KAROL KUZMÁNY’S PHILOSOPHY OF ART AESTHETICS IN CENTRAL EUROPE

This short essay by Karol Kuzmány (1806–1866), a founding father of Slovak aesthetic thinking, was written in Czech and published in 1836 in Hronka, a periodical edited by the author. In the essay, Kuzmány follows on from the thinking of his teacher at Jena, Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), particularly Fries’s theory of Ahn(d)ung (intuitive awareness). In the introduction, Kuzmány emphasizes that his concern is to bridge the gap between the theory of imitation and the theory of art based on imagination. In the first part of the essay, concerning general aesthetics, Kuzmány presents his theory of beauty – the feeling of the essence of things through perception by the mind (Anschauung or intuitus mentis); the basic idea – truth, the moral good, and beauty – according to Kuzmány, comprises the idea of religion in the broader sense – Humanität, humanitas. Rather than the opposite of beauty, the sublime constitutes beauty’s being raised to a qualitatively higher level: it is based on a contemplated intuitive awareness, which is itself felt. The second part of the essay consists of Kuzmány’s attempt to define art and to categorize kinds of art and genres of poetry. He distinguishes between unmediated art, which represents beauty to the external senses, and mediated art, which is aimed at inner feeling. The latter category includes poetry, which is, according to him, the supreme art, for it can, with the help of language, represent all forms of unmediated art as well. Kuzmány also devotes himself to a speculative justification of its genres, poetic style, and verse.

Ladislav he concisely presents a comprehensive and theoretically well-argued view of aesthetics, on the nature and meaning of art and its separate parts.
These works were written while Slovakia was part of the Austrian Empire, during the struggle for independence for the nations living in this territory, including the codification of the Slovak language and the rights of Slovaks to write and speak it. Kuzmány, like most Lutherans, wrote his works in Czech. He was a proponent of the literary, intellectual, and otherwise cultural unity of the Czechs and Slovaks in line with the views of Jan Kollár, 3  The first attempt to codify Literary Slovak was undertaken by Anton Bernolák  in 1787, in the favourable intellectual climate of the reign of Joseph II. Bernolák's attempt at standardization (often called 'bernoláčtina' or, more recently, 'bernolákovčina') was based on cultured western Slovak, but was not favourably received throughout the territory of what is today Slovakia, though many poets wrote in this language. The second successful attempt at the codification of Slovak was Ľudovít Štúr's (1815-1856), which followed on from the phonological spelling used in bernoláčtina, but adopted cultured central Slovak as the basis of the written language. In 1846 Štúr wrote 'Náuka reči slovenskej' (A Course of the Slovak Language), generally considered to be the work in which he codified the language. 5 Jan Thon, 'Jakub Friedrich Fries učitelem K. Kuzmányho' , Listy filologické 39 (1912): 249-57. himself remained silent; unlike the names of Kant, Hegel, Plato, Lessing, and Winckelmann, Fries was never mentioned by Kuzmány.
Another, far more comprehensive, analysis and assessment of Kuzmány's philosophy of art was written by the literary historian Pavel Bujnák 6 in 1927. He is even more critical of Kuzmány's views on aesthetics than Thon is. He considers it impossible to find a common philosophical point of view in Plato, Locke, Kant, and Fries, which, according to him, Kuzmány had done by means of the term essence (bytnost, that is, Wesen), which appears in three forms -truth, beauty, and the moral good. He also considered it impossible to present the soul as an entity unifying three completely different faculties, which could form the foundation of the unity of science, religion, ethics, and art -namely, the faculties of knowing, feeling, and desiring. What Kuzmány calls 'the human soul's faculty of feeling' , Bujnák considers sensory perception. And Kuzmány's basic idea, 'When we feel the essence of a certain object by the mind, we say we see beauty!' , 7 is explained by Bujnák thus: 'Beauty is concealed in the object; the object awakens beauty in us, and beauty is the feeling that a certain object awakens in us. It is therefore in ourselves and arises by means of individual objects.' 8 Bujnák does not distinguish between feeling and sensory perception.
Feeling is for him an exclusively sensory feeling of an actually existing object and he understands essence as an objective quality of an object, perceivable by the senses. He then has difficulty coming to terms with Kuzmány's participation of the subject in the very essence of the object during the revealing of that essence. Bujnák interprets Kuzmány's central idea ('The beautiful is that in which essence is felt by the mind') 9 only as sensualist (in the physiological and the psychological meaning of the word), as a record of a feeling from perception of the existing object.
