“Geist” as Medium of Art in Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan

David E. Wellbery
University of Chicago

The term “Geist” poses notorious problems for the English commentator. Its
usual English equivalents lead one astray. “Mind” is too mental, too much linked
to an individual subject, and “spirit” shades into the religious or superstitious. Not
that either of these connotative directions is entirely wrong, for Geist indeed has
to do with acts of intelligence, and it also extends into the realm of supra-
personal powers. But it is neither of these exclusively and thus the
Phänomenologie des Geistes is really neither of its usual translations: neither a
phenomenology of spirit, nor a phenomenology of mind. Recent Hegel
commentators have therefore sought acceptance for the term “mindedness,”
meaning the entire range of conditions that have to be in place for there to be
something like a recognizable act of thought. Thus, a complex structure to be
equated neither with individualized subjectivities, nor with some ghostly ether
floating above the material world emerges into view: a structure that embraces
practices and meanings, social relations, and institutions. Although in what
follows I shall argue that Hegel offers us an interesting perspective on Goethe’s
West-östlicher Divan, I shall not attempt to file away at the fine points of a
definition of Geist. Suffice it to say that, if something like “mindedness” in the
sense adumbrated is, in fact, a fair account of the Hegelian meaning, then there
is a cognate usage of the term in Goethe. The “Notes toward a better
Understanding” that Goethe published together with the poems of the Divan
unfold a complex picture of the form of mindedness that supports the Persian
poetic tradition: a tradition extending from the eleventh to the fifteenth century
and preeminently represented by the names Firdusi, Enweri, Nisami, Rumi,
Saadi, Hafis, and Dschami. Indeed, one might justly say that Goethe’s major
premise in his account is that a body of poetry can only be understood in relation
to the form of life from which it emerged and within which it makes sense. And in
this sense his is an account, a remarkably contextualist account, of the “Geist” of
the great Persian poetic tradition.

So it is Goethe’s project in the Divan that I am concerned with here, a project that
he himself referred to as “orientalizing” (Orientalisieren). But I am interested in
that project in relation to a thought of Hegel’s. That thought, to put it somewhat
bluntly, is that the Divan represents the dawn of a new stage in the history of art,
the paradigm of a distinctively modern art form. To put the issue yet more
dramatically, modern poetry is born not in the 1850s in Paris, say, with the Fleurs
du mal of Baudelaire, but between 1814 and 1819 in Heidelberg and Weimar, the
period extending from Goethe’s first meeting with Marianne von Willemer to the
publication of the Divan in its first edition. On the face of it, this thought is wildly
improbable, but, perhaps for that very reason, richly suggestive and compelling.
For what Hegel’s thesis comes down to is the thought that European art enters
its authentic modernity by re-connecting with an Oriental origin. Let me leave that
phrase – Oriental origin – undefined for the moment. It’s immediate reference is,
of course, the medieval tradition of Persion lyric poetry I referred to above, but,
as we shall see, its reach is further back in time.

The improbability of Hegel’s remark on the Divan becomes all the more flagrant if
we consider its context. It comes at the end of Hegel’s discussion, in the Lectures
on Aesthetics, of the three historical art forms: symbolic art, classical art, and
romantic art. Hegel’s construction of these three stages in the history of art can
be parsed as follows: 1) Symbolic art is pre-art, an anticipation of art
characterized by the attempt either to bind the Idea to a concrete particular or to
explore the discrepancy between the Idea and finite, concrete objects. It is the
anticipation of art, a working-toward a union of Idea and sensate appearance. 2)
Classical art represents the authentic realization of the concept of art as just such
a union. This realization takes the form of the Ideal, in which the Idea, as the
realized unity of concept and reality, is embodied in an object given to concrete,
sensate intuition. 3) If symbolic art is pre-art, then romantic art is post-art. It
marks, that is to say, the accession of the spirit – of Geist – to a self-
understanding that, because it involves the boundlessness of interiority, cannot
be contained within a sensate appearance. We can say that Hegel’s effort in the
Lectures is to conceptualize the history of art as a function of the history of
mindedness understood as a totality of meanings, practices and institutions.
Employing a slightly different terminology, we might say that symbolic art,
classical art, and romantic art differ from one another not by virtue of stylistic
features or contentual aspects alone, but most fundamentally by virtue of the
differing conceptual spaces within which they take shape. A corollary of this view
is that promiscuous borrowings across heterogeneous conceptual spaces are not
possible, at least not in the way of serious artistic accomplishment. And this, of
course, is one of the reasons that Hegel’s remark on Goethe’s Divan strikes one
as puzzling.

