sulzer and the aesthetic force of music (art)

Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the 'Aesthetic Force' of MusicAuthor(s): Matthew RileySource: Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 127, No. 1 (2002), pp. 1-22Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Royal Musical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3840477 .Accessed: 18/06/2013 11:04

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Journai of the Royal Musical Association, 127 (2002) ? Royal Musical Association

Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer

and the 'Aesthetic Force' of Music

MATTHEW RILEY

Johann Georg Sulzer's encyclopedia of the fine arts, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kiinste (1771-4), was one of the most widely consulted and frequendy cited works on aesthetics of the German Enlightenment In

particular, leading German music theorists and critics ofthe 1770s and 1780s such as Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Heinrich Christoph Koch and Johann Nikolaus Forkel consistently invoked it as an authority on aesthetic matters.1 But the esteem of Sulzer's musical contemporaries makes a sharp contrast with his relatively low standing in the eyes of

many modern musicologists. Although the Allgemeine Theorie still proves an indispensable source of reference for late eighteenth-century musical debates, Sulzer's views on music as such have all too often been dismissed as typifying the anti-musical attitudes characteristic of certain strands of Enlightenment rationalism. This judgment is misguided. I offer here a wholesale reassessment of Sulzer's aesthetics of music, arguing that in fact he assigned music a uniquely privileged status in his system of the fine arts.

Born in Zurich in 1720, Sulzer eventually setded in Berlin, rising to become a leading member of Frederick the Great's rejuvenated Royal Academy of Sciences, and holding the directorship of the class of

speculative philosophy for four years until his death in 1779.2 He read

many papers to the Academy, which dealt with psychology, aesthetics and other philosophical issues.3 However, the Allgemeine Theoriev*a& by far his most successful work. Aimed at a popular market of art-loving amateurs (Liebhaber) who lacked specialist knowledge, it presented its

1 On the connection with Koch, see Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), 116-29. Forkel's references to Sulzer can be found in his 'Genauere Bestimmung einiger musikalischen Begriffe: Zur Ankiindigung des akademischen Winter-Conzerts von Michaelis 1780 bis Ostern 1781', Magazin derMusik, ed. Carl Friedrich Cramer (Hamburg, 1784), i, 1068; and AUgemeine Geschichte derMusik, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1788-1801; repr. Graz, 1967), i, 17; ii, 6-7. Kirnberger, who struggled to get his thoughts down on paper in a coherent manner, collaborated closely with Sulzer on his treatise DieKunst des reinen Satzes in derMusik (1771-9). In fact, Sulzer may have fashioned much of the text. Georg von Dadelsen, 'Kirnberger, Johann Philipp', Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume, vii (Leipzig, 1958), cols. 950-5 (col. 955). 2 For useful summaries of Sulzer's life, see Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 6-13; andjohan Van der Zande, 'Orpheus in Berlin: A Reappraisal of Johann Georg Sulzer's Theory of the Polite Arts', Central European History, 56 (1995), 175-208 (pp. 181-8). 3 See Johann Georg Sulzer, Vermischte philosophische Schriften, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1773-81; repr. Hildesheim, 1974; henceforth Schriften). The essays were originally read in French and published in the Proceedings ofthe Academy. The first volume was translated by Sulzer himself, the second after his death by Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg.


2 MATTHEW RILEY

philosophical and technical arguments in an accessible article format. The work underwent numerous reprints and new editions in the last

quarter of the eighteenth century, and, soon after its initial appear? ance, many of the articles were translated into French and incorpor- ated into the Supplement to the Encyclopedie.4

Modern denigration of Sulzer may be partly due to his frank admis- sion that he lacked technical musical knowledge. In writing the All?

gemeine Theoriehe had to enlist the help of Kirnberger and Kirnberger's former student Johann Adolph Peter Schulz, resulting in a confusing joint authorship for many of the music articles.5 More telling, though, is the fact that the remarks on music for which Sulzer is best known

today suggest that he did not take the art at all seriously. He described instrumental music as

'lively, not disagreeable noise' and 'charming and entertaining chatter which does not engage the heart'.6 Of course, the denigration of instrumental music in colourful terms was far from uncommon in the eighteenth century. Wordless music was frequendy considered incapable of specifying the definite ideas or emotional states that many critics deemed necessary if art was to play what was considered its proper ethical role.7 It was not until the 1790s, and the first generation of German Romantics, that a critical discourse

emerged which truly celebrated instrumental music. Yet, even among his enlightened contemporaries, Sulzer seems especially dismissive. It

4 See Lawrence Kerslake, Johann Georg Sulzer and the Supplement to the Encyclopedie\ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 148 (1976), 225-47. For modern English translations of some of Sulzer's articles, including some which pertain direcdy to music, see Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, and James Day and Peter Le Huray, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1987), 129-39. Christensen's transla? tions are good, but his focus is as much on Sulzer's theory of the creative process - which applies to all the arts - as on his aesthetics of music as such. He thus omits significant articles such as 'Beautiful' ('Schon'), 'Fine Arts' ('Schone Kunste') and 'Force' ('Kraft'), which provide much insight into Sulzer's view of music. 5 To be precise, Sulzer worked with Kirnberger on the articles in vols. i and ii, with Schulz contributing from 'Modulation' onwards. Owing to Sulzer's declining health, Schulz wrote almost all the music articles of vol. iii himself (from letter S); see Sulzer's Preface to vol. ii and Schulz, 'Abhandlung uber die in Sulzers Theorie der schonen Kunste ... zwei Beispiele ...', AUgemeine musikaUsche Zeitung, 2 (1806), cols. 257-65, 276-80 (cols. 276-7). Some commentators have assumed that the ideas found in articles by Schulz such as 'Sonata' and 'Symphonie' can be safely attributed to Sulzer. See Mark Evan Bonds, 'The Symphony as Pindaric Ode', Haydn and his World, ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton, 1997), 131-53 (pp. 150-1); Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), 136-44; Bellamy Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music inEighteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 1981), 145; Peter Vit, 'Die Musik und Sulzers AUgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste1, Die Instrumentalmusik (Struktur--Funktion--Asthetik), Musikwissenschaftliche Kolloquien der Internationalen Musikfestspiele in Brno, 26, ed. Petr Macek (Brno, 1994), 23-8 (pp. 26-7). However, those articles were written at a time when Sulzer's health was poor and he no longer had significant input into the project Schulz took a quite different view from Sulzer regarding the instrumental genres, attributing to the symphony, for instance, the qualities ofthe sublime. Sulzer himself hardly ever mentions the sublime in connec? tion with music, and never with instrumental music. 6

'Lebhaftes und nicht unangenehmes Gerausch'; 'artiges und unterhaltendes, aber das Herz nicht beschaftigendes Geschwaz'. Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Musik', AUgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1771-4), ii, 780-93 (p. 788). 7 The best account of the negative valuation of instrumental music among German critics is Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views. She records other vivid responses ofthe time, including 'formless clanging', 'incomprehensible mishmash' and 'ear-tickling jinglejangle' ('unformliches Geklangel', 'unverstandliches Mischmasch', 'ohrkitzelndes Klingklang'; p. 1).


