Does
a genius produce his artworks like an apple tree, its apples?
Virginia Figueiredo[1]
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil[2]
Abstract
This article addresses two issues: the first is the philosopher's fear
of a lawless freedom of nature. I quote
Deleuze and Guattari, who explain our terror before chaos and the consequent
call for help and protection. My hypothesis was that this threat of chaos has
affected also the enlightened mind of Kant. Facing the possibility of chaos,
the objective Kant did not exactly fear delusion and madness, which affect only
fragile subjectivities, but was terrified with the chance that nature does not
behave regularly, i.e., that knowledge
becomes impossible. The second issue is a harder and more difficult question, and it is
related to the modern artist’s (or
genius) anguish. It is a technical or an artistical complaint. He/She finds no
more given rules to create his/her artworks. Differently
from the philosopher, the genius fears the silence and the absolute muteness of
nature. I try to deal with these two issues by taking into account Kant’s
concept of purposiveness of nature as a regulative principle. I realize that,
although this sufficed to calm down the philosopher’s anxiety, it proved to be insufficient to guide the artist.
The delusion and madness that threaten the genius are deeper and more extreme
than those of the philosopher. In order to
treat the artist’s pain, without having to abandon the connection between art and nature, that
constitutes one of the most fruitful reading keys of Kant’s Aesthetics, I resort to other ideas I found reading Lacoue-Labarthe and
Hannah Arendt.
Keywords
Kant; Theory of Genius; Critique of Power of Judgment; art and nature.
Ultimately, in the practice of art, we can only vie with nature
when we have at least to some extent learnt from her the process
that she pursues in the formation of her works.
About truth and verisimilitude of the work of art, J.W.Goethe
Enlarge art? No. On the contrary, take art with you into
your innermost narrowness. And set yourself free.
The Meridian, Paul Celan
Introduction
I wonder if it is convenient to make a very brief report here about the
notion of natural genius, precisely the one of the vegetable concepts of genius
to which my title refers and which is an essential topic of the “general philosophy of organism” (Abrams 1971, p.
186). For one thing I warrant, the Kantian concept of genius as a natural gift
was not an originality by the Königsberg philosopher. It was not a novelty in
the history of ideas to use this conceptual pair nature and art, an example of
which is the paradigmatic formula in the 45th paragraph of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, that clearly and concisely exposes this use
aiming at a mutual or
reciprocal explanation: “Nature was beautiful, if at the same time it
looked like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it
is art and yet it looks to us like nature.” (Kant KdU, AA, 05: 306; CPJ, p.
185).[3]
This use had long been connected to an old and long tradition of English
literary criticism and poetry, which distinguished two meanings in “nature”:
one internal and the other, external.
As A.O.
Lovejoy has pointed out, the term ‘nature’, in the usage in which it was
opposed to ‘art’, possessed two main areas of application. In reference to the
mind of man, ‘nature’ designated those inborn attributes ‘which are most
spontaneous, unpremeditated, untouched by reflection or design, and free from
the bondage of social convention’. In reference to the external world, it
designated those parts of the universe which come into being independently of
human effort and contrivance. The element
of nature in natural genius, of course, was comprehended under the first of
these applications; but it was easy, in these discussions, to make the
transition from human nature to external nature and to compare the natural
products of mind to the products of the vegetable world (Lovejoy Essays in the
History of Ideas apud Abrams 1971, p. 198).
According to M.H.
Abrams, “the most important document in the development of the vegetable
concept of genius is Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition,
published in 1759” (Abrams 1971, p. 198). Abrams quotes a mighty and synthetical passage of Young,
in which the opposition between art, mechanism, imitation, on the one hand, and
nature (particularly vegetal), organism, and originality, on the other, is
evident: “An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it
rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made.
Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics,
art and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.”
(Abrams 1971, p. 199; author’s emphasis). However, before Edward Young,
the poets Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744) had already
used the vegetal metaphor to “illustrate the difference between the natural and
the artful kinds of genius”, as can be read in two passages quoted in Abrams’s
book, which I cite below:
[Natural genius] is like a rich soil in a happy climate, that produces a
whole wilderness of noble plants rising in a thousand beautiful landskips,
without any certain order or regularity. In the other [artistic genius] it is
the same rich soil under the same happy climate, that has been laid out in
walks and parterres, and cut into shape and beauty by the skill of the
gardener. (Addison Spectator apud Abrams 1971, p. 187).
