بخش ۱: میل به خلاقیت و رشد شخصیت
Chapter One
CREATIVE URGE AND PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
Socrates appears before us as one of those great plastic figures, all of a piece, such as we are accustomed to see at his period —a complete, classical work of art, which has risen of itself to that height. These figures are not made; they form themselves completely into what
they are; they become that which they will to be, and to that they remain true. Thus Socrates, by his art and power of conscious will, formed himself for his own character and his life’s task.
HEGEL
Since I originally approached the art-problem from the psychological side, and wish now, too, to study it/in relation to the development of personality, the historical method of presentation, which is usual in art-histories, is barred. Yet even for the psychological approach it is not the one side or the other that matters, but the fundamental dualism which appears as the basis of all cultural development in man. For if this dualism is as fundamental as we have assumed, it must make itself evident in the various stages of artistic creation as well as in the growth of personality, and will very likely reveal certain essential relations between the two. This, however, only becomes possible by taking a genetic view of the significances of the various ideologies from which both the style of a period and artistic creativeness in it are born. This comparative method, which we shall frequently adopt in all parts of this work, seeks, however, not so much to establish similarities or dependences as to establish a concatenation of meaning extending from the prehistoric cave-man to the individualistic artisttype of today with his “ neurotic” psychology. If such a dualism really does exist in human nature, its existence must be just as demonstrable psychologically in the modern artist as it has been shown esthetically in the history of style or ethnically in the history of culture. We use psychology, therefore, not as an exclusive principle of elucidation, but as an auxiliary that has been provided for us by the study of the modern artist type (not by his art); just as we use primitive art in order to understand the collective ideologies which condition creativity, and Oriental and Classical art in order to discover its intellectual interpretation. Our account may thus put readers off —the more that we ourselves shall often have to wrestle with certain cultural phenomena before we can apply the understanding thus won to the study of art. Fortunately we have at least this much start, that a recent discovery has taken us up to the threshold of our own problems. I refer to the revolution in the understanding of artistic creativity which was set going by the Viennese art-historian Aiois Riegl, and which since its first appearance in his Stilfragen (1893) has dominated all modern studies of art. Riegl posed it as a principle which illuminates the artistic creation of every age, that the peculiarities of style at various epochs are not to be explained by defective ability, but are only intelligible as the expression of a particular will to form. This view may seem self-evident to the psychologist, but it was unattainable either by psychology proper or by a psychologizing 2sthetic. It could only come from viewing style, as Riegl does, as a manifestation of collective ideology. Unfortunately Riegl only lived long enough to illustrate his subtle and far-reaching theory in a single specialized department, that of Late Roman arts and crafts." But the fact that so historically limited and artistically subordinate a domain should have given room for this form of description and presentation shows the brilliant achievement of Riegl in all its greatness. Rejecting the traditional mode of regarding art as a matter of objects and iconography, and understanding it as “ form and colour in surface and in space,” he ascribed to these crafts, even to the ornamentation prevailing in them, the same significance as vessels of the will to form as he did to sculpture, painting, and architecture — thus opening a wholly new chapter in art-history as well as giving a wholly new method of approach.
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1 Die spatromische Kunstindustrie, nach den Funden in Osterreich-Ungarn, im Zusammenhange mit der Gesamtentwicklung der bildenden Ksinste bei den Mittelmeervolkern (Vienna, 1901).
When we remember what an important part was played in prehistory by this form of art, hitherto a neglected stepchild, we may well admit that without Riegl’s magnificent achievement the essence of primitive ornament and thus of abstract art in general would have remained unintelligible. Of course further work was necessary in order to give Riegl’s idea the broad historical and esthetic foundation which was far beyond the attainment of a single — and all too short — life. It is therefore comprehensible that Riegl himself should not have been able to free himself entirely from the shackles of his own tradition and the esthetic views of his age, and that in the application of his ideas he was restricted by academic prejudice. Though his account of the Classical art as an antithesis to Late Roman remains a permanent achievement of an almost spiritual attitude to art, he nevertheless succumbed to historicism in summarily declaring everything “Late Roman” which showed the same criteria of style, without thinking of the possibility of a psychological content in this conception. On the other hand he took the “ denaturalization of the art-form,” as it developed from the Classical to the decadent Late Roman civilization, as a law inherent in all artistic development, again without considering the possibilities of various other conjunctures influencing it. As Scheltema — who fully appreciates Riegl’s main achievement — has shown, there are in the North similar abstract forms which have developed, not from any desiccation of natural forms, but in the reverse direction. The similarity of forms is explained by the similarity of the will, but this was not “Late Roman” in the North, nor “ Nordic ” in the South, but in both cases resulted from a collective ideology which characterized in the South the end, and in the North the beginning, of the development of a culture. Thus, though this absolute art-will of Riegl remains the basis of all treatment of art, yet obviously a great deal, if not everything, depends on which manifestations of the culture as a whole we take for the study of the art-will of this particular period. Riegl did so on the craft-art, and thus at any rate remained within the sphere of art himself, which has obvious advantages, but (as we have seen from his mistakes) disadvantages as well. Other students also have discussed the collective ideology of particular periods, which decides its will to form also, in terms of its religious or philosophical tendencies, in order later to show these as taking effect in the art-forms. All these works of the Riegl school, which go more or less beyond their master’s, are extremely valuable contributions to a new view of art, and will come to be regarded as such. But they all suffer from a certain one-sidedness, which is the more intelligible that the idea of Riegl’s art-will, however collectively we may take it, yet contains in its very name a strong psychological element which absolutely demands the inclusion of the personality of the creative artist. Certainly we do not mean a psychological interpretation of the laws of style, by which their importance would be reduced to mere psychologizing; but we can only hope for a real step forward in our understanding of art if we can settle more definitely the part played by the creative individual in the collective work and then put the result into the great equation of all the factors which have any bearing, direct or indirect, on the creation of the art-forms. Of course, for such an undertaking, which tackles the problem of art primarily from the psychological end, a different starting-point is required from that which is called for in a study of art from the stylistic or cultural-historical angle. Even if by art we understand, not the part played by the creator in the psychological sense, but the product, the work, or even the content of all art — at least for the particular period — we can for the time being sum up the relation of the artist to his art as follows: the artist, as a definite creative individual, uses the art-form that he finds ready to his hand in order to express a something personal; this personal must therefore be somehow connected with the prevailing artistic or cultural