The Man without Content

The Man without Content

Giorgio Agamben – The Man without Content

The book goes from a modern aesthetic conception of art to an art tied to the very meaning of existence. The disinterested spectator, which Nietzsche’s quote at the very beginning critiques, acts as the point of departure. The spectator, the collector, the romantic, accumulates culture and archives it. He or she leaves art at the level of representation.

Agamben, regarding Nietzsche’s criticism of Kantian aesthetic judgment: “the aesthetic dimension – the sensible apprehension of the beautiful object on the part of the spectator – is replaced by the creative experience of the artist who sees his work only un promesse de bonheur, a promise of happiness. Having reached the furthest limit of its destiny in the “hour of the shortest shadow”, art leaves behind the neutral horizon of the aesthetic and recognizes itself in the “golden ball” of the will to power.” (2)

The book attempts to elaborate on this point. On pages 3-4, the discussion regarding Plato and Sophocles – their ban on poetry – introduces the theme of Chapters 6-8: the relationship between praxis and poesis.

Pages 4-5 note the “dangers” of interested art, most notably Plato’s notion of “divine terror”. Here, Agamben contrasts the artist and the spectator.

“To the increasing innocence of the spectator’s experience in front of the beautiful object corresponds the increasing danger inherent in the artist’s experience, for whom art’s promesse de bonheur becomes the poison that contaminates and destroys his existence.” (5)

Note the Rilke quote about the extreme limits of art. This leads to a discussion regarding whether art is dangerous for society, and Agamben concludes that most artists themselves would acquiesce to Plato’s ban on it on p. 6. This leads to a very interesting point:

“If this is true, then the entrance of art into the aesthetic dimension – and the understanding of it starting from…the spectator – is not as innocent and natural a phenomenon as we commonly think. Perhaps nothing is more urgent – if we really want to engage the problem of art in our time – than a destruction of aesthetics that would, by clearing away what is usually taken for granted, allow us to bring into question the very meaning of aesthetics as the science of the work of art.” (6)

This may be at the centre of his study: to recover the origin of art from the hold of modern aesthetics. “And if it is true that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible only in the house ravaged by fire, then perhaps we are today in a privileged position to understand the authentic significance of the Western aesthetic project.” (6)

He revisits this analogy at the end: “According to the principle by which it is only in the burning house the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time, art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project”. (115)

In the final chapter entitled “The Melancholy Angel”, a reference to Benjamin’s Angel of History, he proposes that art is stuck in a paradoxical position between past and future.

“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 served, 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. The angel of history, whose wings became caught in the storm of progress, and the angel of aesthetics, who stares in an atemporal dimension at the ruins of the past, are inseparable. And so long as man has not found another way to settle individually and collectively the conflict between old and new, thus appropriating his historicity, a surpassing of aesthetics would not be limited to exaggerating the split that traverses its appears unlikely.” (112)

So what’s the point? He approaches the question of aesthetic space in a way similar to Arendt (or so I think). “Just as all other mythic-traditional systems celebrate rituals and festivals to interrupt the homogeneity of profane time and, reactualizing the original mythic time, to allow man to become again the contemporary of the gods and to reattain the primordial dimension of creation, so in the work of art the continuum of linear time is broken, and man recovers, between past and future, his present space.” (101-02) He speaks of terra aesthetica and how it obscures the original meaning of art – as well as how this relationship between past and future allows man to comprehend presentness. Terra aesthetica - from what I can gather - is leaving the aesthetic object simply at the level of representation, neglecting the original relationship the work of art has with truth.

“To look at a work of art, therefore, means to be hurled out into a more original time: it means ecstasy in the epochal opening of rhythm, which gives and holds back. Only by starting from this situation of man’s relationship with the work of art is it possible to comprehend how this relationship – if it is authentic – is also for man the highest engagement, that is, the engagement that keeps him in the truth and grants to his dwelling on earth its original status. In the experience of the work of art, man stands in the truth, that is, in the origin that has revealed itself to him in the poietic act. In this engagement, in this being-hurled our into the…of rhythm, artists and spectators recover their essential solidarity and their common ground.” (102) Hence, Todorov’s characterization of Cortes – appreciating the beauty of objects while neglecting the subjectivity of the creators – applies very well to this. The original tie between spectator and artist also undercuts the disinterested experience of a “man of taste”.

The way Agamben sets up his study is quite insightful.

Chapter 2 and 3 sets up the spectator as the “man of taste”, the one who derives meaning (self-meaning) exclusively from aesthetic objects.

Chapter 4 explores the morbid fascination of the modern aesthete for collecting; the rise of the modern museum.