The most problematic part of 'O Kráse' , which, according to Bujnák, reveals the eclecticism and lack of originality in Kuzmány's thinking, is where Kuzmány explains the stages of the aesthetic state and what is happening in it -namely, the movement from beauty to the sublime. Bujnák here understands Kuzmány's use of the word 'feeling' (cjtenj) as a 'mental state' dependent on the organs of the senses, as a step before rational processing. Kuzmány is not, however, A similar misunderstanding is caused by Kuzmány's words 'reasoning looks at essence in a certain object'. In keeping with his own standpoint, Bujnák understands it as 'looking' , that is, seeing on the basis of the organs of the senses. But Kuzmány actually writes 'reasoning looks, so to speak, at essence'; in other words, he is not concerned with looking with the eyes, an organ of the senses, nor is he concerned with an object that is external with respect to the mind. In the first stage, according to Kuzmány, we feel that our mind directly knows the essence of the object (external qualities perceivable by the senses are not the essence of the object), thus we feel beauty. During this act, the attention of the subject is concentrated more on his or her own mind and on himself or herself, no external qualities of the object are identified, nor is its existence beyond the subject. In the second stage, the attention focuses on the 'observing' of the very feeling of essence, that is, on observing the feeling of beauty by the subject. This state is called 'intuitive awareness' (tušenj, Fries's Ahndung). In intuitive awareness the presence of the object has weakened even more. Immersing oneself into the subject and into the state of feeling by the mind then continues in Kuzmány's third stage -when we 'observe' (that is, we observe by means of internally seeing, not on the basis of observing with the senses) that we have intuitive awareness itself. At that point, according to Kuzmány, we call the state of mind sublime or a feeling of the sublime.
Bujnák does not consider Kuzmány the originator of an independent aesthetic or philosophical concept, but as a proponent of Fries's modification of Kant's concept. Like Thon, Bujnák has methodologically based his assessment of Kuzmány's thinking on a comparison of 'original thinkers' (Fries, Kant, and Fichte) and an unoriginal thinker, an epigone (Kuzmány), by pursuing the 'correctness' or 'incorrectness' of the interpretation and understanding of 'original' thinking. addition, praises the fact that Kuzmány's philosophical views are oriented to an exploration of the 'nature of feeling as a cognitive faculty and art as a means of grasping those essential aspects of reality which are realized in the form of beauty'. 11 She considers Kuzmány's conception of humanitas to be a consequence of his philosophical and aesthetic position, and finds in it a 'legacy of Herder and Kollár as well as Fichte's activism'. Kuzmány's term humanitas -religion in the broad sense of the word -is, according to her, the education of a human being in awareness of truth, beauty, and the moral good, which is anchored in the assumed unity of reason, feeling, and the will. Like Bujnák, Várossová 12 points out that Kuzmány has a problem with the question of understanding truth, when he talks about the limits of rational cognition, and also when he uses the term 'essence' , but his explanation of the role of feeling in the noetic process and the role of art in cognition she considers to be a re-opening of the traditional dispute between philosophy and art. 13 She assesses positively Kuzmány's attempt to create a Slovak aesthetic terminology and a draft of his poetics.
Following on from Várossová, the historian of aesthetics, Eva Botťánková, 14 after researching the aesthetic views of Slovak thinkers before Kuzmány's work, argues: 'Kuzmány was one of the most important Slovak aestheticians of the nineteenth century, who tried to create his own philosophical-aesthetic system.
Though one could reasonably argue about the depth and originality of his ideas, one must admit that he concisely covered basically the whole range of classical aesthetics: a theory and philosophy of beauty, the sublime, taste, a theory and classification of art, and, concerning a particular aesthetics  Kuzmány is in a critical dialogue with Kant's aesthetics and theory of art. He thinks that after Kant aesthetic theory developed in two extreme, opposed currents. One of them is the view that the imitation of nature is the supreme rule and sign of the essence of beauty. The other is the view that the supreme rule or the creation and existence of beauty is formed only in artworks made on the basis of the imagination. Kuzmány considers both extremes to be untenable, because one leads to drowning in diversity, the other to the mere formation of concepts from words, to the creation of fractures and not to the naming and knowing of things. Kuzmány's aim is to surmount the two extremes. He differs from Kant in his attempt to achieve a synthesis of cognition, aesthetic judgement, and moral action in the form of the unification of thinking, feeling, and the will, and also a great acceptance of the mystically conceived final sense of art. Art and beauty are, for him, the knowledge of the essence of things, but also of man himself. This is far removed from Kant's standpoint, which talks chiefly about the possibilities and principles of knowledge, moral action, and judgement.
