34. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 738-754

Self-Consciousness: The Divided Self (Friedrich Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard)

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Some heavy reading today. 


Friedrich Schlegel: The Ironic Consciousness 


"Self-consciousness" implies a duality: something that knows and something called a "self." We're aware that we carry on dialogues with ourselves almost continuously. Who hasn't tried to talk the brain into shutting up so you can go back to sleep, or tried to persuade it to quit worrying about something that you can't deal with at that particular moment? In these selections from The Philosophy of Language (1829) and Lyceum of the Fine Arts (1797) Schlegel acknowledges this "intrinsic dualism," which is "so deeply ... rooted in our consciousness, that even when we are, or at least think ourselves alone, we still think as two, and are constrained as it were to recognise our inmost profoundest being as essentially dramatic." The religious portray aspects of this dialogue as that of "the soul with God. And in all religions, what properly is true prayer but a kind of dialogue, a confidential opening of the heart to the universal Father, or a filial solicitation of His benevolence?" 


But approaching this "colloquy with self" or "internal dialogue" from the secular point of view, Schlegel finds it characterized by irony: "I am alluding to the characteristic distinction of the discourses and teaching of Socrates -- that peculiar irony, such as it is found in the Platonic dialogues." It is "a consciousness which, while it clearly perceives the secret contradictions which beset the mind, even in its most earnest pursuit of the highest aim of life, has attained nevertheless to perfect harmony with itself." 


The word "irony," he notes, "is often ... taken ... to designate nothing more than a mere playful mockery." But Schlegel uses it in what he claims is "its original Socratic sense" to mean the "amazement of the thinking spirit at itself, which so often dissolves in a light, gentle laugh." In the Socratic dialogue, "each answer calls forth a new question, and the eddying stream of speech and counter-speech, or rather, of thought and counter-thought, moves lively onwards." 

Socratic irony makes everything at once a joke and a serious matter, at once ingenuously open and deeply dissembled. It arise from a union of the art of life with the spirit of knowledge, from the encounter of a perfected philosophy of nature with a perfected philosophy of art. It comprises and evokes a sense of insoluble opposition between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the simultaneous necessity of total communication.

Through the ironic consciousness "one becomes superior to oneself; and yet it is also ... an unconditional necessity."   


G.W.F. Hegel: The Contrite Consciousness 


Heavy weather in this selection from The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), so let's start with the editors' introduction: 

The very term "self-consciousness" ... implies an inner division between the self that is conscious and the self of which it is conscious.... Hegel interprets the intrinsic duality of self-consciousness as conflict between a "changing" or individual aspect of the self and a "changeless" or universal aspect. These parts pursue and undermine each other and produce a "negative" state of self-alienation; yet they are really parts of one undivided soul, and their war comes to an end when consciousness attains the recognition of its own unity in the synthesis of Spirit.

Got that? Okay, let's wade in. 


"The Contrite Consciousness is this awareness of the Self as the Divided Nature, wherein is only conflict." I wanted to make sure that I knew what "contrite" meant (regretful, penitent), but that doesn't help a lot. It suggests that consciousness itself feels regret for its division into two selves -- the changing and the changeless -- because it wants to be unified. "And accordingly it regards one of them, viz., the simple, the Changeless Consciousness, as the True Self, and calls itself the False Self." The Contrite Consciousness, then, judges itself to be "fickle," and wants to be true: It "knows the relation of the changeless to the fickle as a relation of truth to falsehood." But to eliminate the falseness, the fickleness, the changefulness, would be self-annihilation. Hence the feeling of contrition: "In aspiration it strives hence towards the Changeless. But this aspiration is itself the Contrite Consciousness" -- aspiring and regretting are integral to its nature, to its individuality. 

But one thing the Contrite Consciousness thus learns, namely that individuality is made manifest in the Changeless, and that the Changeless is made manifest in individuality. It finds that in general individuality belongs to the changeless true Self, and that in fact its own individuality also belongs thereto. For the outcome of this process is precisely the unity of this twofold consciousness. 