Chapter 5-6 broaches dichotomies, of a sort: being and non-being, art and the absence of art, in other words, setting up an analogy used in the later chapters, presence and shadow (non-presence). It fields the potential “death of art” in an age of nihilism.

Chapter 7 touches on the topic of products – pop art, consumer art – possibly as an extension of the “cabinets of wonders” of Chapter 4, but differs in its emphasis on production, more specifically the labour involved in production. The point regarding pro-duction serves as the impetus for the recovery of the original meaning of art.

This is an important thread that leads into the longest chapter of the book, Chapter 8, which examines the relationship between praxis and poiesis. It looks at the Greeks (72-76), specifically Aristotle (76-78), Marx on genus or Gattungswesen (79-85), and lastly Nietzsche’s correlation of the work of art to the will to power (85-93).

Chapters 9-10, as the concluding chapters, make very clear the relationship of art to historicism. This “trajectory” (that I have almost arbitrarily imposed on his work) appears to work through the condition of modern aesthetics, one dominated by the man of taste – an extension of the modern knowing subject. The presence of this individual is a manifestation of nihilism, insofar there is a crisis of meaning that stems from an alienation from the original meaning of art. Chapters 7 and 8 aim to recover the original relationship between human action and the work of art, hence the look at praxis and poiesis – one that is inspired by Heidegger and Arendt as the early parts of Chapter 8 implicitly notes. Human action cannot act extemporaneously, hence necessitating the final chapters on man in between past and future, and the possibility of recovering presentness through art. The spatial-temporal questions posed in those chapters most closely resemble Arendt, but are nonetheless interesting questions.

Of the man of taste, Agamben writes the following. “Taste is his only self-certainty and self-consciousness; however, this certainty is pure nothingness, and his personality is absolute impersonality. The very existence of such a man is a paradox and a scandal: he is incapable of producing a work of art, yet it is upon art that his existence depends; though condemned to depend on something other than himself, in this other he does not find any sense of what is essential, because every content and every moral determination is abolished.” (23) He intimates, even here, that man of taste is indeed an expression of nihilism. This becomes clearer later on.

“The spectator’s is the most radical split; his principle is what is most alien to him; his essence is in that which, by definition, does not belong to him. Taste, in order fully to be, has to become separate from the principle of creation; but without genius, taste becomes a pure reversal, that is, the very principle of perversion.” (24)

This invites a lengthy citation from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s “pure culture” is related to the self-annulling nihilism manifested by Rameau’s nephew, the man of taste. “In Rameau’s nephew, Hegel saw the summit – and at the same time the beginning of the undoing – of European culture on the brink of the Terror and of the Revolution, when Spirit, having alienated itself in culture, can only find itself again in the consciousness of a split and in absolute perversion of all concepts and all realities. Hegel called this concept “pure culture”…” (24-25)

“In front of Rameau’s nephew, who has become conscious of the split in himself, the honest consciousness (the philosopher, in Diderot’s dialogue) cannot say anything that the cowardly consciousness does not already know and say itself, because the latter is precisely the absolute perversion of everything into its opposite, and its language is the judgment that, while it dissolves every identity, plays this game of self-dissolution with itself as well. The only way it has to reach self-possession is wholly to appropriate its extreme split […] his consciousness (Rameau’s nephew) is radical inconsistency, his fullness is absolute lack.” (25-26)

On p. 34, the comment on medieval man looking at they tympanum of the Vezelay cathedral: “he had the aesthetic impression not that he was observing a work of art but rather that he was measuring, more concretely for him, the borders of his world. The wonderful was no yet an autonomous sentimental tonality and the particular effect of the work of art, but an indistinct presence of the grace that, in the work, put man’s activity in tune with the divine world of creation, and thus kept alive the echo of what art had been in its Greek beginnings: the wonderful and uncanny power of making being and the world appear, of producing them in the work.”

