By way of introduction: Gernot Böhme, Philosopher

Gernot Böhme (born 1937, Dessau, Germany) - German philosopher

Böhme was Professor of Philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University and has risen to prominence through his work in aesthetics, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of embodiment, the philosophy of technology and his conception of practical philosophy as a capacity for dealing with the exigencies of life. He has become known beyond specialist cricles too, with interviews and articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as numerous publications on Plato, Kant and Goethe. Böhme's essential concerns are to preserve both human values and the natural world under the conditions of a technological civilisation.


Classical Philosophy, Ethics


Philosophical practice for Böhme means the necessity of formulating questions about life and the elaboration of an art of living. It is connected at the same time with the work of the self on the self. Modern academic philosophy refuses this philosophical tradition which derives from the classical world. Philosophy however is not just a form of methodical knowledge related to science, as it is practised within universities. It is simultaneously the wisdom of the world and a form of life. In speaking of philosophy as a form of life, our concern is as it were with cultivating ourselves as human beings, following in the footsteps of Socrates and the world of antiquity. Philosophy considered as the wisdom of the world draws on Kant, who defined it as the type of philosophy that deals with what is of interest to each and every human being. Today the concern is particularly with questions of social significance. Socrates, as a type, represents an anthropological condition distinguished above all through conscious thought. Böheme's conception implies sensitivity towards what is part of one's own existence that is not part of the self (c.f. the Socratic daimonion). Care of the self does not entail that The Other is denied a sense of self. According to Böhme, in dealings with the irrational components of the self, the task of ethics is to develop forms that allow those components to appear necessary, useful and amenable to control. Böhme has become prominent in Kant scholarship through Das Andere der Vernunft (The Other of Reason), a book published with his brother, Hartmut Böhme. The work presents a critical view of modernity, influenced by psychoanalysis. For Böhme, Kant's epistemology turns out to be a theory of alienated knowledge - it articulates an ideal of the autonomous rational individual, who represents a sort of hard-won strategy of self-mastery. Böhme, by contrast, speaks up for "the other of reason", thus especially for the world of nature, the body, imagination, desire and the emotions. In this connection he has put forward a new interpretation of The Critique of Judgment - the beautiful as atmosphere - and a reconstruction of the metaphysical first principles of natural science. Böhme is critical of the Kantian concept of becoming human through education.


Aesthetics as Aisthetics


Böhme is concerned to thematically extend philosophical aesthetics. He conceives aesthetics as aisthetics, that is as a general theory of perception. The concepts of design, nature and art form the centrepoint of his reflections. The task of aesthetics is not to be a mere medium for the transmission of modern art. An exlusively intellectualistic interpretation of works of art is rejected. Aesthetics also has to take up the theme of human beings' new relationship to a natural world increasingly shaped by their action. Moods and affects play a particular role in aesthetics. What Böhme calls "atmosphere" is the primary reality aesthetics has to deal with. It relates to moods and their spatial carriers - which are essentially what the beholder of a work of art and what he or she perceives have in common. By perception, Boehme understands a mode of bodily presence - with an emphasis on emotional components. Perception for him is primarily the sensation of a presence or, alternatively, a certain atmosophere. Atmosphere belongs neither in the sphere of the object nor in that of the subject; rather it is a co-presence that exists within the terms of the subject/object division. Atmophere is only differentiated retrospectively into a polar relation between "me" and the thing I perceive, thus taking on the fixed duality of subject and object:


"In perceiving an atmosphere I sense what sort of environment I find myself in. The perception thus has two sides to it: on the one hand, there is the environment which radiates a certain quality of mood, on the other hand - me, participating in this mood through my very situatedness and thereby becoming aware where I now am . . . To put it the other way round, atmospheres are the very forms in which things and environments present themselves."


