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Poiesis
1. See Hans Blumenberg, " 'Nachahmung der Natur': Zur Vorgeschichte des schop-
ferischen Menschen," Studium Generale 10 (1957): 266-83, still unexcelled. I also base my
discussion on Jiirgen Mittelstrass, Neuzeit und Aufkldrung:Studien zur Entstehungder neuzeit-
lichen Wissenschaftund Philosophie (Berlin, 1970), and on the results of two seminars at
Constance held jointly and to which I owe essential insights.
2. See Werner Conze, "Arbeit," in GeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe:HistorischesLexikonzur
politisch-sozialenSprachein Deutschland,ed. Conze, Otto Brunner, and Reinhart Koselleck, 4
vols. (Stuttgart, 1972), 1:154-215, and Walther Bienert, Die Arbeit nach der Lehre der Bibel
(Stuttgart, 1954); an abbreviated version appears in Bienert's "Arbeit," Die Religion in
Geschichteund Gegenwart (Tiibingen, 1957).
591
592 Hans RobertJauss Poiesis
in both the classical and the Christian conceptual field relating to labor,
we already encounter ambivalent definitions which could introduce and
justify an upward revaluation of man's labor.
According to the Aristotelian conception, the subordination of
poiesis to practice corresponded to a ranking of knowledge in which the
activity of the craftsman or artist as techne was distinguished from the
labor of slaves, which was merely the following of orders. Such poietic
capacity shares with ethical action the presupposition that physical ser-
vices and assistance are subordinate work. (In Aristotle Politics 1254a.
5-8, the slave is no more than an instrument of action.) The technical
skill of the craftsman who can make an object according to a model is an
acquired knowledge and thus ranks below moral knowledge (phronesis)
which, as self-knowledge without anterior certainty, is directed toward
the right life as a whole and can only define itself in its application.3
Theoretical knowledge (episteme)occupies a higher rank because it is no
longer grounded in the changing sphere of action. In contrast to moral
insight, poietic capacity characteristically can have degrees of perfection:
"Wisdom in the arts we ascribe to their most finished exponents, for
example, to Phidias as a sculptor and to Polyclitus as a maker of
portrait-statues, and here we mean nothing by wisdom except excellence
in art" (Aristotle Ethics 1141a). As the highest attainable form of techne,
the work of art here falls outside the dogmatic juxtaposition of work and
virtue. The product of artistic work points in a direction that leads to
philosophical wisdom through the perfect skill of the masters. It is
nonetheless far from being recognized as a "medium of self-knowledge
and self-activation for man": as long as technical and aesthetic work can
only reproduce what nature sets before him as exemplary, binding, and
essentially perfect, man cannot understand his activity as creative, as the
elaboration of as yet unrealized ideas.4 What had to happen to transcend
the limiting conditions of the imitationaturae has been elucidated by Hans
Blumenberg. The process in which aesthetic experience discovers art as
the sphere of creative originality and as the paradigm of the creation of a
human world has the second, no less significant, source of its legitima-
tion in the history of Creation in the Bible.
3. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cum-
ming (New York, 1975).
4. Blumenberg, "'Nachahmung der Natur,'" p. 273 ff.
5. "Man is 'homo sapiens,' but collectively, at least, he is that perhaps only through the
accomplishment of'homo artifex' which is his first definition." It is on this interpretation of
Gen. 1:26 that M. D. Chenu has based his Theologiedu travail (Paris, 1955). The renewed
biblical mandate to transform nature into a human world through work is intended to
annul the classical and Cartesian opposition of theory and practice and the Lutheran
separation of nature and grace, to lessen the theological misunderstanding of the indus-
trial world, and to reconcile again technique and nature.
6. According to Arno Borst, Lebensformenim Mittelalter(Frankfurt, 1973), pp. 203-14;
see esp. p. 213: "Medieval forms of life had to make much greater allowance for the
natural milieu than do modern ones because control over nature had not yet been per-
fected. All the more unanimous was the belief that human historicity and sociability had to
realize themselves in the struggle against, and the victory over, nature. Which means that
the difference between the ascetic who rises above natural conditions, and the technician
who changes them, is not so very great."
594 Hans RobertJauss Poiesis
usually translated: "I will make a poem about nothing" but which could as
well be rendered as follows (my italics):
13.
