I was socialized in the divided Germany of the 1980s. It was a time of maximum nuclear threat; nuclear winter was thinkable every day. It was the time of the Cold War, an ideological thinking in blocs. Capitalism or communism were the two options. Capitalism went hand in hand with a Protestant work ethic, communism with an existentialist materialism. The rest was considered esoteric.
It was not easy to find one’s way in this as a teenager. I lived in the West, on the capitalist side, and if I showed an interest in communism, I immediately heard: then go over there. Compounding this was German guilt. The Holocaust must not be forgotten; the guilt of the Germans had to be kept in consciousness. We all bore the guilt, if not personally, then as a cultural community. How could ‘German’ culture bring forth the Third Reich? The intellectual debates in postwar Germany revolved essentially around this question. Can we identify something that led to this catastrophe? How can we look for it, and once we have found it, what can we learn from it? In philosophy, the Frankfurt School was the most prominent. To this day, Habermas is Germany’s intellectual conscience.
Negative Dialectics
Essentially, the argument is as follows: the German Enlightenment (Kant) gave wings to rational thinking. This rationality, still bound in Kant by the categorical imperative, developed the momentum of modernity; a blind faith in progress was unleashed that actually continues to operate unbroken to this day. Under National Socialism, this faith in progress was perverted through a racial theory, an ideology of a master race. Its instruments of power, of war, of the concentration camps were, however, ‘perfected’ in the sense of a cold rationality. The cruel example is the gas chambers of Auschwitz, which, viewed technically, were effective, and yet were nothing other than the most brutal extermination camps of a systematic mass murder of all those who did not fit the image of the ‘master race.’
Negative dialectics subjected the thinking of modernity to a radical critique. Kant’s table of categories was no longer the foundation on which an enlightened society could be built, but became an emblem of rationalist totalitarianism. The consequence was a philosophy that knew only critique. Everything is questioned with regard to its totalitarian structures and left to discussion. What in Adorno is the infinite critical differentiation of the concept is exposed to discourse in Habermas. Only what is accepted by consensus is valid. If there is no consensus in a society, the discussion must continue…
Beauty and Delight
What kind of aesthetics could be derived from this for ‘my’ generation? Concepts such as beauty and sublimity were, of course, taboo. They were branded totalitarian, since they seem to rest on a subjective and authoritarian feeling that eludes rational justification and cannot command consensus in discourse. An aesthetics that is critical appeared ‘politically correct,’ that is, an avant-garde that questions everything preceding it and replaces it with a new ‘critical’ position. The beautiful in art became suspect; the critical attitude became its surrogate.
And yet, taken to their extremes, these aesthetic positions bordered on the sublime: Mark Rothko, John Cage, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Pina Bausch, Bill Viola, Lucio Fontana… a long list of artists could be drawn up, shaped here, of course, by my personal taste. The sublime here is not a beholding of the Divine, but an aesthetic limit experience.
Hymn of Creation
It took me a very long time to open myself to a critically reflected concept of the sublime. My entire intellectual training resisted it within me. And only art that leads toward an aesthetic limit experience, that is not representational in its subject matter, allowed me to experience and name what I experience there as sublime: a white canvas, for example, cut through with a scalpel, whose opening allows a look behind it. Lucio Fontana‘s (1899-1968) ‘Cut paintings’—they are sublime.
This now reminds me of the Hymn of Creation (Rig Veda X.129). It begins with:
nāś ad āsīn nó sád āsīt tadāń īṁ, nāś īd rájo nó víomā paró yát |
kím āv́ arīvaḥ kúha kásya śárman, ámbhaḥ kím āsīd gáhanaṁ gabhīrám |1|
1. Then existence was not nor non-existence, the mid-world was not nor the Ether nor what is beyond. What covered all? where was it? in whose refuge? what was that ocean dense and deep? (Translation by Aurobindo)
In “The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty,” Aurobindo writes:
“The earliest surviving poetry of ancient India was philosophical and religious, the Veda, the Upanishads, and our modern notions tend to divorce these things from the instinct of delight and beauty, to separate the religious and the philosophic from the aesthetic sense; but the miracle of these antique writings is their perfect union of beauty and power and truth, the word of truth coming out spontaneously as a word of beauty, the revealed utterance of that universal spirit who is described in the Upanishads as the eater of the honey of sweetness, madhvadam puruṣam; and this high achievement was not surprising in these ancient deep-thinking men who discovered the profound truth that all existence derives from and lives by the bliss of the eternal spirit, in the power of a universal delight, Ananda”(CWSA 26, p.255)
How, I ask myself, can I bring my rational thinking to open itself to this view? Can I follow the spiritual path of the Upanishads without becoming caught in totalitarian thinking?
The hymn ends with:
iyáṁ vísr̥ ṣṭir yáta ābabhū́va yádi vā dadhé yádi vā ná |
yó asyād́ hyakṣaḥ paramé víoman só aṅgá veda yádi vā ná véda |7|
7. Whence this creation came into being, whether He established it or did not establish it, He who regards it from above (or presides over it) in the highest ether, He knows, — or perhaps He knows it not. (Translation by Aurobindo)
This gives me comfort.
OM śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ
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Thanks to Nishtha for the document with the transliteration of the hymn