ideology, since otherwise he could not make use of them, but it must also differ, since otherwise he would not need to use them in order to produce something of his own. While this aspect brings us again to the dualism in the artist, there is, as we know already, a similar dualism at the bottom of the cultural ideology, as one of the manifestations of which the style of the age must be regarded. But the general ideology of the culture, which determines its religion, morals, and society as well as its art, is again only the expression of the human types of the age, and of this the artist and the creative personality generally are the most definite crystallization. The circular argument here is only apparent, for we may not disregard the creative process, which presents itself as an essential factor between the ideology of the art, the style, and the creative personality, the artist. We must admit, however, that we know almost nothing of this process in the artist, since here, more than anywhere, the hopes held out by modern psychology have proved delusive. We shall quote later the authors who have been honest enough to admit the failure of scientific psychology to explain artistic creativity; but we would say at once here that this fact has been contributory to our own attempt to understand the problem of the artist purely in relation to that of art —the artist representing only one, the individual factor, while we have to regard art as the collective expression of their contemporary cultural ideology. The artist, as it were, takes not only his canvas, his colours, or his model in order to paint, but also the art that is given him formally, technically, and ideologically, within his own culture; this probably emerges most clearly in the case of the poet, whose material is drawn from the cultural possessions already circulating and is not dead matter, as is that used by the plastic arts. In any case we can say of all artistic creation that the artist not only creates his art, but also uses art in order to create. Withal, there remains still (quite apart from the cultural problem of the origin of style) the purely psychological problem as to what is the type, the individual, that for the creative expression of its personality takes this or that art-ideology in particular, what are the motives and processes which transform a creative impulse into art-achievements of high esthetic value. For the solution of this fundamental psychological question we have naturally to keep to the present, where we have a definite artistic type before us as a living phenomenon, and not merely his historical biography and completed work. But the prevalent psychology has already failed in the task of finding a satisfactory explanation for the birth of an individual work, even when the artist is historically known and his artistic personality has been studied biographically — where in fact the stages of growth can still be traced. Still less, then, is it likely that it could achieve an understanding of primitive collective art or the amazing achievements of the psychologically crude stone-age man. If any psychology is to explain this at all adequately, it will in any case have to be a new one and one that, while taking its bearings by primitive art, avoids, on the one hand, the predication of our own feelings in it and, on the other, the interpretation of our own zsthetic sensibility by reference to it. The merit of developing Riegl’s ideas to their logical issue and placing the esthetic understanding of alien styles on a new basis goes in particular to a historian, Wilhelm Worringer; and his fundamental work: Abstraktion und Einfihlung, ein Beitrag zur Stilspsychologie (Munich, 1908; quoted according to the tenth edition, 1921), is doubly important for us as a starting-point because it also works out the psychological core of Riegl’s attitude, at least as far as is necessary and possible in relation to the zxsthetic problem. And if Worringer, as I should like to remark at once, was limited in his purely psychological penetration of the problem by the natural boundaries of his own interests, he did take esthetic to the very verge beyond which it must give place to psychology. For myself I became acquainted with Worringer’s ideas when I had already settled my own interpretation of the problem of art; still I owe him many valuable suggestions, though yet again I should have been unable to use these had I not of myself gone beyond the traditional view of esthetic, which Worringer so splendidly criticizes and so fruitfully completes. The idea of the will to form, when I came across it in the form in which Riegl first expounded it and Worringer extended it, sounded to me at once like something familiar. Not only had I long ago come to the conclusion from my analysis of creative artists that their productivity and the varying quality of their work were not a matter of capacity; but I had got beyond the individual psychology in my ideas about the creative personality and of the determining ideology, before I returned to the problem of art. For me the problem of willing, in a philosophical sense of the word, had come to be the central problem of the whole question of personality, even of all psychology, and it only remained to apply it to the particular case of the creative artist. Riegl’s revolutionary treatment of art, in the zsthetic and psychological form in which Worringer formulated it, gave me the courage to attempt an understanding of the specific ideology of the artist — that is, his style—in a similar sense to that which my psychology of the will had opened up in dealing with other ideologies. The general principles and interpretation which are valid for the growth and meaning of general ideologies must be applicable to the ideology of art, which we had recognized the peculiarities of style to be. Further, the zsthetic laws deduced from the history of style must either coincide to a considerable extent with, or at least be somehow related to, both the significance of the whole cultural ideology and the manifestations of the creative personality. There was one point in particular in Worringer’s work which seemed to me to confirm my own notions of the origin and significance of the general cultural ideology for the problem of artistic creation. In my Seelenglaube und Psychologie I had, as mentioned above, sought to establish as the primary ideology the belief in immortality which seemed to express itself in artistic creation in the same ways as in religion and social institutions. The particular way in which this showed itself in style, however, remained, for the time being, beyond my grasp, until I had come to know Riegl’s views of style and Worringer’s zsthetic. For Riegl, it is true, who deals particularly with collective phenomena, the art-will is purely instinctive; according to the materialistic conception of Verworn, it is “ physioplastic ”; while for Worringer, who interprets it more philosophically, it is an almost “cosmic something” arising spontaneously from the abstract linear art which corresponds to crystalline form. So far, therefore, it has nothing to do with the individual will of the conscious artistic personality, though we might regard it as being in a Schopenhauerian sense its precursor. But the matter is not quite so simple that we could assume this instinctive art-impulse to have merely become individually conscious; for increasing individualization alters the whole cultural ideology and therefore art with it; and consequently abstract linear ornament is not now created consciously by the individual will of the artists as heretofore instinctively by the primitive impulse to abstraction, but replaced by new forms of expression. For with this individualization the general art-form changes in its essence (some authorities think, in the direction of naturalism), but the creative personality also becomes other than it was. The question: How did the individual artist-type grow up at all in our Western culture if the artistic creation of earlier men and times was abstract and collective? is almost identical with the problem of the development of individuality and personality itself. But this is not a problem that can be solved by psychology alone; rather we may hope for a deeper knowledge of the development of personality from a better understanding of the development of art. As I have shown elsewhere, the immortality-belief in its various forms and cultural variations has certainly participated in it; and it is here, as already remarked, that I find the decisive point of contact with Worringer’s esthetic to which we may relate our study.