An atmosphere flows out into a space in a far from definite way. We can only follow up its traces to the extent that we have direct experience of it. We have to open ourselves up to it, be affectively influenced by it, affected in both senses of the word. Thus for example a certain cheerful or oppressive mood can prevail in a space. But this is not something subjective. The atmosphere is something we have an immediate experience of as quasi-objectively exterior to us. What is designated as atmospheric here is a condition common to the perceiving individual and his/her environment. We have an immediate experience of "atmospheric phenomena" as free-floating qualities, like energy in the bodily or emotional sense or the partly personified forces of nature. Böhme differentiates between the different characteristics of atmospheres. He counts wealth, power and elegance among social characteristics. Warmth, coldness and brightness are among the so-called synaesthetic characteristics. Tension or tranquility are examples of communicative atmospheric qualities. Atmospheric impressions created through movement can be, among other things, oppressive, uplifting, agitating. There are also moods in the narrower sense, such for example as the sense of scene created by an english garden. In perception, the individual doesn't just sense the presence of something external, he or she has a bodily sense of it - in the process sensing him/herself too. Material things arise out of this sensitivity to the atmospheric through processes of defense, differentiation and restriction. Perceiving them is a dynamic process, because they themselves produce atmospheres and hence our sense of situatedness. What distinguishes things is their spatially fixed place, their corporeality, their identity, the way they function as potential condensation points for qualities perceived atmospherically. It is the perception of things that first constitutes the subject-object relationship. We experience them as factually existing in an objective world beyond the subject as defined by this relationship.

The Art of Having Something to Say: Part 6: Schopenhauer

“Oh, for a spot of old-fashioned misanthropy in this unhappy world of notional positivities, of personal and home improvement, of progress that is less than half believed in, of universal fellowship and respect that never seem to work out. . .”

If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.

Everybody’s friend is nobody’s.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every re-meeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.

When dealing with fools and blockheads there is but one way of showing your intelligence – by having nothing to do with them.

We have not so much to find a correct mean between the two views as rather gain the higher standpoint from which such views disappear of themselves.

Excluding those faces which are beautiful, good-natured, or intellectual – and these are few and far between – I believe that a person of any sensibility hardly ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to shock at encountering a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.

humour . . . to do honour to which in the midst of this mercilessly ambiguous existence of ours hardly a single page could be too serious. . .

All truth passes through three phases. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

The animals are the damned of this earth and human beings their devilish tormentors.

The inexhaustible activity of thought! finding ever new material to work upon in the multifarious phenomena of self and nature, and able and ready to form new combinations of them, - there you have something that invigorates the mind, and apart from moments of relaxation, sets if far above the reach of boredom.

In solitude, where everyone is thrown back upon his own resources, what a man has in himself comes to light; the fool in fine raiment groans under the burden of his miserable personality, a burden which he can never throw off, whilst the man of talent peoples the waste places with his animating thoughts.

By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity. If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself. If only other people will applaud him, a man may console himself for downright misfortune or for the pittance he gets from the two sources of human happiness already discussed [what he is in himself; what he possesses]: and conversely, it is astonishing how infallibly a man will be annoyed, and in some cases deeply pained, by any wrong done to his feeling of self-importance, whatever be the nature, degree, or circumstances of the injury, or by any depreciation, slight, or disregards.

The world as representation, if we consider it in isolation, by tearing ourselves from willing, and letting it alone take possession of our consciousness, is the most delightful, and the only innocent, side of life. We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development, of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life. If the whole world as representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the elucidation of this visibility, the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey and comprehend them better. It is the play within the play, the stage on the stage in Hamlet.

Ah, the life of a professor of philosophy is indeed a hard one! First he must dance to the tune of ministers and, when he has done so really well, he can still be assailed from without by those ferocious man-eaters, the real philosophers.

There still exists the old fundamentally false contrast between spirit and matter among the philosophically untutored who include all who have not studied the Kantian philosophy and consequently most foreigners and likewise many present-day medical men and others in Germany who confidently philosophise on the basis of their catechism. But in particular, the Hegelians, in consequence of their egregious ignorance and philosophical crudeness, have recently introduced that contrast under the name “spirit and nature” which has been resuscitated from pre-Kantian times. Under this title they serve it up quite as naively as if there had never been a Kant and we were still going about in full-bottomed wigs between clipped hedges and philosophising, like Leibniz in the garden at Herrenhausen, on “spirit and nature” with princesses and maids of honour, understanding by “nature” the clipped hedges and by “spirit” the contents of the periwigs. On the assumption of this false contrast, we then have spiritualists and materialists. The latter assert that, through its form and combination, matter produces everything and consequently the thinking and willing in man, whereat the former then raise a great outcry.

Not fame, but that which deserves to be famous, is what a man should hold in esteem.