Farai un vers de dreit nien:
non er de mi ni d'autra gen,
non er d'amor ni de joven,
ni de ren au,
qu'enans fo trobatz en durmen
sus un chivau
[Poem 4, 11.1-6]
14. C. S. Lewis, The DiscardedImage (Cambridge, 1964), p. 85.
15. See my AsthetischeNormen und geschichtlicheReflexionin der "QuerelledesAncienset des
Modernes"(Munich, 1963), esp. pp. 9, 25 ff, 47 ff, and 64.
596 Hans RobertJauss Poiesis
perience, one would have to trace how, in his progressive praxis, homo
faber frees himself of the ties to the Platonic eidos, or god-created nature,
and successively comes to see technical invention, the work of art, math-
ematics, and finally history as a whole, as a creation of man. The stages of
this process require a new historical analysis.16 Here we can only high-
light the development by which the fine arts came to be excluded from
the general theory and practice of the poietic faculty.
Jurgen Mittelstrass introduced the concept of poietic capacity to
show the modern discovery of progress as a "result of a revolution in
scientific thought" and thereby to dispense with theories that explain the
break in continuity between the Middle Ages and the modern period by
a secular recasting of Christian positions. To accomplish this, he employs
an Aristotelian distinction: "While theoretical ability consists in con-
structing true sentences and practical ability in judging actions as better
or worse, poietic ability tells us what can be made." Understood in this
way, the poietic capacity transcends the limiting condition of the imita-
tion of nature in all those cases where it becomes apparent "that what can
be made always goes beyond the present state of theory and practice."'7
During the early modern period, this is shown not only in the technical
know-how of the "New Science," which Mittelstrass traces back to origins
in the tradition of the northern Italian workshops, but also in the
aesthetic capacity, which sharply broke with medieval tradition in all art
forms while continuing in theory to subscribe to humanist doctrine
whereby all innovation was understood as the return of a perfect past.
The process of a separation of the fine from the mechanical arts was
thus initiated and provided fresh fuel to the old competition between
technical and aesthetic capacity. In the dialogue De mente by Nicolaus of
Cusa (1450), for example, the layman boasts to the philosopher and the
rhetorician that his product, a spoon carved from wood, differs from the
painter's and the sculptor's work in having no need of a model in nature
and coming into existence "sola humana arte." The value of his testimo-
nial, in which "the whole pathos of the creative individual is expressed
and the break with the principle of imitation made manifest in the work
of technical,not artisticman," becomes even greater because, according to
Blumenberg, declarations of poietic capacity in the technical sphere have
remained rare.18 But they had always been expressed in poetry and art,
which is also shown by the new concept through which the creative
self-understanding, free from creating according to models, was to ex-
press itself: genius as the quintessence of competencies that set poietic
change from the classical to the modern concept of cognition. For con-
struire presupposes a knowledge that is more than a turning back to the
contemplation of preexisting truth: it is a cognition dependent on what
one can do, on a form of action that tries and tests so that understanding
and producing can become one.
The equating of producing with comprehending, which gives man
access to truth through his poietic capacity, gave rise to enthusiastic
declarations on the experience of creativity during the period of
Leonardo. The idea of man as a second creator, which was derived from
poetry and hermetic writings, caused mathematics to be understood as a
man-made conceptual world ("scientia mentis, quae res facit [science of
the mind which makes things]").22 Pico della Mirandola defined man as
"sui ipsius quasi-plastes et fictor [a sort of molder and fashioner of his
own self]" who, in an intermediate position between divine perfection
and animal limitation, intellect and sensuality, is himself to produce the
form of his life.23 And Julius Caesar Scaliger elevated the poet above all
other artists because as a second God, he could create a second nature, in
a manner of speaking: "Poeta et naturam alteram et fortunas plures
etiam ac demum sese isthoc perinde ac Deum alterum efficiet [The poet
fashions a second nature and many fortunes, even to the point of mak-
ing himself in this way a second God.]"24
But these declarations of a new creative consciousness encountered
ontological barriers which were not removed by philosophy until Leib-
niz.25 For the boldly seized possibility of poiesis searching for truth
where man produced it by his own work must ultimately be qualified by
an insight that counsels modesty because it tells us that the first Creator
withholds the ultimate truths of His work from man as the second one.