From Mysticism to Dialogue

Paul Mendes-Flohr. From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989)

“Interpersonal life, Simmel taught, has an ontological grounding.” (14) This follows a description of how Simmel may have influenced the development of Buber’s thought. But it must be noted that Simmel and young Buber’s thought is different from that of later Buber. “Simmel’s – and the young Buber’s – ontology of forms of relationship differ radically from Buber’s dialogical ontology. For Simmel, an infinite number of forms of relationship are, by definition, ontological; for the later Buber, only one form of relationship, the dialogic, is so graced. Simmel’s “formal sociology” would, in any case, seem to have had a seminal influence on Buber’s Ontologie des Zwischenmenschlichen (ontology of the between).” (14) Mendes-Flohr notes that the younger pre-dialogical Buber was only “superficially interested in the relations…between men” from 1899 to 1922 (15). “Indeed, prior to his affirmation of the realm of the interpersonal, Buber’s intellectual and spiritual focus was singularly a-social. In his pre-dialogical period, his central concern was the crisis of Kultur, the decline of spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities wrought by industrial, urban Zivilisation. Such a “romantic discontent” with modernity had been shared by many intellectuals since the rise of capitalist society.” (15) This note is used to introduced the influence of Nietzsche on a young Buber; Buber translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Polish at the age of seventeen. “As a young man, Buber expressly considered himself a disciple of Nietzsche; and even subsequently, a strong trace of Nietzsche’s influence can be discerned in all of Buber’s thought, particularly that of his pre-dialogical period.” (15) Later on in the book, Mendes-Flohr returns to reinforce this point. “Buber apparently held fast to his youthful affirmation of Nietzsche’s Heraclitean Weltbild: the world (qua reality) is in constant flux and should we desire to align ourselves with this process, our “primal” relation to this process must be continually renewed. Renewal – metaphysical, cultural, and social – is at bottom an act of spirit. Indeed, in that he continued to regard acts of the spirit, grounded in the realm of sensibility (Kultur in the broadest sense), as the fulcrum of social change, Buber remained true to his intellectual origins as a Kulturphilosoph.” (126) Mendes-Flohr explains that Buber’s generation approached conventional bourgeois life with great scepticism, seeking a regeneration of Kultur. “Thus, Buber’s early Zionism, which envisioned the redemption of the Jew to lie in a “renaissance” of the Jewish spirit and “primordial” sensibilities, is perhaps best understood as a species of Kulturpolitik.” (16) The discussion of a generational revolt of “spiritually vacuous revolt of bourgeois Zivilisation leads to Buber’s relationship with Wilhelm Dilthey.

“Buber’s generation instinctively protested this conclusion and affirmed the world-in-itself, the presumed reality beyond the phenomenal world refracted through sense data, as the “true reality,” declaring this reality as knowable precisely by virtue of the nonrational categories of intuition and feeling. This “idealistic reaction against science” was represented most prominently in the academy by Buber’s teacher Dilthey, who sought to effect a radical revision of nineteenth century epistemology, particularly with respect to Geistewissenschaften. Dilthey argued that Erlebnis, lived or inner experience (as opposed to Erfahrung, or cognitive experience grounded in sense data), is the primary faculty of knowing the nonlogical, dynamic events of the human spirit. Because it is an “an elementary and immediate reality,” Erlebnis is considered to enjoy an epistemological status (i.e., it possesses an appreciative quality) not obtainable by Erahrung, which medicates the data of sense perception through a priori structures of cognition.” (17) Mendes-Flohr is careful to point out that Dilthey did not “suggest that Erlebnis provided a noumenal, “higher” from of knowledge”; that would be the work of his more enthusiastic votaries. (17) This is done to demonstrate Buber’s brief flirtation with the more romantic elements of German Kultur in his youth, as is shown through his belief that the mystic “achieves unity with the primal experience…of the world spirit”. (18) “Clearly, Buber’s formulation of the mystic’s path to unity is a novel, free combination of Nietzsche’s voluntarism (i.e., unconditional living) and Dilthey’s “Erlebnis” epistemology.” (18)

The final part of the introduction shows the a-social character of Buber’s Kulturphilosophie at its most intense, in the context of the First World War. The enthusiasm Buber displayed for the war was derived from his belief in its metaphysical significance. But, as Mendes-Flohr notes, Gustav Landauer, socialist activist and Buber’s close friend, shook him from his position. The events of the First World War mark the turn in Buber’s thought from, what Mendes-Flohr calls, an a-social phase towards the dialogical Buber of his later life. “For Buber, the axis of Gemeinschaft (community) shifts from pathos to ethos,” writes Mendes-Flohr (19). The shift from the heroic fulfilment of a world narrative to the confrontation of a real world situation occurs in Buber’s thought primarily in response to the unparalleled brutality of the Great War. “At first, Buber had sought to integrate his new sensitivity to the realm of the interpersonal into the categories of his Kulturphilosophie. In time, what emerged was a radical modification of that philosophical system and a novel epistemology and social ontology (bearing, as it does, the imprint of Simmel’s influence) that characterize Buber’s dialogical thought. Mendes-Flohr concludes the introduction by proposing, “I and Thou is also – and perhaps principally – a grammar for the ethical regeneration of Gemeinschaft (community).” This interpretation is one that he brings back in the introduction to The Letters of Martin Buber.

