Phenomenology as an Abortive Science of Art: Two Contexts of Early Phenomenological Aesthetics (Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and GAChN)

ABSTRACT

This article critically examines the usual characterisation of aesthetics as a fragmented, marginal or secondary field within phenomenology. The author argues in particular that phenomenological aesthetics was consciously and systematically articulated as an explicit programme in at least two distinct contexts of early phenomenology: the international project to establish a general science of art known as the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and the Soviet State Academy of Art Studies (GAChN). The article explores the impact of these institutions on the development of early phenomenological aesthetics, highlighting how that development was conditional on the idea of a general science of art. It suggests, in conclusion, that these two attempts to mobilise phenomenology as a science of art, while abortive, cast important light not only on early phenomenological aesthetics, but on phenomenology’s fundamental relation with aesthetics.

KEYWORDS:

• General science of art
• aesthetic object
• strata
• inner form
• Waldemar Conrad
• Roman Ingarden
• Emil Utitz
• Gustav Špet

In their succinct preface to the Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree argue that “contributions to [aesthetics] have continually been made in the phenomenological tradition from very early on, but, so to speak, along the side.”¹ Although “a great deal of [phenomenological] thought about art and aesthetics has […] accumulated during a century” and although art and aesthetics constitute “the most natural field to be approached phenomenologically,”² they have remained marginal, spectral themes, which phenomenologists have generally treated in fragmentary, circumstantial fashion, as a secondary concern subordinated to the central questions of knowledge, perception, experience, or Being.

This view of phenomenological aesthetics as a sum of incidental contributions holds mostly true of early phenomenology: one can mention Husserl and his perfunctory engagement with art, Scheler (who never published directly on the matter), and at least Heidegger’s early work (Sein und Zeit makes no mention of art). Sepp and Embree are also correct in their suggestion that art and aesthetics were usually solicited by early phenomenologists to illustrate or exemplify general themes (imagination, language, intentionality), but not as specifically interesting domains with the potential to deepen, let alone challenge the methods of phenomenology itself. Tellingly, the radical practices of modernist art barely registered with early phenomenologists³ and, if a connection was made between modern art and phenomenology, it was only in the sense that phenomenology offered a ready-made explanation for new art forms such as expressionism.⁴

The fragmentary, peripheral status of phenomenological aesthetics is of course less evident in the cases of Roman Ingarden, of post-war French authors such as Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne, Michel Henry, Henri Maldiney, or of the members of the so-called Milan School (Antonio Banfi, Dino Formaggio, Gabriele Scaramuzza), who all devoted sustained attention to art and aesthetics. But here also a certain marginality is at work: these thinkers’ reflections never coalesced into a structured discourse, let alone a distinct, impactful tradition that succeeded in inscribing art and aesthetics as essential themes at the very heart of phenomenology. Even Merleau-Ponty, whose thought “entertained, in all its ramifications and even in its apparently least aesthetic moments, a semi-tacit dialogue with artists and their work” and who thus “seemed predestined to become a major thinker of art”,⁵ did not provide a phenomenological aesthetics or phenomenology of art. Rather, as Alloa and Jdey note, “it is as if, by freeing art from its reserved domain and making it the privileged interlocutor of a wider reflection on sensible being, Merleau-Ponty had given up, once and for all, on trying to formulate the being of art”.⁶

True, the spectral, diffuse thematic presence of art and aesthetics within both early and post-war phenomenology has also been interpreted as a sign not of their marginality, but of their ubiquity and fundamental importance. Lambert Wiesing, in particular, has suggested that for Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty or Sartre, “phenomenology is always already a form of aesthetics” or, more precisely, “is nothing else than a developed form of transcendental aesthetics.”⁷ In his reading, the great phenomenologists realised that “there was no need for an explicitly phenomenological aesthetics, because phenomenology is per se practised experimental aesthetics.”⁸ It was thus left to lesser figures, such as Waldemar Conrad or Moritz Geiger, to formulate phenomenological aesthetics as a limited, mostly fruitless application of the method of eidetic variation to specific aesthetic questions (What is art? What is beauty?).

As enticing and spectacular as the reversal of the importance of aesthetics proposed by Wiesing might well be, it nonetheless still shares Sepp and Embree’s assumption that phenomenological aesthetics as a specific field is a marginal undertaking: carried out by minor figures in the shadow of the great phenomenologists, it is distinct from and was ultimately of little consequence for phenomenology’s development as a practised aesthetics. But as I now will argue, this widespread side-lining of phenomenological aesthetics as a fragmented or minor, isolated field falls short of adequately capturing its historical role, especially in the development of early phenomenology. In particular, this view fails to account for two concrete contexts where reflections on art and aesthetics most certainly did not happen along the side, but were developed instead as a deliberate, explicit programme, and where, as I will try to demonstrate, the systematic attention thus afforded to art or to aesthetic problems was not reduced to producing localised insights in the specific, marginal field of “phenomenological aesthetics.” Rather, it rearticulated phenomenology’s relation to art and aesthetics in original ways that were, if not always as radical, then at least more explicit and, arguably, more influential (in particular outside of phenomenology itself) than the practised aesthetics of Husserl, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty.

