Art and Necessity: Some Remarks on Lessing’s Critical Practice
In Re-Thinking Lessing’s Laocoon, edited by Michael Squire and Avi Lifschitz (Cambridge, forthcoming)
Paul A. Kottman
“…what has art to do with necessity?”
Lessing 1984: 39
In scholarship on Lessing, and in broader discussions of modern aesthetic philosophy (and well as its reconfigurations of ancient ‘classical presences’), the Laocoon is commonly invoked as the primary text in which – to borrow from art historian, Michael Fried – the “invention of the modern concept of an artistic medium” occurs.[1] Where Lessing’s essay continues to be read and discussed today, it is almost always thanks to its treatment of distinct artistic media – its handling of how the visual and poetic arts mean.
One issue that often arises in such discussions – thanks to Lessing’s own rhetorical framing – is how to understand the essay’s treatment of the ‘limits’ of painting and poetry. In the most general terms, the question typically concerns whether or how Lessing offers transcendental criteria according to which artistic media can be compared as different forms of meaning. For instance, does a transcendental distinction between visible space and temporal distension, or between natural signs and arbitrary signs, ground the distinction between the visual arts and poetry? Does Lessing privilege poetry over painting because, like Aristotle, he sees the representation of human actions in time as offering a fuller understanding of human life than the visual depiction of a single moment?
In the following chapter, I am less interested in contesting the specific answers that interpreters have given to these questions than in reorienting the general mode of discussion, and in three specific ways. First, I want to suggest that Lessing’s own critical practice in the Laocoon is intended to show, and not just tell, how the amateur’s ‘felt’ responses to the aesthetic effect of different artworks bears on the critic’s judgment concerning both what artworks mean and how they mean. Second, I want to suggest that Lessing’s overall concern in his discussion of medium-specificity is not meant to arrive at any fixed ‘theory’ of different media or their interrelation; rather, his discussion follows upon his broader sense of what art does – namely, through its solicitation of our imagination, art makes intelligible some feature of our world or our shared lives together that would otherwise remain unintelligible.[2] Lessing, in other words, deals with what Hegel later called our “need” for different artistic practices – whether Shakespearean tragedy, symphonic music, ancient sculpture or painting on canvas – as a fundamental mode of understanding ourselves and our worldly conditions. If Lessing’s discussion of artistic media has had staying power, then this is largely because – rather than regard artworks as instantiations of formal laws or philosophical concepts that might be grasped without art’s help – his deepest concern is with how different artworks and practices themselves help us in understanding ourselves and our conditions. Third and finally, I want to suggest that Lessing’s focus on the ‘limits’ (Grenzen) of painting and poetry does not present transcendentally derived criteria according to which different artistic ‘media’ are graspable. The Laocoon, rather, was intended to show how the very view that certain artworks or practice yield a special understanding of human life, unavailable elsewhere, is earned, not through transcendental argumentation, but through the careful consideration of the achievements of specific artworks and practices: what Lessing calls the work of the critic.
The 250th anniversary of the Laocoon’s publication offers us a chance to reflect on one of Lessing’s uniquely powerful contributions to aesthetic philosophy: the thought that art is not merely a mirror held up to nature or society, but rather a fundamental matrix – a practiced way [Weg] -- through which social and natural realities are grasped and made intelligible. Moreover, given Lessing’s crucial role as critic, of classical artworks as well as modern drama [Lessing was the first European critic to elaborate Shakespeare’s ‘modernity’], my hope in the following pages will be to illuminate aspects of Lessing’s critical practice that seem to me worthy of further discussion.
1. The amateur and the critic
“The first person [Der erste] to compare painting with poetry,” writes Lessing in the opening sentence of the essay, “was a man of sensitive feeling” (von feinem Gefühle).[3] We go on to discover that this ‘first’ is the “amateur” or Liebhaber (“lover”), whose response to art and poetry is distinguished by Lessing from the philosopher and the critic. In the flow of the essay – with its breezy opening Vorrede – it can be tempting to move quickly past the amateur, and to look to either the philosopher or the critic as somehow closer to Lessing’s own voice. However, several features of this opening sentence deserve to be noted. In particular, I want to draw attention, first, to Lessing’s emphasis on the amateur’s “fine feeling” as a kind of proto-critical response, if not yet a critical judgment; and, second, to the content of the amateur’s response – namely its perception of a unity in the arts, ut pictura poiesis, at least at the level of aesthetic effect.
