Contradictions in Lotze.
The principle of convenience may be excellent as applied to the approximative grouping of botanical or zoological classifications, but it has no place in philosophy; and as Lotze, in common with Schasler and other æstheticians, conformed to Lessing's principle of the constancy, limits and peculiar nature of each art, and therefore held that the concepts of the individual arts were speculative and not empirical concepts, he could not evade the duty of fixing the mutual relations of these concepts, arranging them in series, subordinating and co-ordinating them, and arriving at each of them either deductively or dialectically. He ought, in order to get definitely rid of these barren attempts at classification and at discovering the supreme art, to have criticized and dissolved Lessing's principle itself: to keep the principle and deny the need for a classification, as Lotze did, was obviously inconsistent. But not a single æsthetician has ever re-examined or investigated the scientific foundation of the distinctions enunciated by Lessing in his fluent and elegant prose; no one has probed to the bottom the truth which was illumined by Aristotle in a single lightning-flash, when he refused to allow an extrinsic difference, that of metre, as the real distinction between prose and poetry:[30] no one, that is to say, save perhaps Schleiermacher, who at least called attention to the difficulties of the current doctrine.
Doubts in Schleiermacher.
He proposed to start from the general concept of art and prove by deduction the necessity of all its forms; and after finding two sides to artistic activity, the objective consciousness (gegenständliche) and the immediate consciousness (unmittelbare), and observing that art stands wholly neither in the one nor in the other and that the immediate consciousness or representation (Vorstellung) gives rise to mimicry and music, while the objective consciousness or image (Bild) gives rise to the figurative arts, he then, proceeding to analyse a painting, found the two forms of consciousness to be in this case inseparable, and remarks: "Here we arrive at the precise opposite: searching for distinction, we find unity." Nor did the traditional division of the arts into simultaneous and successive seem to him very solid, for "when looked at attentively, it evaporates entirely"; in architecture or gardening, contemplation is successive, while in the arts labelled as successive, such as poetry, the chief thing is coexistence and grouping: "from whichever side we look at it, the difference is but secondary and the antithesis between the two orders of art merely means that every contemplation, like every act of production, is always successive, but, in thinking out the relation of the two sides in a work of art, both seem indispensable: coexistence (Zugleichsein) and successive existence (das Successivsein)." In another passage he observes: "The reality of art as external appearance is conditioned by the mode, depending on our physical and corporeal organism, in which the internal is externalised: movements, forms, words.... That which is common to all arts is not the external, which is rather the element of diversification." When these observations are compared with the sharp distinction he himself drew between art and technique, it would be easy to deduce that he held the partitions of the arts and the concepts of the particular arts to be devoid of æsthetic value. But Schleiermacher does not draw this logical inference, he wavers and hesitates: he recognizes the inseparability of the subjective and objective, musical and figurative, elements in poetry, yet he struggles to discover the definitions and limits of the individual arts; sometimes he dreams of a union of the various arts from which a complete art would spring; and when composing the syllabus of his lectures on Æsthetic, he arranged the arts into arts of accompaniment (mimicry and music), figurative arts (architecture, gardening, painting, sculpture) and poetry.[31] Nebulous, vague, contradictory as this may be, Schleiermacher had the acumen to distrust the soundness of Lessing's theory and to inquire by what right particular arts are singled out from art in general.
[1] See above, pp. [113]-[115].
[2] D. Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, 1749; Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 1751; Essai sur la peinture, 1765.
[3] M. Mendelssohn, Briefe über Empfind., 1755; Betrachtungen, cit., 1757.
[4] J. Chr. Wolff, Psychol. empirica, §§ 272-312; Meier, Anfangsgründe, §§ 513-528, 708-735; Betrachtungen, § 126.
[5] Letter to Lodovico Cardi da Cigoli, June 26, 1612.