CIVILIZING THE SAVAGE 3

is not surprising that he is routinely quoted by modern authors who seek to capture in a nutshell this aspect of eighteenth-century thought.8 And this easily leads to unflattering appraisals of Sulzer's musical outlook as a whole.9

However, a more sympathetic view is possible. When Charles Burney visited Sulzer in the early 1770s, he described the philosopher as

'particularly attached to music'. They had 'a long musical conference

together', and Burney 'found him to be, not only well-read in books

concerning music, but an ingenious and refined thinker on the

subject'.10 Burney's remarks are worthy of credence. In re-examining Sulzer, I shall set his comments on music in the context of his overall

philosophy of the fine arts, and avoid the problem of joint authorship by concentrating on passages which are easily identified as his own work rather than that of his colleagues.11 Moreover, I shall examine his ideas

largely without reference to the opposition of instrumental and vocal music. Sulzer may not have praised Instrumentalmusik in the way that the Romantics were later to do, but he certainly praised Musik, and his

arguments in support of that judgment, as will become clear, make reference solely to the effect of musical sounds - not words. In fact, Sulzer's apparent attack on instrumental music is more a critique of a certain way of performing and listening to music than an a priori con- demnation of all music that is not accompanied by words. He objects to what he regards as the meretricious virtuosity of some contemporary instrumental soloists, and the way in which large gatherings of inexpert listeners behave at concerts of instrumental music.12 When he contrasts this music with the concept of 'song' (Lied, Gesang), he is arguing for

8 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago, 1989), 4; Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views, 163; John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departures from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven and London, 1986), 66-7; Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor ofthe Oration (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), 162; Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (The Bourgeois Experience: Victaria to Freud), iv (London, 1995), 16; Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge, 1997), 10. 9 Three criticisms of Sulzer recur in the literature: his work is said to be eclectic, unsystematic (this is reinforced by the article format) and, for the 1770s, out of date. Hosler's judgment is especially harsh; she declares that his thought 'can only be described as incorrigibly eclectic, if not altogether self-contradictory at times' (Changing Aesthetic Views, 145). The unfavourable reception of Sulzer was first set in motion by Goethe in a review of the Allgemeine Theorie for the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeiger, see Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 15.

10 Dr. Burney's Musical Tours inEurope, ed. Percy A. Scholes, 2 vols. (London, 1959), ii, 200. 11 The passages either concern general aesthetics or appear in the article 'Music' ('Musik'). They do not deal with musical technicalities, the area in which Sulzer felt he needed help, and, as will become clear, they are marked by his own characteristic ideas and terminology. It is very unlikely that Kirnberger, who was no philosopher, had much input in aesthetic matters. Schulz's aesthetic ideas were certainly not identical with Sulzer's (see note 5 above), and I have been careful not to introduce them from any of his articles. 12 The poor behaviour of amateurs (Liebhaber) was a frequent complaint ofthe experts (Kenner) who attended concerts in the late eighteenth century. The problem was acute at this time because private concert societies in Germany were increasingly opening their doors to a public which was used to the extremely informal atmosphere of the so-called Liebhaberkonzert, where eating, drinking, smoking, walking around and continual conversation were the norm. See Peter Schleu- ning, Das 18. Jahrhundert: Der Burger erhebt sich (Hamburg, 1984), 169-97.


4 MATTHEW RILEY

the superiority of simplicity and emotional directness over empty show-

manship.13 Sulzer even admits that wordless music, if written in the

right way, can be regarded as Gesang.14 He makes suggestions to com-

posers of instrumental music as to how they could improve it, thereby indicating that it is far from irredeemable.15 In short, his jibes are principally directed at a particular cultural practice which, as it

happens, often involves certain types of instrumental music. In what follows, I shall show that when Sulzer's thoughts on music are treated as evidence of a coherent philosophical position rather than an eclectic collection of essays on diverse topics or a mistaken polemic, it becomes clear that, far from being a scourge of music, he assigns it a

unique place - indeed, in one sense, first place - among the fine arts.

THE ETHICAL ROLE OF THE FINE ARTS

Despite his involvement with the Berlin Academy, which, under royal influence, promoted the latest developments in French and British

empiricism, Sulzer's aesthetics was closely informed by a German rationalist tradition of thought stemming from the metaphysics of Leibniz and expounded in systematic form by scholars such as Christian Wolff and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Although it was Baumgarten who in 1735 introduced the term 'aesthetic' into modern philosophical dis? course, the view of aesthetic perception that he and his followers advo- cated seems rather unfamiliar from today's perspective. This is largely due to the legacy of Kant, who in 1790 emphatically distanced himself from the ideas of his German precursors.16 For Kant, the 'judgments of taste' by which we deem an object to be beautiful are entirely free and 'disinterested'. This means that they are unconnected with, and thus absolved from the compulsion of, either intellectual inferences

conceming the object's moral qualities or direct sensory gratifi- cation.17 The pleasure that we feel is independent of any form of desire.

