The meeting of the French Philosophical Society on 17 June 1939 became a clash of ideas when the young philosopher Raymond Aron delivered an address on “Democratic States and Totalitarian States” to an audience that included some of the most influential prewar French intellectuals. Aron, who only the year before had defended a controversial doctoral thesis and was at this time without an academic position, developed the idea that Western democracies were essentially conservative; he presented his reasoning in a self-confident, even somewhat authoritative, tone. Facing powerful fascist states that sought to destroy the very spirit of Western tradition, he argued that democracies had simply retreated into a defensive position while adhering to a naive optimism.Footnote 1
Aron's statement that democracies were illusions, lacking competence and atrophying over a dead heritage, caused the outward consternation of Victor Basch, who from 1928 onwards held the newly created chair of aesthetics at the Sorbonne. As François Furet wrote, the seventy-six-year-old Basch was a fair approximation of everything the half-century-younger Aron was criticizing: pacifism, progressivism and the French-style revolutionary tradition.Footnote 2 Basch, of Hungarian Jewish descent, was the president of the Ligue des droits de l'homme and known for his efforts in promoting the principles of legal and political justice—a mission that would lead to his brutal assassination by the Nazis in 1944.Footnote 3 On 10 January 1944, suffering from cancer, Basch and his wife Ilona, both in their eighties, were taken from their home in Lyon, led down a path, shot in the head and left there by the anti-Semitic French Milice Française, a paramilitary force created by the Vichy regime. Five years earlier, a highly emotional Basch, who as a former immigrant worshipped the meritocracy of the French republic, firmly countered Aron's pessimistic outlook: “I would say that this pessimism is not heroic, I would say that for me, fatally, democracies have always triumphed and always will triumph. There is a regression today; are we not in the valley? Alright then, we will go once more up to the top.”Footnote 4
The discussion between Aron and Basch is in many ways revealing. In the first place, it is illustrative of the “crisis of old age” that philosophy in France was undergoing in the interwar years. Aron's speech can be seen as a reaction against the “gerontocracy” and even “sclerosis” of French philosophy departments.Footnote 5 Second, the confrontation showed the deep rift in the democratic camp during what proved to be the last peacetime summer in France for some years. Basch, one of the architects of the French Popular Front, a broad political coalition united by opposition to far-right groups, clashed with the liberal-thinking Aron. In his later, postwar memoirs, Aron would evoke the polemic with Basch in a chapter entitled “The Route to the Catastrophe,” airing a classic description of 1930s France: a place where the consensus on fundamental political issues collapsed and any serene dialogue became impossible.Footnote 6
The rather innovative background philosophical claims of Aron during the rancorous dispute are known: Vilfredo Pareto's elite theory and Weberian sociology.Footnote 7 In the case of Basch, the link between his political beliefs and his field of philosophical expertise, namely art philosophy or aesthetics, has not yet been investigated. However, as I will demonstrate in this essay, such a connection is well worth examining if one wishes to understand why Basch thought and acted as he did during the meeting of 1939. Theodore Zeldin's statement that the philosophy of the Third Republic might be described as a “celibate having constant affairs” because its ambition to be universal did not prevent it from constantly absorbing ideas from other countries or domains, is also applicable to Basch's philosophical reasoning about art.Footnote 8 As will become clear, there was a connection, a liaison, between Basch's aesthetic and political thinking.
By juxtaposing Basch's aesthetics and politics, this article challenges the traditional historiography of interwar aesthetics. This historiography has too often been limited to an internal and therefore myopic view on philosophical aesthetics.Footnote 9 I argue that interwar art philosophy was not solely driven by the (re)formulation of epistemological issues. Art philosophers like Basch did not only question whether empirical data, and therefore the art object, or the aesthetic experience, and therefore the contemplator, formed the central basis of aesthetic reflection. Nor were Basch and his colleagues merely occupied with interdisciplinary concerns such as the implementation of psychological or anthropological sciences. Instead, the conceptual debates of aesthetics were, to a large extent, constituted by the ambition to diagnose and orientate a rapidly changing world, and hence need to be connected to political thinking and practices.
To approach the multiple issues at stake in this essay, two interwoven lines of questioning will be in play. One considers the extent to which Basch's theory of beauty was a corollary to his political opinions. The other line of inquiry raises questions about how his political views became influenced by his work on aesthetics. In three steps, I will show that these two sets of questions illuminate each other. First, I will trace out Basch's philosophical trajectory and consider a number of formative ingredients of his aesthetic and political thinking during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Once we have gained a clear view of Basch's philosophical profile, we will look, in the second part of this essay, at a series of instances in which Basch's political opinion and aesthetics became interwoven. After examining a debate that took place in 1906, the main focus here will be on the 1930s, leading up to the war of words with Aron. In the third and concluding part of the essay, we will address a more methodological issue. In this final section, I will use the case of Victor Basch as a starting point to reflect upon how a history of art philosophy, one that takes into account the impact of political themes and issues, can be written.