The two historical contexts I have in mind are the international project of the General Science of Art [Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft] and the Soviet State Academy of Art Studies [Gosudarstvennaja Akademija Chudožestvennych Nauk (GAChN)]. Both were notable interdisciplinary projects focused on developing a new general science of art through a methodological redefinition of the respective functions and interconnections of aesthetics, art theory, philosophy of art, and art history. In both these contexts, contributions by phenomenologists such as Conrad, Geiger, Ingarden, as well as Gustav Špet were integrated in and conditioned by a multilateral dialogue between traditions such as psychological aesthetics, hermeneutics, German and Russian formalism, Brentanian psychology, as well as the modernist art practices that were otherwise absent from early phenomenological thought.

Ultimately, neither of these programmes to establish a general science of art were successful. But, as I hope to show, the productive environment they provided nonetheless profoundly affected the development of phenomenological aesthetics, notably the key ideas of aesthetic objectuality (ästhetische Gegenständlichkeit), strata theory (Schichtentheorie), and inner form (vnutrennjaja forma). Conversely, some of the most significant impact of phenomenological aesthetics derived directly from its inscription in these two institutions: one can mention here the role of Špet for Roman Jakobson and the Prague School poetics,⁹ or the importance of Emil Utitz and Ingarden for the structural aesthetics of Jan Mukařovský and the reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss.¹⁰ Most importantly, the abortive efforts to formulate a general science of art led in both the cases of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and the GAChN to original generalisations of the functional significance of art and aesthetics within phenomenology itself, which cast interesting light on Wiesing’s claim that phenomenology is a developed form of transcendental aesthetics

Neither the relevance of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft or the GAChN to phenomenological aesthetics, the impact of these two institutions on its development as a specific tradition nor, of course, their significance to the development of phenomenology as a whole have been widely noted. Tellingly, they are both absent from the otherwise exhaustive Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics. One reason for this is that the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and the GAChN themselves have until recently remained completely forgotten in the historiographies not only of aesthetics or phenomenology, but indeed of art history and art theory.¹¹ The GAChN has only been rescued from oblivion in the last decade by a collective of specialists in Slavic studies devoted to the study of this “forgotten academy,”¹² as well as by renewed interest in the work of Špet.¹³ The rediscovery of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft is even more recent.¹⁴ As a result, my ambition here will be of a preliminary, historiographical nature, namely, to introduce both institutions, to sketch out the place of phenomenology within them, and indicate the most obvious points of their impact on phenomenological aesthetics and phenomenology.

The Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft

In her excellent survey of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov introduces the initiative as follows:

The year 1906 marks the beginning of the rapid development of this research initiative. In that year, Max Dessoir (1867–1947) not only published his programmatic work, Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft [Aesthetics and General Science of Art], but also founded the journal of the same name […] In addition to Dessoir, Emil Utitz (1883–1956), another philosopher, profiled himself as the leading systematiser of the project. […] Five major congresses on questions of aesthetics and general science of art were organized (1913 and 1924 in Berlin, 1927 in Halle, 1930 in Hamburg and 1937 in Paris). These activities were flanked by numerous publications in which the protagonists of the initiative presented their methodological concepts.¹⁵

Dessoir’s and Utitz’s essential aim for the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft was to create an international, interdisciplinary platform that would bring together scholars from all the disciplines relevant to art (art history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc.) as well as from diverse methodological backgrounds (psychological, phenomenological, formalist, empirical, etc.), in order to formulate a new “science” that could capture art and the aesthetic properties of art works in their objectivity and generality. The process of formulating such a science was conceived as an ongoing process open to the discovery of new materials, methods, and practices.¹⁶ Rather than seeking to articulate a single, top-down perspective, the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft was steeped in a culture of debate and functioned more as a forum of ideas than as a coherent movement. More than any substantial theoretical legacy, as Collenberg-Plotnikov highlights, this dynamic, dialogical setup as an intrinsic part of the project’s historical role:

The Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft was an initiative that significantly shaped the scientific exchanges between scholars from all disciplines relevant to art in the first half of the 20th century. It developed a culture of debate about art history that has hardly ever been matched again, not only in terms of breadth and duration, but also in terms of its factual density and potential for innovation.¹⁷

The openness of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft does not mean that it had no thematic coherence or shared orientation at all. At heart, its participants all accepted Dessoir’s call to pursue an “objective” approach to art, as well as his claim that “the domain of aesthetic nature, culture and art generally possesses objective features deriving from its specific objectual nature” [das Gebiet der ästhetischen Natur, Kultur und Kunst [besitzt] insgesamt objektive Merkmale einer gegenständlichen Eigenart].¹⁸ For the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, art, culture or nature in its aesthetic forms consist of aesthetic objects [ästhetische Gegenstände] that must be studied according to their objective aesthetic features. The precise nature of this objectivity was left open to interpretation—allowing its invocation by Dessoir to serve both as a shared starting point and as a problem that accepted diverging answers. And as Utitz noted, it was not even the question of aesthetic objectivity as such that was central to the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, but rather objectivity’s function as the very condition of possibility for a general science of art:

The art historian is primarily interested in art, aesthetics itself is of secondary importance to him. Indeed, he wants to avoid simply surrendering art to aesthetic categories without critically checking that the use of those categories is permissible and, ideally, exhaustive. But how else can he prove the legitimacy of those categories other than by questioning the nature of art. In this way, the objectivity of the works of art becomes both his indispensable starting and actual focal point.¹⁹

The disjunction identified here by Utitz between the systematic, abstract aim of aesthetics—defining a universal criterion of aesthetic value—and the descriptive diversity of the concrete methods of art history—required to identify and assess particular artistic works and practices—was without doubt one of the main theoretical challenges faced by the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Indeed, this fundamental tension—which echoes the older (and still debated) dichotomy between aesthetics and philosophy of art (Kunstphilosophie),²⁰ and which was not resolved by the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft’s invocation of objectivity—is clearly reflected in the dual name of the project. Interestingly, it is precisely this duality that Ingarden highlights in his own assessment of the development of phenomenological aesthetics:

This dual title [Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft] showed that there are two different lines of investigation, the one applying to art, to its works, whose general structure and properties have to be elucidated, while the other was to concern itself with aesthetic experience, but in fact turned out to be a focal point for remarkably diverse enquiries. The connection between those two lines of investigation was somehow lost. The title “A General Science of Art” was also a source of misunderstandings in that it seemed to emphasize its opposition to aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. But from the very beginning it was unclear what precisely this “general science” of art was to be: whether it was truly a science or a branch of philosophy. In practice one got the impression of a philosophical enquiry, with the only difference that in contrast to other philosophical enquiries in this field, there was some reference to actual works of art.²¹

Befitting the open, contributive structure of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, phenomenologists did not adhere strictly or consistently to its programme, but simply contributed articles and papers in the project’s journal and congresses. The first, representative phenomenological contribution—Conrad’s “Der ästhetische Gegenstand”—appeared in 1908.²² From this point on, phenomenology was present in almost all volumes, be it in the form of explicitly phenomenological essays (by Conrad, Utitz, Geiger, Maximilian Beck, Fritz Kaufmann, Hans Mersmann, Donald Brinkmann), of discussions of phenomenological themes in essays by non-phenomenologists, as well as of reviews.²³ The number of phenomenological contributions decreased significantly from the early 1930s onwards, but phenomenology did not disappear completely until the Second World War. In 1937, at the Second International Congress of Aesthetics and General Art Studies in Paris, it even flourished once again with half a dozen papers, including the first (and only) contribution by Ingarden.²⁴

Except for the acts of the Paris congress, where phenomenological essays were regrouped in a thematic section on “General Aesthetics” [Esthétique générale], one finds no distinct structure or evolutionary trend in the distribution of phenomenologically relevant contributions within the Zeitschrift. Along with contributions from other theoretical perspectives—which are similarly disorganised and disjointed—they form a mosaic of insights and views, in which phenomenology had no particular preponderance but participated as an equal in a loose exchange of ideas. In this sense, while it is indubitable that the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft provided a unique forum for debate and engagement on questions of aesthetics (indeed, the only such one in its time), it is difficult to ascertain the precise nature of the engagement of the different phenomenologists within the initiative, whether among themselves (i.e. to what extent were the likes of Conrad, Geiger, Utitz, Ingarden in dialogue with each other and what role did their respective contributions to the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft play in that dialogue) or with the proponents of other traditions (such as Theodor Lipps or the formalism of Oskar Walzel and Eduard Hanslick).

While it thus cannot be question here to assess the demonstrable commitment of each individual phenomenologist to the agenda of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, it is nonetheless possible, I believe, to indicate not only that they all shared with it a clear, common concern for the aesthetic object and the methodological conditions for its “objective” analysis, but that this concern was specifically informed by the tension between general science of art and aesthetics that was a characteristic feature of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. In effect, my suggestion is that Conrad, Geiger and finally Ingarden developed their objectivist phenomenological aesthetics in no small part by integrating insights on the stratified nature of the aesthetic object that had initially been formulated by Utitz in the perspective of grounding not his aesthetics, but his general science of art.²⁵ In other words, while the phenomenologists of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft were themselves never particularly convinced by the idea of distinguishing a general science of art from aesthetics, they were very much open to transforming aesthetics itself in the sense of the science of art proposed by Dessoir and especially Utitz, that is, in the sense of a description of the general properties of artistic works as aesthetic objects.