According to Scaliger, poetry, as a second nature created by man, could
bring together in a work the perfection that lay scattered about in the
world and produce a semblance of things that do not exist in reality. But
though in this fashion human poiesis portrays "what exists in reality as
more beautiful than it is," it ultimately remains within the limits of the
one existing world which it idealizes and with which its product can
compete but with which it dare not yet contrast another world which
does not already exist.26
Renaissance poetics did not take this final, expectable step toward
autonomous art which would have required a complete break with the
imitationaturae. The claim that poietic production can create more than
just a second, more beautiful nature, that is, a different, heretofore
unrealized world, was not made until the literary revolution of the
eighteenth century. It thus made good in the area of aesthetic experi-
ence what Vico in his turn against Cartesian rationalism had claimed at
the same time for a "New Science" of the mondocivile: "History cannot be
more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them.
Now, as geometry, when it constructs the world of quantity out of its
elements, or contemplates that world, is creating it for itself, just so does
our Science create for itself the world of nations, but with a reality
greater by just so much as the institutions having to do with human
affairs are more real than points, lines, surfaces, and figures are."27
With Vico's interpretation of the phrase "verum et factum con-
vertuntur [truth and action are altered]," the history of the concept of
poiesis reaches its ultimate meaning. The dictum that it was not God who
made history but men who produced their historical world themselves
does not refer to aesthetic experience and historical action in the same
way, however. Ferdinand Fellmann has shown that Vico was far from
maintaining that history could be made or that political action could be
rationalized, as the later autonomy thesis of the idealist philosophy of
history understood it. The original meaning of the Vico axiom was
rather: "It is not as actors but as intellectually creative individuals that
men 'make' their history."28 The greater certainty that derives from
equating producing with understanding relates to technical and
aesthetic capacity but not to history as a total process for which man in
his historical reality is responsible as subject without being able to direct
it. In political life, man constantly encounters the contradiction between
intent and result of his acts: here, the efficacy of his will is tied to an
order that is beyond him and which Vico attempts to justify as the provi-
dence that holds sway in the cycles of culture. In the sphere of poietic
capacity, the productivity of the spirit, on the other hand, where ideas
(quite un-Platonically) mediate between production and cognition, man
is the autonomous creator of his works.
Raising intellectual history to the level of a new science resulted in
further insights which gave the history of poiesis a new turn. Where
rationalism proposes to derive the progress of history from a new
methodological beginning, Vico sees the origins of history and thus
man's history-making power in his sensuous productivity, that is, in the
aesthetic truths of myths and the primacy of the practical arts. With this
revaluation of the myth-making imagination as a form of mastery over
nature, Vico, whose effect remains so curiously obscure in the
27. Giovanni Battista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max
Harold Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), p. 104.
28. Ferdinand Fellmann, Das Vico-Axiom:Der Menschmachtdie Geschichte(Freiburg and
Munich, 1976), p. 72.
600 Hans RobertJauss Poiesis
over communicative action (facere in Vico's sense), the young Marx re-
curred to the idealist definition of aesthetic capacity in a passage of the
Economicand Political Manuscripts,which have become famous only in our
time, and characterized work as the properly human activity, albeit one
that is alienated by the egoism of possession. The passage distinguishes
man from the animal that produces only for its immediate need and
according to the "standards and needs of the species it belongs to."
"[M]an produces free from physical need and only truly produces when
he is thus free ... and knows how to produce according to the measure
of every species and knows everywhere how to apply its inherent stan-
dard to the object; thus man also fashions things according to the laws of
beauty."33 Kant's production in freedom has not just been extended,
here, from artistic production to the productive activity of all human
labor. Along with that, the young Marx elevates productive or concrete
doing to the level of aesthetic activity; in other words, he interprets
technical production according to the "inherent standard" of artistic
production. The fashioning of beauty in labor is to fulfill that general
human need "to be at home in the world," which in Hegel's Aesthetics
could be satisfied only by art.34 For the young Marx, labor is the true
"resurrection of nature" whenever it humanizes nature as it produces
beauty and through its products makes the poietically appropriated na-
ture appear to man as his work and his reality.35
This abolition of the distinction or separation between technical and
aesthetic poiesis can be interpreted as the goal or as the still utopian final
state in Marx's 1844 philosophy of history. But the function of aesthetic
experience (i.e., the fashioning according to the laws of beauty) in the
dialectics of the appropriation of nature could also be taken to mean that
artistic production is less subject to becoming alienated through posses-
sion (i.e., through private property) than is work, so that even during the
history of alienation, art continues to provide the possibility of nonalien-
ated work. Doesn't the attitude toward art permit a "having as if you did
not have" (to use Paulinian theology in support of the aesthetic approach
of the young Marx)? For it is certainly true in the case of the work of art
that man "can freely confront his product." This applies to the producer
for whom the product in the work of art cannot become an alien power
as well as to the recipient, since it is in aesthetic experience that need or
enjoyment most obviously lose their egoistic nature.36 Understood in this
33. Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York, 1977), p. 82.
