Walter Benjamin

A brief addendum on architecture and habituation

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Image: Claude Shannon setting
“Theseus” into its rat maze.

Just to clarify, in case my recent post on Bourdieu and de Certeau was misleading, I do not intend to dismiss the role of habituation in art and architecture wholesale:

The human need for shelter is permanent. Architecture has never had fallow periods. Its history is longer than that of any other art, and its effect ought to be recognized in any attempt to account for the relationship of the masses to the work of art. Buildings are received in a twofold manner: by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely and optically. Such reception cannot be understood in terms of the concentrated attention of a traveler before a famous building. On the tactile side, there is no counterpart to what contemplation is on the optical side. Tactile reception comes about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines even the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation. Under certain circumstances, this form of reception shaped by architecture acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means — that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually — taking their cue from tactile reception — through habit.

Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age
of its technological reproducibility” (1935)[1]

There is probably more to this, as well. Frampton’s insistence upon the tactile, tectonic dimension of architecture as opposed to the visual, scenographic qualities celebrated by postmodern architects, likely stems from a similar reasoning.

Notes

[1]  Translated by Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. (Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA: 2003). Pg. 120.

Walter Benjamin reads Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich (1928)

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From The Arcades Project, pg. 40:

Old name for department stores: docks à bon marché — that is, “discount docks.” <Sigfried> Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich <Leipzig and Berlin, 1928>, p. 31.

Evolution of the department store from the shop that was housed in arcades. Principle of the department store: “The floors form a single space. They can be taken in, so to speak, ‘at a glance’.” Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, p. 34.

Giedion shows (in Bauen in Frankreich, p. 35) how the axiom, “Welcome the crowd and keep it seduced” (Science et l’industrie, 143 [1925], p. 6), leads to corrupt architectural practices in the construction of the department store Au Printemps (1881-1889). Function of commodity capital!

Cover to Giedion's Bauen in Frankreich (1928)

Cover to Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich (1928)

Pg. 153.

The first act of Offenbach’s Vie parisienne takes place in a railroad station. “The industrial movement seems to run in the blood of this generation — to such an extent that, for example, Flachat has built his house on a plot. of land where, on either side, trains are always whistling by.” Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich (Leipzig and Berlin <1928>), p. 13. Eugène Flachat (1802-1873), builder of rail-roads, designer.

On the Galerie d’Orléans in the Palais-Royal (1829-1831): “Even Fontaine, one of’ the originators of the Empire style, is converted in later years to the new material. In 1835-1836, moreover, he replaced the wooden flooring of the Galerie des Batailes in Versailles with an iron assembly. These galleries, like those in the Palais-Royal, were subsequently perfected in Italy. For us, they are a point of departure for new architectural problems: train stations, and the like.” Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, p. 21. Continue reading →

Walter Benjamin reads Emil Kaufmann, From Ledoux to Le Corbusier (1933)

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The whole reason I started going back, for the first time in years really, to reading sections of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, was because I learned there is no English-language translation of Emil Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (1933). Besides the first section of Histories of the Immediate Present by Anthony Vidler, also a good read, it’s extremely hard to find even extended quotations from the book rendered into English. So I’ll start off by posting these, as they’re a bit harder to come by than most.

From The Arcades Project, pg. 143:

Kaufmann places at the head of his chapter entitled ‘Architectural Autonomy’ an epigraph from Le Contrat social: “a form…in which each is united with all, yet obeys only himself and remains as free as before. — Such is the fundamental problem that the social contract solves (p. 42).” In this chapter (p. 43): “[Ledoux] justifies the separation of the buildings in the second project for Chaux with the words: ‘Return to principle…Consult nature; man is everywhere isolated’ (Architecture, p. 70). The feudal principle of prerevolutionary society…can have no further validity now…The autonomously grounded form of every object makes all striving after theatrical effect appear senseless…At a stroke, it would seem,…the Baroque art of the prospect disappears from sight.’” E. Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (Vienna and Leipzig, 1933), p. 43.

“The renunciation of the picturesque has its architectural equivalent in the refusal of all prospect-art. A highly significant symptom is the sudden diffusion of the silhouette…Steel engraving and wood engraving supplant the mezzotint, which had flourished in the Baroque age…To anticipate our conclusions,…let it be said that the autonomous principle retains its efficacy…in the first decades after the architecture of the Revolution, becoming ever weaker with the passage of time until, in the later decades of the nineteenth century, it is virtually unrecognizable.” Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (Vienna and Leipzig, 1933), pp. 47, 50.