This consistent focus on the question of the aesthetic object is itself easily discernible from the title of many articles published in the Zeitschrift by phenomenologists (Conrad, “Der ästhetische Gegenstand,” Beck, “Die Methode der objektivistischen Ästhetik,” Brinkmann, “Zur Phaenomenologie des aesthetischen Gegenstandes”) or by their critics (cf. Volkelt, “Objektive Aesthetik,” Odebrecht, “Materialer und aesthetischer Objekt”). Further, the specific meaning given to the term aesthetic object by phenomenologists was remarkably stable and is best exemplified by Conrad’s theoretical contribution—itself recognised as playing a decisive, foundational role for phenomenological aesthetics both within and beyond the Zeitschrift.²⁶

Conrad’s approach can be concisely defined as “a description of the aesthetic object on the basis of the method elaborated by his teacher in the Logical Investigations”.²⁷ Following Husserl, Conrad sought to arrive at a description of the “essential properties” of the aesthetic object “without presuppositions”. By aesthetic object, Conrad did not mean a concrete work of art, i.e. not a “natural object”, but an ideal one obtained thanks to an exact phenomenological description of our intentional experiences of that work, “for which it is essential that it be ‘realisable’ [realisierbar]”.²⁸ For Conrad, this ideal determination in turn did not mean that the aesthetic object is located in a Platonic world of ideas. As in the sense of Ingarden, who later praised Conrad’s essay as the first truly ontological study of the work of art,²⁹ the aesthetic object is also sensuous and always brings with it “its own space and time, its own spatial or temporal ‘environment’.”³⁰ This space is interpreted by Conrad as a space of “intentional representationality”, in which the aesthetic object “possesses a plurality of ‘perspectives’”.³¹ In his programmatic article “Phänomenologische Ästhetik” (1925), Geiger later also took up and reiterated most of Conrad’s arguments, in particular the fundamentally intentional dimension of the aesthetic object.

There is of course still quite a way to go from the persistence of this shared focus on the question of the aesthetic object among the phenomenological contributors to the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft to the claim that the latter constituted a structuring environment for the former. It is indeed undeniable that Conrad, Geiger, or Ingarden all grounded their conception of aesthetics explicitly in Husserl’s philosophy and clearly did so before participating in the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, in particular in the contexts of the Göttingen and Munich circles. But crucially, not only did Conrad, Geiger, and Ingarden all diverge in significant ways from the Husserlian template, they did so in a strikingly similar fashion, converging deliberately towards a realist phenomenological aesthetics that conceived both the aesthetics object and aesthetic experience in terms of intentional strata.³² The clear origin of that idea is to be found in Utitz’s effort to articulate a general science of art.

Tellingly, it is explicitly to the programme of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft that Geiger and Ingarden turned when justifying the objective orientation of their aesthetics. Thus, Ingarden:

Because Conrad’s work did not prove influential it looked as though phenomenology was too inclined towards subjectivist oriented aesthetics. This, together with the then steadily growing psychologically motivated aesthetics, led to a reaction by some philosophers and historians of art. These included Max Dessoir (in 1907) and Emil Utitz who was close to phenomenology and who in 1914 raised the cry of “a general science of art,” setting this science up as a study parallel to aesthetics.³³

Geiger is even clearer:

Within aesthetics as a single science […], where it is a matter of the structure of aesthetic and artistic objects and their determination of value, only the analysis of the objects themselves can lead to the goal. Here, phenomenological aesthetics stands entirely on the ground of that objectivism which Dessoir emphasised programmatically for aesthetics a decade ago. […]

To be sure, one witnesses here a certain confusion as to the respective roles attributed by Ingarden and Geiger to aesthetics and general science of art, as well as to the importance they give to Dessoir, Utitz or the common project of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. But if anything, such a blurring of boundaries is a marker of the influence of the polyphonic context of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and of what Wolfhart Henckmann interprets as Dessoir’s willingness “to see the disintegration of individual subject matters [Sachbereiche] as an enabling factor of fruitful interdisciplinary research.”³⁴ The case of Utitz himself is also instructive as to this importance of the productive entanglements enabled by the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft.

Born in Prague, Utitz was nominally a follower of Brentano and of Prague Brentanists such as Anton Marty and Christian von Ehrenfels. His continuing preoccupation with the Brentano school can be clearly observed in the pages of the Zeitschrift, among other through his numerous reviews of the Brentano School’s works. But Utitz was by no means a dogmatic Brentanian and despite his lasting association with the Brentano School, his contribution in the field of aesthetics was thus mostly associated with the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and Dessoir. This can be seen, for example, in the judgement of Max Brod (who attended a circle of Brentanians in Prague with Utitz), who reports in his memoirs that “Emil Utitz was working eagerly on a Brentanian aesthetics,” but then adds that Utitz “did not deliver the promised Brentanian aesthetic, but worked in the sense of Prof. Dessoir.”³⁵ Utitz’s association with Dessoir, in turn, can also be contested. According to Henckmann, Geiger himself saw Utitz’s approach “not so much as phenomenology, but as the objectivist direction of Dessoir’s general science of art, although he sees in this objectivism, as it were, the methodological basis of the whole phenomenological aesthetics.”³⁶