RECASTING KANT
Studies of French cultural history do not often include the name of Victor Basch.Footnote 10 In most indexes, “Barthes, Roland” is rapidly followed by “Bataille, Georges”. However, there are a few niches of historical study in which Basch figures rather prominently, largely due to his status as a martyr of the Second World War, certainly in the case of work devoted to the history of the French resistance and Vichy France.Footnote 11 This equally applies to work on the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal that divided France during the 1890s and early 1900s. The wrongful conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a promising young Jewish artillery officer, and the political and judicial scandal that followed until his full exoneration in 1906, was not only one of the gravest crises to rock the French Third Republic; it also formed the fait primitif of Basch's political career. Basch called himself a “Dreyfusard through shock”. For him, becoming a supporter of Dreyfus, consequently entering the camp of socialists, republicans and anti-clericalists and opposing the “right wing” of anti-Dreyfusards, who were mostly royalists, conservatives and Catholics, meant both the awakening of his Jewishness and a lifelong engagement to defend civil rights.Footnote 12
As the leader of the Dreyfusards at Rennes, where he taught philosophy at the university, Basch was placed in a difficult position when the case was tried in this city in north-western France in 1899. He was subjected to blatant persecution by the fanatical anti-Semitic populace, who almost lynched him.Footnote 13 In a series of articles and during many rallies, Basch defended the republicanism of 1789, stressing the universalism of French citizens, which was under attack by a right-wing nationalism that defended the relevance of particular truths as products of an all-determining and organically grown history. Basch became, just as the writer Emile Zola did when he exposed the affair to the general public in his famous open letter “J'accuse!”, a prototype of a newborn category, “the intellectuals”, academics and others who took a stand on the grounds of higher principles.Footnote 14
The affair not only brought the crisis of French universalism to the surface. It also prompted Basch's allegiance to Immanuel Kant's thought, on which he relied throughout the Third Republic when he was called upon to resist the increasing pressure on universal statements and values.Footnote 15 In putting trust in Kant's thoughts on universalism, Basch certainly did not stand alone in France. Kantian views were often adopted within French philosophy departments, generating the well-established and influential tradition of neo-Kantianism which would reach its apex in the two decades after the Dreyfus affair. But despite being quite popular among French philosophers, Kant was not always uncontested. With the outburst of the war in 1914, for example, Kant became a controversial figure in France. As a German, so right-wing and nationalist thinkers argued, he was nothing less than suspect. They even began to portray Kant as the instigator of the conflict: with its plea for moral autonomy and a sickening individualism, his thought had formed the fertile soil for an aggressive German militarism.Footnote 16
Basch strongly opposed this view by stressing the importance of humanitarian, international and pacifist ideals within German philosophy, and how Kant's thinking was coterminous with the French republican ideals.Footnote 17 Such defence perfectly illustrates that it was the neo-Kantian movement's ambition to engage actively in society by defending universalistic values, something which would drew most of its adherents within the orbit of socialism. Therefore, when taking up the first chair officially dedicated to the field of aesthetics in Europe, at the Sorbonne in 1928, the fifty-eight-year-old Basch entered a new stage in his academic life. From then on, he became a member of an influential class of neo-Kantian supporters of the Third Republic's ideals based at the Sorbonne.Footnote 18
Yet the former Dreyfusard would always occupy a special niche within the “back to Kant” movement. Unlike the leading neo-Kantian of the Third Republic, Léon Brunschvicg, Basch went beyond defending the universality of the Third Republic through recourse to Kant's transcendental ethics and epistemology. He also studied the aesthetic theory of the sage of Königsberg, a theme that did not loom large among the subjects of French neo-Kantians. Already the doctoral thesis he had defended in 1896 at the Sorbonne was on Kantian aesthetics.Footnote 19 Moreover, his “Essai critique sur l'esthétique de Kant” made Basch's name as the originator of a totally new vision of aesthetics in France. Through his reflections on Kant's Critique of Judgement, he added to the contemporary French aesthetic theories—a patchwork of cautious sociological visions and harsh positivist thinking on art—the German notion of Einfühlung (“in-feeling” or “feeling into”) while stressing the word's double meaning: that of “sympathy” and, more especially, that of “empathy”.Footnote 20