Cover to Kaufmann's Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (1933)

Cover to Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (1933)

Pg. 600:

“Among the dream architecture of the Revolution, Ledoux’s projects occupy a special position…The cubic form of his ‘House of Peace’ seems legitimate to him because the cube is the symbol of justice and stability, and, similarly, all the elementary forms would have appeared to him as intelligible signs of intrinsic moment. The ville naissante, the city in which an exalted…life would find its abode, will he circumscribed by the pure contour of an ellipse…Concerning the house of the new tribunal, the Pacifère, he says in his Architecture: ‘The building drawn up in my imagination should he as simple as the law that will he dispensed there.’ Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der autonomen Architektur (Vienna and Leipzig. 1933), p. 32.

Continue reading →

Walter Benjamin and architectural modernism

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Never realized before just how plugged-in Walter Benjamin was with the avant-garde architectural scene in Germany, France, and Austria during his day. Seriously, even just skimming through the convolutes of his unfinished Arcades Project, the text is teeming with references to Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme (1925), Adolf Behne’s Neues Wohnen — Neues Bauen (1927), Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928), and Emil Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier, Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen Architektur (1933). An acquaintance pointed out to me that he corresponded with Erich Auerbach, later author of Mimesis, as well.

Surprisingly prescient, too. Corbu was already an established figure by then, but Giedion and Kaufmann were relatively unknown. Auerbach wasn’t even on the radar.

Over the next few posts will be spread out some of Benjamin’s notes quoting and discussing some of these figures.

Critical comments on Nick Axel’s recent gloss of Walter Benjamin, “Critique of violence” (1921)

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History or metaphysics?

Untitled.
Image: Walter Benjamin as a young man,
photographed smoking a cigarette (1922)
untitled2

Nick Axel recently wrote up an exegetical piece going over Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “The critique of violence” on his blog, Awaking Lucid (mentioned in the last post). I came across it in connection with the other piece Axel wrote, “What is the problem?”, in which Benjamin’s essay likewise plays a crucial role.

Perhaps I’d need the aid of Agamben here, as he is Axel’s primary interlocutor in reading Benjamin, but as things stand I find his account of the essay virtually unrecognizable. At first I thought I must just be misremembering its contents, but upon rereading it I’m left even more confused. Though Axel begins by suggesting that the relation between ethics and violence is his overriding concern, and that Benjamin’s article only interests him insofar as it elucidates this relation, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between his concerns and those he ascribes to Benjamin. He writes:

Benjamin starts by declaring that the force of law becomes violent when it infringes on ethical issues, and that it is therefore in relation to law that both ethics and violence exist. Although this strongly echoes the reflex mentioned above with ethics and violence composing the two ends of a spectrum, this juridical framework is fundamentally inadequate as this would sanction violence as ethical as long as history records it as righteous, as is often the case (if not the impetus) of those who write history and depend on its words for the maintenance of their powerful status as embodiments of law.

For one thing, the main tension does not in my view consist in an opposition of ethics to violence. Indeed, “ethics” is almost nowhere to be found in the essay. (Perhaps Axel takes Benjamin to mean “ethics” whenever he speaks of “justice,” and thus ethical/unethical to just/unjust? This seems to me slightly more plausible). Rather, there is the fundamental opposition between means and ends in modes of justification, and then in the sphere of legality between natural and positive law. There is a further gradation between “legitimate” (sanctioned) and “illegitimate” (unsanctioned) uses of violence.

What strikes me most about this text is not what it says about the complexities of violence and its potential deployment or non-deployment toward an end irrespective of place and time, but rather the way Benjamin was attempting to work through the political exigencies of his day. Violence was a salient issue in 1921 because the world had just witnessed the greatest concentrated bloodbath in history to that point. Not only from the interimperialist war, but from the many domestic struggles throughout and the revolutionary struggles between 1917-1923. How could violence be justified in one case and not in the other? Why was it that the unjust slaughter of millions in the trenches of Northern France was perfectly legal according to agreed-upon international rights of war, while the violent attempt to overthrow unjust social relations was everywhere decried as illegal? Continue reading →

The many deaths of art

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Anton Vidokle, Gregg Horowitz,
Paul Mattick, and Yates McKee