In summary, much remains to be clarified as to the respective roles of Conrad, Geiger, Ingarden, Utitz and Dessoir—and indeed of many further actors—in the development of phenomenological aesthetics both within and beyond the context of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. What we have clearly established however, is a fascinating convergence of different points of view and approaches (Brentano School, Munich and Göttingen phenomenology, Dessoir’s objective aesthetics) that highlight how phenomenological aesthetics was not a pure product of peripheral debates within phenomenology itself, but rather the result of productive cross-overs and exchanges where art and aesthetics took centre stage. Similarly, and as paradoxical as this might seem, phenomenological aesthetics was developed not directly as an aesthetics, as a direct application of phenomenological methods to aesthetic questions, but by a detour through the general science of art and by Utitz’s explicit efforts to offer a systematic description of the objective, stratified features of artistic works.

In this sense, one can also highlight that the “specific” phenomenological aesthetics developed in the context of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft displays the same tendency, found for example in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, to generalise its “regional” insights on art first to aesthetics, then to phenomenology as a whole. This is evident in the work of Ingarden, who moved from a specifically literary aesthetics to a philosophy of the modalities of existence of the work of art, and, through the theory of strata, to a broad ontological questioning of the modes of being and the existence of the world itself. The same tendency is observable both in the structural aesthetics of Jan Mukařovský, a thinker close to Ingarden, Utitz and the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and in the reader-response theory of Iser and Jauss (themselves inspired by Ingarden and Mukařovský), which moved from a theory of literature to a general “immanent aesthetics.”

The state academy of art studies

As with the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, I defer the historical outline of the State Academy of Artistic Research (GAChN) to its leading expert, Nikolaj Plotnikov:

The State Academy of Art Studies […] was a scientific, art- and cultural-political institution in Soviet Russia, founded in Moscow to further the “comprehensive exploration of all kinds of art and artistic culture” in order to function as an advisory body to the People’s Commissariat for Education on cultural-political decisions. […]

As a research institution, the Academy was supposed to create a platform for the new “history and theory of art” in which all kinds of scholarly explorations of art (in the cultural, social, and natural sciences and philosophy) constituted a transdisciplinary union intended to overcome the methodical and thematic fragmentation of the individual disciplines of the history and theory of art.³⁷

There are a number of obvious links between the GAChN and the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, not least the fact that the latter was one of the direct sources of inspiration for the former’s ambition to establish a general science of art.³⁸ Just as the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, the GAChN was an open, inclusive initiative, that sought to include a multiplicity of points of view (psychological, sociological, philosophical, artistic, etc.) and to integrate all the disciplines devoted to the study of art in a general approach. Although this is less visible from its name, the GAChN also struggled to define the relation of its new science of art with aesthetics.

While the GAChN strongly encouraged a culture of dialogue and saw the development of its programme as an interdisciplinary task, it had a much more coherent, hierarchical structure, that was guided by an ideal of synthesis rather than the serendipitous juxtapositions favoured within the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. As Plotnikov notes:

Behind […] GAKhN and its fields of research lay the idea of reaching a “synthesis” (according to Špet’s explicit correction: a “synechology”) of theoretical disciplines reflecting on the practice of art, art education and art presentation. According to the model of the “synthesis of arts,” the Academy’s concept subsumed not only the fine arts under the term “art,” but the entire range of arts, including literature, theatre, music, film, and also dance, industrial design, and book art. The cooperation was supposed to be designed “horizontally,” i.e. according to the kind of research on the arts in the three departments (psychology and physiology, philosophy, sociology), as well as “vertically,” i.e. according to the respective field of art in the different sections.³⁹

The systematic, hierarchically structured ethos of the GAChN is perhaps best embodied in the following harmonogram, which articulates the symmetric dependencies and forms of bureaucratic cooperation that were envisaged between different disciplines and methods (it is important to note that this ideal organisation was never implemented):

Source: Gosudarstvennaja akademija chudožestvennych nauk, Moscow, 1925. [https://gachn.de/files/data/franz-russ-broschuere.pdf]

In further contrast to the purely scientific, academical vocation and democratic nature of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, the GAChN was a prominently cultural, political project, tasked with taming the radical avant-garde artistic practices of Russian modernism and streamlining them into the Bolshevist agenda of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) and its explicit demands for a sociological, scientific-materialist and “proletarian” theoretical account of art. Despite involving prominent modernists such as Kandinskij in a leadership role,⁴⁰ the GAChN was not at heart an avant-garde institution. Rather, its defining logic was one of necessary, pragmatic compromise, which allowed it—at least for the brief span of its activity, which proceeded freely only between 1921 and the mid-1920s—to become an influential and visible institution at the heart of early Soviet art and cultural politics.