In his polemic with Kant, Fries wanted to return dignity to the thing in itself on the basis of the unity of the finite and the eternal. He does not conceive this in Schelling's sense, that is, as the relation between the infinite and the eternal, nor in the sense of Schelling's conception of the philosophy of art as the organon of every philosophy. On the contrary: he considers the views that unite philosophy and poetry to be pure nonsense. 16 He concisely summarizes the three doctrines within his own philosophy: (1) the necessary limitedness of knowledge, (2) reason's pure faith in the eternal, the thing in itself, and the moral good, and (3) intuitive awareness, which allows the eternal to live in the finite. 17 In Kuzmány's conception, the unity of all the faculties of man (feeling, thinking, and the will) does not have such a radically mystical outcome as the one we find in Fries. 18 Kuzmány is inspired by Fries in that he considers feeling to be a cognitive faculty. But whereas Fries considers feeling to be the equal of intuitive awareness, Kuzmány sees it as something distinct and puts it into a hierarchy.
Fries then gives preference to nature over art, including the aesthetic judgement of the ultimate aim of nature by means of beauty and the sublime.
Art has to follow nature, for interest in the beauty and the sublime of nature has a religious dimension. In natural beauty 'we have an intuitive awareness of the spirit of the whole and the prevailing purposefully formative power in it' and 'the beauty of art can only repeat these forms, but cannot provide any matter to this intuitive awareness'. 'Feeling in intuitive awareness' , Fries says, 'awakened through the judgement of beauty and the sublime, is of a dual nature, piety and enthusiasm'. 19 Kuzmány accepts neither this radical mysticism nor the subordination of art to the models of nature by means of its imitation. The starting point of his reflections is the indivisibility of the faculties of the spirit and the unmediated quality of consciousness. 'If we form, ' he says, 'concepts of art from the pure concepts of reason, that is, concepts of truth, beauty, and the moral good, we shall have achieved the idea of the supreme objectives of all endeavours of the human spirit, or of that which is for man a value in and of itself. Since this cannot be based on anything other than essence itself, we thus create the idea of essence itself.' 20 There is, according to Kuzmány, only one essence, but it exists in three forms, as truth, beauty, and the moral good. It is known, felt, desired, and ultimately intuited by the mind and internally observed as 'stripped bare' , that is, beyond time and space. The connection between truth, beauty, and the moral good is, according to Kuzmány, in the one essence, in the indivisibility of the human spirit, in three forms of the idea, which is created by the unmediated consciousness of man's mind and intuitive awareness. Kuzmány point outs: (a) Science investigates, and makes known, the truthfulness of truth, beauty, and the moral good.
(b) Art represents, and makes one feel, the beauty of truth and the moral good.
(c) Religion leads to consciousness of the moral good, truth, and beauty.
The unity of all of this (religion in the broad sense, humanitas) would be inconceivable if one of the components were excluded. And, similarly, not one of these could exist without the other two. 21 Kuzmány's feeling by the mind is an intuitive awareness, which, in seeing beauty, surmounts the limits of reason, and, in the form of beauty, sees essence revealed, not veiled by time and space. Feeling by the mind is not a sensory phenomenon; it is the world of beauty rooted in art, which provides the first possibility of seeing the essence of the object in front of it. The second act of the workings of the spirit is observing that the aesthetic world is present, that we 'catch ourselves' seeing the essence of the object by means of beauty, that is, we have an intuitive awareness. Only in that culmination, that is, by means of the sublime, which is fully dependent on stripping away time and space, which veiled the essence of the object, do we have 'naked' essence, that is, revealed, unveiled essence before our minds. We cannot understand this essence by reason, but we can feel it with our minds in intuitive awareness. This essencefelt by the mind in intuitive awareness cannot even be explained by reason, nor can it be ascribed meaning that has been justified by reason. Kuzmány undertakes this complicated process in order to achieve humanitas, which is rooted in ethics and religion. With this intuitive awareness, by means of the sublime, the moral good, beauty, and truth are revealed, which is not only the aim, but also the mission of art, the artist, and the scholar.
In Kuzmány's view the aesthetic world is humanitas, that is, religion broadly conceived. This world, according to him, does not require interpretation or rational explanation. He assumes that we are prevented from turning the real meaning of intuitive awareness into a concept 'because of the limits of our reason' , and that 'the ascribing of meanings to our intuitive awareness is the main, plentiful source of superstition'. 22 Kuzmány considers humanitas, religion in the broader sense, a state of mind in which the truth is inquired into and works of art are made by intuitive awareness of essence and also of the indivisible powers of the spirit. Hence his conviction that 'no religion was invented […] in which, on the one hand, truth would not be investigated and, on the other, works of art would not be created […]'. 23 Kuzmány's philosophical and aesthetic position is consistently projected into his conception of art. This conception often makes more precise and more comprehensible his conception of aesthetics. According to him: 'The aim of all art is the creation and representation of the beautiful, or the creation and representation of certain objects in a way that makes it possible to feel their essence, that is to say, that which is a value in and of itself and is the supreme aim of all endeavours of the soul.' 24 Art is therefore not imitation; it is creating Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, XLVII/III,  and presenting something beautiful so that by means of the beautiful it is possible to feel, and then have an intuitive awareness of essence itself, that is, the truth and the value of the object created and presented by the artist.