34. In his dialectic of the appropriation of nature, Marx used definitions which can
already be found in Hegel's Aestheticsunder the heading "The work of art as the product of
human activity." (This includes the notion of doubling: "by doubling himself not only in
consciousness, intellectually, but through his work, in reality, and therefore seeing himself
in a world created by himself.")
35. Marx, Die Friihschriften,ed. Siegfried Landshut (1953; Stuttgart, 1971), p. 237.
36. See ibid., p. 241.
602 Hans RobertJauss Poiesis
Having abandoned the perfect form of the aesthetic object with the
metaphysics of the timelessly beautiful, the imitation of the artist with
the preexistent truth of the idea, and the noninvolvement of the ob-
server with the ideal of calm contemplation, art finds itself on a new
course. It frees itself of the eternal substantiality of the beautiful by
"making the indefinable the essential characteristic of the beautiful."37
And it frees itself of the model of the theoretical cognition of the true,
the connaitre of the philosophers, by disputing the precedence of mean-
ing over form in the process of aesthetic production. Here Valery com-
pletes Edgar Allan Poe's "Philosophy of Composition" (1846):38 "It is
hard for a philosopher to understand that the artist passes almost with-
37. Blumenberg, "Sokrates und das 'Objet ambigu': Paul Valerys Auseinanderset-
zung mit der Tradition der Ontologie des asthetischen Gegenstandes," in Epimeleia,Helmut
Kuhn zum 65. Geburtstag,ed. Franz Wiedmann (Munich, 1965), pp. 285-323; all further
references to this essay will be included in the text.
38. See Hugo Friedrich, Die StrukturdermodernenLyrik(Hamburg, 1956), p. 51: "Poe's
idea is the inversion of the sequence of poetic acts which the older poetics had postulated.
What seems to be the result, the 'form,' is the origin of the poem; what seems to be origin is
'meaning,' 'result.' "
CriticalInquiry Spring 1982 603
out distinction fromform to content and from content toform; that aform
may occur to him before the meaning he will assign to it; or that the idea
of a form means as much to him as the idea that asks to be given a form"
(Works,8:124). Finally, this new course frees aesthetic reception from its
contemplative passivity by making the viewer share in the constitution of
the aesthetic object: poiesis now means a process whereby the recipient
becomes a participating creator of the work. This is also the simple
meaning of the provocative, hermeneutically unjustifiable, controversial
phrase: "mes vers ont le sens qu'on leur prete [my poetry has the mean-
ing one gives it]."
In his "Eupalinos ou l'architecte," Valery had already sketched this
turn in the history of poiesis. In a modern "dialogue of the dead," he has
Socrates advance the reasons why, given the chance for another life, he
would prefer the productive work of the architect to the contemplative
knowledge of the philosopher. In an authoritative interpretation, "So-
krates und das 'Objet Ambigu,'" Blumenberg has shown how the tradi-
tional, Platonic ontology of the aesthetic object is being dismantled here
step by step. I will reproduce his interpretation of the objetambigu be-
cause it can help illuminate the poietic activity which the observer is to
perform as he confronts the fine arts of the twentieth century.