At first blush, Lessing’s use of the term Gefühl – followed in the next sentence by the verb empfinden [“…empfand er…”] – might lead a reader to conclude that the amateur just feels what he feels: that the amateur’s response gives voice merely to an immediate sensibility lacking in conceptual content. Lessing seems to confirm such an interpretation when he notes, shortly after this passage, that whereas the critic can be wrong in his judgment, the amateur and the philosopher “could not easily misuse their feelings” [konnten nicht leicht, weder von Ihrem Gefüle, noch von ihren Schlüssen, einen unrechten Gebrauch machen].[4] In other words, as with the philosopher’s ‘conclusions,’ based on first principles and deductions, so too, the amateur’s feelings are immune to questions of rightness or wrongness: he just feels what he feels. Whereas a critical judgment can turn out to be wrong, the idea of either right or wrong ‘feelings’ is theoretically misplaced.
But this moves a little too fast. In referring to the first-personal response of the amateur to the artwork [“Der erste… war ein Mann von feinem Gefühle”], Lessing does not mean to identify the amateur’s “sensitive feeling” with brute sensation (pain or pleasure, say), wholly devoid of reason-giving. Rather, Lessing is keen to invoke such “feeling” at the outset, as a kind of felt insight or perception into the nature of artworks. Indeed, Lessing is far from alone amongst his eighteenth-century peers, in trying to say something about the relation of feeling to critical insight and theoretical knowledge. As the editors of the recent Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon have pointed out, in the philosophical German of the second half of the eighteenth-century, and especially in the field of aesthetic philosophy, the differentiation of the “pair Gefühl/Empfindung… was the object of a long conceptual inquiry set against a background of ambivalence.”[5] Appealing to an earlier empirical tradition, Christian Wolff saw Empfindung as a source of knowledge: “thoughts that have their causes in the modifications of the organs of our body, and that are excited by bodily things outside of us, we call Empfindung,” he wrote in his 1751 Deutsche Metaphysik.[6] Following Wolff, J.G. Herder likewise later wrote that “no knowledge is possible without Empfindung, that is without a feeling (Gefühl) of good and evil.”[7] And then there is Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in the course of which we are told that Wohlgefallen is not absent in the judgment of beauty.[8] Against this wide background, the ‘fine feeling’ of Lessing’s amateur should start to appear somewhat closer to theoretical knowledge and the critic’s judgment – or rather, at least, the distinctions between these categories begin to look rather less rigid. Lessing seems to be invoking the distinction between the amateur, the philosopher and the critic in order to say something about the importance of amateur ‘feeling’ for both philosophy and critical judgment – rather than to draw any hard and fast distinctions. By emphasizing the place of Wohlgefallen in the judgment of beauty, Kant, too, seemed to be suggesting that critical judgment (the installation of a space of reasons, entailing exposure to ‘getting it wrong’) is somehow continuous with – ‘distinct from’ but not wholly separable from – the moment of feeling.
As I read Lessing’s essay, then, the importance of the amateur’s ‘fine feeling’ for both the critic and the philosopher lies in the way that Lessing seems to leave open the value of that first amateur’s ‘felt perception’ of a likeness of painting to poetry. Indeed, Lessing ultimately judges the amateur to have been ‘right’ to have perceived a unity in the arts, at the level of aesthetic effect. For Lessing’s ‘critic,’ the amateur’s feeling is not to be discounted a priori, cordoned as mere thoughtless feeling – any more than the amateur’s feeling is to be held up as the last arbiter of any critical judgment or philosophical discourse.