Kuzmány needs no 'model' for an imitation of this object to be created by art.
Art creates Being itself, and presents it so that its essence and truth can be felt, as intuitive awareness, directly known. Therein lies the meaning of the creation and existence of art. The aim of art can be achieved, according to Kuzmány, in two ways: either directly, by presenting the beautiful to the external senses (he includes here all the arts except poetry), or indirectly, by presenting the beautiful to the inner feeling by means of words. The supreme art, for Kuzmány, is poetry. Though he understands it as a mediated form of art, he expresses the conviction that it 'has to adopt all forms of unmediated art, or it has to represent all unmediated forms of the beautiful by means of words. Hence "ut pictura poesis", "ut musica poesis", and "ut plastica poesis".' 25 Kuzmány endeavoured to formulate a theory of aesthetics which did not seek to be a psychologizing, sensuous approach or to close itself off to art with an exclusively metaphysical mission. In the dispute between the two antithetical tendencies of the theory of art, of which one agitated for imitation and the other for imagination, he finds the point of departure in a return to classical doctrine, to Lessing and Plato. With a similarly synthetic approach, he rejects the extreme dichotomy between the beautiful and the sublime. He unites them by making beauty the first, unavoidable stage on the way to the sublime. The sublime is anchored in the beautiful; it is the beautiful increased quantitatively.
In this way the aesthetic, the artistic, and, ultimately, also the philosophical come into harmony in Kuzmány's conception. With art we create Being itself, we reveal its truth by means of the beautiful, and by its increase into a form of the sublime we cross the boundary of our own subjective existence. What is striking, as Várossová has pointed out, 26 is that this sort of anticipatory conception was not then taken up by anyone else in Upper Hungary or, later, Slovakia.

KAROL KUZMÁNY: ON BEAUTY
On the idea of beauty, on the beautiful and various ways of creating it in art, on the art of poetry and its genres, on style and verse, as an introduction to further, more amicable, aesthetic discussions.
Philosophy in general aims to understand the ways and causes of all phenomena of the life of the mind and their ultimate objective. Thus the great disputes amongst philosophers are usually based only on the differences amongst these ways. It is through these ways that philosophers attempt, and believe, that their efforts will be achieved, thus giving these ways a scholarly form, to create various philosophical systems. The primary cause of these disputes is, to be sure, misunderstandings, but our insisting on them, linked with a bit of sheer ambition or perhaps even stubbornness, naturally makes them not only more apparent but also more important and more substantial. This may then result in dangerous delusions. Even amongst scholars investigating beauty and the rules of what it comprises, a dispute has existed since the days of Plato. And, I believe, the world may never see an end to these disputes. They exist, however, in almost every other philosophical discipline, save mathematics and logic, though Hegel has lately introduced new chaos even into the last mentioned. With the advent of the Kantian school, the most obvious disputes were amongst those aestheticians who chose, as the supreme rule and also as the most certain feature of the essence of beauty, the imitation of nature, and then amongst those who sought beauty and the supreme rule of its creation in the ideals formed by the ideas of the imagination. This is how it was particularly between Lessing on the one hand and Winckelmann on the other. These two main ways of thinking were followed by almost everyone else with some slight variation.
Those who proclaim that the imitation of nature is the supreme essence and rule of the creation of the beautiful, to be sure, take delight in the liveliness of a certain diversity, but they lack the rule of definiteness or that higher unity of the conception of the beautiful in nature, because the experience to which they turn their attention can in no way provide it. The others, by contrast, lack the liveliness and diversity of the beautiful, for, disdaining nature, they create the beautiful only with their imagination, according to ideas, calling those 'ideals' , although they are actually mere ideas or only imagined shapes. Thus was born the fallacy of imagination, which was then manifested in works of art, especially amongst painters who depicted everyone with the same face, as if they had all been from the same mould and 'toutes les genres sont bien selon les ennuyents [sic]'. These aestheticians, moreover, erred in the way they conceived their own area of scholarship, so that instead of the notion of things they coined only terms without reflecting on specific beautiful things, which, as Schiller says, 'man keinen Hund aus dem Ofen lockt'. The contradiction between these two conceptions thereby turned into such chaos that the official titles of works of art, especially in poetry, and the notions of them, were not determined from reasoning, but only from the action. And, on the basis of such notions, they designed a whole system of poetry and determined its methods, not allowing for anything new, anything that had not already existed before, and indeed outright rejecting it. So, on the one hand, there are those who are fond of the poetry of classical antiquity, considering its methods to be the only true way of creating the beautiful. Others, by contrast, determine the titles of works of art merely by reasoning, and often high-handedly, and are unable to agree amongst themselves. In an effort to avoid these errors, I now propose a conception that I find truthful, so that I may then be more easily understood in more amicable future discussions on aesthetics.