Although around the turn of the century there was no coherent empathy theory but rather “an archipelago of authors and concepts”, truncated by many epistemological discussions, the centre around which Basch organized his theory of Einfühlung was very clear: the work of the German psychologist Theodor Lipps (1851–1914).Footnote 21 Lipps had coined the term Einfühlung to describe the emotional appreciation of another's feelings and had been much interested in aesthetics, which he defined as “the psychology of beauty”. Aesthetics was all about emotional and psychological projection by the individual spectator, he argued. The person who is experiencing beauty melds together with the art object. In his study Grundlegung der Ästhetik, Lipps succeeded in defining “expressive moments” manifesting “inner conditions”.Footnote 22 By fathering such psychological theory, based on a study of embodied responses to images, objects or spatial environments, Lipps had stripped the term Einfühlung of the mystical overtone it had had in the 1890s and provided a theoretical foundation for the doctrine of empathy as a theory of art in which human feelings, emotions and attitudes became projected onto inanimate objects of art.Footnote 23
It was in the last section of his 1896 study on Kant that Basch, relying on work by Lipps, promoted the idea that Einfühlung had to be understood as the key mechanism of every aesthetic experience. Where the first part of the book was in fact a detailed study of the entire Kantian philosophy (many reviewers criticized its “excessive richness”), the last pages contained a plea for understanding aesthetic experiences essentially as acts of empathy.Footnote 24 Basch argued that beauty existed solely in the contemplative mind, at the moment when it is emotionally involved with a piece of art. Therefore aesthetic contemplation could only be entirely subjective. It was an activity of the ego, a particular, even unique, way of envisaging, observing, hearing and interpreting art.Footnote 25
It is important to see that around 1900, by embracing Lipps’ notion of Einfühlung as an active perceptual experience of the individual spectator and hence placing the spectator at the centre of the aesthetic discourse, Basch was opposing the orthodox Kantian tradition in aesthetics. He directly contested the Kantian belief that aesthetics could be punctuated by a sensus communis: the idea that although taste is subjective, it nevertheless involves a valid claim for everyone. Our judgements of taste or aesthetic judgements, so Kant argued, are based in an individual's subjective feelings and, at the same time, they claim universal validity. In 1896, such subjective universality was firmly rejected by Basch. The “aesthetic common feeling Kant dreamt of”, so he argued, would be the “death of art”. When looking at how people appreciated art, for Basch the personal aesthetic sentiments were most important. Within his doctrine of empathy, participation in the emotional character an artist had infused in his artwork prevailed over the transcendental reflections Kant had produced.Footnote 26
According to Basch, aesthetics could not be the bearer of higher, all-transcending, categorical principles. It was a pure individualist matter, deeply rooted in emotions. Moreover, through experiencing aesthetic feelings one could escape from a dreary prison of concepts and metaphysics. A work of art had to be seen as an invitation to each person to give a roll call of his own, individual aesthetic feelings. Even the artist, the person who produced the work, had to be understood as a “contemplator” and “epicurean”, someone who in a spontaneous and quasi-unconscious way fabricated art.Footnote 27 The fact that he supported the doctrine of Einfühlung, claiming that aesthetics had to be anchored in the unique individual, meant that Basch's art philosophy was, as Etienne Souriau once noted, not so much occupied with art. It was far more a very specific theory about how aesthetic feelings arose and were experienced. In fact, Basch reduced the broad intellectual field of aesthetics to an analysis of the infusion of the aesthetic object with feelings.Footnote 28
Still, although they were highly individual, Basch tried to explain and defend his statements on aesthetic experiences through a very systematic discourse. He then often used Kant as a firm basis for his reflections, and that happened, inevitably, through a recasting of the strict Kantian relationship between feeling and desire, and feeling and knowing. For example, because Basch read Kant from a psychological point of view, he consequently used the French word sentiment (feeling) when Kant used the word Empfindung (sensation). By doing so, he neglected the fundamental distinction Kant made between two meanings of this word. The German word Empfindung, like the English word “sensation”, meant two different things for Kant: feeling (of pleasure and displeasure) and perception. Basch did not keep these two meanings strictly apart; he chose to accentuate the former.Footnote 29 In contrast to Kant, Basch did not look at the aesthetic experience as a coming together of feeling and understanding. For him, it was primarily a matter of Gefühl.