There is a further complication to consider. Hegel holds not only that classical art
alone is fully adequate to the concept of art and that symbolic art and romantic
art are, in the sense I noted above, pre- and post-artistic, although nonetheless
pre- and post-artistic as art. He also holds that there is no post-romantic art. His
claim, of course, is not that something we might legitimately recognize as the
production of artistic artifacts continues in the present and will do so in the future.
That is certainly the case. Rather, his claim is that such artifacts can no longer
have the meaning they must have if they are to correspond to the emphatic and
philosophically legitimate concept of art as the sensate embodiment of the Idea.
This, of course, is Hegel’s much-discussed end-of-art thesis, the arguments for
and against which I do not intend to rehearse here. They are well enough known.
The point I wish to emphasize, however, is that the end-of-art thesis – the thesis
that mindedness has advanced to a stage where its highest values can simply no
longer be realized in the sensate medium that art ineluctably is – gives us all the
more reason to pause over Hegel’s remark in the Lectures that Goethe’s Divan
might be considered as instantiating an historical art form that falls outside the
romantic sphere and nonetheless realizes the notion of art.

Of course, one might very well say that this entire historical construction is
insensitive to the complexity of the history of art. Even if we bracket our
uneasiness about Hegel’s diagnosis of art in modernity, it’s still a pretty easy
game to identify individual instances his schema fails to account for. Such
objections are no doubt legitimate from the point of view of philology or literary
history, but then the philosopher certainly has the right to inquire in response:
What is the concept of art that underwrites your collection of those examples?
And then the issue becomes: Whose notion of art – the philosopher’s or the
philologist’s – is adequate on conceptual grounds? In that debate, Hegel would
probably have pretty strong cards. My interest here, however, bears on an
altogether different question. I am interested in the linkage forged in the work of
Goethe and Hegel between a certain concept of artistic or literary modernity, on
the one hand, and the relationship to the Orient, in particular to medieval Persian
poetry, on the other. What is the conceptual motivation for this linkage? What are
the qualities of artistic modernity that are being highlighted here?

To bring some drama into my discussion, I want to call attention to a probing

examination of this point carried out in an article by Dieter Henrich. It is a brilliant
article to which I feel greatly indebted even if the trajectory of my argument runs
counter to that of Henrich’s analysis. To put the matter in the briefest possible
way, Henrich claims that Hegel’s reference to Goethe’s Divan, and in particular
his characterization of the Divan in terms of the concepts “Humanus as the saint
of art” and “objective humor,” are symptomatic of a systematic problem within
Hegel’s system. On the one hand, we can see in these two concepts, which are
meant to identify those features of Goethe’s art that mark its move beyond the
conceptual space of romantic art, an implicit acknowledgment that modernity,
too, has a legitimate claim on an artistic articulation of the Idea in configurations
that unite subject and object in a sensate realization. In other words, the remark
on Goethe shows Hegel resisting his own conclusion that art, in its emphatic
sense, is no longer an historical option. On the other hand, Henrich claims that
the two notions Hegel introduces as possible ways out of his dilemma are
inadequate to the task. The notion of “Humanus as the saint of art” gives us, to
be sure, the possibility of an art that realizes itself in the repetition and variation
of what the arts of the past have achieved and that rehearses the diverse
possibilities of human experience that have historically found artistic expression.
But however expansive of historical memory and aesthetic cultivation such
artistic exercises (Kunstübung) might be, they are certainly not to be confused
with art in the emphatic and legitimate sense of a sensate realization of the Idea.
As for the notion of objective humor, it is incapable of leading beyond romantic
art, since, as a species of humor, it necessarily falls within romantic subjectivism,
which Hegel in fact designated as “humor,” albeit “subjective humor.” In short,
although Hegel’s characterization of Goethe’s Divan in terms of its capacious
humanity and its objective humor is meant to mark a possibility for authentic
artistic achievement and thus to disclose the conceptual space of an artistic
modernity, the concepts deployed are insufficient to the task. As it were, Henrich
gives philosophical backing to the intuition shared by many readers of Hegel’s
Lectures: that the only possibility Hegel sees for modern art is a kind of historicist
pastiche modulated by a gentle humor. And that does seem horribly inadequate.