The position of the GAChN in the early Soviet context is crucial to understanding the general orientation of its scientific project. Indeed, science of art, in the GAChN, was meant to provide concrete guidelines for Soviet cultural policy through an operationalizable account of the social function and conditions of production of art in all its various forms. Where the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft articulated its goal in psychological or epistemological terms and saw the aesthetic object above all as something given in individual experience, the GAChN emphasised the historico-cultural dimension of art as a product and reflection of society. The social and productivist orientation of the GAChN naturally mean that it sought to develop both sociological explanations of art (along the lines of historical materialism), and empirical, psycho-physical accounts of artistic productive practice. But next to these two approaches—which were formalised as the GACHN’s “sociological” and its “physico-psychological” sections—, a third, “philosophical” programme was also pursued. Led by Špet, a student of Husserl in Göttingen and one of the leading defenders of his philosophy in Russia, this programme was of distinctly phenomenological inspiration. Reflecting the more structured nature of the GAChN, phenomenology thus appears there in a well defined position: it is linked to “the efforts of GAChN’s philosophical department, planned and organised by Gustav Špet” that were explicitly formulated as an attempt “to counteract the reductionism from the scientific-psychological as well as the sociological side that was fatal to art research.”⁴¹

In contrast to the obsession of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft for objectivity and the aesthetic object, the phenomenological aesthetics of the GAChN was articulated in the form of a science of art centred on language. As Plotnikov puts it:

Science of art as conceived by the GAChN […] focuses on language as the medium of all arts and sciences. The language of science, which derives its terminology from a critical view of the history and systematics of aesthetic concepts, correlates with the language of art, which enables an articulation of meaning through the design of “detached” object.⁴²

This specific focus on language allowed the phenomenologists of the GAChN to integrate the historical, social, psychological aspects of art, all while taking into account its immanent, autonomous or “formal” aspects.

To a large extent, the phenomenological aesthetics of the GAChN is synonymous with Špet and his philosophy. Špet was a prominent figure of early Soviet philosophy and was especially dominant within the GAChN. On top of his official leadership position, he was supported by a number of colleagues and students (Aleksandr Gabričevskij, Gornung, Nikolaj Žinkin, Maksim Königsberg, Rozalja Šor), on which he exerted considerable intellectual influence and which constituted a sort of “formal-philosophical school” around him.⁴³ Crucially, Špet’s implication with the GAChN corresponds with an already mature phase of his intellectual development, meaning that he had already formulated the core of his philosophy before arriving at the GAChN and thus brought the foundations of his phenomenological aesthetics with him.

This last point is particular important, as it would seem to suggest that Špet’s (and by extension, the GAChN’s) phenomenological aesthetics was mostly the result of extending and applying his conception of phenomenology and language to the specific domain of art and aesthetics. As was the case of most phenomenologists before him, Špet did not set out initially to use phenomenology as a tool or method for studying aesthetics and art. Rather he saw phenomenology as a theory of consciousness and experience.⁴⁴ Moreover, as Liisa Bourgeot has emphasised, Špet’s commitment to phenomenology and specifically to the reinterpretation of Husserl’s theory of intuition he laid out in Appearance and Sense (Javlenie i smysl, 1914), was one of the most profound and constant determinants of all the different stages of his thinking, and one that was absolutely crucial to his conception of art and aesthetics.⁴⁵

The evolution of Špet’s thought can be cursorily summarised as follows. Taking up Husserl’s distinction between “sensible” and “categorial” intuition, in Appearance and Sense, Špet adds a third type of intuition, which he calls “intelligible” (intelligibilnaja) and which “distinguishes itself as much from sensible intuition as from ideal intuition by the fact that it enables an enunciation of the lived experience of a concrete object through which the denomination of its essence is nonetheless conveyed.”⁴⁶ Thereby, Špet underlines how neither sensible nor ideal intuition on their own are satisfactory (or indeed possible stricto sensu as isolated acts), and that a full intuitive, originary act must of necessity involve a hermeneutic process of self-reflexion that synthesises the sensible and ideal moments of a given phenomena in an intuition that grasps what Špet, following Aristoteles, calls an object’s entelechy and allows us to “discover the unity of the object in its inner meaning.”⁴⁷ In Špet’s famous example, in order to fully intuit a hammer, we need to interpret or give meaning to our perceptions of its empirical form through the prism of its possible, goal-directed uses as a tool.

In a text written at the very start of his involvement in the GAChN, Aesthetic fragments (Ėstetičeskie fragmenty, 1922–23), Špet provides a first specification of his vague notion of entelechy. Instead of describing the whole scope of experience, Špet’s focuses on the phenomenon of language, which he recognises as a paradigmatically “hermeneutical” and “cultural” or “internally structured” phenomena, where sensible and ideal moments are bound together not only by intelligible intuitions, but in the very “structure of words:”

By “structure of the word” we do not mean the morphological, syntactical, or stylistic edifice, and certainly not its arrangement “on the horizontal level,” but rather the organic, in a way the in-depth structuring of the word—from the sensually tangible to the formal-ideal (eidetic) object and the [layers] on all intermediate levels. Structure is a concrete edifice whose individual parts may change in “circumference” and even in quality, but from which not a single part of the whole may be removed in potentia without destroying the whole.⁴⁸