By contrast, the earlier generation, including Baumgarten's student

Greorg Friedrich Meier, the Berlin 'popular philosopher' Moses Mendelssohn and the theologian and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, believed that the pleasure taken from art is in principle no different from that derived from any other agreeable stimulation of the senses. It is intimately connected with 'sensory desire' (sinnliche Begierde). While much twentieth-century scholarship has tended to read mid-

eighteenth-century German aesthetics in the light of Rant's subsequent innovations, discerning a gradual progression towards the principle of

13 Sulzer, 'Musik', 788. 14 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Gesang', Allgemeine Theorie, i, 459-61 (p. 460). Kirnberger devoted a

whole section of his treatise - which was a collaboration with Sulzer (see note 1 above) - to the notion of Gesang, where it simply means something like 'melody' or 'melodie progression' and has no connection with words. Kirnberger, Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik, 2 vols. (Berlin and Konigsberg, 1776-9; repr. Hildesheim, 1988), ii, 77-104. 15 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Instrumentalmusik', AUgemeine Theorie, i, 559-60 (p. 559). 16 Immanuel Kant, Critique ofjudgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Berlin and Libau, 1790; repr. Indianapolis, 1987), ?15 (pp. 73-5). 17 7&wl,?5(pp.51-3).



disinterest, in the last two decades it has become more common to treat the work of the rationalists as projecting a relatively consistent underlying framework and being followed by a sudden break.18 The latter

approach will guide my assessment of Sulzer's aesthetics. And to this

purpose, a brief outline of the German philosophical background is

necessary. Leibniz found it useful to think of the world as a collection of simple

substances or 'monads' (of which human souls are a subset).19 Monads have no divisibility or extension, and exist for the entire duration ofthe universe. They are endowed with qualities called 'perceptions' (percep? tions), which consist of an internal representation, or mirroring, ofthe whole world. A monad's perceptions constantly change, driven by an inner law known as

'appetition' (appetition). Each monad strives to per? ceive the world or, equivalently, God as distinctly as possible, although, being imperfect, it is necessarily constrained to perceive only obscurely to a considerable extent. Its own state of perfection can be measured by the degree of distinctness with which it mirrors God's perfection. Equally, this perfection can be stated in terms of 'action' or 'activity' (action) as opposed to 'passion' or 'passivity' (passion): a monad is said to be active in so far as it mirrors God distinctly, passive, or 'suffering', in so far as it mirrors Him obscurely. Leibniz insists that no monad can itself affect, or be affected by, any other. Causal interaction in the world is illusory; its appearance derives solely from God's artifice in organiz- ing a 'pre-established harmony' between monads. Thus, for Leibniz, a monad's internal appetitive striving is its sole meaningful business.

This emphasis on the active mental energy of the isolated individual - albeit relieved of some ofthe counter-intuitive metaphysical doctrines - was inherited by later German rationalist thinkers. Wolff, whose

systematic adaptation of Leibniz's philosophy appeared in the 1710s and 1720s and was immensely influential in mid-eighteenth-century Germany, conceived the human soul (Seele), as a 'force' (Krafi) con? sisting of cognitive and appetitive faculties.20 The cognitive faculties

produce representations (Vorstellungen) of the world within the soul. They are divided into upper faculties, such as reason and under?

standing (Vernunfl, Verstand), and lower faculties, such as the senses and imagination.21 As an arch-rationalist, Wolff saw no value in the

18 See David Wellbery, Lessing's Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1984), 256-8, notes 22, 29; Jeffrey Barnouw, 'The Beginnings of "Aesthetics" and the Leibnizian Conception of Sensation', Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction ofArt, ed. Paul Mattick Jr (Cambridge, 1993), 52-95 (p. 78); and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge, 1993), 84-90. 19 The most concise statement of Leibniz's late metaphysics is found in his Monadohgy, see Nicholas Rescher, G. W. Leibniz's 'Monadology': An Edition for Students (London, 1991). For a more extensive discussion ofthe thought of Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten and its importance for late eighteenth-century German music theory, see Matthew Riley, 'Attentive listening: The Concept of Aufmerksamkeit and its Significance in German Musical Thought, 1770-1790' (Ph.D. disser? tation, University of London, 2000), 50-64, 80-92. 20 Christian Wolff, GesammeUe Werke, ed. Hans Werner Arndt, Jean Ecole, Joseph Ehrenfried Hoffinan and Marcel Thomann, 3 divs., 57 vols. (Hildesheim, 1962-), 1/ii, ?794; 2/v, 'Index capitum' (p. 721). 21 Ibid, 1/ii, ??386, 277, 235.


D MATTHEW RILEY

'confiised' ('verworren') - that is, undifferentiated - representations produced by the lower faculties. Indeed, he thought they could poten- tially mislead the wayward lower appetitive faculty of sensory desire.

Only 'distinct' ('deutlich') representations, the features of which had been carefully isolated and considered, could serve as a basis for legiti- mate knowledge. It was thus not until the slightly later work of Baum-

garten, who took a less austere view of the relationship between reason and the senses, that art found a satisfactory place within the philo? sophical system. Baumgarten argued that confiised representations had an intrinsic value of their own, and that they obeyed a 'logic of the lower cognitive faculties'.22 His followers made a still greater virtue of art's appeal to the senses, assigning it a significant ethical function. Unlike rational knowledge, which is generally dry and makes no immediate impact on the will, they believed that art, by inducing the confused representation of a perfection, could release the 'main-

springs of the soul' (Triebfeder der Seele'), leading to a period of intense appetitive and representational activity known as 'passion' (Lei- denschaft)P The aestheticians saw this process not as a matter of exploiting the soul's weaker aspect (as Wolff might have done), but rather as the unleashing of a source of innate potential energy. As in Leibniz's philosophy, the soul increases in perfection through its desire for an external perfection.

