In the border area between philosophical aesthetics, art and media studies and interreligious spirituality and mysticism, we have recently encountered the desire and idea of writing something like a history of seeing or a history of seeing.
One Vision schoolas Alfons Knoll called it in his insightful look at Guardini in his sermon on Guardini Day.
In Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida he wishes for a history of the "gaze". He justifies this with the birth of photography, which is "the appearance of myself as someone else", "a sophisticated dissociation of identity consciousness". Gottfried Boehm also repeatedly writes about the process of seeing and its history. He speaks of "successful" seeing, which is an oversight. He thus thematises the seen and the shadow of the invisible. Wiebke-Marie Stock contributes to the "History of the Gaze" with texts by Georges Didi-Huberman by not presenting a theory, but by wanting to understand more precisely what the history of seeing means.
Guardini had a Vision school with a view to the whole. In his book On the nature of the work of art (1938), Guardini speaks about seeing Van Gogh: "Every work of art has the quality of being a whole; not a fragment, like the immediately perceived appearance. The chair that I see before me stands in a context that continues in all directions; as soon as I take it out, it is a fragment. But when van Gogh sees the chair, the process of rounding takes place the first time he sees it. It forms a whole in itself, and in it the whole of existence is realised. This happens in every work of art; the greater the artistic power of the design and the purer the appearance is built out of its centre, the stronger it becomes."
In his introduction to his book The conversion of Aurelius Augustinus he again describes seeing: "Of the whole, which is Augustine's name, it (the enquiry) has in mind, if one may say so, that place, that living area, where philosophy and theology are not yet separated in the modern sense, indeed not even as far as was the case in the Middle Ages - where rather Christian existence is taken as a whole, and thinking, without worrying about methodological distinctions, looks out of this whole towards the whole. The point at which this investigation is directed is in part even before the division into theoretical thought and spiritual-practical life. Our work would like to know what Augustine's thought looks like at the root, where he does not even reckon with the possibility of a "purely natural" point of view that refrains from the Christian, but sees "the" world in the world as it emerges from revelation, and therefore simply sees true thinking in faith thinking."
What is the background to his view of the whole? In addition to many influences, there is one aspect that I would like to take a closer look at today.
The encounter with Michelangelo
Romano Guardini opened his extensive literary oeuvre with a translation of Michelangelo's texts, which were published in 1907. Guardini defined these texts as "personality poems". It is often categorised as a youthful inspiration. On the other hand, Michelangelo offers Guardini the opportunity to define the core of his reflection on the nature of art. Using Michelangelo's poems, Guardini identifies the deep relationship between "thought and form in the context of his artistic creation" and discovers how a thought can become a "form", take shape in artistic expression and ultimately contribute to "becoming a human being". In Guardini's opinion, Michelangelo's texts express Michelangelo's struggle with his own soul, a struggle that arises from the tension between the artist's inner and ideal vision and the path to the realisation of this ideal towards a unity that is embodied in Michelangelo's work. In the context of this reflection, Guardini speaks for the first time of the notion and concept of the contrast.
His friend Neundörfer's sentence "In the end, truth lies where the greatest possibility of love is." has become a signpost for Guardini in his contemplation of Michelangelo in order to define his inner struggle. In the introduction, the sentence about "Michelangelo's struggling soul" is quoted with caution, but significantly.
Benedetto Croce and Hugo Friedrich have expressed strong reservations about the literary value of Michelangelo's texts: "Behind these rhymes is Michelangelo, the great Michelangelo, but in them he is not really a Michelangelo poet and artist, or only in rare traits. He composed them for simple "pleasure", writes Benedetto Croce.
Hugo Friedrich distinguishes Michelangelo's poems between "love poems" and "poems of self-interpretation". Friedrich does not fail to emphasise: "Michelangelo's love is also self-interpretation insofar as, as soon as it becomes poetry, it becomes both a transgression of the partner and a self-reflection".