Now the remarkable feature of Henrich’s reading is that, while acknowledging

that Hegel was deeply impressed by the Divan, perhaps even impressed enough
to have made significant conceptual alterations in the Lectures after 1819, he –
Henrich, that is – never consults the Divan itself. This is all the more puzzling
since the Divan includes, in addition to the poems themselves, a lengthy treatise
on the cultural, political, religious, and linguistic environment within which the
poets Goethe’s orientalizing project draws on flourished. These Notes towards a
Better Understanding, moreover, contain significant theoretical statements that
resonate with Hegel’s very brief remarks. Just these remarks, I want to claim, can
help us get a grasp on the concept of artistic modernity emergent in Goethe’s
and Hegel’s work.

Let us start with the notion of objective humor. On Hegel’s account, objective
humor is an attitude of mindedness (Geist) that unites “the disparate extremes of
romantic art.” Those extremes are an unbounded and arbitrary subjective play,
on the one hand, and a realist attention to objective particularities, on the other
hand. The fact that these two directions of artistic endeavor have congealed into
independently pursued projects, unrelated to each other and for that very reason
inadequate to the concept of art, is what demonstrates the dead end, to put it
somewhat drastically, of romantic art. The notion of objective humor, then, is
meant to suggest that a new synthesis of subjectivity and objectivity is possible
as artistic form. More than that: such an art would be adequate to and, indeed,
expressive of a form of mindedness that is fully aware of itself in its essential
freedom, that has realized itself in a ramified network of institutions too complex,
too dependent on abstractive operations to admit concrete or individuated
embodiment, and that has articulated its self-understanding in the form of
speculative philosophy. It is an art that would answer to the modern world as one
of mediation, abstraction, Sachlichkeit, and formalized procedure, all of which
militate against a totalizing sensate symbolization. Such are the criteria that the
concept of objective humor poses for modern art. The first thing one wants to say
about those criteria, I think, is this: It is hard to imagine how anyone could read
them off the surface of Goethe’s Divan.

At least not without Goethe’s instruction in the Notes toward a Better

Understanding. At the very center of that treatise, if it may be so called, one finds
a chapter entitled in such a way as to have caught Hegel’s eye: Allgemeinstes.
Its topic is the most general or universal feature of Persian poetry, one might say:
its concept. Allow me to list the features of that concept:
 1) The supreme characteristic of oriental poetry is, as Goethe puts it, “what
the Germans call Geist.” Geist is the commanding and guiding force that
synthesizes (without homogenizing) all the other poetic features.
2) Geist, considered as the predominant register of artistic or, for that matter,
any other practice, is a characteristic of advanced age or of an aging world
epoch, and its hallmark is the free, ironic use of ones talents.
3) Poets whose work is guided by Geist in this sense have free command
over the entire field of objectivity. This command is exhibited in an agile art
of combination that brings together even the most disparate of things in
surprising and convincing verbal constructions.
4) This sovereign combinatorics resembles what our tradition calls Witz (wit),
but wit is always self-seeking and self-pleasing, features that the art of
mindedness – Geist – is above and entirely free of.