Its merit seems to me to be that it has shown this individual urge to eternalization of the personality, which motivates artistic production, to be a principle inherent in the art-form itself, in fact its essence. He says of primitive and also of Oriental cultures, whose style he is discussing: “ The kind of satisfaction which they looked to obtain from art was not, as in Western art, that of sinking themselves in the external world, and finding enjoyment in it, but that of depriving the individual thing in the external world of its arbitrary and apparently haphazard character; that is to immortalize the object in giving it an abstract form and so finding a resting-place in the flight of phenomena. Their strongest impulse was to bring it close to its absolute value ” (op. cit., p. 21). If, with this “instinctive urge to abstraction” as it appears very early in art, we compare the growth of other collective ideologies at a primitive level, we find to our surprise that, correspondingly, the other ideologies also become the more abstract the further we pursue them backwards. The most important as well as the best-authenticated instance of this is the development of religion, as I have tried to expound it in Seelenglaube und Psychologie. Primitive religion, as a belief in souls (as we know it), is originally so abstract that it has been called irreligious by comparison with higher religions, in which the gods have already assumed concrete form.
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1 We cannot at present enter upon the criticism of Worringer’s exaggeration of his own principle of elucidation which in essence he seeks to exemplify by reference to the Gothic style. He appears therein to have succumbed to the same compulsion as Riegl, in that he calls everything “‘Gothic”’ that comes within the style-criteria of his own “‘Gothic’’ and thus reaches a ‘‘universal Gothic,’’ which perhaps ought to be defined in terms of personality rather than in those of zsthetics.
But from a study of these abstract preliminary stages of religion, which are a matter of spirits and demons, we see also that the urge for abstraction in primitives is rooted in the soulbelief that, in the intellectualized form of the East, culminates in the absolute abstract of the soul. Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the abstractest form of art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most definite naturalism in art is abstract when compared with nature. If primitive art, then, is in its origins a concreted representation of an abstract idea of the soul and is at the same time the nucleus of what becomes at a later stage the figuration of God, we cannot possibly understand the change and growth of art-forms without following the change of the idea of the soul in human history. Here we may state, more definitely than we have as yet, that the main task of this book is to expound the development and change in meaning of art-forms from similar changes in the idea of the soul, which decides the development of personality, even as it is itself influenced thereby. Though we have later to give an account of the relation between the prevailing style in art and the contemporary belief in the soul, we can even now see how religion has always drawn art along in its wake from the earliest times to the present day. The urge for abstraction, which owed its origin to a belief in immortality and created the notion of the soul, created also the art which served the same ends, but led beyond the purely abstract to the objectivizing and concretizing of the prevailing idea of the soul. Everything produced objectively in any period by the contemporary idea of the soul was beautiful, and the esthetic history of the idea of the beautiful is probably no more than a reflection of the changes in the idea of the soul under the influence of increasing knowledge. The most illuminating demonstration that the source of the beautyideal lies in the contemporary ideal of the soul is found in the religious art of all times and peoples, but most conspicuously in the higher cultures, where the already unified idea of the soul was ideally embodied in the forms of their gods. Thus Anubis with his animal head was as much an ideal of beauty for the Egyptians as was Zeus with a leonine mane for the Greeks, or the tortured and martyred body of Jesus for the Christians. The concept of the beautiful, which inspires the works of art of a period, is derived, not from the abstract significance of the soul-concept (in the way in which, for instance, the Romantics spoke of the “ beautiful soul”), but from its concretization. That is, the religious art portrayed the idea of the soul in concrete form for the men of the time, in the shape of gods, and so, psychologically speaking, proved their existence. It is precisely the concreteness of art as compared with the idea of the soul that makes it convincing; for it creates something visible and permanent in contrast to something which was merely thought or felt, which was at first handed down from one generation to another only by means of mystic tradition and was only fixed in literature of religious form at a very late stage. This close association, in fact fundamental identity, of art
and religion, each of which strives in its own way to make the absolute eternal and the eternal absolute, can be already seen at the most primitive stages of religious development, where there are as yet neither representations of gods nor copies of nature. Almost all students of the art of primitive peoples get the unanimous impression that, as the first historian of primitive art, Franz Kugler, put it as early as 1842, “ the intention of primitive art was far less towards the imitation of nature than towards the representation of particular ideas.” More than fifty years later so great an authority as Leo Frobenius says the same of African art: “ We cannot say that there was any direct extrovert effort at the attainment of some perfection of form.’ All the objects of art come only out of the need to give plastic expression to ideas.” We shall show later in detail how almost all these “ ideas” turn more or less on the idea of the soul, which itself arises from the problem of death. Here we need only note that the redeeming power of art, that which entitles it to be regarded esthetically as beautiful, resides in the way in which it lends concrete existence to abstract ideas of the soul. Art, then —at least in its beginning — was not the satisfaction of the desire of the individual artist to attain immortality for himself in his work, but the confirmation of the collective immortality-idea in the work itself as a picture of the soul.
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1 Following Ernst Vatter: Die religiése Plastik der Naturvilker (Frankfurt, 1926). Vatter shows that the plastic of primitive peoples is unintelligible unless it is regarded as an expression of religious ideas.
