The Man Without Content

1. Ancient Art: A Powerful, Interested Force to Be Feared

"We can admit no poetry into our city," adds Plato with an expression that shocks our aesthetic sensibility, "save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men."

Art's ancient power. In ancient Greece, art was not seen as a source of disinterested pleasure but as a potent force deeply intertwined with life, capable of influencing the soul and the city. Plato's famous banishment of poets from his ideal republic stemmed from a genuine fear of their power to shape emotions and beliefs, potentially undermining the social order. This perspective highlights art's interested nature, its direct impact on human affairs.

Uncanny ability. Sophocles, too, viewed man's technical ability (τέχνη) – the power to bring things into being – as the "most uncanny thing," capable of leading to both happiness and ruin. This productive capacity, inherent in the artist, was seen as a force that could disrupt the established order, prompting a wish for its exclusion from the community. The ancient world recognized art's transformative potential, for better or worse.

Not mere enjoyment. Unlike modern audiences who approach art for aesthetic enjoyment, ancient viewers experienced art as something that could evoke divine terror (θει + ̑ος ϕοβός) or profound spiritual engagement. This intense, interested relationship contrasts sharply with the passive contemplation characteristic of later aesthetic sensibilities, suggesting a fundamental shift in art's role and perception over time.

2. The Birth of Aesthetics: Art Judged by the Disinterested Spectator

Kant thought he was honoring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized and gave prominence to those which established the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universality.

Shift in perspective. The modern understanding of art, particularly since Kant, has centered on the perspective of the spectator and the concept of "disinterested pleasure." This approach defines beauty based on a judgment free from personal interest or sensory involvement, emphasizing impersonality and universality as key aesthetic criteria. Nietzsche critiques this, arguing it misses the artist's creative, interested experience.

Artist vs. Spectator. Nietzsche contrasts Kant's view with Stendhal's definition of beauty as "une promesse de bonheur" (a promise of happiness), aligning beauty with the artist's creative drive and will to power rather than the spectator's passive judgment. This marks a pivotal moment where the focus shifts from the effect of art on the viewer to the generative force within the creator, symbolized by Pygmalion's passionate connection to his sculpture.

Purifying beauty. The move towards disinterestedness aimed to purify the concept of beauty from sensory involvement (αἴσθησις), but in doing so, it confined art to a neutral, aesthetic horizon. This purification, while seemingly elevating art, paradoxically diminished its vital, interested connection to life and happiness that artists like Artaud and Rimbaud would later desperately seek to reclaim, often at great personal risk.

3. The Man of Taste and the Split Between Artist and Audience

Anyone who feels this and loves it possesses a perfect taste; but he who is not sensible of it, and loves what is short of that point or beyond it, is wanting in taste.

Emergence of taste. Around the mid-17th century, the figure of the "man of taste" appeared, endowed with a special faculty to discern the "point de perfection" in art. This marked a new era where aesthetic judgment became a distinct skill, separating those with refined sensibility from those without, as described by La Bruyère. This was novel, as earlier periods didn't have such clear boundaries for taste.

Art as spectator's domain. As taste became formalized, the work of art, especially once finished, increasingly became the exclusive domain of the artist's creative freedom, while the non-artist was relegated to the role of a passive spectator. This contrasts with the Renaissance, where patrons like Julius II actively collaborated with artists, demonstrating a more integrated relationship between creator and audience, where art was deeply embedded in social and spiritual life.

Growing distance. The refinement of taste, intended to elevate the spectator's experience, inadvertently created a distance from the work's vital force. While the man of taste became more discerning, the artist embarked on a journey towards eccentricity and imbalance, moving from the social fabric to the rarefied atmosphere of aesthetics. This growing split between the artist's creative process and the spectator's appreciative judgment became a defining feature of modern art.

4. Bad Taste and Perversion: The Shadow Side of Aesthetic Judgment

"He who does not scorn," says a character in Schlegel Lucinde, "cannot appreciate, either. . . . So is not a certain aesthetic cruelty [ästhetische Bösheit] an essential part of harmonious education?"

The paradox of taste. Good taste, in its pursuit of perfection, seems to carry within it a tendency towards its opposite – bad taste. Madame de Sevigné's confession of her inexplicable attraction to "second-rate works" despite her refined sensibility illustrates this paradox. This suggests that good taste is not merely the absence of bad taste, but perhaps even constituted by a thousand distastes, implying a complex, perhaps perverse, relationship.

Bad taste's vitality. Figures like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, despite his lack of refinement, show a genuine, interested engagement with art that refined taste often lacks. His "ingenuous bad taste" appears closer to art's vital core than the cynical sensibility of his supposed educators. This hints that art might prefer the undifferentiated mold of bad taste to the precious crystal of good taste, which can render one indifferent.