To these four features, the chapter immediately preceding (Allgemeines) adds

this:

5) With all its expansive breadth, Persian poetry nonetheless evinces

throughout attention to individual objects, a sharp and loving regard for
significant things. It creates poetic still-lives that compete with the best
Dutch examples, but transcend them in terms of ethical import
(Sittlichkeit). In these poems, the object world – say, the glowing lantern,
the shining candle – constitute a surrogate mythology. Rose and
nightingale assume the place of Daphne and Apollo.

Henrich’s objection to the notion of objective humor was that it suggests a

genuine synthesis between subject and object, but remains qua humor, within
the realm of subjectivity. But if we assume that Goethe’s account of the poetics of
Geist is the inspiration and reference of Hegel’s formula, then we see very clearly
that a “humor” is conceivable that has its proper home not in self-focused
subjectivity, but in the free universality of mindedness. Indeed, such poetry is the
aesthetic articulation of such mindedness, hence of an advanced “Weltepoche”
(historical epoch). And the synthesis with concrete objectivity, hence with intuitive
immediacy, likewise finds a place in Goethe’s account, whereby those objects
are not realistically represented for their own sake, but rather function as
elements of a poetic mythology. Thus Goethe’s description projects an art that is
indeed the synthesis of humorous wit and realist objectivity, not in the sense of a
mere mixture, but of a genuine synthesis on the higher plane of a universally
oriented Geist.

If we turn, with this passage in mind, to the Divan itself, we will find, I think that it
provides an illuminating description of the collection’s immanent poetics. The
salient feature highlighted in Goethe’s description is the sovereign combination of
semantically discrepant units: The element of mindedness asserts itself when the
entities are taken up in a common medium that allows for fluid transformations.
Such mobility is the function of an intellectualized imagination that is no longer
limited by the heaviness of things. In the important poem Lied und Gebilde
Goethe goes so far as to set this mode of artistic productivity in opposition to the
Greek artistic principle. Hegel, who saw in Greek sculpture the highest
achievement of classical art, could not fail to have been struck by these lines:

Lied und Gebilde

Mag der Grieche seinen Thon

Zu Gestalten drücken,
An der eignen Hände Sohn
Steigern sein Entzücken;

Aber uns ist wonnereich

In den Euphrat greifen,
Und im flüßgen Element
Hin und wieder schweifen.

Löscht ich so der Seele Brand

Lied es wird erschallen;
Schöpft des Dichters reine Hand
Wasser wird sich ballen.

Despite its lightness and playfulness, the intellectual ambition of Goethe’s poem
is immense. It carves out a philosophical-historical distinction between two
artistic principles: the principle introduced by the Greeks that rests on the
Gebilde, what might be thought of as objectival, free-standing products, and the
Oriental principle that is grounded in the fluid medium of self-conscious
mindedness. The artistic product, in the latter case, is not a thing, but a
movement of reflection that culminates in virtual moments of condensation. It is
important to note that art realized in the fluid Euphratic medium maintains a
relationship to sensate objectivity, but not in the form of a work-object. Thus, the
“reine Hand” dipping into the Euphrates’ waters constitutes a semantic
configuration of remarkable immediacy, but its effect of presence derives from its
metaphorical evidence, and this is achieved without retrievable reference to the
perceived world. That, of course, is the point of the concluding metaphor, which
marks the artistic achievement in question here as a literally impossible “ballen”
of the water. In this case, the metaphor works – succeeds – for two reasons:
because of the rhyme that links “ballen” with “erschallen” and because of the pun
embedded in the word schöpfen, in which the “scooping” of the water and the act
of creation are compressed. And, of course, in the background here is the divine
act of creation as well. In general it can be said of the Divan that it elevates
rhyme to a general principle of poetic pairing or binding that operates aurally as
well as semantically. It is this general operation of “pairing” as artistic procedure
that is meant by the “free combinatorics” that Goethe attributes to Persian poetry.
Just this combinatoric lifts the particular to the level of the universal without,
however, sacrificing immediacy to conceptual abstraction. Almost any poem of
the Divan will do as an example of this practice, since almost every poem is also
a document of poetological reflection, but the first two stanzas of “Allleben” strike
me as especially telling:

Allleben

Staub ist eins der Elemente

Das du gar geschickt bezwingest
Hafis, wenn zu Liebchens Ehren,
Du ein zierlich Liedchen singest.

Denn der Staub auf ihrer Schwelle

Ist dem Teppich vorzuziehen,
Dessen goldgewirkte Blumen
Mahmuds Günstlinge beknieen.

Dust, one might say, is the very emblem of finite particularity: the characterization
of human mortality in the formula “dust to dust” is not at all far away here. It is
also, of course, -- and this semantic feature will prove important in the course of
the poem -- one of the four elements of the universe. Singing, as the rhyme of
the first stanza instructs us, is a “mastering” (bezwingen) of the dust, a taking
command, forcing it into an order. And this act of oral mastery of the finite, this
redemption of particularity, occurs, as the second stanza illustrates, in the form of
a lovely hyperbole that reverses accepted hierarchy: the dust on the threshold of
the beloved’s door is preferable to the golden flowers embroidered on the carpets
of royalty. What I take to be salient here is not merely the redemption of
particularity, but the extreme semantic tension that joins and even equates the
diminutive and explicitly ornamental “Liedchen” with the Creation of the world.
Our title, after all, is “Allleben” and the bringing forth of life in the world is an
animation of the dust, just that act the poet is demonstrating for us in his imitatio
of Hafis’ “zierlich Lied”. Thus, the poem concludes with the rehearsal of that
world creation in the image of rain and dust coming together to produce the
“greening fragrance” – “gruneln” – of vegetal life. The “zierlich Lied” – an instance
of ornamental artfulness – is equated with the divine creation of the world. The
motivation for this equation – this rhyming of poetic act and divine Schöpfungsakt
– rests in the thought that the “Lied” itself is formed within that animating medium
of mindedness that, in truth, animates the world. Chronologically, the first poem
of the Divan is “Erschaffen und Beleben,” a somewhat burlesque evocation of the
creation of man out of clay, the mixture of dust and water, and the semantic field
of cosmic creation runs through the entire collection. But this is not cosmic poetry
per se. It is not a religious declaration. Nor is it a mere pastiche of exotic and
charming, but no longer compelling cultural forms. The order of cosmic creation
is merely one of the strands that are interwoven in the fabric of a poetic mythos
the guiding principle of which, as Goethe said, is free and self-aware
mindfulness, or Geist.
The poetics of Geist that has emerged into view here can be summarized in two
concepts, one deriving from Hegel, the other from Goethe. In the case of Hegel, I
am thinking of the phrase he used to characterize the poetry of Hafis and the
other great Persian poets. The chapter he devoted to them in the Lectures on
Aesthetics is entitled Pantheismus der Kunst (pantheism of art). Of course, what
Hegel seems to have principally had in mind is the expression of religious
conviction conveyed in the poetry. Here is a sample of his unabashedly admiring
description: “The self-living (Selbstleben) of mindedness (des Geistigen) in all
natural phenomena and human relations animates and en-minds (begeistigt)
them in themselves amd thus grounds a unique relationship of subjective feelings
and the soul of the poet to the objects, of which he sings.” (I, 490) (Das
Selbstleben des Geistigen in den Naturerscheinungen und in den menschlichen