In a later study, The Inner Form of the Word (Vnutrennjaja forma slova, 1927), both Špet’s triadic division between sensible, ideal and intelligible intuitions and his conception of the structure of the word are reformulated through an appropriation of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s distinction between outer form, content, and inner form.⁴⁹ Inner form, in short, is mobilised in Špet’s theory of language as the linguistic pendant of intelligible intuition, as the aspect of language where sensible intuition (or the outer, concrete form of language) and ideal intuition (the content or meaning of language) merge into a single act or complex form, in which verbal structure and conceptual meaning are synthesised. Crucially, according to Špet, inner form is best revealed in the specifically artistic or aesthetics uses of language, in which it appears as a sort of autonomous symbol that reveals its own structure. Špet’s theory of inner form, in other words, thus provided the basis for GAChN’s understanding of art as a symbolic language. As Plotnikov explains:

Art—the object of research for Špet and his colleagues at GAKhN—was interpreted as a language showing a specific structure of meaning which is not understood as a sum of forms, procedures, and combinations of procedures, but as the context of expression accessible to interpretation, i.e. as articulated meaning or as an immanent aim of the work of art and of art in general.⁵⁰

It is of course totally plausible to interpret this development as a series of specifications, extensions and consolidations—from the vague Aristotelian notion of entelechy, to the structure of the word and then to a much more precise theory of inner form and art as symbolic language—that are inherent to Špet’s own thought. Even a brief glance at the modalities of Špet’s involvement in the GAChN, however, can highlight that his theory of inner form did not result from a straightforward extension of his phenomenology to the domain of aesthetics, but a much more complex movement that involved, precisely as was the case for Ingarden, an obvious detour through a discussion of the modalities and conditions of a scientific study of art.

The most obvious trace of Špet’s aesthetics’s debt to debates over the nature of art and artistic practice (rather than to the phenomenological method per se) is the notion of inner form itself. Far from being alone in his recourse to Humboldt, indeed, Špet was part of a broad discourse and of a mainstream reception of the concept of inner form in Russia. Transmitted through the influential work of the Ukrainian philosopher of language Aleksandr Potebnja, inner form was central both to the symbolist poetics of Andrej Belyj and to the new literary theory developed by the Russian Formalists (who directly attacked and rejected the concept), i.e. two distinct attempts to elaborate a science of art, in this case more specifically literature. Špet’s Aesthetic fragments were written explicitly as a polemical attack on the Formalists and led to prolonged and often productive debates both within GAChN and the Moscow Linguistic Circle (one of the organs of Russian Formalism) over the very notion of form and its social, psychological and epistemological implications for the definition of art and literature.⁵¹

Perhaps an even clearer trace of Špet’s involvement in epistemological, cultural and political debates over the nature of art and literature, is the fact that the thematic development of his thought strayed so far from aesthetics itself that its later stage has been plausibly characterised as a “return to aesthetics.” In the view of Galin Tihanov, for example, “Špet’s reflections on literature come into view as a complex amalgam of innovation and regression, a stirring mixture that embodies the turns of intellectual history.”⁵² In this reading, the development of Špet’s concepts of the structure of the word and of inner form were the result of a turn away from philosophical and phenomenological problems (precipitated among other by the closure of the Philosophy Department at Moscow University in 1921 and Špet’s new function at the GAChN), and a commitment to the study of art and literature in dialogue not with Husserl, Hegel or Kant, but with the likes of the Russian formalists, Kandinskij and Bachtin. For all that, it also holds true that Špet was “deeply sceptical of the self-assertion of modern literary theory” and that ultimately his thought remained “embedded in aesthetics and philosophy of art.”⁵³

Conclusion

I have broached two institutional contexts in which the encounter of aesthetics and phenomenology did not happen in fragmentary fashion, along the side, but led effectively to the development of two original forms of early phenomenological aesthetics. In both contexts, however, the development of these original approaches involved a detour by abortive attempts to establish a general science of art (or verbal art, i.e. literature) and did not lead so much to the establishment of a phenomenological aesthetics than to modifications of phenomenology itself, for example in the original philosophies of Ingarden and Špet. Paradoxically, my considerations thus seem to confirm the initial intuitions of Sepp, Embree and Wiesing that art and aesthetics are problems that subsist as such within phenomenology only when they are considered as peripheral phenomenon that are beyond its immediate purview and whose study has to be delegated to another discipline.