Yet, just like Kant, Basch was claiming that the world we live in is inseparable from mind, consciousness and perception. Our world is a perceived world: “das Ding an sich”, the “real world”, is unknown, as Kant stated. But because his (aesthetic) epistemology was so strongly constructed around an outward projection of the self and his feelings, Basch could never completely follow Kant's formal construction of pure concepts. Basch was convinced that feeling was the key to everything: “We don't start with knowing nor with willing; we start with feeling, that is to say: with enjoying and most of all with suffering.”Footnote 30 At the turn of the century, Basch was an often faithful neo-Kantian, but he was also, to use a broader term introduced by Valentin Feldman, a “romantic” idealist.Footnote 31
The fact that Basch defended an idiosyncratic Kantian thinking marked as it was by the emotional fusion between the observer and his or her object, came to the fore during the first international congress on aesthetics in Berlin in 1913. At this meeting, a realization of the German neo-Kantian philosopher Max Dessoir, Basch propagated the idea that aesthetic experiences were essentially acts of empathy. By doing that, Basch launched a sort of counterattack, not at all appreciated by Dessoir, since he organized the congress to make a case for exactly the opposite.Footnote 32 Dessoir, the main leader of the “general science of art” movement, defended the idea that the genesis and production of works of art were not only determined by internal, psychological forces. According to Dessoir, a whole sum of external influences, whether social, climatic or geographical, had to be taken in account.Footnote 33
During his opening speech as the official representative of France, Basch explicitly contested Dessoir's thoughts. He criticized the fact that Theodor Lipps, who was deliberately excluded by Dessoir, was not a keynote speaker at the congress.Footnote 34 During the parallel sessions on the following days, Basch repeated his point that aesthetics could not do without the perspective of empathy. Basch then stressed that he did not adhere to a solipsistic sentimentalism. For him a theory of beauty was simply not a “Hegelian Kingdom of the Idea where Beauty and Truth gleam like diamonds”.Footnote 35 That was, so Basch argued, how many speakers at the conference understood aesthetics. His own art philosophy had a totally different design: it was not a faraway kingdom but an integral part of life. And although acts of empathy were basically individual acts, they still helped to open up the broad world in which individuals operated. An individual could also understand the mental states of other people living and could then be enriched by an interpersonal understanding. Therefore not the image of an unworldly empire, but an ordinary walking trail seemed to Basch a better metaphor to characterize his aesthetics: “I go slowly and uncertainly on the uneven, bumpy, muddy roads of reality, where beauty is separate, as it is from goodness and truth, mixed with innumerable strange, worthless elements.”Footnote 36
As would become clear on several other occasions in the three decades between his activities as a Dreyfusard around the turn of the century and the furious debate he had with Aron in 1939, many encounters in Basch's (professional) life had a political content. The Basch of 1913 had already gone through a very formative moment namely the hard-fought exoneration of Dreyfus in 1906. Other moments still had to come, especially during the 1930s, the so-called demoralized or “hollow years” of the Third Republic.Footnote 37 As we will see, all these encounters with political challenges were, although they took place in different contexts, somehow similar. They triggered, in 1906 as well as in the 1930s, heated debates gravitating around a double question: “what is democracy and how should it be organized?” And during all these debates, Basch's aesthetics, with its focus on how an individual perceived and experienced reality or could develop an interpersonal understanding when confronted with the mental states of other people, was never far away. It formed his not uncontested outillage mental.
ON DEMOCRACY: DEBATING A MYSTIC MOMENT
A limited thinker, never hesitating to put his know-how into areas other than aesthetics, such as politics: that was how the irritated philosopher Jules Lachelier portrayed Basch during a 1906 meeting of the French Philosophical Society dedicated to the theme “democracy”. Thirty-three years before Raymond Aron would cross swords with Basch during a meeting of the same society, the neo-Kantian Lachelier denounced the fact that Basch wrongly looked at political problems through his very personal, sentimental aesthetic gaze, downplaying the role of rational concepts in favour of intuition. That explained to him why Basch had no real contact with reality: “Mr. Basch takes us to an ideal society where there would be no individual prosperity, no money, no richness; in that society everyone would be a philosopher, would be virtuous, would love each other, would embrace each other with a divine compassion.”Footnote 38
What exactly was this affectionate paradise? What had Basch been proposing by looking through an aesthetic lens? Quite simply, a government of the people and by the people that would find its directive in a shared experience of feelings. More specifically, Basch had emphasized that throughout history the realization of the democratic ideal had too often and too exclusively been bound up with rational thinking. That had resulted in a neglect of the people's spontaneous instincts and feelings, although these often enabled one to see “much more clearly and much further than reason.”Footnote 39 The democracy of Athens and its modern variants in the United States and France, shaped as they were by strict reason, had resulted in a regime which was in the grip of showmen and money. To a greater or lesser extent, these democracies had become ochlocracies: governments run by mob rule.Footnote 40