Sulzer too was adamant that the fine arts could cultivate the ethical side of human nature in a way that intellectual endeavour generally could not. In the Preface to the first volume of the Allgemeine Theorie, he divided the soul into the faculties of understanding (Verstand) and moral feeling (sittliches Gefilhl). It is only the latter that responds to the beautiful and the good (two concepts which Sulzer routinely linked).24 Humanity as fashioned by the fine arts would not be enslaved by its senses, but neither would it be a race of purely rational beings. Accord?

ing to Sulzer, the arts should teach us to feel desire for the good and aversion towards the bad, so that we gradually become able to make fine moral judgments on the basis of immediate feeling. And he consistently stressed the need to cultivate the usefully directed activity (Tdtigkeit, Wirksamkeit) of our souls.25

22 See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Texte zur Grundlegung der Asthetik, trans. and ed. Hans Rudolf Schweizer (Hamburg, 1983), 16-17. Baumgarten's main works on aesthetics are Reflections on Poetry, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Halle, 1735; repr. Berkeley, 1954), and Aesthetica (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1750-8; repr. Hildesheim, 1961). 23 See, for instance, Georg Friedrich Meier, Theoretische Lehre von den Gemuthsbewegungen uberhaupt (Halle, 1744), ?97; Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Leidenschaften', AUgemeine Theorie, ii, 692-703 (p. 693). For commentary, see Wellbery, Lessing's Laocoon, 59-62. 24 The idea of 'moral feeling' indicates an affinity with the British 'moral sense' school of aesthetics represented by Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and others. Sulzer's identification of the beautiful and the good recalls the early eighteenth-century thought of Lord Shaftesbury, whose works were widely read in Germany at this time. On Shaftesbury, Sulzer and the close alliance between ethics and aesthetics at this time, see Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1995), 27-38, 191-5. 25 Wirksamkeit literally means 'effectiveness', but Sulzer uses it to denote the employment of the soul's active force in so far as it is used freely and independently. In translating his Academy papers (see note 3 above), Sulzer used Wirksamkeit for the original action. I shall use 'activity' or 'action' as appropriate.


CIYILTZING THE SAVAGE

Sulzer took this ethical orientation a step further, however. He saw the fine arts as a vital tool in the

'civilizing' of the human race. Like

many others of his time, Sulzer understood human history on its broad- est scale as the abandonment of an initial 'state of nature', leading to the establishment of the laws and institutions of civil society. Accord-

ingly, a recurring theme in his aesthetics is the figure of the savage (Wilde), an original human being who has yet to experience the effects of the fine arts. Sulzer sees the savage principally in terms of cognitive inactivity. All monads, according to Leibniz, are part active, part passive, but in Sulzer's savage the activity has hardly been aroused at all. This creature is little more than a beast (Tier) ,26 It has not yet learnt to distance itself from its representations and reflect upon them at leisure - the prerequisite of developing a faculty of reason. Instead, its actions consist merely of immediate responses to the endless flow of

impressions received through the senses according to whether those

impressions are agreeable or disagreeable at any given moment. As Sulzer puts it, 'The savage hiiman being has no ideas except those

referring to sensations, and no necessities except distancing himself from all disagreeable sensations. In this condition his actions are as little grounded in reflection as the actions of beasts.'27 Since its soul remains inactive, this human being never develops a sensibility attuned to the good; it is characterized by 'stupidity' and 'insensitivity' (Dummheit, Unempfindlichkeit) ,28

Sulzer's view of these matters is guided by a faith in human reason and civilization, and is thus directly opposed to the ideas developed by Rousseau in his Discourses of the 1750s, in which he attacked the idea that advances in the arts and sciences were beneficial to the human condition, and glorified the savage in the state of nature.29 On the other hand, unlike certain other influential conceptions ofthe state of nature, Sulzer's is conceived as a historical reality, not a mere figure of

thought to aid a theoretical Gedankenexperimentso Moreover, to the extent that no one's soul consists of pure activity, Sulzer believed that

26 I prefer 'beast' to 'animal' because it conveys the pejorative connotations of Sulzer's use of Tier and excludes humanity - at least, what Sulzer would have regarded as healthy, rational humanity. Since the beast represents a lack of activity, it is quite different from the rapacious inner beast conceived by Plato (Republic, 9.571c) and others. 27 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Psychologische Betrachtungen uber den sittlichen Menschen', Schriften, i, 282-306 (pp. 288-9). All translations from Sulzer's writings are mine. 28 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Gedanken uber den Ursprung und die verschiedenen Bestimmungen der Wissenschaften und schonen Kunste', Schriften, ii, 100-28 (p. 118); idem, 'Schone Kunste'; AU- gemeine Theorie, ii, 609-25 (p. 612). 29 Jeanjacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses together with theReplies to Critics and Essay on the Origin of Languages, trans. and ed. Victor Gourevitch (New York, 1986). 30 The state of nature has been theorized in a variety of ways in Western thought. For Aristotle and the scholastics it was simply life in the ideal polis. Stoicism and Christianity postulated a utopian, pre-civil condition, while the Epicureans believed that human beings had originally been free, but solitary and at odds. In the seventeenth century, Hobbes notoriously developed the latter view into the idea of a savage 'war of all against all'. See the helpful remarks by Michael Seidler in his edition ofa treatise of 1678 by Samuel Pufendorf, On the Natural State ofMan, trans. Michael Seidler (New York, 1990), 28-30. For more detailed discussion regarding the eighteenth century, see Gunther Bien, 'Zum Thema des Naturstands im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert', Archiv fur Begriffs- geschichte, 15 (1971), 257-98; and Werner Kraus, Zur Anthropologie des 18. Jahrhundert: Die Fruhgeschichte der Menschheit im Blickpunkt der Aufkldrung (Berlin, 1978), 103-18, 170-5.


MATTHEW RILEY

we all carry a residue of the original human being within us. This is

why, even in his own society, he insisted that the fine arts still had a

civilizing task.31 The following passages from two keynote texts, the article 'Fine Arts'

('Schone Kunste') and the essay 'Thoughts on the Origin and the Different Natures of the Sciences and Fine Arts' ('Gedanken uber den Ursprung und die verschiedene Bestimmungen der Wissenschaften und schonen Kunste'), offer Sulzer's most concise expression of these ideas. In the first he explains how the beauties found in nature and the fine arts draw out the sensibility latent within human beings, thus separ- ating us from the beasts and unleashing the appetitive activity of our souls' forces:

These beauties are commensurate with a keen sensibility lying within us; it is continually stimulated through the impression that the colours, forms and sounds of nature make on us, and in this way a softer feeling becomes active in us, spirit and heart are busier, and not only the coarser sentiments which we have in common with the beasts, but also the gentle impressions become effective in us. In this way we become human beings: our activity is increased because we find more things interesting, there arises a general striving of all the forces within us, we lift ourselves up out of the dust, and draw ourselves closer to the nobility of higher being. We now find nature arranged not for the mere satisfaction of our animal necessities, but for refined enjoyment and gradual elevation of our being.32

He adds later: 'The stupidity and insensitivity ofthe raw, natural human

being gradually disappears, and from a beast which may have been as wild as any other, a human being is formed whose spirit is rich in graces and whose temperament is gentle.'33 Yet this process is not irreversible.