Untitled.
Image: The “tombstone” of Kazimir Malevich,
buried beneath The Black Square (1935)
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Originally posted over at the Platypus Review. Last spring, in response to Paul Mason’s article “Does Occupy Signal the Death of Contemporary Art?,” the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted an event on the “death of art.”[1] Speakers included Julieta Aranda who was represented by Anton Vidokle, Gregg Horowitz, Paul Mattick, and Yates McKee. The discussion was moderated by Chris Mansour and was held at the New School in New York on February 23, 2013. Complete video of the event can be found online by clicking here. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Opening remarks

Anton Vidokle: These are Julieta Aranda’s opening remarks: It was with a strange sense of déjà vu that I accepted the invitation to attend yet another funeral for art. Of course I have heard about all the previous ones, but this is the first time I have been invited to attend one. As an artist it is hard to understand the compulsion to establish our sense of art history through the recurrent announcements of “the death or art.” Art seems to be constantly dying, but we never talk much about its birth. It must have been stubbornly reborn on countless occasions, since we are here again, trying to measure its vital signs. I tried to do a bit of a research into the many deaths of art — but I was quickly overwhelmed: In one way or another, we have been trying to put art in a coffin and nail it shut for the past 2,000 years.

In the 1980s — during the art market boom — there were plenty of death calls: the death of painting, the death of modernism, and also the death of postmodernism. Meanwhile, the New York art market was very much alive, fueled by the usual suspects: speculators, investors, real estate developers, social climbers, and so forth. Of course as with everything that is artificially inflated, there was an eventual market crash, and this crash had many casualties. Many galleries disappeared, and many artists’ careers dried out. But this wasn’t understood to be the death of art as it had been previously announced.

I am skeptical about the Peter and the Wolf announcements of an imminent death of art — this time in its “contemporary” incarnation. For me, it is more interesting to question the favorable disposition — almost a wish — that we have towards the demise of art. The death sentence on contemporary art comes not only because the current operative model for contemporary art is deficient. (Under the current model, meaning is often quickly emptied out from objects and images, and market artists are a renewable resource.) But this wish also comes partly because we want a new big thing, we want the new thing to come now, and we want to be the new thing while the market is booming. As Hito Steyerl, a German video artist and writer, points out in her Kracauer Lecture, “The New Flesh: Material Afterlives of Images,” “To declare something over or dead is a form of production, that purposefully kills off something in order to launch new commodities or attract attention.”[2] Continue reading →

Left-wing melancholy: On Erich Kästner’s new book of poems

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Walter Benjamin
Die Gesellschaft
Vol. 8 (1931)

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Today Kästner’s poems are already available in three imposing volumes.[1] However, anyone wishing to study the character of these strophes is advised to stick to the form in which they originally appeared. In books they are too crowded and somewhat stifling, but they dart through the daily papers like fish in water. If this water is not always of the cleanest and has quite a lot of refuse floating in it, all the better for the author, whose poetic minnows can fatten themselves thereon.

The popularity of these poems is linked to the rise of a stratum which took unveiled possession of its economic power positions and prided itself as none other on the nakedness, the unmasked character of its economic physiognomy. This is not to say that this stratum, whose only aim was success, which recognized nothing else, had now conquered the strongest positions. Its ideal was too asthmatic for that. It was the ideal of childless agents, parvenus of insignificant origin, who did not, like financial magnates, provide for their families over decades, but only for themselves, and that hardly beyond the end of the season. Who cannot see them — their dreamy baby eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles, their broad pale cheeks, their drawling voices, their fatalism in gesture and mode of thought? From the beginning, it is to this stratum and to this stratum alone that the poet, has something to say, this stratum that he flatters, insofar as from dawn to dusk he holds up a mirror to them, or rather holds it against them. The gaps between his stanzas are the folds of fat in their necks, his rhymes their thick lips, his caesurae dimples in their flesh, his full-stops pupils in their eyes. Subject matter and effect remain restricted to this stratum, and Kästner is as incapable of striking the dispossessed with his rebellious accents as he is of touching the industrialists with his irony. This is because, despite appearances, this lyricism protects above all the status interests of the middle stratum — agents, journalists, heads of departments. The hatred it proclaims meanwhile towards the petit bourgeoisie has itself an all too intimate petit bourgeoisie flavor. On the other hand, it clearly abandons any striking power against the big bourgeoisie and betrays its yearning for patronage at last in the heartfelt sigh: “If only there were a dozen wise men with a great deal of money.”[2] No wonder Kästner, in settling accounts with the bankers in a “Hymn” is as obliquely familial as he is obliquely economic when he presents the night thoughts of a proletarian woman under the title “A Mother Strikes the Balance.”[3] Ultimately home and income remain the leading strings by which a better-off class leads the mewling poet.