The first chapter “Simmel’s Paradox” is inaugurated with a brief note on Buber’s relation to sociology, primarily through his teacher Georg Simmel, and the various publishing and editing projects he undertook. The primary point to be grasped is that the concept das Zwischenmenschliche (the ontology of the between) emerges in this early period. “He seems to have introduced this neologism to clarify a problem in Simmel’s epistemology of social life…” (25) Mendes-Flohr goes on to explicate Simmel’s approach to social relations on pp. 26 – 29.

“Interaction does not occur in a haphazard or irregular manner, rather it displays specific patterns. Borrowing the Kantian dichotomy of form and matter, Simmel contends that a priori principles of forms (Formen) structure the given expression of a particular interaction or sociation between individuals. Form is an analytical construct designed to isolate the purely social from the content (intent, purpose) of a social situation, “content being in itself not social”. Justification for this distinction is the observation that the same content may be found with an endless variety of forms; and vice versa, the same form may be realized with an infinite variety of contents. The identification and description of these forms, which proceed inductively and psychologically, Simmel avers, are the principal task of sociology as a science.” (27)

“Further, Simmel emphasizes, “these forms do not make for sociation; they are sociation.” This is to say that social life constitutes “a unique and autonomous form of existence.” (27)” There are traces of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy in what Simmel puts forth. But Buber puts these ideas to greater scrutiny. Simmel, however, realizes the uniquely contradiction this conception of sociation poses. “As a Kantian, Simmel was profoundly perplexed by this observation – and this perplexity recurs throughout his sociological writings. How could society, understood as fundamentally an interpersonal relationship or event, be said to possess objectivity if it is devoid of spatiality? To Kant, only the realm of space and time could possibly qualify as objective.” (28) But Buber, in I and Thou, reveals the I-Thou relationship is neither objective or subjective in substance (personal note). Simmel concludes that “sociation as consciousness of the other is a form of knowledge, akin to apperceptive self-consciousness is a form of knowledge, akin to apperceptive self-consciousness.” (28) “Society is a fact of cognition”, exclaims Simmel. (28) As Mendes-Flohr explains, Simmel, however, rejects the psychological-functional model of interaction as inadequate. “This model of social interaction would imply that the response of one individual to another is merely a modification, conscious or unconscious, of one’s psychic interests. To Simmel, this could hardly explain the objective forms to which individuals seem to adhere in their relations between one another.” (28) By applying a Kantian concept of synthesis, Simmel tried to respond to functionalist arguments. “In synthesis, primally disparate and incoherent elements are “connected” to form a unity of perception. This unification endows the constituents with a quality they do not possess in and of themselves. Kant of course confines this act of cognition to spatial objects.” (28-29) This is the paradox mentioned in the title of the chapter. Buber proposes das Zwischenmenschliche as a “descriptive designation of the ‘region’ of interaction” (29). Mendes-Flohr reiterates, for the sake of the reader, that this is the central preoccupation of the study; to uncover the relationship of the ontology of the between or interhuman to Simmel’s sociology. In other words, Mendes-Flohr embarks on a genetic account of the concept interhuman in Buber’s thought.

Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), French sociologist, perhaps the first in Europe to propound the idea of a social psychology opposed to a Volkerpyschologie, taught that social facts arise through imitation, an “inter-mental” activity in which the action or value of one individual is duplicated by that of another. “The mechanism of imitation is affective. Individuals influence each other much in the manner that a wave motion is distributed: an innovative motion (act, value) is distributed (socialized) through a series of assimilative, monadic (human) relations. In a less mechanistic version, Tarde contends that a social process is initiated by an innovative act that is an adaptation to a given situation; other “intuitively” acknowledge the genius of this act and imitate it.” (33) Although this discussion between sociology and social psychology is interesting it leads to a divergence between Dilthey and Simmel, two primary influences on Buber. According to Mendes-Flohr, Buber cites Dilthey as a his “principal teacher in philosophical studies” (34). The quote from Dilthey regarding man as a “historical and social being” is reflective of his influence on Buber’s later work on philosophical anthropology in “What is Man?” (personal note). Dilthey’s objections to the discipline of sociology lies in its attempts to provide grand formulas…a science “which aims at comprehending everything with happens de facto in human society in a single study…” (35) “Dilthey,” according to Mendes-Flohr, “argues that political science (Staatswissenschaft) is the only discipline methodologically capable of treating such phenomena. Furthermore, the “state” assures the functioning of “lower” organizations and often has incorporated these into its own juridical organization.” (36). Mendes-Flohr notes that Buber’s affinity to Dilthey is largely “terminological”, but the conceptual substance of his idea of social science remains dependent on Simmel (36). He relates Dilthey to “political principles” or institutional conventions and Simmel’s forms to a priori principles, “whose dynamic transcends both history and individual action system” (36). The point of the chapter is clear enough. Mendes-Flohr attempts to demonstrate the Simmel has a philosophical influence on Buber, as much as Dilthey. “Buber’s social psychology is non-psychologistic; therefore, Dilthey’s psychologistic position is not a contributing factor in its formation.” (42) Mendes-Flohr clarifies this later on. “Contrary to Dilthey, Buber presents the descriptive and analytical aspects of social psychology as procedurally separate. Furthermore, he suggests that these aspects are each of a fundamentally different order: analytical social psychology is confined to the labour of one individual, descriptive social psychology is a cooperative effort of many; the former is pedestrian, the latter a new and fruitful departure.” (42) It goes on to be a deep analysis of Buber’s preface to Simmel’s work. The point is that the terminology for interhuman is posed in the preface and reflects a convergence of the influences Dilthey and Simmel had on a young Buber. “For Simmel the fleeting moment of interaction is an elemental sociation; for Buber the evanescent “meeting” of an I and Thou is an “elemental dialogue” – and as such, it discloses an oft-hidden “reality.” In the fleeting moment of meeting, one gains a glimpse of the life of “genuine community” (echte Gemeinschaft), or matrix of warm and trusting relations that had been eclipsed by the competitive, calculating relations of bourgeois urban life. The I-Thou meeting is an elemental Gemeinschaft, and hence, as we shall subsequently see, Buber held that Gemeinschaft is not, as many pessimistically presumed, irretrievably lost; and if indeed it is locked in the past, at least, Gemeinschaft-like relations are an elemental, and thus preduring, transhistorical reality.” (45)

Mendes-Flohr describes the transition of das Zwischenmenschliche from a “sociological designation denoting the zone of interaction” to “a term of ontological ethics describing the realm of “authentic” interhuman relations” (46). “Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft are no longer simply a matter of organic structures, of historical, diametrical oppositions, but of transhistorical forms of relation: in Between Man and Man (1947), Buber attributes the crisis of modern man, his “social and cosmic homelessness” to two factors…” (46) Having read BMM, I can tell you those two are the increasing decay of the old organic forms of direct life of man with man; and the second is that man can no longer master what he has brought about, i.e., technology. The presumption that a choice must be made between an individualistic anthropology and a collectivist sociology is erroneous. “The influence of Simmel’s “formal sociology” is palpable. His teaching that society is essentially structured by a priori forms of relations would thus seem to have furnished Buber with a seminal insight leading to a strategy for the renewal of Gemeinschaft.” (47) The pre-dialogical Buber, as Mendes-Flohr notes, “subsumed his interest in sociology to his overriding quest for heightened inner experience (Erlebnis) and mystical unity beyond the phenomenal and therefore social world” (47). This cannot be presented as a mere aberration, as Mendes-Flohr does, of Buber’s generation. This quest was mystical unity was of course steeped in neo-Romantic yearnings for lost roots. Although the connection to a Volkish ideology is made elsewhere – Bloch and Mosse – it cannot be made in the case of Buber. It was an intellectual movement against urban bourgeois values, but also intent on reviving Kultur.

“Buber’s pre-dialogical thought is dominated by an interest in mysticism, particularly, in the unitive Erlebnis. This interest was…a correlate of his concern with the putative decline of man’s spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities attendant to the rise of bourgeois Zivilisation.” (49) This chapter appears to clearly draw out the influence of Nietzsche on Buber’s pre-dialogical, but also his dialogical thought. But to examine Nietzsche’s influence on Buber, we must examine Schopenhauer’s framing of the problem of individuation.

“For Schopenhauer the empirical world is principally a fact of individuation: a plurality of discrete and autonomous units, all of which are eternally separate from one another. An irremovable barrier separates all empirical facts of existence, between man and man, between object and object, and, of course, between man and object. Such an individuated world is a function of the perceiving mind, however. The a priori structure of human cognition prescribes that the world be apprehended by the formal principles of time and space, principles that, because they seek to specify or measure relatedness, “succession of moments” and “position of parts,” necessarily imply a cognitive finiteness or individuation of that which is perceived…Time and space are the sole and defining principles of the phenomenal world, the world of individuation.” (51) We return once again to Nietzsche.