[A Theory of Beauty]
The ultimate and supreme objective of the human spirit is that which cannot be used for any higher goal, but is a value in and of itself. The soul is, to be sure, a single, truly indivisible faculty, but in order to fully comprehend its workings we observe it in parts, and, in a psychological examination, divide it into three parts, based on the three main faculties of its operation: those of knowing, of feeling, and of desiring. All endeavours of the spirit are therefore also divided according to these three faculties, that is, knowing, feeling, and desiring. The chief objective of our endeavours, stemming from the faculty of knowing, or that which is a value in and of itself with regard to the endeavours of the faculty of knowing, is truth. The chief objective of our endeavours, stemming from the faculty of feeling, or that which is a value in and of itself with regard to the endeavours of the faculty of feeling, is beauty. The chief objective of our endeavours, stemming from the faculty of desiring, or that which is a value in and of it itself with regard to the faculty of desiring, is the moral good. If we form concepts of art from the pure concepts of reason, that is, concepts of truth, beauty, and the moral good, we shall have achieved the idea of the supreme objectives of all the endeavours of the human spirit, or of that which is for man a value in and of itself. Since this cannot be based on anything other than essence itself, we thus create the idea of essence itself. It is identical only in three different respects. In itself, as it is, or at least in itself as it is with respect to This idea of essence, of that which is a value in and of itself, of that which is the supreme objective of all aims of every endeavour of the human spirit, is (1) with regard to the human soul's faculty of knowing, the idea of truth; (2) with regard to the human soul's faculty of feeling, the idea of beauty; (3) with regard to the human soul's faculty of desiring, the idea of the moral good.
So, you say, the idea of truth is the idea of essence (of that which is a value in and of itself, that which is the supreme objective of all endeavours of the human soul), regarding the human spirit's faculty of knowing, and so forth. (a) The true is that in which essence is known by reason; (b) The beautiful is that in which essence is felt by the mind; (g) The morally good is that in which essence, by means of conscience, leads one to consciousness.
In this way it is absolutely necessary to place essence in and of itself, the ideas of it, and its representation in certain objects, within the limits of a concept. If there were no truth, beauty, and the moral good (that is to say, if there were no essence -that which is a value in and of itself, that which is the supreme objective of all endeavours of the human soul), our spirit could not contain even the ideas of truth, beauty, and the moral good. And if the spirit did not contain ideas of truth, beauty, and the moral good, we could not even know the true, nor feel the beautiful, nor be conscious of the moral good. The thing that aims to lead our spirit to understand the true is called science. The thing that aims to lead our spirit to feel the beautiful is called art. The thing that aims to lead the spirit to be conscious of the morally good is called religion in the narrow sense of the word. And so the idea that comprises the concepts of science, art, and religion (in the narrow sense) is the idea of religion in the broad sense of the word, that is, Humanität, humanitas. In other words, science is a system of investigating truth; art is the way of presenting beauty, and religion leads one to be conscious of the moral good. Truth, beauty, and the moral good are therefore identical in the idea of essence. They differ from one another only in their relation to the three faculties of our spirit. It is therefore possible to say: (a) Science investigates, and makes known, the truthfulness of truth, beauty, and the moral good.
(b) Art represents, and makes one feel, the beauty of truth and the moral good.
(c) Religion leads to consciousness of the moral good, truth, and beauty. also Boileau, who claims that only truth is beautiful, though this is probably meant figuratively. But this leads me to ask myself whether truth is beauty and whether the moral good is beauty. No. They have an identical object; but truth, beauty, and the moral good are only aspects of the same objective basis or, rather, of its essence, leading to the three main faculties of our spirit. From this it follows why no religion was invented (an impossibility in itself ) in which, on the one hand, truth would not be investigated and, on the other, works of art would not be created, for only in both could religion arise and achieve its aim. It is therefore clear why the state of the religion of one people corresponded, and corresponds, also to their enlightenment and their aesthetic education, taste.