Change cannot exist without changelessness, and vice versa, so "the Contrite Consciousness discovers itself to be the individual who dwells in the Changeless." And by this realization it "becomes aware that its individuality is reconciled with the Universal." 


Or something like that. 


Karl Marx: Alienation


Hegel almost makes Marx seem crystal-clear. Almost. This excerpt from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 still strikes a chord for everyone who has ever found himself or herself "working for the weekend." That Marx had the factory worker in mind doesn't limit its applicability to the office worker, the middle manager, the white-collar wage slave, or anyone else who has ever discovered "the fact that labour is external to the worker," that it consists of a good deal of self-denial, that he "does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind." In essence, "the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another." And because "It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self." 


Such a worker finds his self only in animal pleasures: "eating, drinking, procreating, etc." These are the things in which he is free to act. "Man is a species being ... because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being." All that is outside the human, i.e., nature, is inorganic to him. But nature is also that "with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die." Therefore, labor which estranges man from himself and from nature "estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life." For "free, conscious activity is man's species character." 

The animal is immediately identical with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity.... Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity.... Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence. 

The true function of labor, of work, is to produce, to express, to allow man to contemplate "himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real objectivity as a member of of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from him. Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity, to a means, estranged labour makes man's species life a means to his physical existence." And when man is estranged from his work, the result is "the estrangement of man from man." 




Søren Kierkegaard: Indirect Communication

Søren Kierkegaard, c. 1840

In these selections from Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859), Kierkegaard proclaims the necessity of subjectivity:

While objective thought translates everything into results, and helps all mankind to cheat, by copying these off and reciting them by rote, subjective thought puts everything in process, and omits the result.

Human beings are "constantly in process of coming to be," and thus the subjective view is truer than the objective. When two people communicate, and the one acknowledges agreement with what the other has said, a "double reflection" has taken place "in the process of communication." The speaker has reflected his subjective perception (itself a reflection) in the consciousness of the other. "Wherever the subjective is of importance in knowledge, and where appropriation thus constitutes the crux of the matter, the process of communication is a work of art, and doubly reflected." 


Kierkegaard's position is that of the "negative" thinker: 

Negative thinkers ... always have one advantage, in that they have something positive, being aware of the negative element in existence; the positive have nothing at all, since they are deceived. Precisely because the negative is present in existence, and present everywhere (for existence is a constant process of becoming), it is necessary to become aware of its presence continuously, as the only safeguard against it. In relying upon a positive security the subject is merely deceived. 

"The infinite and eternal is the only certainty," Kierkegaard asserts, but this assertion contains a "tremendous contradiction, that the eternal becomes, that it comes into being." As infinite and eternal, it cannot be, it must forever become. And consequently, definite statements about existence are false by nature: "an elusive form of communication is the only adequate one; because a direct form of communication is based upon the security of social continuity, while the elusiveness of existence isolates me whenever I apprehend it." 


Like Schlegel, Kierkegaard is aware of the ironic consciousness: "The irony of Socrates makes use ... of a form of speech which sounds in the first instance like the speech of a madman." Socrates constantly challenges the conventional, the commonsense, which is the habit of the mad. The "genuine subjective thinker ... is conscious of the negativity of the infinite in existence, and he constantly keeps the wound of the negative open, which in the bodily realm is sometimes the condition for a cure.... He is therefore never a teacher but a learner; and since he is always just as negative as he is positive, he is always striving." 

An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming; the actual existing subjective thinker constantly reproduces this existential situation in his thoughts, and translates all his thinking into terms of process.... The incessant becoming generates the uncertainty of the earthly life, where everything is uncertain.

So the subjective thinker "is as sensitive to the comic as to the pathetic.... The pathos which is not secured by the presence of the comic is illusion; the comic spirit that is not made secure by the presence of pathos is immature." This need to balance the comic and the pathetic in one's thought is a product of the uncertainty of existence. "The comic expression for worship is therefore just as reverent, religiously, as its pathetic expression." 