Despite the 'irresistible force' (unwiderstehliche Kraft) that for Sulzer, as for Leibniz and Wolff, serves to drive the soul's activity, it is always liable to lapse back into inactivity and boredom if not properly stimulated by an object which will occupy it. By providing this stimulus, the fine arts guard against a relapse into the bestial life:

The human soul is set and driven into motion through an irresistible force. This [force] continually opposes rest and inactivity... When there is a lack of objects capable of occupying us, the soul declines into boredom, the humours of the body are spoilt [and] the human being becomes a burden to himself or fails into a dull insensitivity which joins him to the beasts. It is the fine arts that pull him out of this company, dispelling the bestial insen? sitivity that is natural to the uncultivated soul. It is they that sustain good

31 Sulzer saw the arts as having an important role in modern-day politics ('Schone Kunste', 614-15). The best account of his opinions regarding the civilizing effects of the arts is found in Van der Zande, 'Orpheus in Berlin', despite the relative lack of direct quotation. In some respects, Sulzer anticipates die thought of Schiller, who argued that one could not make 'the sensory human being' ('der sinnliche Mensch') rational without first making him aesthetic, and spoke of 'the aesthetic state' ('der asthetische Staat'). See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. and ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard A. Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), 161, 218. 82 Sulzer, 'Schone Kunste', 610. 33 Ibid., 612.


CIVIUZING THE SAVAGE

cheer, extending an endless quantity of graces and pleasures over life, refreshing the soul when it is oppressed by the burdens of duties or by lethargy.34

Sulzer conceived the distinction between human beings and animals in (for his time) conventional terms, that is, according to the presence or otherwise of a faculty of reason. In Wolff's philosophy, this corre-

sponds to the division into upper and lower faculties: only human beings have the ability to reflect upon the confiised representations provided by their senses, analyse them and bring them to the level of distinctness. For Wolff, and for those like Sulzer who adopted his terminology, the

key cognitive faculty involved in this process was 'attention' (attentio, Aufmerksamkeit) .35 Attention acts as a kind of fine cognitive light source, illuminating each part ofa representation in turn. Since the human soul is finite, however, our ability to pay attention is limited and we often fall

prey to distraction. In this way it is our destiny to remain poised, as it were, between the condition ofthe angels and that ofthe beasts. Sulzer, like many of his contemporaries, expressed this idea through a distinc? tion between two kinds of attention, which he refers to as 'compulsive' ('erzwungen') and 'voluntary' ('freiwillig'):

It [attention] is elicited on two grounds; one is the particular strength with which certain ideas move us, and the other is distinctness. The first ground elicits a compulsive, unthinking [attention] mixed with astonishment; the other a voluntary attention accompanied by reflection. We experience the effects of compulsive attention when an object moves us so strongly that our soul begins to stir, as during pain and during the sensation of an urgent necessity. Such a sensation draws all our attention to itself and holds it so fast in the present condition of the soul that its [the soul's] actions seem to be halted and transformed into a mere striving.36

Only creatures possessing voluntary attention can become active, rational and free. The beasts, which, according to Sulzer, have only compulsive attention, are constantly distracted by the most attractive external stimulus that presents itself to their senses at any given moment. They cannot focus on a single representation for long enough to reflect on it and render it distinct.

For Sulzer, then, cultivation of the attention was a key component in the civilizing process. But the promotion of voluntary attention alone could not be the goal of the fine arts, since this would produce purely intellectual beings without moral feeling. Accordingly, Sulzer intro? duced a further distinction, this time between what he called the acts

of'cognition' (Erkennen) and 'sensation' (Empfinden). In cognition, all our energies are devoted to examining something outside ourselves.

Subject and object are clearly differentiated, and the experience tells us nothing about ourselves. In sensation, however, the object is not

34 Sulzer, 'Gedanken', 117-18. 35 Wolff, GesammeUe Werke, 2/v, ?237; 1/ii, ?268. There is very little modern literature on this important aspect of eighteenth-century German thought; see Riley, 'Attentive Listening', 64-79. 36 Sulzer, 'Zergliederung des Begriffs der Vernunft', Schriften, i, 244-81 (p. 253).


10 MATTHEW RILEY

external to us, but consists of our present inner condition itself. The attention is turned inward:

Sensation directly concerns our inner condition, since with each new sensation we are conscious of a modification within ourselves. Gognition concerns something which we see as separate from ourselves. In cognition we are the viewer of that which happens; in sensation we ourselves are the thing to which a modification happens, and we observe this modifying not as something distinct from us but as something which lies within our [realm of] action. In sensation, the attention is directed entirely to ourselves and to the modification in our inner condition; in cognition, however, it goes to something distinct from us.37

This means that cognition is a morally neutral condition. An external

object can never have an ethical effect as long as it draws the attention entirely onto itself, because we do not feel any urge to change anything conceming ourselves:

In this case [cognition] we very clearly differentiate between the thing that occupies us and ourselves, since we see it as outside ourselves. The attention has a target, which seems to lie outside us and has nothing to do with our agreeable or disagreeable existence. The more strongly we direct our attention onto the make-up ofthe object, the more we forget ourselves. Our activity is now taken up with seeing the object, discovering its variety, and giving ourselves an account of it. While we try to perform cognition in this way there arises not the slightest striving to alter anything in our existence; we merely want to see more, or more exactly - we do not want any change in ourselves.38

The act ofEmpfinden is closely connected with the concept of Empfind? ung, perhaps the centrepiece of Sulzer's aesthetic terminology. He

explains that the word can be understood in two ways.39 In the first sense, which he calls the 'psychological' sense, and which roughly cor-

responds to the English 'sensation', Empfindungis merely non-rational

knowledge - what Baumgarten would have called the work ofthe lower

cognitive faculties. It gives us no insight into truth or falsity; we can only judge it to be lively or weak ('lebhaft'/'schwach'), agreeable or dis? agreeable ('angenehm'/'unangenehm'). In the second sense, broadly equivalent to the English 'sentiment', it is a feeling (Gefuhl) which, through continual reinforcement, can be the cause of actions. In this

respect, Empfindungis a primitive emotional response - an immediate

feeling of desire for or aversion towards something.40 Sulzer says that the immediate goal of the fine arts is to arouse the first type of

response, but that this should ideally lead to the second. (The ultimate

37 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Sinnlich', Allgemeine Theorie, iii, 1083-8 (p. 1084). 38 Ibid Sulzer had first developed these ideas in an earlier essay, 'Anmerkungen uber den verschiedenen Zustand, worinn sich die Seele bey Ausubung ihrer Hauptvermogen, namlich des Vermogens, sich etwas vorzustellen, und des Vermogens zu empfinden, befindet', Schriften, i, 225-43.

39 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Empfindung', Allgemeine Theorie, i, 311-16 (p. 312). 40 Georgia Cowart provides an informative discussion of the terms 'sentiment', sentiment and Empfindung as they apply to eighteenth-century musical writings in general; see her 'Sense and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought', Acta musicologica, 46 (1984), 251-66.


CIVIUZING THE SAVAGE 11

goal, he observes once more, is to cultivate a 'well-ordered sensibility of the heart', which continually directs the soul's desires to the good and away from the evil.)41 In an early essay on psychology, he had laid down the conditions under which agreeable and disagreeable sensations arise. Proceeding from the now familiar Wolffian notion of the soul as an active force, Sulzer claims that a disagreeable sensation occurs when the soul encounters an obstacle (Hindemifi) to the con- tinued development of its representational activity.42 An agreeable sensation occurs when the soul is at rest, and thus by definition cannot encounter an obstacle. But this state of contentment (Behdglichkeit, aisance) does not yet constitute authentic pleasure (Vergniigen). For the soul to experience pleasure, it must encounter an object containing a reasonable number of ideas which it can develop for itself without

encountering obstacles. The promise of unhindered activity arouses desire (Begierde) .43 Sulzer emphasizes that, in the absence of desire, one cannot properly speak of pleasure, a view which reflects the tendency of German aestheticians at this time to identify these two notions. He can thus hardly be said to anticipate the Kantian concept of 'disinterested pleasure', and I remain sceptical of attempts to view parts of the

Allgemeine Theorie as a stepping-stone between Baumgarten and Kant.44 In short, Sulzer's Empfinden is a condition of the soul which is accom?

panied by much representational and appetitive activity, yet which involves the soul feeling itself rather than losing all self-consciousness in the contemplation of an external object.45

Accordingly, for Sulzer, 'beauty' is not something which we simply stand back and contemplate: it should have an active effect on us. He

captured this effect in his notion of 'aesthetic force' (dsthetische Kraft).46 An object has aesthetic force when it 'is capable of bringing forth a sentiment within us'.47 Sentiments are of course nothing more than the product of the act of sensation (Empfinden), the work of the inward-directed attention. Thus the notion of force can also be

expressed in terms of an effect on the attention: ' [An] object has an

41 Sulzer, 'Empfindung', 315. 42 Sulzer, 'Untersuchung uber die angenehmen und unangenehmen Empfindungen', Schriften, i, 1-98 (p. 11). 43 Ibid., 13.

44 See Friedrich Springorum, 'Uber das Sittliche in der Asthetik Johann Georg Sulzers', Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie, 72 (1929), 1-42 (pp. 14-15). 45 Sulzer's theory of pleasure was informed both by Wolff's work and by an influential treatise of the mid-eighteenth century by Louis Jean Levesque de Pouilly (Theorie des sentiments agreablesr, numerous editions). On these influences, as well as the sometimes complex relationships between the concepts of pleasure, perfection and beauty in his thought, see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London, 1973), 60; and Riley, 'Attentive listening', 179 (note 19). 46 Other translations are possible. Sulzer himself offers the alternative term Energie: 'Von der Kraft (Energie) in den Werken der schonen Kunste', Schriften, i, 122-45. Springorum finds parallels with John Locke's notion of 'power' ('Uber das Sittliche', 21-2). Herder used the term Kraft in his aesthetic theory, although in a rather different - and more obscure - way. See Clarke, 'Herder's Conception of "Kraft"', Proceedings ofthe Modern Language Association, 57 (1942), 737-52; and, for a more recent view, Robert E. Norton, Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1991), 141-9. 'Force' as predicated on aesthetic objects should not be confused with its use when applied to the soul: the two meanings are not directly related. 47 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Kraft', AUgemeine Theorie, ii, 602-5 (p. 602).


12 MATTHEW RILEY

aesthetic force if it is capable of deflecting our attention from the con? sideration of its make-up and directing it to the effect that the object makes on us, above all on our inner condition.'48 There are two types of aesthetic force, the accidental ('zufallige') and the essential ('wesentliche').49 The accidental includes categories such as novelty (Neuheit), the exceptional (das Besondre) and the wonderful (das Wun- derbare), and qualities such as unexpected ('unerwartet') and extra- ordinary ('auBerordentlich'). These all denote some kind of disruption to the even flow of representations in the soul. The disruption makes the soul suddenly aware of itself; in other words, it deflects the attention back into the soul.50 The essential is the more important type of force. It encompasses not just local events but the overall layout of aesthetic objects. There are three subcategories among essential forces: the good, the perfect and the beautiful (das Gute, das Voll- kommene, das Schone).5* The good is simply something which we immediately perceive as 'good for us'. This might be no more than a

pleasing effect of sheer sound or colour. We share the type of pleasure arising from this force with the beasts. (Understood in this sense, the good is not identical with the beautiful, and the meaning of the term must be differentiated from that implied when Sulzer speaks of 'the beautiful and the good'.) The perfect, by contrast, yields an intellec? tual pleasure to someone who recognizes the purpose of its inner

layout. It appeals to the understanding; if one is not reflecting, one is indifferent to it. The beautiful lies between these two, just as the human being formed by the fine arts stands between the brutish primitive man and the unfeeling intellectual. It pleases on account of its form (Form), and appeals to the attention, but without inducing dry, distinct

representations: 'The makeup of the objects stimulates our attention, but before we recognize them distinctly, before we know what the

things should be, we feel enjoyment from them.'52 In practice, the beautiful is characterized by three properties. The first ensures ease of

comprehensibility; the latter pair suggests the formula of unity in

variety, which traditionally indicates beauty or perfection:

(1) The form, considered as a whole, must be well defined and com- prehensible without tiring effort.