[Alexander Pope] expanded Addison’s parallel between natural genius and a
natural landscape. The ‘invention’ which characterizes all great geniuses is
equitable with nature, and ‘as in most regular gardens, Art can only reduce the
beauties of Nature to more regularity’ (Abrams 1971, p. 189).[4]
In fact, the most comprehensive idea of a poet’s inspiration is very
ancient; since Plato (Ion) and Aristotle (the famous Problem XXX:
“The man of genius and melancholy”, described as he who “has been seized
by the madness or enthusiasm disease”). The explanation of the mysterious inspiration as a deity, a “supernatural visitant” (Abrams 1971, p. 189), an
“external power” that takes the place and speaks on behalf of the poet occurred
way before nature appeared as mediator between art and the beautiful. From the
end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century it was
not possible anymore to attribute seriously the poetic inspiration to a deity,
even if Bishop Warburton (1698-1779) and Father Bouhours (1628-1702) still
insisted on finding an “affinity between these
poetic mysteries and the supra-rational and contra-rational mysteries of the
Christian faith” (Abrams 1971, p. 195) The theory of genius in the 18th
century, also named the “Aesthetic Century”, would be one of the witnesses of
this “momentous historical shift from the view that the making of a work of art
is a supremely purposeful activity to the view that its coming-into-being is,
basically, a spontaneous process independent of intention, precept, or even
consciousness” (Abrams 1971, p. 187). The Critique
of Power of Judgment that brought together Aesthetics and Teleology, that
is, Art and Biology, announces what would soon be acknowledged as “the age of
biologism: the area of the most exciting and seminal discoveries having shifted
from physical science to the science of life, biology has begun to replace
Cartesian and Newtonian mechanics as the great source of concepts” (Abrams
1971, p. 204, 207).[5]
Still in this
introduction, I would like to refer to the position occupied by the theory
of genius in the third Critique: a position which, according to
Allison, is “largely polemical” (Allison 2001, p. 301). This theory occupies paragraphs 46 to 50 of the CPJ, that is
to say within the first part entitled “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment”, after the two
Analytics: of the Beautiful and of the Sublime and before “The Dialectic
of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment”. Also, it is necessary to add that these
(only) five and not so long paragraphs about the genius occupy the center
of the theory of art, about which, the same Allison authorizes us to say
that it exists. Nevertheless, this assertion that a Kantian theory of
art does exist is, by itself, equally polemic.
It is really a
difficult task to face the almost crystallized interpretation that points out
that, if it was not negatively, it was quite ambiguously that Kant inserted,
within his phenomenal Aesthetics, the problem of art. There are several very consistent arguments, in fact, that led the
official commentary to
decide for that negative position towards art. The first of these
arguments states that, as the main problem of Kant’s Aesthetics is the aesthetic
judgement, the privileged point of view is that of the spectator and not
that of the artist. In other words, it is a theory of taste or, as Allison says: “a
‘reception aesthetic’ rather than a ‘creation aesthetic’.” (Allison 2001, p. 271).
Moreover, it is claimed that, in general, for
Kant, the beautiful that is worthy of all attention is that which nature
produces involuntarily and spontaneously, i.e., without any intention or
purpose. On the other hand,
the undeniably intentional and artificial character of works of art would
arouse in the philosopher very little (if any) affinity for them.
The fatal and definitive argument, however,
which interpreters usually find undeniably explained in § 42 of the CFJ, literally
establishes a difference between men of taste who admire the beauty of nature and those who
cultivate the artistic beautiful, a difference which is quite unfavorable to
the latter, while the former would denote a “favorable disposition to the moral
feeling” (Kant KdU, AA, 05: 298-299; CPJ, p. 178), art lovers would be “usually
vain, capricious [and] given over to pernicious passions”. As the system of
Kantian philosophy has traditionally been understood as convergence towards morality,
one can estimate how much this indisposition of the admirers of the artistic
beautiful towards the “morally good” [6] constituted a fatal argument against art. Besides, the only artist that
enters and leaves the Kantian polis without being blocked is the genius,
because, in fact, his rule is the same as nature’s, which means, at least paradoxically and
apparently, that the genius’ rule is ultimately not … artistic.