As an alternative to mob rule, Basch proposed a “socialist democracy”. This meant a government where, in Basch's much-adored French revolutionary tradition, collectivized property eliminated the suppression of the poor by the rich and the then liberated masses would feel equality and, most importantly, a deep sense of comradeship. In short: morally conscious and cultivated initiates in art and science would create a sensus communis, the Kantian idea of a public sensibility of which Basch had been so critical of in his doctoral thesis of 1896. The individual, he now argued, could possess a ground in common with other subjects: democracy, a collective belief in which one was raised and which became reality through experience. Not without a deep sense of pride, Basch illustrated this last point by referring to the profound impression that (cultural) meetings of unions and cooperatives had made on him around the turn of the century. On those occasions he had often become emotional, because it had allowed him to see with his own eyes that everyone, even the non-educated, could experience “superior pleasures” that created a common ground between all individuals present.Footnote 41
The moment when diverse people could share “superior pleasures” was exactly the point at which in 1906 Basch's detractors situated the outspoken sentimental character of Basch's socialist democracy. Basch, so they argued, believed in a non-realistic “miracle politics” based on the “mystic principle” that a mass could become a corporate “we” by sharing aesthetic feelings.Footnote 42 There could be no mistake, they said: the mass project of democracy in the first place demanded a clear rational calculus, not a bizarre mix of emotions. Basch immediately replied that he was not confusing the two fields, but that he wanted to show how inseparable they were:
I say that one prepares the other, that one will come, undoubtedly, out of the other. From a moral point of view, at least, those perfectly disinterested people [who have an aesthetic experience] are already aristocrats . . . Thus I believe that it is possible to create widened aristocracies, not aristocracies that only include people of the elite, but aristocracies composed out of individuals capable of understanding and respecting people of the elite and capable of joining them in the highest pleasures.Footnote 43
Basch echoed Kant's famous claim of the disinterestedness of all aesthetic judgments: the appropriate mode of aesthetic experience may be defined as interesseloses Wohlgefallen (“disinterested pleasure”). The definition implied that pure aesthetic pleasure (free beauty) must concern itself only with form (shape, arrangement, rhythm, etc.) in the object presented, not with the content.Footnote 44 Yet in his escalating invocations of the Kantian theme, Basch's idea of a “widened aristocracy”, and his opinion that aesthetic feelings could contain some form of collectivity because they had their basis in shared cognitive faculties, are illustrative of a decisive transformation in Basch's thinking: a flattening out of the outspoken individualistic character of the philosophy launched in his doctoral thesis of 1896. After 1906, the year when Dreyfus was exonerated, Basch's aesthetics became more and more coloured by an ethics of participation and identification. By now using the notion of “symbolic sympathy”, he acknowledged the possibility that aesthetic feelings could lead to a sphere of reconciliation in which individuals became connected and were not simply brooding within their own personal feelings.Footnote 45
That was the reason why, during the international congress of aesthetics in 1913 already mentioned, Basch not only presented himself as a fierce opponent of metaphysical aesthetics by using the metaphor of an individual walk on a muddy road, but also named some elements he came across on the road of reality. For example, he referred to his political engagement and spoke about the atmosphere that reigned within the universités populaires, socialist initiatives to make common people more familiar with (high) art. Even the gathering of all the university professors of Paris and Berlin, Basch argued at the 1913 congress, could never produce the warm and intense feelings of those meetings.Footnote 46
Such an emphasis on the social and political importance of collectivity stood also central during the second international congress of aesthetics Basch himself organized in Paris in 1937. In his opening speech, Basch wished to make clear that his aesthetic theory of Einfühlung was not just limited to the individual, it also, through the evocation of a state of supreme feelings, vouchsafed an encounter of knowing and feeling:
In aesthetic contemplation, emotional sensitivity and knowledge, which elsewhere are antagonists, interpenetrate and marry one another. The feeling breaks the chain of the subjective and the individual, deepens itself, disciplines itself, and grinds itself onto the modes of understanding, widening until it reaches, if not the universality itself, at least a communion quite close to this . . . In the most perfect manifestation of aesthetic contemplation, Einfühlung, the barrier which pitilessly seperates the emotional life from the intellectual life, collapses. At that moment there is not just feeling and knowing, there is knowledge full of feeling and feelings that are saturated by knowledge. The double human being is just one: he is reconciled with himself.Footnote 47
At the end, his speech gained an outspoken political tone as the interpersonal potential of Einfühlung received his full attention. Basch linked the reconciliation within the aesthetic sphere with his belief in internationalism and cosmopolitanism, typically the core elements of his republican speeches.Footnote 48 At a moment when political Europe was extremely divided because of the Spanish Civil War, Basch discovered in aesthetic contemplation a secure rest, tangible in its reunion of an individual world of understanding and sensitivity—one therefore inspiring a rapprochement between the individual and the social fabric or, on an even larger scale, the appeasement of nations with each other.Footnote 49