This relation between the comic and the pathetic view of existence is expressed by one's point of view toward God, or the cosmos, or as Kierkegaard says there, "the Idea." 

When viewed from a direction looking toward the Idea, the apprehension of the discrepancy [between the individual and the eternal] is pathos; when viewed with the Idea behind one, the apprehension is comic. When the subjective existing thinker turns his face toward the Idea, his apprehension of the discrepancy is pathetic; when he turns his back to the Idea and lets this through a light from behind over the same discrepancy, the apprehension is in terms of the comic. 

To view existence from the temporal point of view is to experience a sense of the great failure of human accomplishment. To view it from the point of view of eternity, is to recognize the comic in it. 


Communication must be indirect and dialectic because life is a process, but even Socrates, whose method was dialectic, fell into the inconsistency of speaking at length to explain to his hearers some facts that he thought necessary for the discussion. Kierkegaard rejects this effort at accommodation: "To me it seems better to reach a true mutual understanding in inwardness separately, though this might take place slowly." Kierkegaard advocates "the indirect method, which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraw." 


He advocates this method, too, for promoting Christianity, admitting that a little deception is sometimes necessary for promoting the truth. He used it himself, he says, in his religious polemics, disguising himself under pseudonyms (and denying that he had done so). 


A little end note: I'm not satisfied at all with these notes. All of these excerpts are dense and challenging. I just hope I've understood some of the key points and touched on some of the essentials.  

16. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 329-349

Realism: Socialist Realism (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky)

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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Social Reality as Class Struggle

The Communist Manifesto as a treatise on aesthetics? Not exactly, but its influence on all aspects of modern thought shouldn't be underestimated, and the Marxist emphasis on the economic causes of all social change translates directly into art as a social product, as Trotsky will show us. And if "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," then class struggles, as defined by Marx and Engels, must have determined the shape of art. Moreover, plenty of non-Marxist artists directed their art and their aesthetic credos against members of Marx's dominant economic class, the bourgeoisie, sharing in the Manifesto's bill of particulars: The bourgeoisie

Karl Marx in 1861

has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasms, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Friedrich Engels, c. 1857

Marx and Engels didn't forget to include the artist among the victims of the bourgeoisie: "It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid laborers." And the effect of the bourgeoisie's "constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production," which it must do in order to exits, is that "All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Hence, realism.

The bourgeoisie thus has become what some artists claimed to strive to become: like the god of creation. "In a word, it creates a world after its own image."

There is an implicit appeal in the Manifesto for artists to recognize themselves as part of the proletariat, whose work "has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him." Any artist who depended on wealthy patronage or faced an uncomprehending audience could respond to that. Artists were no strangers to the class struggle.


Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Economic Sources of Consciousness

The German Ideology, written two years before The Communist Manifesto, didn't see print until 1932, but it speaks more directly to some of the issues of intellectual concern to artists. Marx and Engels were working toward defining their particular brand of materialism.

We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. 

Men make ideas, ideas don't make men, to greatly oversimplify. Or as Marx and Engels put it, "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." In "civil society," ideas are formed "from material practice," and idealism is "humbug." The "driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy, and all other types of theory" is revolution. There are no absolutes.

This sum of productive forces, forms of capital, and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and "the unique." 

We are, in essence, how we work, but traditional historians have ignored this fact. "For instance, if an epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely 'political' or 'religious' motives, although 'religion' and 'politics" are only forms of its true motives, the historian accepts this opinion." These historians have made ideas into "the sole determining, active force." In India and Egypt, it was the division of labor that created the caste system, but historians get it backward, believing "that the caste system is the power which has produced this crude social form." The French and English, they suggest, make politics "the driving force of history," while "the Germans move in the realm of 'pure spirit' and make religious illusion" the primary force.

The materialist view of history explains "this theoretical talk from the actual existing conditions." And they find it significant that "For the mass of men, i.e., the proletariat, these theoretical notions do not exist, and hence do not require to be dissolved, and if this mass ever had any theoretical notions, e.g., religion, etc., these have now long been dissolved by circumstances."