Light is not visible unless it meets with something to reflect it and talent is sure of itself only when its fame is noised abroad.

He who deserves fame without getting it possesses by far the more important element of happiness, which should console him for the loss of the other.

When modesty was made a virtue it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.

The present alone is true and actual; it is the only time which possesses full reality, and our existence lies in it exclusively. Therefore we should always be glad of it and give it the welcome it deserves, and enjoy every hour that is bearable by its freedom from pain and annoyance with a full consciousness of its value.

Review: Harry Redner's Aesthetic Life: The History and Present of Aesthetic Cultures

Harry Redner’s account of aesthetic life in his book of the same title is one to which the classic dictum of Lichtenberg applies: Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. Replace “good taste” with the more awkward “sense of aesthetic value” and you have Redner’s guiding insight in a nutshell: giving an account of what art is means avoiding all artful pleas for one’s own taste. It means submitting taste to multi-dimensional critical scrutiny on the highest intellectual level. Redner, in short, always has his reasons at his disposal. In Aesthetic Life he is never tempted to evade careful explanation of his whys and wherefores with picturesque rhetorical gestures or baroque theoretical artifice, or by sprinkling the names of the classics across the page.

The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.

In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.

In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .

Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)

Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.

The art of having something to say: Part 4 - Kraus

Seeing that the fifth of the four reader comments that The Great Stage has elicited so far was spoken in praise of the Karl Kraus quote at the top of last month’s big VCA piece, here, mid-week, are some more Kraus translations, with the promise of reams more if someone can find me a publisher:

The aphorism never coves itself with truth, it is either half true, or one-and-a-half times true.

Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.

Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write.

Ethics is running up against the limits of language.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

The world has been defeaned by deadly intonation. It is my conviction that events no longer come to pass, that instead clichés do the entire work of their own accord. Or if events are supposed to come to pass all the same, without being scared off by clichés, then they will cease once the clichés are shattered. The matter is befouled by the language. Our time stinks of its phraseology.

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper, from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts of our machines.

Where will I find the time not to read so much? . . .

Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those that p*ss upon my ways and desecrate my language.

For the first time in the world SHE wants it all and HE wants nothing but her, the gulf between the sexes widens, making room for a whole lot of misery and moralism.

There are metaphors in the language of love too. Those who are illiterate call them perversions and abhor poetry.

Sex can be brought into connection with everything in heaven and earth, with holy religion and sweaty armpits, with the music of the spheres and hurdy-gurdies, with prohibitions and lumpy skin, with the soul and with corsetry. One gives these linkages the name perversions. They have this to be said for them – that they put you in possession of the whole thing when you only have part at your disposal.

The greatest ill in the world is the force impelling one to fritter away one’s inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.

If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.

If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested, nor to a psychoanalyst, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.

The egghead who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without re-stating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered a smartarse.

The report’s distortion of reality is the truly faithful report on reality.

Journalism, which has driven Spirit into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of its pastures. The hack would like to be a full-blown published author. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach; in its hands eternity itself becomes topical; if it weren’t that eternity just as easily becomes an anachronism too if you let a journalist near it. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. It ages confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.

Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.

The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together in the thought.

Woe betide an age in which art doesn’t make the earth less cocksure of itself, in which the artist and not mankind faints before the abyss separating the artist from mankind!

Culture comes to an end when barbarians erupt out of its midst.

Age review of John Armstrong's In Search of Civilisation

John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilisation runs two intersecting arguments. The first is that civilised culture comes into existence where material and spiritual prosperity mutually enhance each other. The second is that “any ambitious account of civilisation has to be an account of how we should live, individually and collectively.”

The emphasis there is on the “should”. Armstrong says at the outset that he is not much interested in civilisation as an historical or sociological phenomenon. What he’s after is the essence of civilisation and the essence of civilisation, he hopes, can function as a source of cultural idealism in a world in which such idealism feels like it is under permanent attack.

Out he comes and says it, with his characteristic directness: philosophy can and should be the basis of all civilised aspirations, the goal of philosophy being the realisation that the good, the beautiful and the true are one . . . Civilisation ought to make us wise, kind and tasteful. And the purpose of the economy is to promote exactly that.