However, it would be wrong to state that Basch presented aesthetics as a direct and concrete road for the realization of democracy. In 1934, at a philosophical congress in Prague where he was taking part in a session on “the crisis of democracy”, Basch had stressed that art and politics were two totally different regimes with different logics.Footnote 50 Even at this moment of careful distinction, however, Basch also emphasized that there could exist a point of intersection between politics and aesthetics, visible in the way the creative individual could form the basis of a larger, meaningful grouping of people: “All great things that have been realized in our world, are they not the result of a minority or even an individual?”Footnote 51
By making such statements, Basch was referring to the subjective universality that Kant had defended in his aesthetic theory: although our judgement of taste is subjective, it nevertheless involves at the same time a claim to consent by all. Kant had never been particularly explicit about the analogy between such aesthetic sensus communis and a political Gemeinsinn. According to later readers, the latent connection between his aesthetic writings and his juridical reflections allow the political implication of Kant's aesthetic theory to become clear.Footnote 52 Basch insisted that this latent connection be made explicit. He argued that democracy was based on a “mystic moment”: the unmotivated agreement between subjects becomes concrete in the ambition to form a community. In Basch's eyes, people that came together and experienced a form of universal communicability simply could not be wrong. These assembled individuals formed a larger democratic constellation, the “widened aristocracy” he had started to talk about in 1906.Footnote 53
The use of such terms as “mystic moment” and “widened aristocracy” not only reveal that after 1906 Basch's Kantian belief in a unifying feeling among human beings coincided with his enthusiasm about linking politics and aesthetics. Most of all, it shows how the doctrine of Einfühlung had led to a deeply romantic colouring of Basch's thinking. For as has already been demonstrated with the aesthetics of music at the beginning of the twentieth century, the theory of Einfühlung implied “a late flowering of the romantic tendency towards ascribing a certain aesthetic significance to the whole material world.”Footnote 54 Basch was convinced that the totality of reality only could be understood through the lens of individual feelings, hoping for a spontaneous commonality with other individuals to emerge. And for Basch such common possession of subjective feelings, forming a “widened aristocracy”, found its political translation in a socialist democracy.
But as the dramatic controversy with Aron in 1939 illustrates, it was exactly this political translation which formed the weak point of Basch's reasoning. Fascinated as he had become over time by the mobilizing power of a Kantian sensus communis, Basch's thinking did not pay so much attention to the concrete techniques necessary to realize and maintain his political dreams. That was what Aron detested, along with a whole generation of young French philosophers. For them, defending high principles, such as democracy, could not be the ultimate guide to taking correct decisions. They stopped looking at philosophy as a model of public discourse, capable of offering an idealist, secular, and cosmopolitan response to political issues, as Basch and other neo-Kantian thinkers of the Third Republic did. Marked as Aron's generation was by a rising existentialism, they felt it necessary to think of concrete possibilities and alliances in the political actuality.Footnote 55
Basch's thinking became outmoded because it did not seem to correspond with the real questions of the time. Basch's theory of democracy based on Einfühlung could coincide with an indignation shared by many during the Dreyfus affair; as Dreyfus himself wrote in the 1930s to Basch, “I was only an artillery officer . . . Dreyfus the symbol is not me . . . it is you who created that Dreyfus”.Footnote 56 But Basch's theory turned out to be no match for the more intense crisis France faced a quarter of a century later. This crisis did not demand a philosophy stressing universal principles based on individual feelings, such as the perspective Basch offered. Instead, in the view of Aron and others, it required an approach calibrating concrete political strategies and solutions.Footnote 57
In the 1930s the reign of Einfühlung was largely over, as Juliet Koss has clearly pointed out. Where from the late nineteenth century the concept of Einfühlung had offered a popular path for addressing individual perceptions at a universal level, after the First World War the emergence of the consumer society caused the disintegration of the paradigm based around “empathy”. A constantly growing number and variety of services, appliances and products complicated the process by which consumers projected emotions and sensations on objects, including art objects. The consumer society triggered a misery of choice, thus deeply challenging the subjective response of viewers. In such a society of mass consumerism, people definitely still felt the urge to translate individual claims into mass experiences, but Einfühlung was, by the 1930s, generally perceived as an inadequate or even unethical option for doing so. It became identified with the private, elitist and therefore otherworldly realm its defenders seemed to occupy.Footnote 58 For those who criticized Basch's political goals and blamed him for being politically immature, it was exactly this negative opinion of Einfühlung that formed the common denominator. Basch came to be portrayed as a romantic individualist, totally unfit for politically elevating mass society.Footnote 59
Nevertheless, at least for Basch himself, his aesthetics could offer orientation in political matters because he actually thought that his aesthetics did succesfully cope with the political actuality. This aestheticization of politics and politicization of aesthetics illustrates very well the difficult task with which the historian of aesthetics is confronted. He or she has to analyse new modes of aesthetic thinking without forgetting the reception of these conceptual moves through the changing sociocultural context in which they became operationalized.Footnote 60 The question then is: how to succeed in this double challenge? Which approach do we need in order to flesh out, simultaneously, shifts in the scientific field of aesthetics and the evolving political culture of which it formed a part?