Taste, depending on the character of religion, either increases or declines, is simple or elaborate, lovely or sublime, and so forth. Consequently, the efforts of those who disdain works of art, sculpture, painting, music, song, poetry (not only lyric, but also epic, even drama, which is here called 'ceremonial'), and want to exclude them from religion, are wicked and foolish. From this it is clear that there is nothing more repulsive than false poetry, that is, poetry that represents lies as truth, and baseness as the moral good.
The aim of all art is the creation and representation of the beautiful, or the creation and representation of certain objects in a way that makes it possible to feel their essence, that is to say, that which is a value in and of itself and is the supreme aim of all endeavours of the soul. But how does it happen awareness, but only by ascribing meaning to that intuitive awareness is one led to delusion. Thus, for example, the spirit of a morally educated person in great peril at sea -when his ship is being tossed about by huge waves in a violent storm and he is seized by the conviction of the futility of any human help -will be raised by the mind's perception, enabling him to feel his essence above the feeling of horror, and the feeling of this observation will become sublime. For his spirit now has an intuitive awareness of his own independence and self- reliance (immortality, eternity), and this intuitive awareness will surely not deceive him. He can err only when he wishes to ascribe a particular meaning to this kind of feeling, for example, when a Roman says that he sees the river Acheron or a Turk says that he sees Mohammed's paradise open. For this mere intuitive awareness, whose real meaning we are prevented from turning into a concept because of the limits of our reason, a Roman or Turk understands by the concepts inculcated in him by his education. It is now clear that the ascribing of meanings to our intuitive awareness is the main, abundant source of superstition; but it is also clear that no superstition could ever originate without an intuitive awareness, which is in itself, as we have already seen, always true, and is based on the supreme truth. It is also clear that just as no religion could have originated and existed without a sense of beauty, the same sense of beauty will be an occasional cause for the emergence of a great many errors and superstitions. That is also the case with reason if it is emboldened to ascribe meanings to, and pass off certain concepts as, intuitive awareness, it will have exceeded its natural limits to such an extent that it will consider feeling to be a concept, an image a thing, and a phenomenon essence. Just compare, dear reader, the Gnostic teachings with this psychological explanation and you will, I believe, be easily convinced of its correctness. Taste, its strength, health, or weakness, can exist in countless degrees, because of the countless differences in the degrees of education of mind and heart, as well as the development of the sense of beauty. It is for this reason that matters of taste can be discussed only with a truly enlightened and truly morally educated person sincerely seeking the truth, but not with an unenlightened, morally uneducated, prejudiced, or deluded person. Only for the former kind of person does the proverb 'De gustibus non est disputandum' hold true.
When with the mind's perception we feel the essence of a certain object, we say we see beauty! From this it follows why Plato concluded that in us, as beings that have come from the world of essence or ideas into the world of phenomena, when we see beauty, ideas of essence originate as if they were recollections of essence, whereby, allegedly, the sense of beauty arises in us.
But how is it possible that we feel the essence of objects by the mind's perception? As we have seen, if there were no truth, moral good, or beauty, that is, to say, that which is a value in and of itself, there would be no essence with respect to the human spirit, nor would there be ideas of truth, the moral good, or beauty. And if these ideas did not exist, we would be unable to know anything as true, morally good, or beautiful. All knowledge begins with perception by the external senses, and proceeds all the way to ideas, whose essence one can be aware of only by the mind's direct feeling. For example, by directly feeling with the mind we realize that we are thinking and that our reason can know truth, and so forth. By directly feeling, however, we cannot be aware of the existence of ideas except together with their essence; and when we are aware of their essence we are also aware of their existence. In the mind therefore is where the direct perception of them arises and where beauty is felt.

[A Theory of Art]
The aim of all works of art can be achieved in two ways: either unmediated by representing the beautiful to the external senses (this includes all works of art except poetry) or mediated, by representing the beautiful to inner feeling by means of words, which, through awakened imagining, compel the faculty of imagination to imagine the beautiful and, so to speak, to adumbrate it, which takes place in poetry.
In art which affects one directly the beautiful can be represented to different external senses, that is to say, (a) to sight, either most directly, by space, because, to sight, space is perceived as surface -by means of sculpture and its various kinds; or only directly -by time; because, to sight, time is light, shade, and darkness -by means of painting; or by the alternative application of both, in gardening, and so forth.
(b) to hearing -to hearing itself, most directly by music; or by the most unmediated way linked with mediating, that is, by means of poetry -in song.
(c) to sight and hearing -by means of dance. [Poetry] Poetry, as a mediated form of art, has to adopt all forms of unmediated art, or it has to represent all unmediated forms of the beautiful by means of words.