Poetry is another embodiment of the dynamism that sculptural art expresses. Michelangelo struggles with marble as much as with language. Just as many of his sculptures are prisons, many of his texts are fragmentary or incomplete. The effect of Michelangelo's sublime work was to create a hermeneutic correlation between painting and poetry, allowing them to illuminate each other.
Michelangelo's theory of art is contained in the expression "levare il soverchio" (remove the superfluous). This expression is contained in a famous letter to Benedetto Varchi from the spring of 1547. In this context, Michelangelo defines sculpture as an art in which one works "by force of removal" in order to produce the figure captured by the marble. The term "intellect" could sometimes mean the spirit of the artist (or poet), sometimes the divine spirit. In line with the Neoplatonism of the Florentine Academy, Michelangelo adopts the idea that the world was created by the emanation of the divine essence and that each block of marble conceals a single soul and an ideal form possessed by the artist. Ingenuity will only be able to deduce and liberate if its intellect bends and adapts to the divine intellect that the "concept" of this form has hidden in lifeless matter.
Michelangelo writes that the best artist has no form ("any concept") that is not already in the marble. The concept is not the image of the form, since there is no fixed image in the marble. The expression "no concept" indicates that it is not a question of an exactly fixed image in the marble, but that it is both one and the other, depending on the nature of the marble block. The ideal image is created in the hands of the "best artist". A little further on we read in the second quatrain of the same sonnet: "The evil I flee from and the good I promise myself is hidden in you, graceful woman, haughty and diva; and so that I no longer live, art counters the gloomy effect."15
The artist who imparts to matter the creative principle of his art will be able to make the transition from the power of formless marble to the act of artistic form and, just like the marble that encloses a form, in the "graceful woman" the evil "haughty" from which the artist must flee or the good he wants to achieve can remain hidden.
Polizian's influence and the influence of Aristotelian thought are not absent from Michelangelo's aesthetics. Although Michelangelo never speaks explicitly of Aristotle, there is an ontological dimension of Aristotelian origin in his aesthetics, as Guardini also emphasises, which can be derived from the clear relationship between loving and creating from the material of the artist's work. This is also the case with his poetry.
Aristotle illustrates the becoming that is necessary for the Poiesis is characteristic of that particular production that combines artistic and poetic production and reduces matter to form. According to Aristotle, "everything except that which becomes, whether through nature or through art (téchne), a substance, for he who has the capacity both to be and not to be is in one of all things". Aristotle explains the origin of things with the pairs of concepts hyle - eidos and dynamis - energeia. From there, Guardini will formulate his theses on polar opposites together with Neundörfer. The formless matter (hyle), in which form is concealed, is: "that which, without actually being a certain something, is nevertheless, as far as possible, a certain something". Therefore: "Form, or whatever we call the shaping of the sensible, is rather what it becomes in another, through art or through nature, or through the ability to produce something."
Are we talking here about artistic thinking or thinking that sees?
Is Guardini concerned with a theory of art? What is the essence of the artist's reflections? We should ask much deeper questions here: is the artist forced to account for his artistic existence and raison d'être and thus reflect on the essence of art? Today, artists' written explanations are often explained in terms of Beuys or the roots of the 19th century avant-garde. From the point of view of the artist revolting against convention, "to create himself as a metaphysical justification", according to Kurt Barth. As a kind of metaphysical burden of justification that takes a positive turn when artists refer to transcendence, the divine and the otherworldly, as the final instance of an artist's existence.
Eduard Trier has given reasons why artists change the medium and take the floor. Theory arose as a necessary consequence of creative activity. Artists do not write about art, but from art. This is probably the key. Nevertheless, her findings go beyond the specific genre of painting. They are universally valid for art, and the Life. What Klee calls the "elementary doctrine of the creative" or Kandinsky the "principle of inner necessity". This applies not only to painting, but to every creative activity and thus to the whole of life. Today, the term artist's theory stands for the artist's thinking in its manifold differentiations; it is the counter-concept to his pictorial-practical activity, writes Bunge. Theory and practice are in polar tension, they form a complementary unity. Artistic theory, he explains, is not theory in the usual sense. The peculiarity of artist theory becomes clearer if we look at the etymology of the word. In Greek, the word means Theoria looking at, contemplating, looking around, which then becomes the spiritual vision of abstract things or the thinking contemplation of phenomena in philosophy. In contrast to the practical examination of them.