Melancholia, by Jacek Malczewski (1894)Melancholia

This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this heaviness of heart derives from routine. For to be in a routine means to have sacrificed one’s idiosyncracies, to have forfeited the gift of distaste. And that makes one heavy-hearted. It is this circumstance that gives this case a certain similarity with that of Heine. The notes with which Kästner indents his poems, to give these shiny children’s balls the appearance of rugby balls, are routine. And nothing is more routine than the irony which, like baking powder, helps to raise the kneaded dough of private opinion. It is only unfortunate that his impertinence is as much out of all proportion to the ideological forces at his disposal as it is to the political ones. Not least does the grotesque underestimation of the opponent that underlies these provocations betray how much the position of this left radical intelligentsia is a lost one. It has little to do with the labor movement. Rather, as a phenomenon of bourgeois dissolution, it is a counterpart to the mimicry of feudalism that the Kaiserreich admired in the reserve lieutenant.[4] Left radical publicists of the stamp of Kästner, [Walter] Mehring, and [Kurt] Tucholsky [5] are the decayed bourgeoisie’s mimicry of the proletariat. Their function is to give rise, politically speaking, not to parties but to cliques, literarily speaking, not to schools but to fashions, economically speaking, not to producers but to agents. And indeed, for the last fifteen years this left-wing intelligentsia has been continually the agent of all spiritual conjunctures, from Activism, via Expressionism to New Objectivity.[6] However, its political significance was exhausted by the transposition of revolutionary reflexes, insofar as they arose in the bourgeoisie, into objects of distraction, of amusement, which can be supplied for consumption. Continue reading →

Nikolai Suetin's crypto-Suprematist model for the 1937 Soviet Pavilion, featuring Iofan's Palace of the Soviets

Nikolai Suetin’s crypto-Suprematist model for the Paris 1937 Soviet Pavilion, featuring Iofan’s Palace of the Soviets

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Untitled.
IMAGE: Suetin’s model
.Untitled

From the first chapter of Douglas Murphy‘s Architecture of Failure (if you haven’t checked this book out by now, you really should):

Industrial exhibitions of one kind or another had been held for at least half a century before 1851.  However, as the Great Exhibition would be the first that was international in any sense, and as it would also be an event on a scale that dwarfed any previous exhibition, then it is not unreasonable to think of it in terms of a ‘first of its kind.’  Moreover, it set in motion a massive cultural movement; the Great Exhibition is often said to be the birth of modern capitalist culture, both in terms of the promotion of ideologies of free trade and competitive display but also in the new ways in which objects were consumed, and how they were seen. Benjamin refers to how the exhibitions were ‘training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value,’ while more recently Peter Sloterdijk would write that with the Great Exhibition, ‘a new aesthetic of immersion began its triumphal procession through modernity.’  The financial success of the Great Exhibition was swiftly emulated: both New York and Paris would hold their own exhibitions within the next five years, and there would be a great many others held throughout the century all over the world.  As time went on, the event would slowly metamorphose into what is now known as the ‘Expo’, a strange shadow counterpart to the events of so long ago, but one that still occurs, albeit fitfully, and with a strange, undead quality to it.  By the time the first half-century of exhibitions was over the crystalline behemoths of the early exhibitions had been replaced by the ‘pavilion’ format, whereby countries, firms and even movements would construct miniature ideological edifices to their own projected self-identities. The 1900 Paris exhibition was the first to truly embrace this format, and in future years one could encounter such seminal works of architecture such as Melnikov’s Soviet Pavilion and Le Corbusier’s Pavilion Esprit Nouveau (Paris 1925), Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona 1929), Le Corbusier & Iannis Xenakis’ Phillips Pavilion (Brussels 1958), or witness the desperately tragic face-off between Albert Speer and Boris Iofan (Paris 1937). Continue reading →

“What would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?” (Guest post by Paul Brennan)