Hence 'ut pictura poesis' , 'ut musica poesis' , and 'ut plastica poesis'. It should be noted at this point, however, that the poet can represent many places but only one after the other, not simultaneously. That is why certain limits have to exist between the two modes, that is to say, between poetic painting and painterly poetry, which Lessing superbly demonstrated in his Laocoön. Painterly poetry is not poetic painting. For this reason no poet should dare to describe, for example, some female protagonist in the greatest detail of her limbs, every part, believing that by imitating a painter's work he might produce something beautiful; he would be mistaken. If he were able to express it all in a word and thus evoke the appropriate perception, it would definitely be beautiful and evoke a feeling of beauty. The poet, however, is able to represent only constituent parts of such an image; the whole disappears and with it also the perception of beauty, that is, the feeling of beauty, and so the beautiful as well.
In poetry the beautiful can be represented in three ways: (a) If the poet represents the perception of his own mind and thereby evokes in us his feelings and compels the mind to imagine the beautiful. This genre of poetry may be called lyric poetry.
(b) If the poet depicts beauty by means of certain existing phenomena, he depicts the beautiful, how it evokes in the mind the perception of its own essence, this genre of poetry may be called epic poetry.
(c) If the poet depicts essence itself, independent of specific objects, that is to say, the idea of essence for an observing person, how it determines the objects according to all its own relations to the faculties of the human soul, this genre of poetry is referred to as dramatic poetry.
In lyric poetry, only a certain concept of essence in a certain object appears, not essence as such; we may therefore refer to this poetry as symbolic.
In epic poetry, essence as such refers to a certain object and this poetry can be referred to as allegoric.
In dramatic poetry, essence as such appears in a unity of specific objects; one may therefore call this poetry synthetic.
Lyric poetry is distinguished by its plasticity; it is this plasticity which expresses the excellence of lyric poetry. The plasticity represents the shape of a body when the poet thus describes the perception by his mind in such a way that it evokes the same feelings, the same perception, in the reader or the listener, and thereby the same object is represented before the reader's or listener's eyes. And if it is an animate object, it seems as if it has moved before us in its own body. Horace, like Goethe, is unsurpassed in this respect. And Goethe once said that he felt it was quite odd that his lyric verse was admired, because he had, apparently, merely carefully observed his own feelings and then, so to speak, transferred them into words.
Epic poetry is marked by its painterly form; it is this painterly form that expresses the excellence of epic poetry. But since the objects in epic poetry are not determined by the perception that they evoke in us, but vice versa, the represented object evokes in us a perception of its own essence, this painterly form must be in the past tense. (I say 'past tense' because the object has already been represented.) For this reason, in epic poetry everything must live in the past. Therein lies the excellence of Homer: when he describes Achilles' sceptre, he leads us into the forest where the sceptre is in the form of a tree; Achilles then cuts down the tree, strips it of its leaves, branches, and so forth. Later on, when Homer describes a chariot, a wheel, or a shield, he does not describe these things as they are now, but how they came into being. That is why verbs and verbal nouns are so valuable to epic poetry. We may say that past life is described in epic poetry as if present and an inanimate object is described as if once living.
In dramatic poetry the idea of essence is independent of individual objects; it alone determines objects. Dramatic poetry is therefore marked by, and excels in, both forms, plastic and painterly, body and life, that is to say, existing life.
Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Schiller are unrivalled in this genre.
The basis of a taxonomy of lyric poetry will be the diversity of perceptions in the poet's mind. The diversity of perceptions is determined by the diversity of objects. The forms of the genre of lyric poetry will therefore be the ode, hymn, elegy, song, and so forth.
The basis of a taxonomy of epic poetry, in which the objects themselves determine the perception of their essence, is therefore the object itself. Since this object must be the effect of the spirit, otherwise it would be unable to express its essence, it is either the effect of a human spirit or a superhuman spirit, that is to say, the spirit of God, and must be mythologically truthful. The workings of the human spirit are expressed either in life at home -described in pastoral, bucolic, or urbane (wzdělanenka) verse, in short the idyll -, or in public or civil life, in the description of which heroic poetry emerged. The description of the workings of the divine spirit and the mythologically truthful spirits, with respect to their influence on human life, is called epic.
The basis of a taxonomy of dramatic poems is the effect of the idea of essence, an idea independent of specific objects, by means of objects that are determined by this idea as if for feeling. The forms of dramatic poetry are drama, tragedy, comedy, and so forth. Opera is epic disguised in dramatic form, or is simply drama.