Thus primitive art must be, like the primitive idea of the soul, collective in order to achieve its aim, the continuation of the individual existence in the species. And it follows, too, that primitive art must be abstract in order to reproduce this abstract idea of the soul as faithfully as may be. Worringer was certainly right in denying that art began with the imitation of nature, or even had this object; but it was imitation all the same, though in a wider sense. The most definite representation possible of an idea zs imitation, in the ideoplastic sense; and we might explain this very character of abstraction of primitive art by the fact that it faithfully represents an idea which is itself abstract. That is, the soul was depicted as abstractly as possible, in order that it might be like this abstract, and the further the divinizing of the soul in different personifications proceeded, the more concrete, or, as we should say, naturalistic, art became. If in this wise the obstinately defended theory of imitation (though not strictly in the sense of imitation of nature) is found to have a deeper significance in the soul, we may use the second disputed principle of the old esthetic also to support our new structure. The accusation of aimlessness made against an art which exists only for beauty’s sake cannot be sustained, either in respect of primitive art or in respect of the individual creative dynamism of the modern artist. Art unquestionably has an end, probably even serves a variety of ends — but the ends are not concrete and practical, they are abstract and spiritual. Primitive art above all has obviously some object, as Vatter points out (op. cit., p. 103), as deterrent, magic, charm; and it obtains it by making the supernatural ideology of primitive men tangible and comprehensible. In this is its value, its function, and hence comes the satisfaction it provides, which at later stages of zxsthetic appreciation is deduced from the idea of beauty —an idea which originally, and even in Greek philosophy, was coincident with the idea of the good, the satisfying, and the useful. The relations of art and religion, though so often discussed, would thus seem to call for a new treatment from our point of view; which we cannot give here, although in the course of a discussion centred on the development of personality we may be able to throw some light on hitherto unsuspected linkages. There is no doubt that even in the historical times of art religion used it as a means to represent, in objective and concrete form, the contemporary idea of the soul; but not, so to say, “ illustratively,” as if mankind were too immature to form abstract ideas of the soul. It Aad to be made concrete, pictorial, and real, so as to prove its existence, and had to be presented in matter to demonstrate its indestructibility. Not only, therefore, have we in the art-form (style) the expression of a will that varies from time to time under the influence of changes in the soul-idea, but the same principle holds even of the content of art — so far as it is religious — and, indeed, it is religious from the start, if we may give this name to the supersensible, even where it has not condensed into the idea of a god. It is therefore not a defective faculty of abstraction which drives to the concretization of the soul and its pictorial representation in the god, but the will to objectify it and thus to impart to it existence and, what is more, eternity. Here we come to the interesting question to what extent the development of primitive art and its frank use by religion has itself contributed to the formation of a religion itself, and how far it was essential to it; in other words, whether the transition from animism to religion (that is, from the belief in the soul to the belief in God) was only possible through art, because in art lay the only mode of exhibiting the soul in objective form and giving personality to God.’
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1 We shall refer later to the apparent exception of the Jewish people, which condemned every representation of Deity as idolatrous, and consequently produced no art.
It seems certain that art was at one time more abstract, since its purpose was to give existence to the non-existent by the truest possible copying. In the course of development it merely became more concrete, a destiny which it shares with all other ideologies, as I have shown elsewhere, and with the development of human institutions out of these ideologies. Its culmination came in the individual artcreation of the Classical style as we have it in Greek work. There man himself — in his own full naturalness, yet in idealized beauty too— had become the vehicle of an immortal soul and was not, like the Oriental gods, a mere representative of the belief in the soul. In this sense not only did the development of the soul begin with art, but the process of humanization of the soul completed itself in art and not in religion. It was art, by its embodiment of man in lasting material, that finally gave him the courage to reassume the soul which, because of the transitoriness of its bodily form, he had abstracted into an absolute idea of the soul. From a point of view such as this, art, though born from the same spirit as religion, appears not only as outlasting it, but actually as fulfilling it. If religion, as is hardly disputable, could only develop beyond soul-belief by the help of art, and if, moreover, as I would believe, the humanization of the soul, which implies the completion of religion, is accomplished by art, religion would almost sink to a transition stage of art. This is, of course, a matter of attitude — but it does seem certain that the development of art has always striven beyond religion, and that its highest individual achievements lie outside purely religious art, until in modern times it completely emancipates itself from that influence and even takes its place. But this tendency towards independence corresponds to an irreligiosity (or even an anti-religiosity) which is inherent and essential in all artistic creation, and which we must admit, in spite of its logically contradicting our own discussion, unless we are to sacrifice a decisive, and perhaps the most important, side of the creative impulse to a one-sided theory. Personal creativity is anti-religious in the sense that it is always subservient to the individual desire for immortality in the creative personality and not to the collective glorification of the creator of the world. The individual artist of course uses collective forms, among which the religious, in the widest sense, take first place, so as to overcome his personal dualism by a social compensation. But at the same time he tries to save his individuality from the collective mass by giving his work the stamp of his own personality. Hence it is quite rightly that Rudolf Kautzsch, in his brief but valuable paper Die bildende Kunst und das Jenseits (Jena, 1905), emphasizes the fact that on one side religion is a handicap on art; and we too have seen in our survey of prevalent theories of art that the periods of strong development of personality, or of constructive individualism like that predicated of the superman, have always been among the highest periods of artistic productivity. Among these periods of floraison we have mentioned the prehistoric art of self-dependent palzolithic man, Classical Greek art, and the Renaissance. All these periods, which either are individualistic or are carried along by a definite cult of personality, show —in contrast to the abstract and rigid style of Egyptian, Christian, and to a certain extent even Gothic art —a vivid naturalism which 1s certainly no imitation of nature, but rather an organic vitalization of fossilizing art-forms. We have indicated in the Introduction the psychical significance of this antithesis and how it may be psychologically understood. Religion is the collective ideology par excellence, which can only spring from a powerful group-need and mass-consciousness, which itself springs from the need of the individual for dependence and implies his subjection to higher forces. Art also, which sprang originally from self-feeling, is then subordinated to religion, just as the creative personality is subordinated to the creator. Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual. The conflict between art and religion, which we can so easily trace in the individual artist, is thus ultimately a conflict between individuality and collectivity, the dualistic struggle within the creative artist of the two impulses of his own self. In this sense there is a reciprocal dependence between art and religion, but, concurrent with it from the outset, an opposition between them. For, on the one hand, the artist has need of religion so as to make his own impulse towards immortality collective, while religion needs the artist in order to make concrete its abstract notion of the soul; on the other hand, the artist seeks to eternalize his individuality apart from the collective ideologies, while religion would deny the individual in favour of the community. Thus though art is in the last resort anti-collectivist — in spite of the fact that it makes use of the various communal ideologies, especially of contemporary religion and the style dependent on. it — it yet needs these collective ideologies, even if only to overcome them from time to time by the force of personality. This fact may perhaps explain why the present age, with its strong individualism, has failed to produce any great art like other periods marked by strong personality and consequent alienation from religion. These other periods had strength in their religious and antireligious currents, as well as other powerful collective ideologies, which our present-day society in its disruption lacks. Even if nowadays, with the decay of religious faith, the artist is immeasurably overvalued, this seems only a last effort at reestablishing a similarly decaying cult of the personality, of which we are just as incapable as we are of collective faith. True, there was, probably, a time when the artist did play the part of the religious hero on earth, being the creative representative of a humanized god: the time, that is, when there arose content and concept of genius wherein dwelt the divine spark, the immortal soul. But if we want to understand the personality of the creative artist, we must turn for a while to the history of this idea of genius; for this idea has not always existed, though there were geniuses before it. The necessity for the birth of this idea, and its elaboration into a cult of personality, whose last stages only are known to us, seem to me to have arisen from the incessant conflict with, and final conquest of, these collective ideologies by a new type of humanity, which appeared first in Greece, but had to be reborn for western Europe in Italy. For Greece had, in spite of its extraordinary personality-culture, a strong national idea which defined the type, while in the Renaissance a new European personal consciousness arose which towered above religious and national boundaries and established a world-reign of humanism which could vie with collective Christianity. The notion of genius as it grew up between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century was created by the artist as a new ideology, and henceforth it was as much a means towards production as had previously been the abstract idea of style derived from the collective belief in the soul. But this new “ religion of genius,” as Zilsel calls it," centred on a type and no longer on a collectivity; it was indeed individual and even psychological, in its emphasis, based wholly on the artist and no longer on art, on style. At the Renaissance, out of which this genius was born, the Middle Ages were freed from the collective spirit of Christianity and fought through once more to personality. Now for the first time there appears the creative artist of the modern age, whose epigoni today produce their art without possessing either the collective ideology of earlier ages or the individual religion of genius which has produced the greatest of our great artists, a Michelangelo, a Shakspere, a Rembrandt, a Goethe. Such men as these, being tied to their age, stand in sharp opposition to a collective art such as had still ruled in the Gothic. They are alone and unique — in spite of their countless imitators — for they are individual; and not only in their personality and the works born from it, but their whole ideology is individual, since it springs from the notion of genius and is only possible through it. These men who are for us the representatives of the type “ genius” embody the same process and achievement, on earth and individually, which in its religious form we saw beginning with the image of God.
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1 Edgar Zilsel: Die Geniereligion; ein hritischer Versuch aber das moderne Personlichkettsideal (Leipzig, 1918). See also, in connexion with what follows, the older work of Jacob Cahan: Zur Kritik des Geniebegriffs (diss., Berne, 191 I).
The idea of genius is, in its mythical origin, a representation of the immortal soul, that part of the personality which can beget (gignere) what is immortal, be it a child or a work. The idea of the “Genius” comes originally from early Roman times, when it means the personal protecting spirit, of man, as opposed to woman, where it is called “Juno” and corresponds to the Egyptian “Ka” and Greek “daimon.” Without discussing this notion of a psychical double of man, which is represented in different forms in the different doctrines of the soul, let us note here that the Roman Genius, in keeping with the cultural idea of Rome which was built up on the right of the father, acquired the literal meaning of “ begetter.” But Otto * is right in maintaining that the current explanation of Genius as a deified incarnation of masculine reproductive power does not fully explain the idea. Thus, Genius is also the god of one’s birthday — and Otto concluded that the idea contains, as well as the notion of begetting, that of the descent also and indeed that of the continuity of all life. It is hard to see why philologists find this view so difficult, since it is precisely the stage of father-right that is characterized by the collectivizing of the personal reproductive impulse. And so the Roman idea of Genius contains from the beginning, in addition to the individual urge to reproduction, a collective element which points beyond the individual, in a way that is not true of the Egyptian Ka and the Greek daimon, both of which are purely personal.’ For this reason it was specially fitted to become a social conception of genius that should include both individual and collective elements. Still the artist’s concept of genius is more personal than collective and thus needs a new ideology. This could no longer be a personal peculiarity of style deduced from a collective idea of the soul, but had to become an esthetic of feeling dependent on consciousness of personality.
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1 W. Otto: Die Manen oder von den Urformen des Totenglaubens (Berlin, 1923).
2E. Bickel shows brilliantly CHomerischer Seelenglaube: geschichtliche Grundzsige menschlicher Seelenvorstellungen; Berlin, 1925) how all these various soul ideas eventually, in the late period of Greece, passed into the new concept of psyche, which prepared the way for the Christian idea of the soul.
Thus the eighteenth century, which was completely sterile of any collective art and was distinguished only by a few dominant artistic individualities, produced an esthetic as abstracted from the art-products of earlier ages. This was not, however, the universally valid “science of art” that it was for so long supposed to be, but was itself a new ideology of art, which was to replace the now decadent religious collective ideology by a psychological artistic ideology corresponding to the new genius-type. Aisthetic is thus the psychological ideology of art, born from the notion of the genius-type and not from the collective — and religious — notion of style. Our Classicist esthetic in fact directs its gaze much more to the individual art-product of Classical artists, while the abstract style of which Worringer speaks appears much more as a collective product. When Worringer explains the incongruence of art-history and esthetic by the fact that our esthetic is nothing more than a psychology of the Classical way of feeling art, he is certainly right; but there will probably always be a similar incongruence between every ideology and its concretization, as indeed there actually is between our esthetic and the corresponding intuitive (eznfihlende) art, as also between the religious art of Egypt and medieval Christianity and the works respectively produced by them. In addition to this natural divergence between an ideology and its concretization, there is in artistic creation yet another decisive factor which zsthetic would have to neglect entirely if it sought to make its laws absolute, and this is the personality of the artist, with his own system of ideology, which perhaps runs largely parallel with the general, but by no means coincides with it. These problems of the boundaries between psychology and esthetics we will postpone till a later chapter; here we need only state that even Worringer underestimates the influence of the creative personality when he is dealing with art- and style-forms from the standpoint of their esthetic effects, however he may emphasize the importance of abstract art as well as intuitive.