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El Lissitzky - Sketch for PROUN 6B

by Paul Brennan

Like revolution, socialism, communism, and Marxism, like any conception that would have it that there is an alternative to capitalist ontology, today the avant-garde is as extinct as the proverbial dodo. The age of militant artistic publicity seems a long, long century ago. Back then there was still a future, one that could be determined by the productive, social imagination. The historical avant-gardes, pitting themselves against the demarcation that separated the creative from the social and political, were natural allies of revolution. Not always the right kind of revolution, of course, as the example of Italian Futurism, with its militarism and misogyny, and later fascism, shows. And not always, or even often, without a large quantity of crankery and self-indulgence to go with the inspiration. Still, surveying the early twentieth century scene, it is striking how different was the conception and practice of art compared to today. True, there were painters and writers and composers for whom art remained a trade, a form of petty commodity production, but there were others, many others, at work on projects which they pursued with an idealism that would make them a laughing stock today. These could be those like Breton or Maiakovskii, for whom the creative was inseparable from the idea of a new society, or those like Joyce or Pound, politically equivocal or even downright reactionary, but who made it so intensely new that to imagine proper readers for their works was to imagine an entirely different order. Today, figures like Joyce and Pound seem to belong to an entirely different world.

Last year Penguin Books published 100 Artists’ Manifestoes: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. It is an enthralling read, at least initially; after the excerpts from Situationist writings — and surely Situationism is the moment when the avant-garde achieves its most fully realized conception of the need to erase the boundary between life and art — the sad truth begins to sink in that the avant-garde has become a joke. The movements that define the boundaries of the text tell a story. Marinetti’s Futurists represent the Ur-form of the avant-garde — the moment when it was possible to declare that “time and space died yesterday” on the front page of Figaro and not only become a subject of mockery. By the time of the Stuckists any mockery one can imagine the artist’s tracts receiving seems completely justified. It is avant-gardism — or at least an avant-garde gesture — against the avant-garde, a silly, merely reactive whinge against conceptualism and a call for a return to figuration in painting.

One reviewer of 100 Artists’ Manifestoes suggested that Alex Danchev could have improved his book by including a selection of the documents published by a group that appeared in 1999, the International Necronautical Society, which threw down its marker by publishing its first manifesto, in an homage to Marinetti, on the front page of the London Times (http://necronauts.net/manifestos/1999_times_manifesto.html). The INS deserves attention; not at all because it has rekindled the true flame of the avant-garde, impossible anyway, but because it at least evinces some ambition and does represent a focused, immersed response to the historical avant-gardes and their place in modern cultural and political history.

The INS is a “parodic” or “ironic” avant-garde, indeed it styles itself a “semi-fictitious avant-garde network,” but it is not the self-consciousness of this organization that distinguishes it from the historical avant-gardes. Self-consciousness was a built-in, preconditional quality of those movements. The classic account of this may be Peter Bürger’s, in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1972). In this now somewhat derided text (it flatters no one and is hostile to any claim that there can be a valid “tradition” of the avant-garde) Bürger charts the history of modern art as a story of autonomy achieved (in the moment of the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century) and then relinquished, when artistic self-consciousness, by the time of the late nineteenth century found itself dissatisfied with the available alternatives of artistic practice as either petty commodity production or aestheticism. The avant-gardes, for Bürger, wished to surrender their autonomy in return for an art rejuvenated by social relevance — hence the radical politicizations of art of the early twentieth century.

The self-consciousness, the reflexivity, of the INS is different. It is a organization that at once holds itself aloof from the narrowness of (particularly) contemporary British art and literature, but seems equally incapable of taking seriously the utopian projects of the historical avant-gardes. For this reason it presents itself as a kind of parody of a totalitarian state or party, merged with the attributes of movements like Surrealism and Situationism. Members can be expelled for the slightest infraction, if not shot. There are committees and sub-committees, communiques, and “agents.” The military aspect of the avant-garde is maintained, but with acknowledgment that it is more appropriate today, in our society of spectacular capitalism, to think of such activity as a kind of espionage. All of this with tongue firmly in cheek.

More striking is the death-obsession of the INS. Its members conceive of themselves as “necronauts,” travels or voyagers into death. This seems to me symptomatic of the place that the avant-garde has arrived at. It is no longer possible to think of an expansive, adventurous artistic activity, one outside of the Culture Industry, other than as life placed in a relation of perpetual adjacency to death. Its “General Secretary,” the now well-known novelist Tom McCarthy (http://www.surplusmatter.com/) gives special importance to the Freud of the Death Drive, to Heidegger, Bataille, and to Blanchot. The philosophical stance of the group (Simon Critchley is the INS “Philosopher in Chief”) is decidedly anti-humanist, with a particular hostility to Hegel and Marx. The emphasis falls on the post-structuralist “textual” author, on literature and art as networks, and on technology.