The usual understanding of theory is formulated as follows: "the intellectual scientific consideration in the endeavour to create a strictly logical system of knowledge". Theory in this interpretation must endeavour to overcome sensory phenomena, as it must not stop at perception. It is believed that artists have hardly created a theory of art, apart from rudiments, but often a Theoria of art. Consequently, if we translate artist's theory as artist's view and understand it as the way in which the artist looks at his own practice of art and its meaning in a thinking contemplation, we recognise that the transitions between theory and practice are fluid. For theory is already a conscious activity, albeit an action in the mind and not with the hands. Theory as a mental perception is the prerequisite and leads to the practice of action.
But where does theory end in art and where does practice begin? Should the intellectual design, the vision, the sketch of an idea, the spiritual vision of the archetypal image, the Ideathat arises in the artist's mind as a theory? And is then the artistic execution, the moulding of the clay or the application of the paint to the canvas, whereby the visible form (Eidos) of the picture (Eikon) arises, the "practice"? Is it even possible to speak of images without simultaneously thinking and looking at them, i.e. being mentally active? Consequently, is not the supposedly practical activity always also a theoretical one and vice versa? Can there be painting without thinking?
Today, people refer to Michelangelo's saying that you don't paint with your hand, but with your brain. Does this not mean that an absolute dualism of theory and practice could never be asserted for art? Artistic theory nevertheless differs from abstract, scientific system thinking: it is a visual or representational way of thinking that we call pictorial thinking because it is correlative to the ability to create.
Michelangelo and Guardini: the struggle and love
Guardini's approach to the theoretical writings of artists, especially Michelangelo's poems, is not typically art-historical or art-theoretical. By the time he "looked at" Michelangelo, he had already developed a view similar to the one he had cast on St Augustine. Guardini dedicates the first pages of his youthful work to the suffering of the soul and the artist's inability to love Michelangelo. The analysis of a poem by Michelangelo for Vittoria Colonna makes clear to him Michelangelo's inability to "surrender" and "lose himself completely in the other". Michelangelo's inability to open himself up to the Other becomes the starting point for an irresolvable inner tension towards a promise that is embodied in the work of art. Romano Guardini and Josef Weiger live out precisely this principle in their friendship: man is only truly human through the other. The work of art reveals this tension and this pain: artistic production is the artist's way of trying to overcome this drama. Michelangelo, especially in his mature age, was often alone with himself, with a man who had to fight with his soul alone to assert his noblest "I" against the passions whose strength had characterised his creations; thus the tension within him, which describes what he had seen: "Tell me, love, whether I really see the longed-for beauty here, or whether it lives within my soul, and I glorify the face of the mistress looking at it?" Guardini describes it as a unit of tension that belongs to the living concrete, without the respective poles ceasing to exist, and recognises in Michelangelo's texts a polarity between "successful" or "unsuccessful" love and the verses declining it, the embodiment of the vision of love.
In fact, Michelangelo is not able to "really lose himself to the other [VI], to really see him as he was, as if he had not actually found his comrade in her either". According to Guardini, the Roman noblewoman was the person Michelangelo loved, and yet she was the "place" where he himself "did not find his partner" (Comrade). Unresolved tensions of love harbour the whole secret of artistic creation. Later, the theologian would express these intuitions in the writing From the preoccupation with art in which he proposes a perception of art and its ability to lead people to love.
Michelangelo's art is longing. He saw its beauty only in the people he loved, as is the case with someone who unconditionally idealises the person he loves. As he revered the greatness and nobility of others, he recognised the vision of images and his own striving for perfection, which he transformed into the form of art: however, there is another perception: a vision that does not define reality and place it within a framework recognised by common sense, but which allows everything to "approach the vision" or "penetrate the vision". The real begins where it is grasped in its hidden and complex depth, where intention ends. It seems that these words reveal the principles of the artist's creative process and the process of profound self-knowledge.
