely the outward deprivation (that is, the pressure of a mechanical age) that obstructs the artistic development of modern individuals, but the strong impulse towards life which goes hand in hand with personality-development and makes the creative will of the individual feel that artistic creation is an unsatisfactory substitute for real life,. In other words, the conflict between life and creation, the basic problem of all productive work, has nowadays become a social instead of a psychic conflict. A harmonious reconciliation of an art-ideology with an ideology of practical life is more and more difficult as life becomes more technical and the members of a community become separate individuals. The two masters whom the artist has to serve at the same time, a self-confident productivity and a life of sacrifice, are less and less reconcilable, so that art and life are both dissatisfying, or, rather, the individual attains neither, because he is not satisfied with one and cannot attain both. This is characteristic of the so-called neurotic type, in which I had long ago seen an "artiste manqué" rather than an undeveloped normal type. The neurotic is himself a symptom of the modern conflict between the individual and society, a conflict which might in other ages have been productively surmounted in artistic creation. Nowadays the old art-ideology is no longer, and the new personality-idea not yet, strong enough to admit of either solution for the individual impulse to create. Everyone suffers—individual, community, and, not least, art as an ideological expression of their interrelation.
Everything seems to drive us to the conclusion that we are at one of those crises in human history in which once again we must sacrifice one thing if we want the full enjoyment of another. If we look back at the modern artist-type as we know it, even in biographical form, since Renaissance days, there can
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be no doubt that the great works of art were bought at the cost of ordinary living. Whatever our attitude towards this fact and interpretation of this fact, it is at least certain that the modern individualist must give up this kind of artistic creation if he is to live as vigorously as is apparently necessary. Not only are the two things incompatible, in terms of soul and of energy, but there seems to be a spiritual law whereby nothing can be wholly won or enjoyed without something being given up or sacrificed for it. From the fabulous ring of Polycrates, who tried to buy his good fortune from heaven, down to the neurotic feeling of guilt, with its apparent self-punishment, we see this compensatory principle operating in the relation of individual to society. The individual, it seems, cannot permanently endure one sort of condition—even if it be happiness—because he immediately loses a part of the full humanity which is needed for his real personality. Where happiness and misery are concerned the individual is clearly controlling his own destiny by meeting good and ill fortune half-way ere it can surprise him.
If there are really these two incommensurable magnitudes, such as supreme art and full experience seem to be, the conflict can only end with the surrender of the one to the other. But as long as this involves a feeling of sacrifice, there is no real solution, rather an intensification of the conflict, for the responsibility is always laid on an external deprivation which is to be fought against. Only a full renunciation, such as a few great artists have achieved despite their natural inclinations, can overcome this feeling of sacrifice so that surrender means, not an imposed necessity, but a freely chosen decision. This turning-point in the life of the individual artist has also become a secular crisis of our age, in which we have to see that the surrender of traditional forms no longer means a loss to us, but a liberation of creative force from the chains of old ideologies. Now, our previous conclusions show that this creative impulse can be set free from artistic ideologies, because it is not irrevocably bound
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thereto as an art-ideology is obliged to assume. We have seen that the impulse was originally directed towards the body and only gradually was objectified in collective art-forms. On the other hand we see modern individuals, particularly the neurotic, striving once more to direct this creative instinct towards the ego in order to make it more useful and efficient for life. The fact that the neurotic at present fails in face of his problem cannot diminish his pioneer achievement—if he seeks his salvation in artistic création instead of in the development of his own personality, it is because he is still in the toils of old art-ideologies. The many forms of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis included, cannot free him from the dilemma, since they either try to restore him to the normal or force him to a false artistry instead of allowing to develop a true form of himself.
The new type of humanity will only become possible when we have passed beyond this psychotherapeutic transitional stage, and must grow out of those artists themselves who have achieved a renunciant attitude towards artistic production. A man with creative power who can give up artistic expression in favour of the formation of personality—since he can no longer use art as an expression of an already developed personality—will remould the self-creative type and will be able to put his creative impulse directly in the service of his own personality. In him the wheel will have turned full circle, from primitive art, which sought to raise the physical ego out of nature, to the voluntaristic art of life, which can accept the psychical ego as a part of the universe. But the condition of this is the conquest of the fear of life, for that fear has led to the substitution of artistic production for life, and to the eternalization of the all-too-mortal ego in a work of art. For the artistic individual has lived in art-creation instead of actual life, letting his work live or die on its own account, and has never wholly surrendered himself to life. In place of his own self the artist puts his objectified ego into his work, but though he does not save his subjective mortal ego from death, he yet withdraws himself from real
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life. And the creative type who can renounce this protection by art and can devote his whole creative force to life and the formation of life will be the first representative of the new human type, and in return for this renunciation will enjoy, in personality-creation and expression, a greater happiness.