To develop the point further: Whether or not an amateur’s first-personal feelings will ultimately count as reasons – as reasons ‘for’ or ‘against’ a critical judgment about an artwork – cannot be determined in advance by any inherent status of the feeling as feeling, by its inherent reasonless or infallibility. Hence, critical judgment would earn little by distinguishing itself from the reasonless-ness of the amateur’s feeling. Put differently, the distinction between the ‘fallibility’ of the critic’s judgment (‘he can get it wrong’) and the ‘infallibility’ of the amateur’s feeling (‘he just feels what he feels’) – to which Lessing draws attention in the opening passage of the essay – is not put forward by Lessing as an a priori distinction to which the critic can then point in order to justify the special reason-giving status of his judgment. Rather, the specialness of the critic’s judgment – its real or earned difference from amateur ‘feeling’ – is something that Lessing’s critic achieves in his work, in the elaboration of a critical judgment, in part by not simply accepting the amateur’s feelings as reasonless or mere brute sensation but by attending to its potential worth. If the critic’s judgment is distinctly valuable precisely because of its fallibility, then this is in part because critical judgment subjects itself over time to other ‘feelings’ that might contradict it. The amateur’s response, on the other hand, submits itself to no such contradiction -- and that is what makes it amateurish.
Lessing’s essay, then, is an attempt to earn its status as a work of criticism or critical judgment. In this way, the essay would show as much as tell what such critical work looks like – and thereby ‘bring about’ its own standing as something other than amateur feeling (or ‘philosophical deduction from first principles’) – precisely by submitting itself to the amateur’s felt response from the outset, and then by supplying reasons for taking seriously the amateur’s feeling (reasons that the amateur’s feeling ‘on its own’ could not provide). Admitting feelings as reasons – as proto-rational, or discriminatingly evaluative – is, so to speak, something criticism might thus allow for or accomplish.
The point, moreover, can help us to see better how Lessing aimed to distinguish his ‘criticism’ not only from the amateur, but also from the aesthetic ‘philosophies’ of Baumgarten or Meier and their deductive methods as well.[9] Rather than derive concepts from other concepts, like the ‘systematic books’ (systematische Bücher) at which earlier German aesthetic philosophers are said to excel,[10] Lessing wanted to show how getting something right or wrong about artworks – the fallible discrimination and evaluation of the critic – is the source of any theoretical knowledge about the arts. And because (I am suggesting) such evaluation includes determining how and when amateur feelings count, the work of the critic also entails registering and tarrying with the ‘felt’ response of the amateur. By the same token, because theoretical knowledge about the arts is a plausible and worthy aim, the philosophical implications of the critic’s work also deserve our note.
II. IMAGINATION
All of this is worth saying, I think, because it also shows us something about how Lessing’s essay proceeds, not only in its presentation of the work of the ‘critic,’ but also with respect to the way Lessing sees artworks and practices. Namely: Lessing sees distinctions between the arts as distinctions that are earned or brought about in the practice, over time – not merely asserted or demonstrated according to a priori standards for reflection that can be articulated categorically.
With this in mind, then, let us now consider the content of the amateur’s response – namely his perception of a unity in the arts, ut pictura poiesis, at least at the level of aesthetic effect:[11]
The first person to compare painting with poetry was a man of fine feeling who observed that both arts produced a similar effect upon him. Both, he felt, represent absent things as being present and appearance as reality. Both create an illusion, and in both cases the illusion is pleasing.
For Lessing, all artworks supply a ‘felt’ apprehension of an imagined object – something which is not ‘really’ there but is rather imitated or represented – and thereby made ‘present to the mind’ of a receiver as distinctly pleasurable and intrinsically valuable. On this point, Lessing’s amateur is saying something close to Aristotle’s claim in the fourth chapter of the Poetics, to the effect that the pleasure we take in imitative works is intellectual and lies in grasping the artwork as mimetic – as standing for this-or-that – not just in the pleasure taken in the sensuous features (such as colour) alone.[12] All arts are fundamentally ‘imitative’ in this way, for Lessing, just as they all produce this distinctly aesthetic effect – namely, the pleasure taken in the exercise and expansion of our overall understanding of the world and ourselves through the presentation of some feature of the world or human life.