Finally, I would
also like to add one more comment by Allison that pointed out the fact that
Kant hesitated between two conceptions of genius, both of which he clearly
distinguished: one thick, and the other thin. I describe them
below quoting Allison:
the “thick”
conception is at work throughout most of the discussion of fine art. It is this
conception that is characterized as an “exemplary originality” and that
includes understanding and, indeed, judgment, together with an inventive
imagination as essential components. It is also genius in this sense that
‘gives the rule to art’, thereby distinguishing genuine products of genius from
“original nonsense”.
At some points,
however, and particularly in § 50, Kant presents a “thin” conception of genius,
according to which genius seems to be limited merely to an imaginative
capacity, and therefore does not itself involve understanding, judgment or
taste. Consequently, in these places Kant emphasizes the necessity of “clipping
the wings” of genius, of “disciplining and training” it through taste and a
judgment, lest the imagination in its “lawless freedom” produce nothing but
original nonsense. (Allison 2001, p. 301)
It is clear that I’ll
try to defend, along with a certain Allison, the “thick conception of genius”,
the one that, perhaps like all theses developed by Kant in the third Critique (the beautiful, the sublime, the
taste, etc.), depends also on an essential connection between art and nature. I
can affirm with a certain assurance that this relationship (art/nature)
constitutes one of the most powerful and fruitful reading keys of Kant’s Aesthetics.
Not being an exception, the Kantian genius depends on both a reflection on nature, and a “serious
discussion about art” (as Allison taught us) which “begins only in §45”
(Allison 2001, p. 274), observing that the theory of genius (§§46 to 50) comes
right after that “serious discussion” (§46 is entitled: “Beautiful art is the
art of genius”) and constitutes the true center of the Kantian theory of art.
The dreadful fear of the philosopher
I begin with a long
quotation of Deleuze and Guattari, from their book What is philosophy?, from the last chapter entitled “From chaos to
the brain”:
We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more
distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that
disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into
others that we no longer master. […] We constantly lose our ideas. That is why
we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much. We ask only that our ideas are
linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the
association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules – resemblance,
contiguity, causality – which enable
us to put some order into ideas, preventing our ‘fantasy’ (delusion, madness)
from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons
breathing fire. But there would not be a little order in ideas if there was not
a little order in things or states of affairs, like an objective antichaos: ‘If cinnabar were
now red, now black, now light, now heavy...,
then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to
think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the color red.’ And finally, at the meeting point of things
and thought, the sensation must recur – that of heaviness whenever we hold
cinnabar in our hands, that of red whenever we look at it – as proof or
evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs that do not perceive the
present without imposing on it a conformity with the past. This is all that we
ask for in order to make an opinion
for ourselves, like a sort of ‘umbrella’, which protects us from chaos. (Deleuze; Guattari 1994, pp. 201-202)
I have the impression
that this threat of chaos, “delusion and madness”, depicted with an undeniable
humor by Deleuze and Guattari, also affected, and in an obsessive way, the
“enlightened” mind of Kant. Perhaps Kant
translated this danger of chaos not in terms of delusion and madness, but
rather in the possibility of a nature that could behave in an irregular way or
even the possibility of a nature which he would have called “sublime”.[7]
Let us imagine a Humean Kant asking himself: “and if, perceiving the color
green of a leaf, could I not, in some way, ‘include it’ (comparing it with
previous sensations) or ‘classify it’ in an empirical concept of a subspecies,
for example, an oak, an almond tree or any other ‘tree’ and keep ‘rising’
toward the ‘plant species’, and soon reach the genus ‘living being’? And if
looking at the green leaves of a tree, I had to suspect that I was standing
before a mineral such as malachite or quartz? And could I not, at the expense
of my very dear notion - that of the ‘system’ - realize that the mineral world
has distinct and unmistakable features from the plant world? And without any
help from a ‘protective rule’, assigning meaning and significance to the world,
could I not make an experience of the empirical specific world? What should I
do, as I wrote in my first Critique,
‘if cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy’ (Kant 1998, AA,
3-4: A 100, p. 229), ‘if a human being were now changed
into this animal shape, now into that one, if on the longest day the land were
covered now with fruits, now with ice and snow’? (Kant 1998, AA, 3-4: A 100, p.
229). Faced with an unruly
nature, which we are unable to organize according to an a priori system
of classification that divides everything into genera, species, and subspecies, I’m sure I would become crazy!
Consequently, I see a
great resemblance between what Deleuze and Guattari mean by “to make an opinion
for ourselves, like a sort of 'umbrella', which protects us from chaos”, and
what Kant called “sensus communis” or
even his “concept of the purposiveness of nature”. I wonder if the “opinion” of
Deleuze and Guattari, on one side, and Kant’s “sensus communis”, on the other, have both a similar role or
function: to answer to that painful experience of fear or distressing feeling;
an answer to give us (human beings) a consolation, a quietness. This sensus communis promises us some order, some
understanding, capable of protecting us from the “lawless freedom” of nature,
which, just like the unbridled imagination (Schwärmerei[8])
of genius, “produces nothing but original nonsense.” This protective rule
assures us the confidence and the legitimacy of the “movement” of our power of
judgment, which Kant called, only in the third Critique, “reflective”. This “movement”, that starts from an
empirical intuition, consists of getting more and more general concepts (of
subspecies to species, and from these, to genera) or higher genera, in view of
a classification, a generalization or, better said: in view of a unit of nature in a concept.
As everyone knows, the discovery of the
principle of purposiveness of nature seems to have constituted the main password
for the faculty of judging to ascend to the Olympus of the Transcendental,
forcing Kant to consider it, with the understanding and the reason, as one of
the three higher faculties. Although not obvious, it is possible to argue that,
at least indirectly, the concept of the purposiveness of nature provides a
basis for the judgment of taste. In other words, the principle mentioned could
be a guide to the spectator of the beautiful both in nature and in art. As a
formal and subjective principle, the question that it was trying to answer
would never lead to a “methodus”, because it recognizes the impossibility of
any “science of the beautiful”. The concept of the purposiveness of nature
would refer, at most, to the external
“manner” or “modus” of nature (Kant KdU, AA, 05: 355; CPJ, pp. 228-229). It is
the grounding of the artistic or technical way of looking at nature and,
thus, it must be free of all conceptual restriction, making this regard to
nature intentionally superficial, exterior, held in the forms, as someone gazing at a landscape.
Aesthetic reflection, as we know, is not an
act aiming at knowledge of the object. The so-called “contemplation” is the
attitude of reflection that keeps outward
the regard of the viewer of the work of art or nature as if they were mere
landscape. It allows us to be attentive to (or distracted by the) forms; it
suspends or decrees the “strike” of the scientist’s regard who goes inward to examine and make the anatomy
of the bodies. In opposition to a biologist who turns his guinea pig organs
inside out, reflection allows the aesthete or the flâneur, that is, the man/woman of
taste to stroll through the beautiful works of nature (or art), keeping them at
a certain distance, measured, at same time, by modesty and admiration. As stated
by Jean-Yves Chateau: “In the aesthetic perception, I don't consume the object,
it remains intact; or rather, it becomes more and more itself, it seems to be
enriched by determinations more and more numerous and complex, as I feel
increasingly invaded by pleasure.” (Chateau 1981, p. 14).
The anxiety of the
natural poet
A similar feeling of
anxiety to that of the philosopher with the possible objective chaos of nature,
takes place in the subjective intimacy of the modern (and also contemporary)
artist, as already announced in the passage of the Holderlin’s Observations on the Oedipus:
In order to ensure
to poets, also among us, a citizen's existence, it would be nice to raise poetry, also among us, taking into
consideration the difference of times and conditions, to the mekhane of the Ancients. (Hölderlin
2008, p. 67)
Hölderlin’s quote takes
us to the problem immediately raised by the, so to speak, natural paradigm of art. This is the modern artist’s complaint that
remains in force in contemporary times. The motto that characterizes, according
to Arthur Danto among countless theorists and philosophers of contemporary art, the “everything is permitted”[9] only increased the disorientation and aggravated
the problem. The question that obsessed Hölderlin was “how to write Modern
poetry and drama once ‘the ancient rule’, precisely the Aristotelian one, was
over?” The poet lived in stormy times, when a big transition occurred from the Classical to the Romantic model. The
typical modern artist, this Shakespearean
phenomenon, began to question the validity of the rules (especially the
Aristotelians) of ancient tragedy. In the absence of artistic rules, poets
should get their new rules from nature. Faced only by a silent and unfathomable
nature, Hölderlin was desperately struggling with his production, searching for
this new technical and artistic principle to guide him in his work. There is an
undeniable tone of supplication in his words, an explicit demand of
“citizenship” for art. And what is “citizenship” but law or rule serving as a
guide for acting? What is that but the painful problem of the possibility of
modern art? What is this if not the recognition of the major difficulty of modern art? Translating into Kant’s
terms: the question about the conditions of the possibility of modern (and
contemporary) art.
It is, therefore, in
this rough context, in which we can hear, on one hand, Hölderlin’s complaint,
and on the other, Goethe’s enthusiastic exclamation about Shakespeare’s
characters, the highest expression of a Romantic Genius: “Nature! Nature!
Nothing is as nature as the men created by Shakespeare!” (Goethe 1983, p. 214). In this praise, we confirm the
bankruptcy of the old and imitative model and the consecration of the new paradigm
of the genius, which is the modern artist. If there is a model to follow, it
will no longer be found in the ancient classical rules; this “model”, if it
still exists, should be sought, from now on, in nature. As the third Critique states it is nature that will
provide the “rules” of modern art: “Genius is the inborn predisposition
of the mind (ingenium) through
which nature gives the rule to art.” (Kant KdU, AA, 05: 307; CPJ, p. 186;
author’s emphasis).
Would the principle of
the purposiveness of nature save the poet from chaos? From his anxious
disorientation? Probably not! We know how much nature’s answer is mute,
speechless and how much does it not reveal its ways of producing, which are so heterogeneous as casual and contingent, at
least for us. Facing Hölderlin’s desperate demand that nature should present,
show its ways of acting, that the
apple tree should teach how it makes its apples, we discover that the answer is
a unique and unfathomable silence! Maybe here, not even the concept of
purposiveness of nature will serve as a protective “umbrella” against chaos. The delusion and the madness[10]
that threaten the genius are deeper and more extreme than those of the
philosopher.
Maybe, appealing to the
famous fourth proposition of Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan Aim, geniuses are nothing but human beings for
whom the natural law, which guides the species, prevails over the human
law, which concerns the individual. When he argues that genius is a “talent or
natural gift” (Kant KdU, AA, 05: 307; CPJ, p. 186), it is possible that Kant
was only trying to distinguish those human beings for whom, for some equally
unfathomable reason (i.e., casual or contingent), the finality of the species
spoke louder than the individual’s. Because, as he states in the Proposition mentioned above: “nature knows better [than human
beings] what is good for his species” (Kant 2007, AA,
08: 21, p. 112). It is not hard to verify
this point and, agreeing with Kant, testify how much artists (if not the whole
lot of artists, at least a great majority) sacrifice their lives or
individual existences (and not voluntarily) in favor of their works, their art.
How much suffering and anguish have artists endured? Examples abound: from
Arthur Bispo do Rosário to Cézanne, from Amy Winehouse to Beethoven, from
Antonin Artaud to Lima Barreto, from Celan to Hölderlin, and the list could
grow indefinitely.
Would it be possible to
establish a parallel between the faculty of genius, this “favorite of nature” (Kant KdU, AA,
05: 318; CPJ, p. 196), which consists of a “faculty for apprehending the
rapidly passing play of the imagination and unifying it into a concept (which
for that very reason is original and at the same
time discloses a new rule, which could not have been deduced from any
antecedent principles or examples)” (Kant KdU, AA, 05: 317; CPJ, p. 195), and
“free favor”, through which Kant defined our (the spectator’s) satisfaction in
or pleasure with the beauty of the nature? (Kant KdU, AA, 05: 210; CPJ, p. 95).
Well, following the philosopher, we do not achieve this faculty through any
technique, knowledge, or study; and not even the one who received its gift and
benefit can take possession of it. As happened with Rousseau, according to
Kant, who not even understood what he “discovered”: “Rousseau made an effort to
sketch human nature. Every original is unintelligible: even the one who
discovers does not understand.” (Kant Logik
Phillippi apud Suzuki 1998, p.
47). Therefore, our difficulty to understand and
absorb what is original and unprecedented. Because it is a personal and
untransferable gift of nature, the one that benefits from it can only exercise
himself/herself in it, many times in a blind, even vegetal way, as
Edward Young suggests in the seminal text Conjectures on Original Composition, which we have already mentioned here.
As a last attempt to
deal with the distress of the artist, I would like to propose an interpretation
of Kant's theory of genius in the light of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s theory of
mimesis, as it still demands support
in the indisputably essential relationship between art and nature. This French
philosopher resorted, in a unique way, to an Aristotelian definition of mimesis that is not found in the Poetics, but in Physics II, and states that the tekhne
(the art and not the technique) completes what nature (physis) cannot achieve (telos). [11] This original reformulation of the concept of mimesis allowed Lacoue-Labarthe to
update Kant’s theory of genius, and to abandon the traditional art theory,
according to which art is a mere imitation
of nature, in favor of a much more interesting art theory based on a
reciprocity or complementarity relationship between art and nature. On this
re-reading, the Kantian genius stops mimicking the finished form given by nature,
and creates something that is beyond
nature or that nature is unable to do, for example: change the gender’s law.
Would this mean that the artist would stop imitating the form finished and
given by nature and would start creating his/her own work (of art) following
the same obscure principle through which nature also produces its work?
Invoking Spinozian terms, could we say that the artist (or the genius) would
stop representing (imitating) the “natured nature” to represent (would it still
be “to represent”?) the “naturing nature”.
Conclusion
If philosophically, the “issue of taste” and,
to some extent, that of “modern art” seems to be resolved, the artist’s
question, “how to do it?”, however, seems
to continue without response, remaining trapped in a typical double bind
reasoning struggle. Apparently, neither Kant’s principle of the purposiveness of nature nor Aristotle’s
assumption of a complementarity between art
and nature have provided an answer capable of definitely comforting the anxiety
of the poet. For the poet’s anxiety and despair, his/her natural predisposition
does not act on his spirits or faculties in a mechanical way as, for instance,
in the bees instinct to produce their honeycombs
regularly, according to the distinction that Kant made between an art work and a
natural product in the beginning of § 43 of CPJ, “On art in general”.[12]
Even if we could not reduce the nature of the 18th century to a mere
mechanism and that, from the “discovery” of the organism onwards, the concept
of nature had grown much more complex, the citizenship of the work of art had
to be searched for and conquered in the sphere of Freedom. Our only way out was
to appeal to a new concept of freedom. Perhaps a “freedom” like
the one that is at stake in the great and well-known definition of beauty of
Schiller, which states “Beauty is the
only possible expression of freedom in
phenomena” (Schiller 23rd Letter 1954; emphasis mine).[13] Of course, in this definition we must “read” Kant’s spirit and follow him beyond his letter, because here we
should be able to imagine a possibility of a positive presentation of freedom![14] Although we remember Kant’s
rigorous letter, which states “the idea of freedom is a negative presentation”. Anyway, the concept of freedom that
concerns us now has nothing to do with “free will” and much less with its moral
definition, of a law-abiding or of an acting accordingly to the rational will.
The “freedom” of the artist can only have an extra-moral sense, maybe a
“natural” sense, once the “action” of the genius does not depend on a decision
and, therefore, contrary to morality, is not a voluntary act.
Maybe the work of art
is the form of freedom, or even, maybe it results from the action,
work, technique, exercise of freedom ... All of these names,
be it said in passing, improper, could replace those old names of divine inspiration,
originality, and geniality. Maybe the best and most appropriate
concept of freedom for us is the one that Hannah Arendt, inspired by an unprecedented
Augustine, gave us: that of a beginning. And beginning can
translate exactly one of the formulas through which Kant defined genius, as the
one who is able to create “one other [second] nature [...] from the content
that the real one gives him” (Kant KdU, AA, 05: 314; CPJ, p. 192).[15] Form of freedom on the side of the creative artist, freedom of form on the
spectator’s side. In the latter’s case, the pleasure would come from an
experience of amplification of the world; the world’s time and space are
amplified by the work of art. Both in the nature that resembles art and in the
art that resembles nature we find this opening strength, this strength of a
beginning.
