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The Shape of Revelation

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................ixAbbreviations....................................................xiPreface: Revelation and the Spiritual in Art.....................xviiIntroduction.....................................................11 Form...........................................................232 Abstraction....................................................633 Pathos.........................................................974 Time...........................................................1355 Space..........................................................1676 Eros...........................................................207Epilogue: Mutations..............................................245Notes............................................................267Index............................................................293

Chapter One

Reading Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art, the northern expressionist sculptor and dramatist Ernst Barlach complained: "I will believe this honest man when he claims that for him, points, spots, lines, and dabs ... create profound spiritual shocks, i.e., they have effects that are more than ornamental. Yes, I will believe, and then-good by." Barlach did not share the nave trust in graphic or linguistic form that was an essential component in the work of Kandinsky, Klee, Buber, and Rosenzweig. He failed to see how the transposition of bare formal elements into complex compositional networks might take shape as the human correlate of supersensual creativity. In the lines drawn between the graphic and verbal nodes of expression, our own definition of "form" as found in the discourse of revelation and the spiritual in art refers to two discrete phenomena: the isolated points, spots, lines, and dabs parodied by Barlach versus the broader form pattern, the Gestalt into which they morph. Formation is genesis. Points, spots, lines, and dabs do not "represent" the world of visible objects. In Klee's Memory of a Garden (fig. 3), they are world-creating, the elemental building blocks of what Rosenzweig called a super-cosmos (berwelt), the transfiguration of this empirical world.

The difference between Barlach and Kandinsky about the spiritual status of form and form-creation reflects the foundational dispute in German philosophy between Kant and Hegel. For Kant, human cognition relies upon aesthetic forms of intuition (space and time) to receive sense impressions, which are organized by concepts of the understanding and ideas of reason into an ordered whole. Form-the points, spots, lines, and dabs of human consciousness-has no determinate reference apart from its own operation. Time and space, concepts and categories, are not real per se. They are only forms of intuition. As for the ideas of reason (God, world, and soul), these are referents whose existence we can only postulate, since they stand beyond the limits of possible human experience. Hegel placed much greater faith in form than Kant did. Spirit unfolds logically through art, religion, and philosophy. The third term in Hegel's dialectic always combines the partial truths that precede it into a more complete Idea. Intermediary cultural forms, even those said to be one-sided, are thus necessary for truth to present itself-qua simple sense impression, qua religious imagination, qua philosophical reason. Graphic and linguistic marks are not just decorative. Their significance oversteps into the truth of Spirit's self-unfolding. After Kant, all claims regarding revelation and the spiritual in art presuppose, to one degree or another, Hegel's second navet.

The free shape of form in twentieth-century aesthetic theory enjoys this advantage over its predecessors. In German idealist aesthetics, intellectual and the spiritual form ride roughshod over empirical reality and content. Creative activity dominates physical content. "In a truly beautiful work of art," Friedrich Schiller writes in the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795), "the content should do nothing, the form everything.... Therefore the real artistic secret of the master consists in his annihilating the material by means of the form." The "unrestrained freedom" of the formal impulse allows the artist to "join what Nature sundered ... and sunder what Nature combines." Twentieth-century aesthetics is inflected by a more fluid tension between form element and form pattern than Schiller's strict opposition of spirit to nature and freedom to necessity. There is no fast and firm distinction between form and content. Individual and isolated elements can be epistemological (sense impressions, concepts, judgments), historical (drawn from art, religion, philosophy, politics), theological (God, world, soul), dialogical (I, YOU, IT), or painterly (points, spots, lines). In a formal analysis, one looks at how they combine, splinter, and recombine into "compositional" frameworks (cognitive, institutional, pictorial, textual, sonic, performative).

Fluid, transactional conceptions of form dominated early twentieth-century German culture. Anxious to distinguish the humanities and the social sciences (Geisteswissenchaften) from the natural and mathematical sciences, German scholars at the turn of the century used the freedom of "form" to establish their own work on a firm but nonpositivist basis. As understood by Georg Simmel, form is not static and thinglike. Based upon flowing lines of relationship, form is an activity, not an object. Central to Simmel's sociology is an overriding interest in formal acts of sociation that organize elemental physiological and psychological drives, interests, purpose, inclinations, and movement. Focused upon the Fluidum created between form elements, not the individual element itself, society "certainly is not a `substance,' nothing concrete, but an event-it is the function of receiving and effecting the fate and development of one individual by the other." Seen as such, form is "the mutual determination and interaction of the elements of an association."

The expressionist generation was to make greater claims about form than did Simmel. In line with Kant, Simmel restricted his analysis of it to strictly intellectualist terms. A very important essay, "Religion" (1912), indicates no metaphysical interest whatsoever. Attention shifts from doctrinal elements and ritual contents to what Simmel calls "religiosity," an organic rhythm based on formal relationships that lack a fixed set of objects. Simmel made it clear that "his intent was [to] show the structural meaning of religion as a mental-spiritual phenomenon." Following Kant, he would not discuss the suprapsychological existence of its objects outside the subject's own apprehension of them. While there is much to be said for Phillip Hammond's claim that Simmel was religiously musical, especially in comparison to Weber, he was positively tone-deaf compared to the expressionists, whose creative work was based upon the almost occult conceit that every form-each individual element, and the patterns they shape-resonates with a spiritual presence whose reality transcends the real world of visual objects and form-creating human subjects in which it is seeped.

In early twentieth-century Jewish thought in Germany, form represents the vital...