Armstrong basically wants to define civilisation as whatever makes personal self-development possible. Within that limited compass, he has plenty to say. How you deal with the little things in life and how you enjoy yourself are under-recognised parts of what it is to be civilised. Healthy civilisations are those which imbue routine activities with the qualities of works of art. Civilised societies are those which help individuals develop a sense of sophistication and refinement. They support “good accumulation”, money-making with a sense of higher purpose. They even improve the quality of relationships.

As in his earlier Secret Power of Beauty, Armstrong’s strength is in condensing complicated thinking into the clearest simplest terms. In Search of Civilisation contains a topnotch 2 page summary of Freud’s case in “Civilisation and Its Discontents” and a mildly amusing modern adaptation of Aristotle’s ethics.

He’s also good at teasing out both sides of cultural conflicts that materialise partially in individual life. His chapters on “decadence” and “barbarism” genuinely do something with those over-wrought nineteenth century terms; if you thought you could do without your inner bogan or your inner dandy then according to Armstrong you mistake the way modern civilisation necessarily produces both.

Several of Armstrong’s observations have a sort of low-key reflective heft: the specialised world of art scholarship can be as culturally dispiriting as plastic statuettes of Michelangelo’s David; a bit of old-fashioned sublimation of desire is not just good but downright noble.

There are a couple of problems with tone. For one, Armstrong can sound sanctimounious when he speaks on behalf of his readers. When he assumes too easily that his own professed longing for civilisation resonates with “our” deepest needs and concerns, “our” humanity, he sounds like Tony Blair transported into a philosophy tutorial.

Though not exactly irrelevant to his theme, the grace, charm and material comfort of Armstrong’s own way of life are put on display with a mite too much self-satisfaction, gently suggesting that he himself embodies the civilised ideal his book sets out to explain.

One-dimensional expressions of ardour for civilised things are a second problem. Armstrong’s intention is clearly to avoid dry philosophical technicality. But surely he might have found other ways of doing so than avowing that he is “penetrated to the depths of his soul” by so many things? Sometimes the intrusions of authorial personality simply seem, well, a bit embarrassing. They make the book too much about Armstrong and not enough about civilisation.

“Perhaps we are inescapably marked – when it comes to ideas – by early life. . . My deepest fear is of loutish bullying and, close second, of appealing for help and being told the problem lies in me. Uncritical emphasis upon ideas like difference and equality is terrifying. . .”

There are also some broader failings related to the substance of Armstrong’s thinking about civilisation. Because he chooses not to engage with the problem of civilisation historically, he doesn’t acknowledge that the very concept might have changed radically under modern social conditions.

His stated aim is to re-make the “tarnished idea” of civilisation. But how is this possible without recognition that we live in an increasingly globalised world that has all but effaced former boundaries between cultures? How does it differ from nostalgia if it doesn’t face up to the paradoxes with which technology confronts the aesthetic and ethical ideals of old?

Because Armstrong doesn’t qualify his argument about the virtues of materialism, he overestimates the way economic success can be a neutral second pillar of civilisation alongside spiritual prosperity. The possibility he doesn’t consider is whether contemporary economic life in a high-tech globalised world has a radical potential to act as a sort of acid for dissolving the forms of culture and civility that ground the life of civilised communities.

The results are all around us. The “civilising” content of the cultural past is re-packaged as another sort of economic product. As that content is made available in relatively cheap standardised form to masses of people the world over, it is evacuated of a large part of its meaning. Nor is the high-minded re-assertion of the civilising mission of high culture likely to do any good under such conditions. High culture is well and truly catered for as a niche product within a mass market, which is ultimately where Armstrong’s work takes its place. - It is not just that the petunia in the onion patch is unlikely to convince the onions to become petunias. We’ve got to the bizarre point where the petunia’s attempts to convince the onions sow the seeds of more onions.

Armstrong’s sections on the contribution of material prosperity to civilisation represent the real weakpoint of his thought. Where the rest of his book is often psychologically canny, in the sections on culture’s relationship to money Armstrong wants to deal with a large-scale social conundrum without bothering with the detail of how societies work. His few nods in the direction of economics are unconvincing.

Nor does the book engage enough with the collective side of the enterprise of civilisation that on Armstrong’s account is supposed to be the complement to the individual side. The organisations and institutions of civilised life hardly make an appearance. But without them the book’s notion of civilisation looks more like a personal idyll than a coherent ideal.