Verhältnissen belebt und begeistigt dieselben in ihnen selber, und begründet
wiederum ein eigentümliches Verhältnis der subjektiven Empfindungen und
Seele des Dichters zu den Gegenständen, die er besingt.) It seems very likely to
me that this characterization is drawn from study of Goethe’s Divan and the
accompanying notes. Be that as it may, the notion of a “pantheism of art” will not
apply to Goethe if what is implied by that phrase is a living religious belief
embodied in institutions and practices. But we can, I believe, employ the term in
a slightly modified form, speaking with regard to Goethe of an artistic pantheism
(künstlerischer Pantheismus). This artistic pantheism would be rooted in the
exercise of art that knows itself to be a form of mindedness or Geist. It is art
practiced as the self-explication of the artistic intellect. The second term I want to
call to mind here was invented, as I mentioned, by Goethe, although not in
connection with the Divan exclusively. In his later years, Goethe tended to abjure
traditional terms for poetic semiosis such as “symbol” and “allegory” and to
replace them with the term “Formel” or even “geistige/ere Formel.” The phrase
captures both a quality of abstractness or intellection and a certain verbal
operativity, as when we speak of a magical formula. The point I am trying to get
at by alluding to this concept bears, of course, on the peculiar quality of the
language of the Divan. In many respects, the Divan is characteristic of the older
Goethe’s achievement of an artistic language that is at once abstract, stylized,
and in this sense formulaic, and at the same time enigmatic, suggestive, and for
this reason of remarkable poetic power. In the Divan itself, this quality of the
“geistige Formel” is staged in terms of a number of arcane textual practices:
ciphers, enigmas, secret codes, anagrams. And, of course, what might be called
an aesthetics of ornamental script, of the linguistic arabesque, constitutes one of
the most important strand of the Divan’s poetics. (This aspect has been incisively
analyzed in Gerhart von Graevenitz’s book Ornament des Blickes, one of the
most forceful modernist readings of the Divan in the secondary literature.) Artistic
pantheism and formulae of mindedness: these are the two leading terms I wish to
recommend for a possible analysis of the Divan as a paradigmatic work of artistic
modernity. Certainly these terms more accurately capture the Divan’s poetic
specificity than the concept of “objective humor,” although I think they are fully in
the spirit of Hegel’s insight regarding the Divan’s epochal significance.
We can, I believe, deepen this account by turning to the second criterion of
artistic modernity mentioned by Hegel. The art he sees embodied in the Divan
and thus as an option for artistic modernity stands beneath the sign of Humanus
as its patron saint. Nothing is alien to it. Its field is the entirety of human
experience as expressed in the diverse historical realizations of spirit in art. The
Divan, which, as Hegel, puts it, “brings to us” the Orient (Morgenland),
exemplifies this artistic mode. It is a sort of historical and cultural repetition. As
noted above, in Henrich’s view, this description condemns modern art to
historicist pastiche. The question to be asked, however, is: Is this an accurate
description of the cultural poetics of the Divan? What is the relationship between
Goethe’s poetry and its predecessors?