(2) It must allow diversity to be felt, but [with] order in the diversity. (3) The diversity must run together in a single whole in such a way that

nothing particular stands out.53

48 Sulzer, 'Kraft', 602. 49 Ibid. 50 See especially Sulzer's earlier explanation of aesthetic force, 'Von der Kraft', 125-6. 51 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Schon', AUgemeine Theorie, iii, 1037-40 (pp. 1037-8). 52 Ibid., 1038. For Sulzer, knowing 'what it should be' was a mark ofthe intellectual recognition

of the perfect Christensen observes that the formula was common in German rationalist phil? osophy; Baker and Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 43. 5S Sulzer, 'Schon', 1039. Sulzer's threefold division of forces superficially resembles Kant's later distinction between 'the agreeable', 'the beautiful' and 'the good'; Critique offudgement, ?5 (pp. 51-2). (Sulzer's 'good' would correspond to Kant's 'agreeable', and Sulzer's 'perfect' to Kant's 'good'.) However, as I have indicated, the Kantian principle of disinterested pleasure runs against the grain of Sulzer's theory as a whole.



This theory of aesthetic forces clearly lends itself to practical application and, in the case of music, seems to have proved highly attractive to theorists ofthe time. Sulzer's vocabulary of attention and sentiment was routinely deployed to explain the aesthetic goal of various pieces, passages or technical features. Among the accidental forces, Sulzer himself lists some musical instances, which include sudden dynamic changes, long pauses, changes of tonality and the reharmonization of a familiar phrase.54 Forkel has a similar principle in mind when he

speaks of 'figures for the attention' ('Figuren fur die Aufmerksamkeit'), which may consist of 'new, unexpected turns and sudden transitions in the progression'.55 As regards the essential forces, the AUgemeine Theorie article 'Main Theme' ('Hauptsatz'), which Sulzer co-authored with Kirnberger, explains how a single theme, presented in successively varied ways and judiciously complemented with contrasting themes, can arouse and sustain attention on a sentiment.56 This is nothing less than a description of the beautiful at work in music, and one which was

adopted by Koch, Forkel and others.57 Finally, the intellectual pleasure afforded by the perfect closely informed Forkel's ideas about the way in which musicians with technical training supposedly listen to music.58

It is fitting that the music theorists should have seized on Sulzer's

theory, since his favourite analogy for the effects of the fine arts involved the figure of Orpheus, whose lyre was said to have worked subtle but irresistible enchantment.59 According to legend, Orpheus's song persuaded the residents of Hades to let him enter and rescue his deceased wife, Eurydice. On his return, having lost Eurydice once

again, he charmed wild animals, plants and stones so that they gath? ered around him, entranced.60 Sulzer followed the interpretation of the myth by the Roman poet Horace in his Arspoetica, who understood it to mean that the Greeks were first civilized through the influence of

poets (Orpheus has frequently been claimed by poets as well as musi? cians) . The wild beasts gathering around the singer signify the Greeks leaving their barbarous, pre-civilized existence and taking the first steps towards a coherent social order.61

54 Sulzer, 'Von der Kraft', 126. 55 Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte, i, 58-9. To be precise, these are a subset of Forkel's figures, which he says appeal only to the attention. There are many types of figure (Forkel developed an elaborate theory of musical rhetoric), many of which affect the attention by means of some other cognitive faculty, such as die imagination. See Riley, 'Attentive listening', 134-5, 140-1. 56 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Hauptsatz', Allgemeine Theorie, i, 522-3. 57 Riley, 'Attentive listening', 115-20. 58 Ibid., 188-96. 59 Johan Van der Zande has noted Sulzer's liking for the Orpheus myth ('Orpheus in Berlin', 176, 202-3). However, his observation that Orpheus became Sulzer's 'constant companion' during the writing of the Allgemeine Theorie can be taken only in a weak sense, namely to mean that Sulzer always kept in mind the civilizing task of the fine arts. It would be an exaggeration to suppose that he constantly refers to the actual name of Orpheus. 60 I follow the version of the story given by Virgil (Georgks, iv, 453-527), one of the earliest and most substantial sources despite the Greek origin of the myth. 61 Horace, Ars poetica, 391-3; Leon Golden and Osborne B. Hardison, Horace for Students of Literature: The Ars poetica* and its Tradition (Gainsville, 1995), 19, 76-7. For a similar Roman interpretation of the legend, see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, I.x.9.


14 MATTHEW RILEY

Sulzer's Wolffian principles demanded, in turn, a slight reinterpretation of Horace. The fine arts do not need to tame the beast within us in the sense of calming fierce behaviour, since Sulzer's beast represents passivity and suffering rather than uncontrollable activity. It is more like the stones and plants of the original legend, wKich must be awak- ened rather than calmed. After the passages (cited earlier) in which he warns how easy it is to fall back into the company of beasts, he expresses this awakening in terms of attentiveness: 'The more one submits to the

graces ofthe muses, the more attentive one becomes to everything that can contribute to pleasure. It is the happy influence of the arts that tames humanity's natural savagery.'62 A little later, quoting Horace, he

explains the role of Orpheus:

In this way, Orpheus, according to the opinion of Horace, that great teacher of artists, tamed the raw, cruel peoples through the enchantment of his lyre in order to lead them to [their] duties.

'When men still roamed the forests, Orpheus, the priest and prophet of the gods, deterred them from slaughter and from an abominable way of life. On account of this he is said to have tamed savage tigers and lions.'63

The reinterpretation is plain. The fine arts combat our inner beast by compelling us to be more active and in particular more attentive to

things which yield morally efficacious pleasure (Vergniigen). In the article 'Fine Arts', Sulzer offers another perspective on the matter:

In truth, from a human being whose imagination is sufficiently attuned to the feeling for the beautiful and whose heart is sufficiently attuned to the sensibility for the good, one can, through a wise application ofthe fine arts, realize everything of which he is capable... he [the artist] whom the muses love will, like another Orpheus, bring people even against their wills, but with soft, gentle compulsion, to the assiduous achievement of everything that is necessary to their happiness.64

As long as we feel any slight attraction to the beautiful and the good -

and the example of Leibniz's system suggests that all souls by nature reflect God's goodness and perfection, however obscurely - the fine arts can cultivate this inclination, leading us to our destiny and happi? ness. The artist as Orpheus can even make people behave contrary to their wills (this applies to the case in which our desire for the good and aversion towards the evil are still fairly nascent). Such compulsion (Zwang) might seem to indicate that the artist is merely exploiting compulsive attention (erzwungene Aufmerksamkeit). Yet the overall objective of the arts is to emancipate humanity from precisely the condition characterized by this form of attention. On Sulzer's terms, the arousal and manipulation of sensation by an external agent leads seamlessly to the feeling of moral sentiment within. The artist's 'soft, gentle com?

pulsion' extends only so far as directing us to the good, thus realizing an inclination which is innate within us anyway.

