Karl Philipp Moritz's Concept of the Whole in His "Versuch einer Vereinigung…" (1785)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Karl Philipp Moritz's Concept of the Whole in His “Versuch einer Vereinigung . . (1785) ERDMANN WANIEK The rather brief history of literary scholarship is marked by quite a number of shifts in focus and method. Through all changes, however, one basic tenet has remained stable. We assume that each work of art exhibits a distinct order, indeed that it is the degree of purposeful organization that distinguishes a work of art from other objects. For example, even, or especially, when reading Andre Breton's Nadja or Samuel Beckett's latest story "Ill Seen, Ill Said," we sooner or later face the question: How does it add up? This colloquial phrase is but one version of the expectation that the work, though apparently consisting of disjointed, incoherent parts, should coalesce upon closer scrutiny into a whole of some sort. At vari­ ous times in the history of aesthetics in general and literary scholarship in particular, this expectation has petrified into a doctrine of unities, or sprouted into a vision of organicism, or dominated as "Stimmigkeit" the practice of "Werkinterpretation," or surfaced as a concern for binary op­ positions and layers of codes. In whatever form, the fundamental premise that the work has an intelligible order governs our efforts of interpreta­ tion and indeed makes them possible. The joy of reading is in seeing the order of the work; stated differently, the act of interpretation is nothing if not the attempt to elucidate the order of a work. In our period of decon­ struction when this notion is no longer taken for granted, it is especially necessary to determine the point in the past when the more or less implicit 213 214 / W A N I E K assumption of an order distinguishing a work of art crystallized into a clearly elaborated concept of the work of art as being a whole. The usual answer is well known: the general source of this concept is German idealism, the specific, familiar texts are Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) and, partly under Kant's influence, Schiller's aesthetic writ­ ings, starting with the early essay "Uber den Grund des Vergniigens an tragischen Gegenstanden" ["On the Reasons for our Enjoyment of Tragic Subjects"] (1792).1 There we find what have come to be considered the classical formulations for both the basic idea of the work of art as an in­ terrelated, autonomous whole and for various ramifications, such as the separation between moral and aesthetic realms, or the idea of aesthetic distance. It is my opinion, however, that the locus classicus with respect to both date and succinct inclusiveness of formulation is rather Karl Phil­ lip Moritz's "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schdnen Kunste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten" ["Essay on the Subsumption of all Arts and Sciences under the Concept of that which is Complete in itself"].2 The essay was published in March of 1785 in the Berlinische Monatsschrift , with a dedication to Moses Mendelssohn. Title and dedication es­ tablish a framework of reference. The title harks back to Batteux's Les beaux arts reduits a un meme principe, first published in 1746, where Batteux subsumes music and painting as well as dance and poetry under one prin­ ciple. His central notion, imitation of nature, identifies model and proce­ dure for the creative act. Mendelssohn in turn, while not rejecting Aristo­ telian mimesis, points out in his Betrachtungen uber die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schdnen Kunste und Wissenschaften [Observations on the Sources and the Relations of the Arts and Sciences] of 1757 that it can­ not be considered the basic principle of the arts, since adopting it only re­ moves the problem one step: "Wie wenn Batteux gefragt wiirde, was fur Mittel hat die Natur gebraucht, uns zu gefallen? Und warum gefallt uns die Nachahmung?"3 Establishing mimesis as creative procedure does not explain our reaction to the work of art. Mendelssohn instead claims that clarifying the effect of the beautiful and its causes may yield one principle common to all art forms, namely pleasure. Moritz, through title and dedi­ cation, hints at the significant differentiation between a rule-governed aesthetics of production and a psychologically...