Aesthetic perversion. As aesthetic taste became a distinct faculty, it also became associated with a form of moral perversion, a kind of antidote to the Tree of Knowledge where the distinction between good and evil blurs. Diderot's Rameau's nephew embodies this: a man of exquisite taste but utter moral depravity, whose taste exists in a total void, a "moral gangrene." This figure highlights the radical split taste introduces, becoming a principle of perversion when divorced from other human faculties.

5. The Museum and Gallery: Art as Accumulated, Alienated Object

It seems, that is, that the single canvases have no reality outside the unmoving Theatrum pittoricum to which they are consigned, or at least that they acquire all their enigmatic meaning only in this ideal space.

From Wunderkammer to Gallery. The historical shift from the medieval Wunderkammer (cabinet of wonder), which promiscuously mixed natural curiosities, scientific instruments, and art objects as a microcosm of the universe, to the modern art gallery or museum reflects a fundamental change in art's status. Early collections integrated art into a broader world of wonders, where objects derived meaning from their place in a unified cosmos.

Art's self-contained world. The modern gallery, exemplified by Teniers's Theatrum pittoricum or Boschini's imaginary space, presents art as a self-sufficient world, enclosed and separated from the outside. Paintings are hung wall-to-wall, losing individual prominence, becoming part of a pictorial magma. This suggests that art's reality is now primarily defined by its inclusion in this ideal, aesthetic space, rather than its function or integration into life.

Loss of dwelling. In this aesthetic dimension, the work of art is no longer an essential measure of man's dwelling on earth, building and enabling that dwelling. Instead, it is consigned to an atemporal space, increasing its metaphysical and monetary value while dissolving its concrete connection to human life. Like Boschini's convex mirror, the object draws back when approached, becoming elusive, its authentic reality seemingly secured but ultimately unattainable.

6. The Artist Without Content: Genius as a Self-Annihilating Nothing

At the extreme limit of art's destiny, when all the gods fade in the twilight of art's laughter, art is only a negation that negates itself, a self-annihilating nothing.

Artist's radical split. The artist, having become a "tabula rasa" free from traditional subject matter and forms, experiences a radical split. Pure creative subjectivity, divorced from content, becomes an abstract inessence, dissolving every content it touches. The artist is trapped: lying if seeking certainty in content, paradoxical if seeking reality in pure subjectivity, condemned to dwell beside their reality as a "man without content."

Irony and doubling. This condition gives rise to irony, the faculty by which the artist tears away from contingency, conscious of absolute superiority over content. Baudelaire saw this as a "permanent duality," the power to be oneself and another, leading to the "comique absolu" or absolute laughter. This doubling exposes the artist to extreme threat, resembling Maturin's Melmoth, a "living contradiction" whose organs can no longer bear his thought.

Self-annihilation. Hegel, analyzing romantic irony, recognized its destructive vocation. By annihilating all determinacy, the artistic subject elevates itself but is bound to turn this negation against itself, destroying the very principle of negation. This is the "self-annihilating nothing" (ein Nichtiges, ein sich Vernichtendes). Art, at its extreme, doesn't die but eternally survives itself in this state, wandering in the desert of aesthetics, unable to attain positive work or identify with content.

7. The Crisis of Poiesis: Art Becomes Praxis, Rooted in Will

"any cause that brings into existence something that was not there before is Ποίησις"

Poiesis vs. Praxis. The Greek concept of poiesis (pro-duction, bringing into being) was distinct from praxis (doing, acting). Poiesis was a mode of truth, an unveiling (ἀ-λήθεια) that brought things from concealment into presence, with its end outside itself in the work. Praxis, rooted in the living being (ζῴον), was action driven by will (ὅρεξις), whose end was inherent in the act itself, bringing only the will into presence.

Shift to Praxis. In Western thought, this distinction blurred. Poiesis became a mode of agere (acting), an operari (putting-to-work), transposed onto the plane of voluntary action. The focus shifted from the work's truth-unveiling to the artist's operari, their creative genius and process. This paved the way for art to be understood within the dimension of praxis, as a peculiar form of creative activity.

Praxis as Will. The Aristotelian interpretation of praxis as will (ὅρεξις) persisted. As work ascended to a central value (Locke, Smith, Marx), all human doing, including artistic production, was increasingly interpreted as praxis, conceived as concrete productive activity rooted in the biological cycle and vital force. This led to a metaphysics of will, where art is seen as the expression of the artist's creative will, a perspective that even radical critiques of aesthetics have struggled to escape.

8. Originality vs. Reproducibility: The Split in Human Production

Originality means proximity to the origin.

Dual status of production. With modern technology, human production split into two modes: art (governed by aesthetics) and technical products (governed by τέχνη). Art's status was defined by originality or authenticity – a unique, irreproducible proximity to its formal origin. Technical products, conversely, were characterized by reproducibility, their formal principle being an external paradigm for indefinite replication.