In his debut work, which is dedicated to Michelangelo's texts, Guardini introduces a specific modality in the arrangement of the poems, namely the modality with which Guardini himself selects and arranges these texts: "The order of these groups among themselves attempts to proceed from the evaluation that Michelangelo himself made of their content by measuring it against the image of man that he strove to realise in himself. If this is successful, then the poems form a series which, starting from the relatively external, progresses more and more towards what Michelangelo judged to be his most valuable and most individual. I have not concealed from myself the danger of subjectivity in this attempt, but this seemed to be the best way to turn a mere sequence into an internally connected whole. The letters are organised chronologically. Very few had to be selected from the large number. They are particularly those in which the master's peculiar relationship with his family, his constant concern and willingness to help, and then also his position towards friends and patrons are expressed. Vittoria's few surviving letters to him are included as an appendix."
Guardini follows in his work Michelangelo. Poems and letters the inner structure of the creator-artist and the creation of the work of art. "It summarises the poems that correspond to the same prerequisites in the soul of their creator, basic forces, dispositions of his being, goals that he aspired to, values that he affirmed and in which he found his ultimate satisfaction. The order of these groups among themselves attempts to proceed from the evaluation that Michelangelo himself made of their content, measuring it against the image of the man he strove to realise in himself."
It is Michelangelo's struggling soul that is hidden in his poetry. With few exceptions, his verses, even when he speaks about others, tell of his feelings, his struggles, the values and ideals he sought and which he saw embodied in the people he loved. He was, especially in his old age, constantly alone with himself, a man who constantly had to fight alone with his soul and who had to assert his noblest self against the passions whose strength his creations foreshadowed; and so the tensions did not allow him to rest in his ego.
The order of the poems reveals "the inner process of imitation/realisation of the artist's desire/vision of what is most precious to him, even if it is not yet realised but only imagined in art". In this arrangement, the poems create a path that - in our opinion, completely successfully - claims to penetrate ever deeper into what Michelangelo considers to be the most precious and personal of the innermost. The order Guardini chose for the poems reveals his great pedagogical skill. For Guardini, anthropology is a pedagogical principle that concerns artistic creation. He urges us to follow this development of becoming human and, while describing the creative process and the polar structure of the artistic gesture, speaks of the artist's struggle as a path to redemption. The then young theologian wrote: "These poems are largely addressed to Christ, and the ideas of guilt, repentance, the struggle for redemption often find marvellous expression in them." They are always inspired by the inability to love others and to give oneself completely to them.
Later in 1913, we see in a letter that the work of art itself becomes a place of care for the world. It says: "Grünewald has it, Michelangelo, I have also found it in others. And in such places you look deep into the heart of man; often it is only like a faint smile that flits by, and soon the forehead is dark again; the mouth hard! But once you've seen it, you have to love it, with what I might almost call a caring love, then you've seen the child under the heavy armour."
At the centre of Guardini's reflection is the purity of the human gaze, which perceives a deeper aspect in suffering. Guardini meditates on Michelangelo's letters and announces an aesthetic anthropology in which the attitude towards the other or the world is seen as asceticism, distance and humility, which is synthesised in love and understood as an authentic ability to see: He who loves strides uninterruptedly towards freedom; true freedom
from the bond, i.e. from itself.
Guardini understands form as creative form. When Guardini speaks of the creative act and its expression, he introduces the concept of form understood as a vital act (similar to Kandinsky's "inner necessity"). In fact, form is always both concrete and dynamic, like Michelangelo's poems, and open to foundation and action. For form is the context in which the whole and the particular give themselves to each other; in relation to the act: for form only manifests itself in the realisation, it is given in the act. The artistic form is to be sought and this happens in the case of recognition in the other. Likewise, the creative act has the character of an action; it neither denies nor contradicts the essence of the reason, nor does it merely express it, but it realises it precisely. It is a process of anthropological, spiritual and aesthetic realisation that goes beyond the longing for an idea.