That question is incredibly complex, of course, but our focus here is principally on
the general conceptual issue and the relationship between Goethe and Hegel
and in this regard I believe there is something to be said for a different inflection
of the issue than the historicist reading Hegel seems to promulgate and Henrich
seems to subscribe to as well. We might take the concluding lines of Gingo
Biloba as our guide here:

Fühlst du nicht an meinen Liedern

Dass ich eins und doppelt bin?

The suggestion is that of a unity emergent out of duality, of a reflection of self in

the other and the other in the self such that a third entity emerges from that
reflection. Of course, this self-other code in the Divan has as much to do with the
poetic register of “love” as it does with the relationship to the Orient, but that only
confirms our initial hypothesis: Love and Orient, each internally double in relation
to the poetic subject, are themselves the twin poles of the Divan’s reflection. In
fact, the Divan constantly varies and transforms this two-in-one structure. Here is
another example, poetically especially interesting because it culminates in
Goethe’s emphatic notion of the intensified present or Augenblick:

Wenn du Suleika
Mich überschwänglich beglückst,
Deine Leidenschaft mir zuwirfst
Als wär’s ein Ball,
Daß ich ihn fange,
Dir zurückwerfe
Mein gewidmetes Ich;
Das ist ein Augenblick!

The more one allows such figures of dialectically mediated doubleness to

assume prominence in one’s reading, the less likely it seems that the guiding
intention of the Divan’s poetics is historical and cultural pastiche. The first time he
read Hafis, Goethe remarks in the chapter on Hammer in the Notes, “I sought
through my own production to put myself into relation to him.” („...suchte mich
durch eigene Produktion mit ihm in Verhältnis zu setzen“). Productivity here is
the way to the other and the other is the way to ones own productivity. Much the
same could be said, of course, about the relationship to Marianne. And as a final
piece of theoretical evidence we have Goethe’s theory of translation. That theory
famously distinguishes three types of “Übersetzung” (of linguistic and cultural
translatio). The first is prose translation that transmits basic information about the
age or culture in question; one might think of it as an operation of contentual
abstraction or reduction. It’s virtues are essentially practical. The second type
looks very much like what I have been calling historicist pastiche: “one attempts
to place oneself into the conditions of the foreign lands, but only in order to
appropriate foreign meaning (sich fremden Sinn anzueignen). Goethe calls such
translations “parodistic.” The third and highest form is achieved when one
endeavors to make the translation identical (“identisch” with the original so that it
has its validity not instead of the other, but in the position of the other (“so daß
eins nicht anstatt des andern, sondern an der Stelle des andern gelten soll”). He
continues: “This type of translation initially suffered great resistance; for the
translator who binds himself so tightly to the original more or less gives up the
originality of his own nation, and thus there arises a third object (ein Drittes),
which the taste of the great majority must be educated toward.” (281) What we
have, then, is not an historicist plundering of exotic cultural forms, not an
appropriative act at all, but the emergence of what I want to call a third space: an
artistic space in which every unity is an identity of the Ginko sort: eins und
doppelt.

Now the point here is not that just this is what Hegel meant with his reference to
the patron saint Humanus. The point is, rather, that Goethe’s Divan and the
accompanying Notes exemplify a genuine structural feature of artistic modernity.
That, after all, is what Hegel was claiming for the figure of Humanus. But Hegel’s
description of that structural condition needs to be improved upon since it leads
to a misreading of the Divan and of artistic modernity generally as historicist
pastiche. To conceptualize the structural feature in question I find it useful to
draw on Niklas Luhmann’s form/medium distinction. We may say that art
generally, whether modern or not, consists of form/medium relations. These
relations produce an interplay of self-reference to the so-called formal qualities of
the work, and hetero-reference to features of the world, let us say. My claim is
that, in the case of Goethe’s Divan, these first-order form/medium relations
become themselves the medium of a second-order relationship. This is the third
space that I was referring to above. It becomes the medium for second-order
formal achievement, or what we have called with Goethe unities or identities. And
this entire picture gives us the structural feature of artistic modernity we were
looking for. Perhaps we can put it this way: artistic modernity is characterized by
the fact that artistic production passes through the space of “art” in its historical
achievement. Art is recognized – that is a premise of participation in the game of
art – as a medium that, as it were, absorbs all works into itself. But this means
that artistic practice is aware of itself as presupposing a subtending unity. And
just this sub-tending unity is expressed in the notions of Geist and artistic
pantheism. What these notions finally refer to is not a metaphysical entity, but
rather the very structure of modern artistic communication. Artistic modernity is a
second-order phenomenon: form shaped within the medium of artistic
form/medium relations. This need not be pastiche at all. But it nonetheless
involves, as Goethe says, the abandonment of national originality. Goethe’s
poetics of Geist in the West-östlicher Divan is paradigmatic of artistic modernity
just to the degree that it takes full cognizance of this structural pre-condition of
modern artistic communication.