Originality's burden. The doctrine of originality exploded the artist's condition, demanding liberation from common forms and traditions. While intended to elevate the artist, it also isolated them, eroding their concrete social status. Hölderlin foresaw this, wishing for art to regain the calculable, repeatable craftsmanship of ancient times to secure a "bourgeois existence" for poets.

Hybrid forms. Contemporary art reveals a crisis in this split, producing hybrid forms like the "ready-made" and pop art. The ready-made transfers a reproducible object into the sphere of unique authenticity, while pop art renders unique art reproducible. Both play on the split, highlighting the inability of the object to fully attain presence, suspended between being and nonbeing, actualizing a "privation" or "availability-toward-nothingness."

9. Rhythm and Epoché: The Original Structure of the Work of Art

(Learn what Rhythm holds men.)

Rhythm as origin. Hölderlin's statement, "every work of art is one rhythm," points to rhythm not as mere stylistic unity or calculable structure (ἀριθμός), but as the original principle (οὐσία) that opens and maintains the work's space. Unlike the elemental matter (τὸ ἀρρύθμιστον) of Antiphon, rhythm is Form, the "cause of being" that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts, a concept structural analysis often misses by seeking ultimate elements.

Rhythm as Epoché. Rhythm, etymologically linked to flow (ῥέω), paradoxically introduces a stop or interruption (ἐποχή) in the incessant flow of linear time. This ἐποχή is both a holding back and a giving, a gift and a reserve. It is the ecstatic being-outside-oneself into a more original temporal dimension, revealing the work's particular mode of presence.

Holding man's essence. The Greek verb ἐπέχω, from which ἐποχή derives, also means "to be present, to dominate, to hold." Rhythm holds men by granting this ecstatic dwelling in an original dimension, opening the space of their world. It is the poetic act that founds man's original historical space, enabling praxis and historical consciousness. Art, as architectonic (production of origin), gives this original site, breaking linear time and recovering the present.

10. The Melancholy Angel: Art's Survival in the Age of Lost Tradition

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.

Loss of transmissibility. Walter Benjamin's "angel of history," propelled backward into the future by the storm of progress while facing a past of accumulating wreckage, symbolizes man's situation when tradition is severed. Tradition, the living act of transmission, welded past and present, giving culture immediate meaning. Its interruption means the past loses transmissibility, becoming an accumulated burden.

Alienation value. In this era, culture is accumulated in a "monstrous archive," losing its criterion for action. Art, particularly in Baudelaire's work, responds by making intransmissibility itself a value, reproducing the shock of dissolution. The "decline of the aura" doesn't eliminate authenticity but transforms it into an "alienation value," the measure of tradition's destruction, becoming the last source of meaning.

Aesthetics as archive. The melancholy angel in Dürer's engraving, contemplating the scattered, de-contextualized tools of active life, represents the angel of art. Unlike the angel of history, he is frozen in an atemporal dimension. The past, incomprehensible to the historian, reconstitutes itself before the art angel as an alienated image. Aesthetics, like Kafka's castle or the museum, becomes the phantasmagoric archive where accumulated culture finds a precarious survival through aesthetic alienation, a death-like inability to die.

11. Aesthetics as Destiny: Art's Precarious Place in a Nihilistic Age

Thus aesthetics is not simply the privileged dimension that progress in the sensibility of Western man has reserved for the work of art as his most proper place; it is, rather, the very destiny of art in the era in which, with tradition now severed, man is no longer able to find, between past and future, the space of the present, and gets lost in the linear time of history.

Art's nihilistic power. At the extreme of its metaphysical journey, art becomes a "self-annihilating nothing," a nihilistic power wandering in the aesthetic desert. Its alienation is fundamental, reflecting the alienation of man's original historical space. Losing his poetic status, man cannot simply rebuild his measure elsewhere; salvation must come from where the danger lies.

The split persists. The split between artist and spectator, genius and taste, originality and reproducibility, is not overcome but made extreme in contemporary art and criticism. Aesthetic judgment, the logos of art and its shadow, becomes a science of non-art, or collapses into itself as art incorporates its own negation (ready-mades, pop art). This crisis of criticism mirrors the crisis of art.

Kafka's judgment. Kafka's image of travelers lost in a tunnel, unable to discern beginning from end, captures man's inability to appropriate his history. His concept of the Last Judgment as a "summary court in perpetual session" suggests man's historical status is a perpetual crisis. Art's task, in this state, might be to transmit the act of transmission itself, independent of content, sacrificing truth for the sake of transmissibility, highlighting the precariousness of culture's survival through aesthetic alienation.

Last updated: May 7, 2025