This is a pre-worldview approach, which I had often gratefully discussed and considered with Helmut Zenz, especially in view of his new discoveries in the archives, which could substantiate this approach. Guardini had conceived this approach from 1921/22 in Bonn and from 1923 in Berlin, in particular for mental-rational cognition in the field of the university as a "Weltanschauungslehre" (doctrine of worldview), and in doing so, he understood metaphysical, theoretical, conceptual-abstract, deductive sciences on the one hand and empirical, experiential, typological-concrete, inductive sciences on the other as rational-mental modes of cognition, as two types of thought in the field of science that are opposed to each other as polar-complementary opposites. They only come closer to the "whole", to the "truth", to "full" knowledge, if they do not mutually exclude each other, but rather hold each other in tension.
According to Guardini, this unity of tension can only be achieved if this unity of tension is an independent, non-scientific, but nevertheless mental-rational path of knowledge that takes up and integrates the results of all sciences, but without synthesising them. Guardini sees this third path on a different level in the contemplation/observation/contemplation of the overall wholes of God, the world and man (as self). In the area of the university, the focus is primarily on the totality of the world; it is therefore about world sciences, which is why Guardini also speaks of world contemplation. The world itself is a wholeness divided into countless polarities, in which the field of "art" plays a particularly paradigmatic role for Guardini in order to enable a "view of the whole", of the full realisation of truth. Art has a primacy of beginning and order with regard to other areas, but for Guardini this is always a relative primacy and never a primacy of dignity, value or meaning. With regard to the "meaning of the university", Guardini himself, since he teaches at the university as a professor of Catholic philosophy, limits himself to the mental-rational realm of knowledge, but without excluding or even devaluing the intuitive-sensual realm of knowledge. It is therefore a matter of setting a centre of gravity and a pars pro toto-This is a decision that, according to Guardini himself, only succeeds if it is not dialectically exclusive (see Bergson's intuitionism versus Kant's rationalism). Any university teacher or academic who denies, devalues or excludes the sensual-emotional-intuitive realm will inevitably fail in their "view of the whole", just as artists and prophets also fail in their view or vision of the whole if they deny, devalue or exclude the mental-rational-intellectual realm.
The task of every human being, and especially of the university teacher or academic, but also of the artist on his path from idea to form (work of art), is to become aware of the contradictory nature of life and, in particular, of one's own life and, in turn, of one's own inner life, and thus also of the movements and encounters of knowledge and love that emanate from them and their prerequisites.
Guardini developed the concept and method of the doctrine of opposites from his own work, as well as from Georg Simmel's dialogue with Michelangelo.
Guardini moved to Berlin at the beginning of the winter semester 1905/1906 and "listened to lectures of various kinds again, mainly to escape political economy, which he did not understand: philosophy by Georg Simmel, art history by Heinrich Wölfflin [1864-1945]". The academic inspiration came from the lectures of Simmel (1858-1918), who first published an essay on Michelangelo in 1889, then in 1910 and finally in 1916.
Simmel's contribution was of fundamental importance to Guardini, not only because of the reference inherent in Michelangelo, but also for the elaboration of his theory of "polar opposition", which Guardini set out in an initial sketch as early as 1914. In 1925, he presented the work in a more detailed form, in which works by Georg Simmel are quoted: View of life and Philosophical cultureabout the "flow of life itself" and "the ability to transcend life". In 1913, in a letter dated 29 August 1913 to his friend Josef Weiger, Guardini referred to "a truly extraordinary book", the Goethe by Simmel, whose essay on Rembrandt from 1916 is also worth mentioning, in view of the fact that Guardini would also dedicate several pages to this artist a few years later.