Leon Trotsky: The Limitations of Formalism

Leon Trotsky in 1929

In these excerpts from Literature and Revolution (1924), Trotsky is specifically focusing on Formalism, a critical movement in Russia that focused on the scientific study of poetry. But his discussion broadens out into a more general approach to the arts under socialism, asserting that "from the point of view of an objective historical process, art is always a social servant and historically utilitarian."

"Art for art's sake" is necessarily, in the Marxist point of view, a bourgeois concept. Instead, Trotsky would raise such questions as "to what order of feelings does a given artistic work correspond in all its peculiarities? What are the social conditions of these thoughts and feelings? What place do they occupy in the historic development of a society and a class?" The larger point Trotsky makes is "that of the subsidiary rôle which art plays in the social process."

Trotsky insists that the Marxist concept of art "does not at all mean a desire to dominate art by means of decrees and orders." (One reason, among many, why he didn't get along with Stalin.) And that "It is not true that we regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and it is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital!" But having given an inch, he then takes a mile: "Of course the new art cannot but place the struggle of the proletariat in the center of its attention." He assures us that "Personal lyrics of the very smallest scope have an absolute right to exist within the new art," but he always has the function of the personal lyric as the end in sight: "the new man cannot be formed without a new lyric poetry." And his assurance that "No one is going to prescribe themes to the poet or intends to prescribe them" sounds a little hollow in hindsight.

Turning his attention to the Formalists, Trotsky faults it for its pretense at objectivity, and even suggests an analogy to the "infinite monkey theorem" -- that a monkey hitting typewriter keys at random would eventually, given infinity in which to do so, type the plays of Shakespeare.

If one is to regard the process of poetic creation only as a combination of sounds or words, and to seek along these lines the solution of all the problems of poetry, then the only perfect formula of "poetics" will be this: Arm yourself with a dictionary and create by means of algebraic combinations and permutations of words, all the poetic works of the world which have been created and which have not yet been created.... All that one needs is infinity in time, called eternity.

Clearly an impossibility, Trotsky says, so "the fundamental source of poetic words will remain, as before, the preconceived artistic idea understood in the broadest sense, as an accurate thought and as a clearly expressed personal or social feeling and as a vague mood."

Victor Shklovsky in the 1920s

Trotsky's chief target among the Formalists is the Russian critic Victor Shklovsky, whose "arguments against the materialist conception of art" he takes apart one by one. Shklovsky observed that the universality of certain themes in world literature seemed to contradict the materialist theory that tied art to a particular "environment and the relations of production." Trotsky retorted, "The fact that different peoples and different classes of the same people make use of the same themes, merely shows how limited the human imagination is, and how man tries to maintain an economy of energy in every kind of creation, even the artistic." He tests Shklovsky's objection by applying it to technology, observing the universality of the principle of the wheel and the axle. Both the peasant's wagon and the automobile are variations on "the same 'theme,' namely, four wheels on two axles. Yet every time a peasant's horse shies in terror before the blinding lights of an automobile on the Russian road at night, a conflict of two cultures is reflected in the episode." Art is limited by the fact that "it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society."

Trotsky admits "that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics." Marxism itself can't be used to judge the success of a work of art. "But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why." Art, in short, is "a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment."

To those who insist on the autonomy or the timelessness of art, Trotsky has nothing but scorn: "The effort to set art free from life, to declare it a craft self-sufficient unto itself, devitalizes and kills art. The very need of such an operation is an unmistakable symptom of intellectual decline." All art, like politics, religion, law and ethics, is a function of the social environment. The Formalists, Trotsky charges "show a fast ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that 'In the beginning was the Word.' But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow." As for Symbolism, it was "the intelligentsia's escape from reality, its way of constructing another world, its artistic bringing up in self-sufficient day-dreaming, contemplation and passivity."

Trotsky is certain that "the new art will be realistic.... Our age cannot have a shy and portable mysticism.... Our age wields an axe." (A chilling prophesy of the instrument used in Trotsky's murder.)