ON WRITING THE HISTORY OF AESTHETICS
In recent years, multiple lines of conflict that framed and constrained Basch's life and choices have been subjected to considerable study. His defence of the German cultural universe as a French patriot, or the tension between his emphasis on a Jewish particularity and his devotion to the universal ideals of the French Republic, were certainly decisive in encouraging his intellectual agenda.Footnote 61 But as has become clear, one can also say that besides and beneath those lines, there probably existed a more fundamental line of potential conflict which was the difficult relationship between his mindset based on Einfühlung that he worked out in his writings on aesthetics and the Kantian universality he wanted to realize on a political level.
In 1925, in the foreword of a re-edition of his doctoral thesis of 1896, Basch described Kant as the permanent “trampoline”, the energizing guide to his own thinking.Footnote 62 Yet it was Kant who most influentially inserted the difference between individual feelings and the organization of a community that Basch wanted to overcome. As Matei Calinescu has observed in an analysis of the philosophical context from which the twentieth-century cultural avant-garde emerged, the divergence of speculative idealism from Romanticism, the division between the phenomenal and the nominal, as well as that between “is” and “ought” or the individual and collectivity, were all launched by Kant's “opening up of an abyss where a bridge should have been.”Footnote 63 One could say that Basch, by means of his philosophical work on art and his political speeches, tried to build such a bridge. Even in the occupied Paris of 1940, in considerably difficult circumstances, he continued imagining an anti-fascist future.Footnote 64 It is therefore quite horrifying that a picture of Basch working behind his desk, once published in a fascist periodical to illustrate the dangerous “cosmopolitan Jew”, was the one the French Milice Française used to identify Basch on the night of his murder in 1944.
The dynamic relationship at work between Basch's aesthetics and politics seems to prove a statement made by the Renaissance specialist Bernard Berenson: since 1800, the interest of art philosophers has always been in a metaphysical or ideological system in which their aesthetics were just the concluding section, attached to it “as a tin can to a cat's tail”.Footnote 65 And indeed, directed by his socialist ideology, Basch started to situate, from 1906 onwards, the ultimate meaning of aesthetic contemplation in a sensus communis, an intersubjective and unifying feeling. He thought that this feeling would be realized within the framework of a socialist democracy. Thinking within Berenson's metaphor, Basch's trust in a sensus communis might be seen as the rattle of a dangling tin can that resounded when the cat, the political idealist Basch became after the Dreyfus affair, began to move.
And yet it is at the same time justifiable, as I have shown, to think the other way round: then aesthetics is the driving force which drove Basch's political thought. It is important to recognize in Basch someone who was attached to aesthetics not only by his own scholarly articles but also through his whole persona. For example, the famous 1939 confrontation with Aron definitely took place on philosophical grounds as Basch's romantic idealism clashed with Aron's pragmatic analytical thinking. But such contention of political styles did not only surface in Aron's and Basch's discourse. In their contrasting body language (calm versus agitated) and way of speaking (loud versus moderate), the two turned the 1939 debate into a dramatic controversy. Therefore it is not a coincidence that Aron, like other critics of Basch, explicitly illustrated his criticism of Basch's philosophy with comments on the particular way Basch acted or presented himself during debates. The fact that Basch wore a black bow tie instead of a tie and made broad gestures when arguing or always shook his head when he did not agree with someone, functioned not only as colourful mannerisms but were phenomena in which the very essence of the man was revealed.Footnote 66
The fact that often very personal aspects gained political relevance proves, as many studies on political culture have stressed during the last decades, that twentieth-century politicians such as Basch have to be seen as actors who, sometimes unconsciously, elaborated through their physical appearance and way of speaking a personalized “acting method” which was indispensable in how the theatre of politics developed.Footnote 67 In fact, from the moment he became politically active during the Dreyfus affair, Basch's reputation of being an energetic speaker whose aesthetic reflections and political discourse were constantly intermingling also began to grow. According to one anecdote, when a large group of right-wing students were demonstrating in front of Basch's house in Rennes, shouting “Basch à bas!” (“Down with Basch!”), they were confronted with a decisive Basch, fearlessly opening his window and speaking the following words: “Change your cry, you give the impression of being senile, shout ‘Basch à l'eau!’ [Basch in the water], that's more melodious. When we are in my course, we will see to that!”Footnote 68
Basch was not only a political animal, nor was he only a homo aestheticus. He was both at the same time. In fact, we have to look at the continual alternation and mutual determination of his (personal) aesthetics and politics. Writing a history of twentieth-century aesthetics therefore demands a gaze that takes in the complex historical situations from which aesthetic reflections grew, and which they addressed in turn.Footnote 69 That implies that one looks through the eyes of those who were reflecting on aesthetics, that one tries to understand the world they lived in. In Basch's world, where categories of perceiving and knowing were fundamentally altered by the development of new technologies or political and social upheavals, aesthetics was not only about comprehending art, but also about understanding and explaining the cohesive links between art, society, culture and philosophy.Footnote 70 When he participated in socialist rallies or situated their unifying potential in the aesthetic power they generated, he tried to resolve at least one central dilemma of modernity: how to transcend society's fierce polarization?
