II was socialized in the divided Germany of the 1980s. It was a time of maximum nuclear threat, nuclear winter was a daily possibility. It was the time of the Cold War, ideological bloc thinking. Capitalism or communism were the two options. Capitalism went hand in hand with a Protestant work ethic, communism with existentialist materialism. The rest was considered esoteric.
It wasn't easy to find your way around as a teenager. I lived in the West, the capitalist side, and if I showed an interest in communism, I immediately heard: then go over there. German guilt made things even more difficult. The Holocaust could not be forgotten, the guilt of the Germans had to be kept in our consciousness. We all bore the guilt, if not personally, then as a cultural community. How could 'German' culture bring about the Third Reich? The intellectual debates in post-war Germany revolved 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 the intellectual conscience of Germany.
Negative dialectics
The essence of the argument is as follows: The German Enlightenment (Kant) gave wings to rational thinking. This rationality, still shackled by the categorical imperative in Kant, developed the momentum of modernity, a blind belief in progress was unleashed, which actually continues unabated to this day. Under National Socialism, this belief in progress was perverted by a racial theory, an ideology of master race. However, their instruments of power, war and concentration camps were 'perfected' in the sense of cold rationality. The gruesome example of this are the gas chambers of Auschwitz, which were technically effective, but were nothing more than the most brutal extermination camps of a systematic mass murder of all those who did not fit into the image of the 'master race'.
Negative dialectics subjected modernist thinking to radical criticism. Kant's table of categories was no longer the foundation on which an enlightened society could be built, but became a symbol of rationalist totalitarianism. The consequence was a philosophy that only knew criticism. Everything is questioned with regard to its totalitarian structures and left open to discussion. Adorno's infinite critical differentiation of the concept is exposed to discourse by Habermas. Only that which is accepted by consensus is valid. If there is no consensus in a society, there must be further discussion...
Beauty and delight
What kind of aesthetics should be derived from this for 'my' generation? Terms such as beauty and sublimity were of course taboo. They were branded as totalitarian, as they seemed to be based on a subjective and authoritarian feeling that defied rational justification and was not capable of consensus in discourse. A critical aesthetic appeared 'politically correct', i.e. an avant-garde that questioned everything that had gone before and replaced it with a new 'critical' position. Beauty in art became suspect, the critical stance its surrogate.
And yet these aesthetic positions bordered on the sublime in their exaggerations: Mark Rothko, John Cage, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Pina Bausch, Bill Viola, Lucio Fontana... a long list of artists could be drawn up, which is of course influenced by my personal taste. The sublime here is not a show of the divine, but an aesthetic borderline experience.
Hymn of Creation
It took me a very long time to open myself up to a critically reflected concept of the sublime. My entire intellectual training resisted it. And only art that leads to an aesthetic borderline experience, which is not representative of its subject, allowed me to experience and name what I experience there as sublime: a white canvas, for example, cut through with a scalpel, the opening of which allows me to look behind it. Lucio Fontana's (1899-1968) 'Cut paintings' - they are sublime.
This 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 Aurobindo)
Aurobindo writes in "The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty":
"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 puruṣamand 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 get my rational thinking to open up to this view? Can I follow the spiritual path of the Upanishads without getting caught up 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 Aurobindo)
That gives me comfort.
OM śāntiḥ śāntiḥ śāntiḥ
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Thanks to Nishtha for the document with the transliteration of the hymn