The diversity of the pleasure of the sense of beauty depends on the different effects of perception by the mind, that is, when we feel the essence of a specific object, either in itself or in its encounter with difficulties or in its relation to the human spirit, either generally or in relation to the moral nature of individual people, which leads to the diversity of the pleasantness of the sense of beauty in the presence of the beautiful or the sublime. And because essence is either truth, the moral good, or beauty, its relation either to facility or to difficulty determines the diversity of the pleasantness of the sense of beauty; this surely leads to an awakening of the passions of joy, sorrow, grief, fear, love, hatred, and so forth. In lyric poetry, sorrow is the basis of the elegy. In dramatic poetry, it is the basis of tragedy. In lyric poetry, joy is the basis of song. In dramatic poetry, it is the basis of comedy, and so forth.
In each genre of poetry, essence must be represented through perception by the mind. It is only in this way that we can feel beauty. And essence is in itself truth, the moral good, and beauty. All genres of poetry should therefore contain morality and truthfulness, in subject matter and in depictions. Consequently, even mythology must be truthful in all poetry. That is why the Iliad was a genuine epic only for the Greeks; for us, on the other hand, only Genesis is a genuine epic. We must consider Milton's Paradise Lost and Klopstock's Messias failures. That is also why when we now call upon the Muses or Cupid it should be considered false poetry, representing lies as truth. For the same reason we can no longer even use our own pagan Slav mythology. Though it is possible that someone would still make an epic, it is far more difficult now than before.
Some kinds of poetry have their own times in which they can be born and live.
Similarly, as we know from the natural sciences, some species of birds and plants once existed, but no longer live, nor can they. When their time is over, they can no longer come into existence. (I am talking about the past and present of the intellectual life of a nation. Consequently, what is no longer possible in one nation may still be possible for another; one nation can definitely be adult at the same time as another which is, so to speak, still in its infancy.) For example, genuine fairy tales in our country will no longer be made; they were once the epics of our pagan forebears. We preserve some of the surviving ones like stuffed birds, and enjoy only this kind. But the singing of these birds will never be heard again.
From our discussion it follows that some Germans, who have had their brains smoked with Latin and Greek, acted ill-advisedly when they called Voss's Louis and Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea mistakes, believing that neither was an ei du ¢llion. It is not of course as the Greek ei du ¢llion once was, which surely was like our pastoral poems, a picture of the simplest way of human life. Though ei du ¢llion generally means only 'little picture' , even our pastoral and urbane idyll could each be called an ei du ¢llion, the former a picture of rural life, the latter a picture of town life. Under the pastoral form we can imagine a cradle, which stands alone by a babbling brook. Under the pastoral, we can imagine a neat little village house. Under the urbane idyll we can imagine a house in a town, surrounded by a garden with rows of flowers, beside which is a gazebo with a beautiful girl inside. The pastoral shows a shepherdess (the sweetheart of a shepherd or a fisherman), tending her goats, making fishing nets, picking flowers, or weaving baskets. It can also depict the sweetheart of a village lad, in her Sunday best, or fetching water for the cows, or just sitting on a bench in front of her house and being merry, or sitting at a spinning wheel and telling stories. The urbane idyll depicts the young sweetheart of a young man from the town, and she tends her garden or plays the harp, and so forth. We could add that heroic poetry depicts the Amazon and that the epic also depicts Isis, the national goddess of the Egyptians. [Style] Style is the means of expressing what we think and it is therefore natural that it has to suit every genre and form of poem. After all, who would ride a cat to a camp or cuddle a horse on his lap? Who would lead a nation while spinning wool and create worlds while squeezing the whey out of cheese? There will be as many styles as there are genres and forms of poems. In general, however, we distinguish three styles: the classical, for describing the beautiful or the sublime with simplicity; the oriental, for describing the sublime in its diversity; and the romantic, for describing the beautiful in its diversity. [Verse] Poetry represents the beautiful either with free, unrestricted speech or with verse. Verse is a certain form of inner sense, which is to be adopted and fulfilled by some idea that is embodied in words. It then depends on an arrangement of words which will in its own way encourage perception by the mind for the very thing contained in it, so that the essence of the object can be felt by the faculty of feeling. Just as it is with the faculties of knowing and desiring that the human spirit first realizes in itself an unmediated idea and in accord with it recognizes essence in specific individual objects, so it is with the faculty of feeling. And the sequence of mutual relations is the supreme basis for all workings of the human spirit. We observe it in our own bodies, in our heartbeat and our breathing. From this a syllogism arises in reasoning and knowing, the antecedent and consequent in speech. From this, so-called 'parallelism' emerges, which is the basis of each and every symmetry in all works of art and is the reason why without symmetry, whether known or felt, nothing beautiful can be represented.
This concentrated symmetry in the mutual relations of the workings of the spirit is therefore the basis of all tunes and also all verse. The simplest verse will be that which represents only the concentrated symmetry of a thoughthomogeneity (parallelism) in a given number of syllables; because parallelism, put into sequence, creates metre in verse, which will now have not only limbs but also joints.