The "ambiguous object" in Valery's dialogue is something that the
sea has thrown up on the beach: "a white thing of the most pure white-
ness; polished and hard and smooth and light."39 Finding this object sets
off a train of thought in the young Socrates which he cannot bring to a
conclusion: "It is an object which cannot be interpreted within a Platonic
ontology. Socrates sees this immediately-it is an object which recalls
nothing and yet is not amorphous" ("Sokrates," p. 301). The question
concerning the natural or artificial origin which can always be decided in
ancient ontology cannot be answered here. In view of the equivocalness
of this object which negates the borderline between art and nature,
Socrates must decide whether his attitude toward his find should be one
of inquiry or of pleasure, theoretical or aesthetic. The aesthetic attitude
"can always ... content itself with a solution which is not a resolution of
what is given but can deliberately ignore the remaining indeterminacy of
other possibilities. The theoretical hypothesis, on the other hand, is bur-
dened with the possibility of other, better solutions none of which can
ever definitively exclude the chance that its verification will fail" ("So-
krates," p. 318). Valery's Socrates throws the object back into the sea,
thereby becomes a philosopher, and now attempts to solve the question
how the poiesis of nature differs from that of art by advancing a theory:
he defines the work of nature as a form that is perfect at any given
moment, whereas the work of art is merely a possible solution before an
40. See Blumenberg, "Sokrates," p. 308: "As aesthetic, technical being, man needs
integral nature. The finality of nature ruthlessly cuts across the finality of homofaber,
'construire' and 'connaitre' are antinomic, and as compared with nature, man's artificial
and artistic work is based on an act of renunciation: he can only act and create because he
can 'disregard.' "
41. Odo Marquard, "Zur bedeutung der Theorie des Unbewussten fur eine Theorie
der nichte mehr schonen Kunst," in Die nichte mehr schinen Kiinste, ed. Jauss (Munich,
1968), p. 379. In what follows, I refer to discussion ten in this volume, "'Op,' 'Pop,' oder
die immer zu Ende gehende Geschichte der Kunst" (" 'Op,' 'Pop,' and the Forever Ending
History of Art"), pp. 691-705.
42. Max Imdahl, "'Is It a Flag, or Is It a Painting' ": Uber mogliche Konsequenzen
der konkreten Kunst," Wallraf-RichartzJahrbuch 31 (1969): 205-32, explains this turn to
the extra-artistic in the history of art, which radically changed the relationship of the arts
that have traditionally been strictly separated, as resulting from Kandinsky's 1912 theory.
He shows how the "Great Abstraction" provokes the "Great Realism" as a presence of the
real and the concrete, which itself falls under the criterion of the Great Abstraction and
thus makes possible the objettrouve. Imdahl's conclusion is that "though this is necessary
under the conditions of the traditional concept of art, art need not be made, it can also be
discovered in the unmodified real object. The Great Abstraction makes possible within the
Great Realism the art-relevant 'objettrouve' " (p. 224).
CriticalInquiry Spring 1982 605
45. See Jurgen Wissmann, "Pop Art oder die Realitat als Kunstwerk," in Die nicht mehr
schinen Kiinste, pp. 507-30, and Imdahl, "'Is It a Flag?'" p. 214 ff.
46. Wissmann, "Pop Art," p. 517.
47. According to Imdahl, who interprets Johns' painting of the flag as "a case where
reality and art in the sense of concrete art overlap" according to the definition by Theo van
Doesburg (p. 218).
48. See my "Diderots Paradox uber das Schauspiel," Germanisch-romanische
Monatsschrift 11 (1961): 380-413, where the relevant texts, esp. Goethe's "On Truth and
Probability in Works of Art" (1797) and Diderot's "Entretiens sur le 'Fils Naturel'" and
"Salon de 1763" are quoted and interpreted.
CriticalInquiry Spring 1982 607
nature in the work of art to the truth of what is imitated, that is, to the
latent harmony of the "systeme de la nature" which the great artist
knows how to make manifest in the reality all of us share. Diderot be-
lieved he could solve the paradox of the appearance of the true in the
other direction because for him, the nature of things already included
that higher reality which, according to Goethe, only the artist could
produce as a "second nature." The pop demonstration would have had
Diderot's approval if one understands its goal as an "innovation of the
obvious" which calls on the viewer to discover in the "commonplace of
our environment" the hidden harmony or potential artistic beauty of a
world of consumption which man has created.49
What is new for a history of poiesis in the pop demonstration is
therefore not the abolition of the line dividing art object from object of
the environment (this was also attempted by the trompel'oeil of classical
painting) but rather the call on the viewer of an aesthetically indifferent
ambiguous object to switch from a theoretical to an aesthetic attitude. As
a condition of the poietic activity of the viewer, this switch supplements
the formulation in which Blumenberg summarized the pop art discus-
sion: