“UNE PROMESSE DE BONHEUR”

This entry touches upon Stendhal’s incomparable gem, caught here in Nietzsche’s fine net with such brilliance as to make him worthy of equal co-ownership. The following passage is from Genealogy 3:6:

“Schopenhauer used the Kantian version of the aesthetic problem, although he did not view it with Kantian eyes. Kant thought he was honoring art, when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized those, which establish the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universality. This is not a place to inquire if it was a mistake; all I wish to stress is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of seeing the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist, the creator, considered art and the beautiful purely from the point of view of the spectator, and unconsciously introduced spectator into the concept beautiful. It would not have been so bad had the spectator been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty, namely, as a great personal fact and experience. But I fear, the reverse has always been the case, so they have offered us definitions in which a lack of experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error. ‘That is beautiful,’ proclaims Kant, ‘which gives us pleasure without interest.’ Without interest! Compare this with the definition framed by a genuine spectator and artist Stendhal, who once called the beautiful ‘une promesse de bonheur.’ He rejects the one point which Kant has stressed: le desinteressement. Who is right? If our aestheticians rule in Kant’s favor that under the spell of beauty one can even view undraped female statues without interest, one may laugh a little at their expense. The experiences of artists are more interested, and Pygmalion was not necessarily an unaesthetic man.”

Impersonality and universality, these Kantian predicates of knowledge will be interesting to explore, even though epistemology is not exactly the subject of my book. My point, however, is that Kant wishes to create a general theory here, a noli facere from my perspective, and his ‘fat worm of error,’ in Nietzsche’s superb metaphor, may not only eat into his aesthetic competence, which may have been minimal all along, but also into his great warhorse knowledge. My own theory of knowledge treats the subject of impersonality with a much greater caution. And what about the subjectivity vs. objectivity of knowledge? How does knowledge stand in the social environment vis-à-vis, say, opinion? What about creation vs. communication, the artist and the spectator problem, once again, with as little success as in matters aesthetic. Because what interests me the most in this, is the problem of the creation and the communication of knowledge. How can created knowledge be impersonal? Here is a very deep and subtle line of thinking; this raw and sketchy scratching of the surface does not do it justice. Later I must elaborate on this, namely, on the parallel of epistemology and aesthetics, and with regard to my admiration for the George Bernard Shaw quip about only fiction being true. Applied to Kant’s definition, how about the universality of fiction? And, of course, when the most personal creation of the artist becomes art, does it also become impersonal?

Incidentally, in line with George Berkeley’s subjective thinking, epitomized in the famous nonsense to the effect that there can be no sound without someone to hear it, I believe in the vital connection between the creator and the spectator, which contradicts both Kant and Nietzsche, as it introduces both the aesthetic interest and the spectator’s active role in the artist’s creation. Curiously, I very much prefer live performances or taped live performances to studio recordings, as the latter exclude the spectator, and in my subjective aesthetic view, impoverish the performance and the original work of art itself…

I can go on and on endlessly here, but here is just one more parting thought, before I stop: if, paraphrasing Nietzsche slightly, only the history-maker can have the authority to communicate history, how about that only the creator of knowledge can have the authority to communicate it? And I do not mean God; I mean exactly what I say, a true scholar, a teacher, a statesman… Getting back to my beloved geometry analogy, what is knowledge but a hypothesis, an experience, an opinion. How can knowledge become impersonal in the process of communication? Paraphrasing Dèscartes’ appeal to his followers: “Do not impersonalize my personal knowledge by appropriation, on the strength of its authority; create and develop your own very personal knowledge, where mine is just a stepping stone, the manure for the very personal plant to grow.”

I should definitely develop my own personal theory of knowledge, protected from the worst possible virus: of propaganda and indoctrination. Unless we change the very definition of knowledge, unless we treat it in a very special, thoughtful way, it will become, at best, meaningless and worthless to us and, at worst, it will destroy our thinking capacity altogether.