If the near-corpse of the Left is to be revived, then art will have to be revived with it. In the past leftists argued over what a healthy form for a radical art might be. In the age of great realistic fiction, Engels criticized novelists too quick to believe that they had to sacrifice verisimilitude for the sake of propaganda. Trotskii, in Literature and Revolution (1924) endorsed the idea of the avant-garde, but had many cogent criticisms to make of the artistic and cultural schools of this day. Lukács provided a defense of the realist novel against modernism in The Historical Novel (1937). In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno conducted a seminal discussion over the questions raised in the former’s “Artwork” essay (1936). Benjamin argued for an art appropriate to the “environment” which was “being prepared for us by technology” and advocated a practice that would seek to hurry along the extinction of the “aura” and that would be, at the very least, “completely useless” to fascism and its “aestheticization of politics.” Radical art would be a marriage of technology and tendency. Adorno responded by insisting on the value of artistic autonomy, emphasizing artistic technique over technology, as a last-line resistance to the onslaught of commodification. Examples could be multiplied, for Marxism has a rich legacy of aesthetic debate and discussion. (One place to look is the Fredric Jameson-edited anthology, Aesthetics and Politics, which contains writings by and exchanges between Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, and Sartre.)

Today art and literature mostly seem to be a business. One could be forgiven for characterizing them as merely a niche industry supplying a rather snooty form of entertainment commodity. The situation vis–à–vis the critical understanding of art is little better. Who cares, you may say, there are other priorities. But the idea of art is inseparable from the idea of the imagination and the imagination is in turn inseparable from the idea of another world, and so I ask, what would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?

The Tragically Sublime: Schelling’s Metaphysics of Fate and Freedom in his Philosophy of Art

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The discovery that man’s actions fail to produce their intended results, that the world does not bend itself to his will — this is the first instance of his spiritual alienation.[1] For herein lies the recognition that the world is not of man’s making, the understanding that nature obeys laws utterly removed from his desires. Such laws, insofar as they are intelligible, do not yet threaten mankind’s claim to freedom as such. Their necessity is only empirical. That is to say, the limitations they impose are of a merely physical character. In this respect, these laws do not jeopardize man’s moral autonomy. Rather, they are seen to possess a sort of brute factuality, an objective regularity. So long as man exempts himself from their mechanism, his freedom is preserved. His actions would thus simply be subject to material constraint.[2]

Another necessity presents itself to experience, however, of a far more sinister aspect. This necessity, by contrast, appears irreconcilable with man’s sense of free will. Its source is likewise external (heteronymous), but its precise origin remains shrouded in obscurity. As such, its machinery is wholly incomprehensible.[3] Where the one necessity persists in universality, the other exhibits itself as entirely particular.[4] In other words, the determinations of the first sort are understood to follow a consistent, uniform pattern; conversely, those which issue from the second variety seem hopelessly arbitrary, catastrophic. The apparent indeterminacy of the latter’s foundation does not alter its necessity, however. Its dictates must not, for this reason, be thought any less binding. On the contrary, the decrees of this invisible necessity govern the outcome of men’s actions with irresistible effect, deciding their fortunes without their consent.

This latter necessity is commonly referred to as fate. Qua absolute necessity, it is the essential annihilation of human freedom. Our activities are thus revealed in their impotence: we are not the masters of our destiny. It is on this account that the intuition of fate is always accompanied by a distinct feeling of horror. The moral freedom we so fervently assert as essential to our subjectivity is contradicted outright by the objective necessity of fate. Each side (subjective and objective alike) claims total sovereignty, and can scarcely tolerate its opposite. Yet both seem to contain an equal degree of reality. How can this be? To admit the one would surely be to negate the other. Are these two sides not incommensurable?

For the idealist F.W.J. Schelling, this paradox was definitive of the human condition. Indeed, it was viewed as the central problematic at work in transcendental philosophy, since the very possibility of this philosophy rests on the presumption that free will exists. In his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling explains the connection between freedom and fatal necessity as “a relationship whereby men through their own free action, and yet against their will, must become cause of something which they never wanted, or by which, conversely, something must go astray or come to naught which they have sought for freely and with the exertion of all their powers.”[5] Schelling here confirms much of what has been hitherto described: namely, that one’s free actions engender unimaginable consequences, regardless of intention; moreover, that the real results of his endeavors appear totally divorced from their ideal basis.

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