This warning having been duly issued, the "fundamental duality" [[WHERE does this phrase actually appear?!!]] of individual vs. collective becomes quite the tentpole for Rank as he unspools his theory.
Among myriad exegetical principles which have come and gone since Rank's time, is the Political reading of artworks not among the most apt to yield just such specious products?
Human variability can be wide and perplexing, usually it is not so hard to catch even the true eccentric exhibiting baseline human behaviors if one knows where and how to look for them.
Passive reception is, then, reception which is not transformative, out of which nothing is generated. Passive reception of artworks may of course be reinforcing of identity in any number of familiar ways (i.e. to create association, materially or otherwise, with a given group of people), but it must be said that even this is by no means a given; more likely it too must be anticipated, if probably not in such terms as I am using here, and probably not consciously.
Looking to Current Events for analogies, the influence of violent depictions in movies and video games can only be a parsimonious explanation for real violence when its effects on viewers are established to be uniform and predictable. Otherwise, what I am calling a "passive" recipient is not (or is negligibly) affected; among "active" recipients, whose beliefs, personalities, and/or actual behaviors are meaningfully altered, some will in fact be appalled by all this violence and thus "altered" (further) away from it; what remains is a mere subset of a subset, the active recipients who ultimately affirm violence in thought and/or behavior on direct account of their having seen it portrayed. If we are not in too stingy a mood vis-a-vis the status of Entertainment in the realm of Art, it could be argued that what I am advocating for under the label of "active" reception has a proven downside which outweighs any known upside. Of course this is the case only if we absolve the content creators of any responsibility, and also if we insist against the evidence that it has one uniform effect on all viewers.
This would seem to have, should we wish to go there, an evolutionary basis in both basic self-preservation and in reproduction+nurturance; but even if it doesn't, the point seems to me unavoidable. For this cohort of moderate self-stylers, more restless than the couch potato but less motivated than the entrepreneur, generative reception is well-calibrated.
The difference in this respect between the heroic phase of romanticism and our own decadent, post-romantic milieu is that, at least in hindsight, formerly the elevation of the artist seems to have been of an affirmative nature, e.g. as a national hero or a singular genius; whereas today it is, I would say, much more often defined negatively.
"the creative process, which presents itself as an essential factor between the ideology of the art, the style, and the creative personality, the artist." This is difficult to parse. Is this to say that "the creative process" is the common denominator? Or that it is the go-between which "presents itself as an essential factor" in (that is, wildly complicates and probably confounds) any attempt to draw connections among "the art, the style, and the creative personality, the artist"? The implications of these two readings point in opposite directions. As common denominator, "the creative process" explains it all, and the condition of "knowing almost nothing of this process" seems like it must be remediable given the sheer quantity of material that is available for study in this regard. Conversely, as go-between, it becomes a dynamic mediating force upon all of these artifacts, and whether its own operations are totally grasped or remain totally mysterious is irrelevant considering that the dynamic quality of these processes limits their commensurability even as they do, literally, come from the same place.
Much reception is unseemly to look at and also not exactly/totally passive, e.g. the consolidation of identity by way of purely social association. This being necessarily an ephemeral concept to all but the individual concerned, it may thus look "passive" when it really is not; or, perhaps it is impossible to be fully "passive" vis-a-vis The Work Itself when the work is the proverbial Rock Concert, not even if your attention is divided. (I wouldn't know). The most fully passive art consumers I (think I) have ever laid eyes and ears on have been at gallery openings, which are their own curious study in self-contradiction and pretense. My secondhand image of the Rock Concert involves far more attention paid by the "audience" to the "artwork" than do my firsthand gallery observations. In any case, there seems to be an incredible amount of self-styling being grasped at in both cases. The overall thrust of this self-styling, ethically and materially, seems to me a far stronger basis for outside judgment than does the supposed ethical or narrative or expressive content of the stimulus itself according to this or that reductionist interpretation. Disentangling the web of self-styling is not necessarily easy, but disentangling the web of artistic creation, expression, and meaning is a fool's errand.