Returning to our first question: “Does a
genius produce his artworks like an apple tree its apples? Unfortunately, I
could only answer this question in a most ambiguous and insufficient way: “Yes and no!”
Yes, because the genius’s impulse to produce something as an artwork does not
at all depend on his/her will or his/her decision, it is not (as I’ve just said) a voluntary or rational act. Surely, this initial
impetus is a natural unconscious instinct,
which leads us to claim a true
resemblance between the apple tree and our genius. Similar to Angelus
Silesius’s rose[16] (Die Rose ist ohne Warum/ The rose is
without why), the artist does not control that natural requirement and has no rational intention. In Kant’s terms
this natural instinct could be called “the faculty for the presentation of
aesthetic ideas” (Kant KdU, AA: 05:
314; CPJ, p. 192).
Nevertheless, at the same time, we are forced
to answer “No”, because the freedom
of an apple tree is very limited, as
every Kantian present here knows. As they are also aware that it is only
through a certain subreption[17] that we can speak of a “natural freedom”, even if it is exactly
what pleases the Kantian man/woman of
taste, when he/she perceives the beautiful (or the apparently free) objects (works?) of nature. We love natural beauty
as if it were free! Anyway, the apple tree’s freedom does not allow it to produce oranges instead of apples.
Unlike the artist’s freedom, he/she has the
right or even the duty, as prescribed in Aristotle’s formula, to “complete what
nature (physis) cannot bring to a
finish”. But also, as Schiller taught us, by stating that genius, “with unrestrained freedom”, could “join
together what nature sundered, as soon as he can think of it together, and
sunder what Nature combined, as soon as he can separate it in his intellect”
(Schiller 26th Letter 1954; emphasis mine). To designate this unlimited freedom of genius we appeal to names such as
“originality”, “talent”, “endowment”, “spirit”.
But perhaps the best and most appropriate name for this freedom is the
one given by Hannah Arendt, inspired by an unexpected
Augustine: of a beginning. And a beginning, for her, means merely “the birth of each man/woman”. I quote this beautiful passage of Arendt:
We find in
Augustine not only the discussion of freedom as liberum arbitrium, though this discussion became decisive for the
tradition, but also an entirely differently conceived notion which characteristically
appears in [...] the City of God,
[...] Freedom is conceived there, not as an inner human disposition, but as a
character (sic) of human existence in the world. Man does not possess freedom
so much as he, or better his coming into the world, is equated with the
appearance of freedom in the universe;
man is free because he is a beginning
[...] In the birth of each man this initial beginning is re-affirmed [...]
Because he is a beginning man can
begin; to be human and to be free are one
and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the
faculty of the beginning: freedom. (Arendt 2000, p. 457)
To conclude, I would like to go back to Paul
Celan’s epigraph in an attempt to decipher its content from this very
suggestive notion of freedom. If, according to Arendt, by his/her birth, every human being means a beginning, the freedom of each one is to be found in
his/her only uniqueness, in the
affirmation of each singular existence, which is always and involuntarily an
expansion of the world. The genius, understood in the light of this idea of
“beginning”, will no longer be an exceptional subjectivity, or even an
“exceptional intersubjectivity” (Deleuze 1963, pp. 131-132), as once defined by
Deleuze. Could I ambitiously conclude that the genius has been turned into a
kind of archetype of transcendental
subjectivity? A subjectivity that, like any other (even before the
universal access to reason, morality etc.), is born and “comes to the world”,
as a living creature, governed by an indeterminate and inexplicable genetic
principle whose main act would consist of nothing more, as life itself, than
wanting to surpass oneself. [18] Maybe genius is nothing more than someone who took his/her
“uniqueness”, his/her ability to “begin” (as Arendt would say) to his/her
ultimate limits. Finally, paraphrasing Paul Celan: someone who took his
existence into one’s innermost narrowness, and set oneself free.
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