A powerful technique for unravelling the link between aesthetic theories and the way they reflect a positioning in the broader field of society can be found in a history of ideas that focuses on the genesis, (re)articulation and appropriation of leading aesthetic concepts. As we have seen, Basch's interwar intensification of his hitherto individually orientated theory of Einfühlung into a broader doctrine of fellowship took place at the moment when mass democracy became, on more than one occasion, a controversial issue. That can explain the personal note on the front page of a study of the relationship between art and life given by its author, the French philosopher of art Charles Lalo, to Basch in 1933. In the year when Hitler came to power in Germany, Lalo called Basch an “eloquent arbiter of parties when there was no dictatorship in the aesthetic republic”.Footnote 71
Lalo, who succeeded Basch at the Sorbonne in 1933, developed in his book a sociological view of aesthetics, one that broke away from Basch's fascination with Einfühlung. He moved from psychology to sociology. And with success: around 1935, two years after Basch had left the Sorbonne, Basch's art philosophy was generally seen as a traditionalist one that could not adequately respond to a rapidly changing reality. Basch became identified with a past era in the discipline of aesthetics.Footnote 72 Or, as Lalo expressed things in his note for his former master, Basch had been an eloquent arbiter.Footnote 73 In parallel with this sense of Basch's supersession, Lalo also conveyed in those succinct words the difficult political context in which Basch's thinking had to operate in the year 1933. At that time, Basch was one of the leading critics of fascism in France, often portrayed in right-wing periodicals as the embodiment of everything the right wing only could oppose, and therefore had to hate: cosmopolitism, Jewishness and socialism.Footnote 74
Lalo's short dedication in which “republic” and “aesthetics”, the two core elements of Basch's world view, melded together, illustrates that the paradigm shift Lalo wished to achieve at the Sorbonne and the heated sociopolitical context in France acted, to a large degree, as two sides of the same coin. Alexander Baumgarten—one of the founders of modern aesthetics—had already stated in 1750 that it was legitimate to understand his field of philosophy as a scientia cognitionis sensitivae,Footnote 75 an aesthesis or perception of a changing reality. That this fundamental dimension of the philosophy of art has all too often been neglected in the two hundred years since Baumgarten founded aesthetics as an autonomous discipline is due to the fact that aesthetics during this same period became a confusing record of highly divergent and abstract opinions in which the world's greatest philosophers never seemed to find any agreement. The discipline of aesthetics, the philosopher Helmut Kuhn cynically wrote in 1965, manifested itself from its beginning as a “brilliant and result-oriented fiasco”.Footnote 76
Because historians and philosophers working on the history of aesthetics have been confronted with a continually expanding conglomerate of discourse, they have frequently tried to install a semblance of order by detecting how changes in the philosophical method have prompted or sometimes even revolutionized aesthetic reflection. Therefore they decided that it was sufficient to explain which conceptual aspect of the theoretical statements had changed. This approach had one important consequence: the modern historiography of aesthetics became very much occupied with concepts and theories as sterile products without context.Footnote 77
One could say that this historiography agreed with Lalo's reference to “the aesthetic republic” primarily as a scientific community with conflicting paradigms. But it was not particularly interested in how and why this republic, and also the French Republic, adored by Basch and criticized by Aron in equal measure, had been aesthetic. As our analysis of Basch's double mindset has suggested, the study of conflict and consensus within the history of aesthetic theory—a study that proceeds by mapping the (hidden) genealogy of ideas—is certainly necessary. Except it is also crucial to bring such dissection of the shifting intellectual language of this branch of philosophy into close connection with broader contexts, such as the personal life of aestheticians or the society they lived in—contexts to which these theoretical reflections were clearly related and by which they were even constituted.