On the path that was to lead Guardini to the elaboration of the theory of "polar opposition", his encounter with Michelangelo must also be taken into account - alongside a number of other references (Goethe, Bonaventure, Hegel...). Georg Simmel's Michelangelo. A metaphysics of culture is not a theory of art, nor aesthetics, nor cultural studies, but is about a Epistemology of seeing in which knowledge of art, self-knowledge and knowledge of God occur unmixed and unseparated. On the one hand, according to Simmel and Guardini, the artist has a special "predisposition" in his artistic talent for the "view of the whole" through the sub-area of art, but this is not automatically given in the realisation; it does not require the one-sided cultivation on one side of the polarity, which thus degenerates into an extreme, but the conscious cultivation of the tension of all polarities in the direction of a living-concrete unity of tension, i.e. not a synthetic-abstract, integralistic unity.
This theoretical methodology of Guardini basically serves exclusively one's own consciousness in the encounter with the self, with the world and with God, in order not to fall into one-sidedness due to one's own imprints or predispositions in the rational-thinking and mental-contemplative-viewing confrontation as well as in the intuitive-feeling and sensual-contemplative-viewing confrontation, both in the preparation (practising the view with the "new eyes") and in the implementation, i.e. not to "overlook" something in the end and thus not to recognise the "whole", but only a "section".
Guardini will pass this on to his friend Josef Weiger at the same time as he drafts the 1925 version of the doctrine of opposites, which will later be published under the title Letters from Lake Como published letters, using the example of his own theories, his own reflections on his experiences and his own views on the "cultural form" of the landscape around Lake Como. At the end he writes: "But all this does not come as something new; it is the old, repressed realisation that is making room for itself again. What is at stake everywhere now, in the image of the world as in that of man, is this: To see how the forces relate to each other. Quantity and quality; calculation and creation; machine and life; thing and person. In the individual and as a whole."
End
Perhaps we now understand the dimensions between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) and the French artist Pierre Soulages (1919-2022). The art historian Marie-Amélie zu Salm-Salm drew my attention to these parallels. This proximity seems all the more exciting to me as Heisenberg was honoured with the Guardini Prize in 1973. In his speech Natural science and religious truth On the occasion of the award ceremony, Heisenberg told how deeply impressed he had been by Guardini since he had read his writings and that he had met him in person as a young man. Heisenberg says that since the famous Galileo trial, we have thought that scientific truth could not have been reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. The physicist does not want to simply dismiss the content of religious thought as part of an outdated stage of human consciousness that we will have to do without in the future. He was compelled to reflect again and again on the relationship between these two spiritual worlds because, as he says, he could never doubt the reality of what they indicated. Guardini had written so convincingly in Heisenberg's eyes that he tried to describe the relationship between these two truths. The physicist's findings created a break with the traditional understanding of a purely "objective" reality. After seeing a travelling exhibition of Soulages' works in 1948/49, he is said to have remarked - as the artist reported in an interview with Salm-Salm - that what these painters were doing was not similar, but parallel to what they were doing. Just as Soulages has always believed that a painting constantly takes on or transforms the senses that viewers are able to see in it, the physicist is of the opinion that what we see, grasp and objectify no longer belongs only to the realm of reality and science, but also to what we think. Sensory knowledge and the knowledge of theoretical thinking can no longer be separated, but are in a direct relationship of tension. Heisenberg goes beyond so-called causal thinking by ascribing a level of knowledge to the connections and relationships between the elements. His complementary theory therefore goes beyond the conventional understanding of an objective reality and even recognises parallel cognitive processes as part of reality.
For Heisenberg, the arts are intermediate beings. In literature, various cognitive processes have been recognised in Soulage's works of art over time, relating to neurology, music, poetry, linguistics, physics or other fields. In his documentary film for Arte in 2017, film director Stéphane Berthomieux created a transdisciplinary work by giving astrophysicists, musicians and a priest, among others, space to speak about their respective proximity to Soulage's art. These individual cognitive processes, which can be analysed by individual disciplines, appear to form a whole in the work of art, without the different cognitive processes being able to be mixed, combined or integrated into one another. This is precisely the essence of a created work that carries within it an interdisciplinary consciousness that - as in the case of Soulages - can be experienced and recognised by the viewer.