True, in a summing-up waich is perhaps the culminating point of his magnificent argument, Worringer says that the psychological victory over this esthetic dualism is found in the demand for self-renunciation which lies at the root of all esthetic experience and which is achieved now by intuition (Einfihlung), now by abstraction. But it is just these ultimate psychological problems of art that will trip us up if we have neglected or inadequately understood the creative personality, an understanding that is an inherent necessity in all esthetic, however far it may advance into the domain of psychology. For zsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art, and it takes account of its creation by an artist only by arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator. But this conclusion, apart from its indirect nature, is a fallacy; for as we (or at least as I, myself) have been convinced by a study of the productive personality, there is between that and the unproductive type not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference. The quantitative difference, which is obvious, would be enough in itself to throw doubt on the soundness of thus arguing back from the receptive to the creative; and the qualitative demands a wholly new orientation to the problem, which we shall attempt at least to suggest in the chapter on the play-impulse and esthetic pleasure. But even at the outset it seems to me clear that the idea of intuition (Einfihlung) as fashioned by psychological esthetic has been attained as from a view-point of reception, while the notion of abstraction which Worringer contrasts with it refers rather to the spiritual attitude of the creative artist. In any case there is here a vagueness of concepts, though it is not attributable to Worringer’s unitary interpretation, but belongs to all esthetic. Ever since Aristotle’s day this seems to me to have begun with the tacit assumption that the artist intended to present the effect he aimed at in its phenomenal form, and that therefore there were involved in the creation, at least potentially, the same psychological experiences and psychical processes as are to be observed in the contemplator of the work and especially in the esthetic critic. Without disputing that in some cases the artist does aim at a definite idea effect in his work, it is certainly not the rule, especially with the individual work of the creative artist, since here the work of art is essentially an expression of his personality. Nor need we doubt that the artist occasionally does find pleasure and satisfaction in his creation, though the confessions of great artists themselves generally tell rather of the struggle and suffering of creating it. But the fundamental difference in essence between the creative and the receptive types, which are psychologically complementary, is not affected by such evidences. While esthetic pleasure, whether in the creator or in the contemplator, is ultimately a renunciation of self, the essence of the creative impulse is the exactly opposite tendency towards assertion of self. Here again, however, we must be careful not to set up this opposition, in the form in which we have to state it, as if it were absolute. There may be periods in which a strong individualism or a particular development of personality expresses its tendency towards a self-assertion in creativity as opposed to other periods of collective subordination which involve rather a self-negation. In other words, the dualism of the individual and the community, which we showed to be the fundamental conflict, appears here also in a psychological form and in its relation to various forms of art. Even though we found religion with its collectivizing tendency to be ultimately restrictive of art, this really means only that under its influence another art grows and flourishes in which the individual art-expression, being alien, is thwarted and that this again reacts to force collective art into new paths. All the same, it seems psychologically indispensable to set an impulse of self-assertion against that of self-negation if we are to understand the creative personality as it develops out of the idea of genius. Though this artistic type, as such, was only born with the Renaissance and developed from the idea of genius, yet it must have existed previously as a creative type in the sense of an urge to self-assertion, since otherwise no art, and least of all the strongly marked naturalistic art of prehistoric man, would have been possible. Our psychological knowledge of the type begins only with the Renaissance; and there already it denotes — artistically, sociologically, and psychologically — something different, which we can only conjecturally assume in the artists of earlier epochs. Psychologically the notion of genius, of which we see the last reflection in our modern artist-type, is the apotheosis of man as a creative personality: the religious ideology (looking to the glory of God) being thus transferred to man himself. Sociologically, it meant the creation and recognition of “ genius” as a type, as a culture-factor of highest value to the community, since it takes over on earth the rdle of the divine hero. Artistically, it implies the individual style, which indeed still holds on to the exemplars that later appear in xsthetic as formulated law, but which is already free and autonomous in its divine creative power and is creating new forms from out of itself. This artist, liberated from God, himself become god, soon overleaps the collective forms of style and their abstract formulation in esthetic and constructs new forms of an individual nature, which cannot, therefore, be subsumed under laws. And so our Classicist esthetic of the eighteenth century appears as a final attempt to save the Classical forms —1f not wholly, at any rate in abstract formule — before they were shattered by the individual Sturm und Drang effort of the self-creative personality. Aisthetic appears here as the last endeavour to find art’s psychological justification in itself, which corresponds exactly to the self-justification of the artist in the psychological type of the genius. Here begins the “ art for art’s sake ” ideology, and here too is the source of all artistic psychology, both of which began with the birth of the genius-notion. Psychology is, of course (at least as dealing with the problem of the personality), a young science, so that it will be best to start with its latest results that we may be clear as to what it has contributed to the elucidation of these problems and what still remains obscure.
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1See the extract prefixed to this book, from Pico della Mirandola’s oration on human dignity, which is described by Burckhardt (Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien) as ‘‘ one of the noblest achievements of this cultural period.”’
Now, the latest statements in this field show with astonishing frankness and unanimity that the psychology of personality has helped little or not at all to the understanding of genius or (as it is termed scientifically) the productive personality;* moreover, that it probably never will contribute anything, since ultimately we are dealing with dynamic factors which remain incomprehensible in their specific expression in the individual personality. This implies that they can be neither predetermined nor wholly explained even ex post facto; as, indeed, we cannot understand, in my view, personality at all, even man as such, by a purely individual psychology.” In any event, the notion of art had always proved too narrow to include under one aspect the varieties of productive personality or their manifold achievements; and on the other hand the psychological idea of the productive personality was far too wide to explain artistic production. For, psychologically speaking, there are productive personalities which never produce a work of art, or indeed anything creative at all; and, again, the poet may be so different from the plastic artist, the musician, or the scientifically productive type that it is impossible to bring them all under one head. The study of a certain neurotic type, which I had already regarded as “ artiste manqué” in my youthful work, gave me a new approach, on the basis of that analysis, to the problem of the creative personality.
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1E. Kretschmer: Geniale Menschen (Berlin, 1929; reprinted lectures of 1919); W. Lange-Eichbaum: Genie-Irrsinn und Rubm (Munich, 1928); P. Plaut: Psychologse der produktiven Persénlichkeit Stuttgart, 1 929).
: 2 One may be unable, for example, to arrive at an individual psychological explanation of homosexuality in the artist (Michelangelo, Shakspere) and yet understand why a particular artist-type is, and almost necessarily must be, homosexual (see pages 52 et seq.)
We have in such cases either individuals who, though they are really productive (since they possess the productive force of dynamism), produce nothing, or else artistically productive men who feel themselves restricted in their possibilities of expression. Pure psycho-analysis of such types undertaken for the removal of inhibitions as indicated by Freud’s therapy, did not help at all for the psychological understanding of the creative process, although it established a fair amount regarding their behaviour as individuals. The only tangible statement which Freud’s theory could give us about the artistic process was that which asserted that the impulse to artistic productivity originated in the sex-impulse. But it is easy to see that this explanation (which I myself accepted in my first work on the psychology of artists) takes us no further in reality, being a pure paraphrase of the individual meaning already obvious in the very concept of genius (gvgnere = to beget). But psychology could not explain how from the sex-impulse there was produced, not the sex-act, but the art-work, and all the ideas called in to bridge this infinite gulf — “compensation,” “sublimation,” etc.— were only psychological transcriptions for the fact that we have here something different, higher and symbolical. Dreams, too, which in the new interpretation of Freud seemed to promise so much for the elucidation of artistic creativity, proved, on a more careful comprehension of the problem, to be incapable of taking us beyond a superficial analogy.’ The fact that we all dream and, in dreams, are all (in the fine comparison of Schopenhauer) poets of the stature of Dante or Shakspere is sufficient by itself to force to our notice the fact that we do not know what it is which allows a Dante or a Shakspere to do in waking life what we all, according to Schopenhauer, do in our sleep. They all (as I expressed it) superadd, to their equipment and their creative dream-fantasy, a particular ideology of art.
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1 On the subject of dreams and art, see also Friedrich von Hausegger: Das Jenseits des Kanstlers.
And so we are back at our question, what individuals are driven and able to do this and what psychological presuppositions make it possible. If we approach the problem from the study of the productive neurotic type — that is, if we start with the artistic type living today — we arrive at the following condition for creative art. The neurotic, no matter whether productive or obstructed, suffers fundamentally from the fact that he cannot or will not accept himself, his own individuality, his own personality. On one hand he criticizes himself to excess, on the other he idealizes himself to excess, which means that he makes too great demands on himself and his completeness, so that failing to attain leads only to more self-criticism. If we take this thwarted type, as we may do for our purposes, and compare him to the artist, it is at once clear that the artist is in a sense the antithesis to the self-critical neurotic type. Not that the artist does not criticize himself, but by accepting his personality he not only fulfils that for which the neurotic is striving in vain, but goes far beyond it. The precondition, then, of the creative personality is not only its acceptance, but its actual glorification, of itself. The religion of genius and the cult of personality thus begin, in the creative individual, with himself; he, so to say, appoints himself as an artist, though this is only possible if the society in which he lives has an ideology of genius, recognizes it, and values it. This leads straight to the realization that the productive personality, if it has once accomplished this selfappointment by the aid of his community’s ideology of the artist, must justify this self-assertion under compulsion by its work and by ever higher achievement. And so the problem of the process of artistic creation, which is no more than a compulsory dynamic, shifts to its precondition, which is the glorification of the individual personality. At this point we have a fruitful parallel to the “ absolute will to art” which Riegl talks of and Worringer defines as a lifting of the object out of nature and its eternalization in an abstract schematic form which reproduces the essential. We see that the very same process which at the primitive stage of the collective abstract style relates to the object takes place at the developed stage of individual art, in relation to the subject; in other words, the individual raises himself from out of the community by his inclusion in the genius-type in just the same way as the object is torn from its natural surroundings by its artistic stylization. The individual, as it were, abstracts himself in the style demanded by the genius-ideology and so concentrates the essence of his being, the reproductive urge, in the genius-concept. He says, more or less, that he needs only to create and not to beget.’ The novelty of our present view lies, however, in this: that we have good reason for assuming that this creativity begins with the individual himself — that is, with the self-making of the personality into the artist, which we have described previously as his appointment to the genius-type. The creative artistic personality is thus the first work of the productive individual, and it remains fundamentally his chief work, since all his other works are partly the repeated expression of this primal creation, partly a justification by dynamism. I regard it as the double advantage of this insight into artistic personality-development which is gained from a study of the modern type, not only that it is applicable to the understanding of all cultural genesis, but that, moreover (according to a theory of art which I only came across after the event), artistic personality appears to subsist already in the beginning of all artistic production. Certain modern art-historians assume that the origin of primitive art is to be found neither in the imitation of nature nor in the impulse to abstraction, but in bodily ornament. As far as I know, Ernst Grosse was the first, in the already cited book on the beginnings of art (1894), to insist on the priority of body-painting over ornamental decoration; and Adam van Scheltema particularly has tried to extend the idea even to prehistoric art (Die altnordische Kunst; 1923).
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1 Here, perhaps, there is a most suggestive link with Schulte-Vaerting’s theory of the ‘‘sexual superman"’ (1928), which he regards as a biological throw-back phenomenon.
It is sufficient here to refer the reader to a later exposition and to quote the (to the best of my belief) latest author who champions this view; according to which we should be justified in saying that the tendency towards self-creation which is brought to light in modern artist-psychology is one of the essential components of artistic creation even in primitive times. E. von Sydow (pp. 173 et seq. of his book quoted above) accepts the view that “the beginning of art lay in its application to the body.” He does not, however, mention his predecessors, so that it is apparently psycho-analysis which led him to this idea. Yet, if this were so, the psycho-analysts interested in the problem of art would not have needed to wait for Sydow in order to introduce this principle of explanation into the history of art, and anyhow it would be a confirmation on their part of a view which is alien to them. For this view of art presupposes a voluntaristic psychology, which in my own case I was only able to reach after passing beyond the libido theory of Freud, and which takes Sydow also far beyond his sexualization of the artistic impulse. Sydow, it is true, appeals to the deliberate interference with the natural form of the body in primitive tribes, which in some cases, although not always, is sexual in character: for instance, the deformation of the skull, the piercing of ears, lips, nose, etc. But even in the artificial painting of the body and the tattooing which is to be found all over the world, the sexual explanation fails completely; and so Sydow’s generalization looks more like an instance of our self-conscious impulse to creation than a proof that art in particular has a sexual origin. “ Art rose, not in any isolated and self-contained work, but by the moulding of the human body, to a formative plasticity, urged thereto by an idealized instinct of will to style. It is true, indeed, that even at this stage the art-form not only serves to give a close support to the human form, as it is found in nature, but impresses and enforces a dominant form on the natural material of bone, flesh, and blood, as an assertion of its own independence; so that art in this application of it to man himself achieves or seeks to achieve a truly new creation. It is only when the art of the body has been perfected that it separates itself from the body and becomes self-dependent in a permanent work” (op. cit.; italics mine). Yet again, to make this view sound, we must give a plausible explanation of why body-art passed over to ornament proper, a problem of which there have been some preliminary explanations, but which, if we assume the priority of “body-art,” more than ever demands a clear psychological understanding of the development of personality — to which accordingly we must now pass. Whatever the meaning of the much-disputed tattooing as the essential expression of body-art may be, it is at least certain that practical objects, such as hardening the skin or the attraction or repulsion of others, do not have a great bearing. The purely sensual interpretation of tattooing, as suggested by W. Joest,* has nowadays given place to the magic interpretation, as emphasized in Jane Harrison’s well-known Ancient Art and Ritual and as has been admitted by W. D. Hambly in his most recent discussion of the subject.’ But there is no sort of consensus of opinion as to the real point of this magical painting of the body. We shall have opportunity later to give our own view; here it is enough to state the general conclusion that an artistic achievement is also part of the business. It seems, too, worth mentioning in this connexion that certain linguists connect the German word “malen” (to paint) with the drawing-in of body-marks (Mal) or signs, just as the Tahitian word “ tatu” is derived from “ ¢a,” which means mark or sign. Among the American Indians as well as the Australians and other peoples, a typical form of painting is, in fact, the sign of the tribe, which indicates membership of a particular totem, and is therefore in a sense a collective badge of the individual which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community, and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others,
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1 Tdtowiren, Narbenzeichnen, und Korperbemalen (Berlin, 1887).
2 The History of Tattooing and its Significance London, 1925).
Both would explain why tattooing follows on the puberty ceremonies at which the individual becomes both a personality and a member of a community. On the other hand, the belief held by the Fijians and the Eskimos alike that to remain untattooed is to hazard one’s future happiness in the world beyond throws a light on the religious significance of tattooing, a significance that inheres also in membership of a particular totem-society. We have thus along with the enhancement of (and even emphasis on) the self its levelling-down by means of the collective symbol; so that in fact we should find the fundamental dualism of art even at the primary stage of human creative instinct. This discovery loses much of its strangeness and gains considerably in probability when we remember that the same thing is found in the medizval guild uniforms, and still exists today in the uniform of various professions, which marks out the individual above his neighbours, but makes him, as beyond himself, a member of a great professional group or class. From this point of view, of course, we cannot admit it to be mere chance that the “Bohemian” artist of modern times, even as late as the close of last century, had a definite costume, even a conventional mode of doing the hair and beard, which were to mark him out as a “ genius.” The proper artist, who had chosen art as his profession, had a special manner, almost a special life, laid down for him; and in actual fact he had to play a definite part determined by an ideology; so also, according to Dessoir, the actor nowadays represents this pristine type of artist, where object and subject coincide, and the body forms the material in which and through which the artist creates. So, even at this last stage of the individual “ artist’s art,” we have the genius-type to which the artist tries to suit himself even in costume and manner, serving as an ideology for artistic creation; just as earlier esthetic, and still earlier religion, had provided the art-ideologies of their various times and places. Yet, be it observed, these were ideologies of art — that is, collective style-laws, as in religious art, or psychological laws of feeling in esthetes’ art — but at this latest stage of individual artist’s art we are concerned no longer with an ideology of art, whether abstract or emotional, but an ideology of the artist; and this means a justification of art-creation in the creative personality itself that struggles for eternalization, and not a justification of art by some abstract impulse of the soul, as in religion, or in esthetic of sensation, as in psychology. Now, though Worringer quite rightly opposes linear art, which develops from the impulse to abstraction, to the Classical art which is intuitive, this is obviously not enough, for we have here a third type of art, which is as different from the other two as the one is from the other. If we want a word to set in parallel with “abstraction ” and “intuition” as expressing the spiritual attitude of modern art, based on an individual, we may talk of an art of “expression”— in fact the word, as “expressionism,” has been taken as their slogan by a group of modern artists (according to Sydow, p. 117, called also “ psychic vitalism”). But since we are ourselves living in the midst of this art, it is doubly difficult to pass from a purely esthetic judgment to a psychological valuation. It is too tempting to look for a historical comparison and a cultural valuation of this “ modern art”; Worringer, strangely enough, does not admit modern art to be the expression of any “ will to form ” of its own, but regards it rather as an expression of “ inability,” which he does, however, concede to the result of an excessive urge to equal —or to outdo — earlier epochs.’ We shall have to discuss in a later chapter the reasons for which our present-day Culture had to come out at the art that it has done. At the moment it is more important to notice in these art-forms only the exaggeration (or, if you like, the distortion) of a quality common to all creative art, which entitles such an art as this to its place with the rest in the development of forms; in the same way as we tried to understand abstract and naturalistic styles not only as art-forms but as psychical expressions. Then we shall see that we have here to deal not with a third type of art, nor indeed with a type of art or a style at all, but with spiritual needs which at one time are abstract, } at another naturalistic, at a third individualistic. It is not our business to attempt an esthetic judgment — least of all before we have studied the question how far the psychical basis of the modern artist can be traced up in the origins and development of Classical and abstract art. Yet it may be that the genesis of the creative personality, which is the problem that this book is seeking to unravel, will throw a new light on the form of art which is included under the esthetic law of intuition (Einfihlung) and may even contribute to the elucidation of other, still obscure points in that abstract style of primitive art which so purely expresses the absolute will to form.
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1 Wilhelm Worringer: Ksinstlerische Zeitfragen (Munich, 1921).