At the same time, the very different set of insights and modifications brought to phenomenology respectively by Ingarden and Špet also clearly indicate that the link between aesthetics and phenomenological philosophy cannot simply be characterised, as it is by Wiesing, as a development of transcendental aesthetics. Rather, we see here the diversity of problems that art and aesthetic objects can raise for phenomenology and the various nature of the possible theoretical avenues—objectivity or language, stratification theory or inner form—that can be pursued to answer them. In that sense the contexts of the Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and the GAChN do highlight the need to rethink the meaning of the endemic marginality of art and aesthetics within phenomenological philosophy as a failure of phenomenology itself to clarify, if not its foundations, then at least its fundamental relation with art and aesthetics.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks go to Harri Mäcklin for his kind invitation to participate in this volume, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers whose detailed and thoughtful comments were essential in clarifying the main thesis of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Flack

Patrick Flack is Senior Lecturer in the History of Ideas of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Fribourg. After obtaining a PhD in Comparative Literature from Charles University in Prague (2011) he carried out post-doctoral research at the Central-European Institute of Philosophy (Prague), the Peter-Szondi Institute (Berlin) and the Husserl Archives (Leuven). He is principal investigator of the SNF-funded project Communities of dialogue: Russian and Ukrainian Emigrés in Modernist Prague (2023–2027), the author of Idée, Expression, Vécu: la question du sens entre phénoménologie et structuralisme (Hermann, 2018) and the co-editor of several edited volumes on Merleau-Ponty, Neo-Kantianism, and the history of the language sciences.

Notes

1. Sepp and Embree, Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, ix [my emphasis].

2. Ibid., ix.

3. See Dufrenne, “L’esthétique en 1913,” 25; and Maiatsky, “Husserl, phénoménologie et art abstrait,” 204.

4. Walzel, Die deutsche Dichtung, 216–217, 271.

5. Alloa and Jdey, Du sensible à l’oeuvre, 9–10.

6. Ibid., 10.

7. Wiesing, “Phaenomenologische und experimentelle Aesthetik,” 248.

8. Ibid., 249.

9. See Holenstein, Roman Jakobson.

10. See Burg, Jan Mukařovský, 168ff; and Hansen-Löve, “Synthetische Avantgarde,” 136.

11. Collenberg-Plotnikov, Die Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 14.

12. Hansen-Löve, Obermayr and Witte, Form und Wirkung; and Plotnikov, Kunst als Sprache; Sazonov and Hennig, Sintez sovremennosti; and Plotnikov and Podzemskaja, Iskusstvo kak jazyk.

13. Dennes, Gustave Chpet; Tihanov, Gustav Špet’s contribution; and Bourgeot Gustav Špet’s theory.

14. Maigné, Trautmann-Waller and Collenberg-Plotnikov, Berlin 1913 – Paris 1937; Collenberg-Plotnikov, Die allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft; Henckmann, “Vorwort;” and Mehring Philosophie im Exil.

15. Collenberg-Plotnikov, Die Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 10.

16. Utitz, Grundlegung der allgemeinen Kunstwissenschaft II, 309.

17. Collenberg-Plotnikov, Die Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 9.

18. Dessoir: “Objektivismus in der Ästhetik,” 3.

19. Utitz, “Über Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft,” 6 [my emphasis].

20. Figal, Erscheinungsdinge, 2; and Benjamin, “What Is the Object of Art?”

21. Ingarden, “Phenomenological Aesthetics,” 259.

22. Conrad, “Der aesthetische Gegenstand,” ZÄK 3, 71–118, 469–511; and ZÄK 4, 400–455.

23. For a detailed list of contributions, see Flack, “Phänomenologische Ästhetik.”

24. Ingarden, Das aesthetische Erlebnis, 54–60.

25. See Utitz, “Die Gegenständlichkeit des Kunstwerks.”

26. Krenzlin, Das Werk «rein für sich», 58ff.

27. Angelucci, “Waldemar Conrad,” 53.

28. Conrad, “Der ästhetische Gegenstand,” 453.

29. See Ingarden, Vom Erkennen, 406.

30. Conrad, “Der ästhetische Gegenstand,” 454.

31. Ibid., 454.

32. Angelluci, L’oggetto poetico; Henckmann, “Vorwort.”

33. Ingarden, “Phenomenological Aesthetics,” 259.

34. Henckmann, Vorwort, XV.

35. Brod, Streitbares Leben, 246.

36. Henckmann, Vorwort, XXI.

37. Plotnikov, “The State Academy,” 164.

38. Plotnikov, “Kunstwissenschaft,” 229.

39. Plotnikov, “The State Academy,” 167.

40. Kandinskij’s involvement in the GAChN was short-lived (he left Russia in 1921), but highly significant, see Podzemskaja, “Nauka ob iskusstve,” 44–52.

41. Plotnikov, “The State Academy,” 165–6.

42. Plotnikov, “Kunstwissenschaft,” 238.

43. See Hansen-Löve, “Synthetische Avantgarde.”

44. Haardt, Husserl in Russland.

45. Bourgeot, Gustav Špet’s theory.

46. Dennes, “De la ‘structure du mot,’” 85.

47. Špet, Vnutrennjaja forma slova, 196.

48. Špet, Estetičeskie fragmenty, 11.

49. Dennes, op. Cit., 86.

50. Plotnikov, “The State Academy,” 172.

51. See note 43 above.

52. Tihanov, The Birth, 94.

53. Ibid., 95.