Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Band 68/2

This text is about Martin Seel’s philosophical experiment on »not wanting to be right« in the light of concepts of the neutral, as found in French philosophy (Nancy, Blanchot). In the »neither-nor« and »both-as-well« positionings neutralize themselves undialectically. In relation to this, the relationship between art and philosophy can be systematically redefined. According to the thesis of this essay, both fields gain their comparability, difference, and specific contour through their complementary relationship to the neutral.

Is wanting not to be right – the endeavor that Martin Seel not only explores and defends but practices in his eponymous book (›Nichtrechthabenwollen‹) – the expression of a paradox, a self-contradictory undertaking? It is indeed if to want something means to judge it as right. The text proposes to understand the wanting Martin Seel speaks of differently. This can be done with the help of the figure of »active passivity,« in which Seel sees the essential thought of Adorno.

Martin Seel wonders how it is possible to liberate oneself from wanting to be right. In the following, we will ask whether the idea of a wanting to be right is so much as intelligible. For if one thinks about thinking and asks what it means to think something, then the idea of wanting to be right seems to have no place. Both the possibility and the necessity of a liberation from wanting to be right seem to dissolve. And yet, we will show, there is wanting-to-be-right. But we do not understand the idea of wanting-to-be-right merely by thinking about thinking. Rather, we understand the idea of wanting-to-be-right only because thinking is something that takes place between two whose thoughts can contradict each other. If my thought meets your thought, and your thought negates my thought, then it is possible that we both want tobe right. This is the existential core of the idea of a liberation from wanting to be right: It is about the liberation from conflict and the hope for reconciliation.

Ever since ›Die Kunst der Entzweiung‹, one can detect a certain Lubitsch touch at work in Martin Seel’s books: subtlety, wit, finesse, elegance, nonchalance. In a general typology that tentatively orders philosophy in its relation to comedy, Seel accordingly belongs to the wellknown type of irony and humour. However, this type can only show its strength when it absorbs the unsettling intensity of experiences and the sting of indissoluble opposites, a synthesis for which Billy Wilder stands cinematically.

The German philosophical tradition has always been open to challenges that can be seen as a continuum. This text discusses Friedrich Nietzsche as a master of wild challenges and Martin Seel as a master of friendly challenges, often blurring the line between them. In doing so, it challenges traditional truth debates by raising questions about the circumstances of truth and the practical aspects of truth orientation. Because Seel uses challenges as hermeneutical resources, he conceives of challenge as a method for encouraging new approaches in philosophical thought.

Martin Seel once made a very derogatory comment on Thomas Mann’s ›Doktor Faustus‹, which can also be called »Nietzsche novel«. I take this as an opportunity to appreciate, in a broader perspective, a thinking born from historical experience and cultural sensitivity in the context of Adorno and Nietzsche. Thomas Mann’s confrontation with the ambivalence of modernity, motivated by National Socialism, points to an unsurpassable intellectual imprint that he shares with Adorno’s experience-bound philosophy. Adorno’s theory of art is aptly corrected by Martin Seel with regard to its aesthetic utopia, but at the same time the affirmative potential of art is vindicated. Following Adorno, art is capable of opening up experiences in its own way that can also provide impulses for politics. This can equally be said about Thomas Mann’s ›Faustus‹.

The paper aims at demonstrating that Martin Seel’s aesthetic theory suffers from the same unresolved tension that can be found in Schiller’s ›Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man‹: On the one hand, art is assigned the task of bringing to our attention the undiminished complexity of an object’s qualitative properties; on the other hand, however, art is also given the role of putting us into a state of »active determinability« thanks to its liquefaction of all our well-rehearsed determinations and determinations, thus allowing us the freedom of experimental self-exploration. Both theories fail to make plausible the argumentative transition that could establish a link between these two tasks of art.

With a philosopher like Martin Seel, reflecting this closely on the literary form in which to present his ideas, it is not surprising that philosophy of language makes for a focus of interest. Since my own interest also points in this direction, I will start with Seel’s groundbreaking essay on literal and figurative speech (I). I will then deal with the concept of ›letting oneself be determined‹ as the pivotal point of Martin Seel’s philosophy (II). The resulting pragmatist understanding of sociocultural forms of life has important consequences for the way in which Seel detranscendentalizes Kant’s epistemology (III). Finally, I will critically examine the conception of a practical philosophy developing aesthetics and morality out of the fundamental question of ethics (IV). In this conception, a self-image of philosophy oriented towards the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. In my opinion, however, Martin Seel neglects history as a dimension in which reason leaves its traces (V).

The essay discusses the claim and the attempt to theoretically grasp the entire artistic production of the present, the possibility of which is suggested by a philosophical concept of art in the singular. On the basis of Umberto Eco’s reconceptualization of the code of a language as a heuristic fiction, it analyzes various attempts of mapping and categorizing certain historic developments and fields in the arts and contemporary attempts of writing a global history of art and music, respectively. Finally, it turns to theoretical projects that claim to be able to capture the heterogeneous field of contemporary art. Even though there is a fundamental difference between encyclopedic and clearly normative approaches, any totalization must be recognized as situated. In this sense, it is a speculative fiction that may be productive but is in danger of becoming ideologic if this situatedness is forgotten or obscured.

›Pop‹ often functions as an abbreviation of ›popular‹. If that is the case, ›pop‹ includes talk of ›simple,‹ ›catchy‹, ›vivid‹ and/or ›standardised‹, ›schematised‹ and/or ›charming‹, ›spectacular‹ artefacts as well as their ›lively‹, ›unmediated‹ or ›conditioned‹, ›passive‹, ›merely sensual‹ reception. This essay reconstructs precisely those approaches to a pop aesthetic, from Richard Hamilton, among others, to cultural studies and German-language pop discourse, that deviate from this and offer an independent position. Three areas of such pop aesthetics are examined in more detail: 1. determinations of individual pop arts and pop-specific value judgements, 2. forms¨ of not purely discursive pop aesthetics, 3. provisions for an overarching pop aesthetic. In the comprehensive inspection of corresponding presentations on pop music, pop art, pop literature and pop design, characteristics cited, such as superficiality and artificiality, are examined for their viability, deficits are identified and, in some cases, new proposals are made.

This paper challenges the assumption that lines, colors, and shapes have aesthetic effects that are the same for everyone. From an interdisciplinary perspective of art history and empirical aesthetics, we argue that assigning aesthetic effects to specific lines or colors may well be a valid theory for some aesthetic encounters, it falls short of explaining universal aesthetic effects. Our analysis proceeds in four steps: We begin by reconsidering the notion of aesthetic effect as defined in the tradition of Goethe. We then demonstrate that doubts regarding the universality of aesthetic effects have existed since the nineteenth century and that the concept of aesthetic sensitivity was introduced around 1900 to account for individual differences. We point to the persistence of the idea of universality and, related to this, sensitivity by considering the Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test, first developed in the 1960s by Karl Otto Götz, Daniel Berlyne, and Hans-Jürgen Eysenck. We discuss new empirical research testing interpersonal agreement about aesthetic effects. The findings of these studies indicate a low agreement among the participants about aesthetic effects, raising serious doubts about assumed universality. In a concluding section, we discuss what remains of the universality claim and propose a weak theory of intersubjective agreement about aesthetic effects.