62 Sulzer, 'Gedanken', 118. 63 Ibid, 119-20. See Horace, Arspoetica, 391-3. In translating the Latin passage, I have followed Golden and Hardison, Horace for Students, 19. 64 Sulzer, 'Schone Kunste', 613-14.



THE AESTHETIC FORCE OF MUSIC

On close inspection, certain divergences emerge between the two pre- ceding references to the Orpheus legend. The first indicates that the fine arts have a decisive effect on the most primitive human being of all. They initiate the process of civilization and moral cultivation. Indeed, their value lies in the fact that they possess a power of enchantment over entirely brutish souls. The second, by contrast, implies that the arts can accomplish their task only when they already have some?

thing to work on; they can cultivate an inclination towards the good, but cannot implant it in a barren soul. Initially, this might seem to reflect a certain ambivalence in Sulzer's theory as a whole. Do the fine arts have the power to affect an entirely passive creature, to set its cog? nitive forces and appetitive urges in motion for the very first time? Or do they rely on the natural goodness which, in practice, exists to a

greater or lesser extent in every monad-like soul? The answer depends to some extent on the ontological status of the savage itself. Sulzer

undoubtedly sees the creature as an authentic historical reality. Yet to the extent that we all possess a spiritual beast - namely, the finiteness of the active principle of our souls - it is a relative category which coex- ists with our civilized, ethical aspects, and which can be incrementally diminished through steady progress. However, in this section I shall show that any ambivalence in Sulzer's thought is illusory. He clearly dis-

tinguishes between the two meanings of the idea of the beast, and in

doing so argues that music has a unique place among the arts. This question ultimately stems from the very nature of the rational-

ist approach to history and 'human nature' common in Sulzer's day. Many writers engaged in a lively discourse concerning origins: the

origin of culture and language, for instance.65 As long as one is pre- pared to discuss such origins, however, an important problem arises. If there was a first condition of language, culture or the human cognitive faculties, how did change initially come about? Was it caused by an internal principle of development and, if so, why did the initial state ever exist beyond the first few moments of human history? If there was no inner force, however, the departure from the origin seems like sudden, unmotivated 'bootstrap pulling'. This paradox emerged strongly in the deliberations of the Berlin Academy, especially with

regard to the origin and development of language (a debate to which Sulzer himself made a contribution) ,66 The philosopher and demo- graphic expertJohann Peter Sussmilch had caused particular problems for the secular thinkers ofthe mid-eighteenth century by arguing that, on the one hand, the emergence of language presupposes the posses- sion of reason, while, on the other, reason cannot be exercised without

65 On the significance of music in this debate, see Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995); Christine Zimmermann, Unmittelbarkeit: Theorien uber den Ursprung der Musik und der Sprache in derAsthetik des 18. fahrhun- derts (Frankfurt am Main, 1995); and Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language, 85-102. 66 Sulzer, 'Anmerkungen uber den gegenseitigen EinfluB der Vernunft in die Sprache und der Sprache in die Vernunft', Schriften, i, 166-98.


16 MATTHEW RILEY

language. This contradiction, he claimed, meant that language could not have arisen gradually among human beings, but must have been the product of a moment of divine intervention.67 The pressing ques? tion in Sulzer's aesthetics, then, is whether the aesthetic forces effect the initial emancipation from the origin or merely exploit an inclination towards goodness and activity once the process of cognitive development, having been sparked off by some other cause, either human or divine, is already underway.

In the article 'Diversity' ('Mannigfaltigkeit'), Sulzer casts light on this

issue while providing the theoretical justification for the quality that he regarded as one of the main characteristics of the beautiful. His argument echoes his earlier thoughts on the cause of pleasure. Owing to the soul's active force, it will remain focused on a single object only if that object has enough different components to keep it occupied for a sustained period. This is because only the promise of ever-new features arouses desire, and thus pleasure. Too much uniformity will cause the soul to sink back into inactivity:

Change among representations and sentiments seems to be a natural necessity of a human being whose reason has come to be at all developed. Indeed, as agreeable as certain things are, through continual or over- frequent repetition one becomes first indifferent to them, and then wearies of them. Only frequent change, that is, variety among the objects that occupy the intellect or the mind, sustains the pleasure that one takes from them. The reason for this natural tendency is easy to discover: it lies in the inner activity of the spirit.68

Yet the opening sentence significantly qualifies the position. The argument applies only when the soul's faculty of reason has developed to some degree. This is just to say that diversity will not have the appro? priate effect on a purely passive creature. The desire for change, the

appetitive urge, must already have begun. Sulzer continues with an

example:

But it [the tendency] shows itself only after the human being has come to a certain degree of self-reflection and has often enjoyed the pleasure of being active. Half-savage peoples, such as those [Native] Americans who do not count above three, can sit thoughdess for a whole day and repeat the same note on their pipes a thousand times without feeling bored.?9

67 See Norton, Herder's Aesthetics, 106-7. Condillac, whose friend Maupertuis had been appointed President of the Academy by Frederick the Great, and against whose ideas Sussmilch's arguments were largely directed, believed that there had been a 'stepping-stone' period between an unreflective initial state of humanity and the time of the emergence of true verbal language. At this stage, Condillac believed, human communication had consisted of quasi-musical utter- ances (see Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language, 72). 68 Johann Georg Sulzer, 'Mannigfaltigkeit', AUgemeine Theorie, ii, 741-3 (p. 741). 69 Ibid., 741-2. Sulzer refers to a travel report by Charles Marie de la Condamine to support his remarks. This was certainly the source for his comment about the Americans' supposed modest ability at arithmetic, although probably not for the flute image. See Condamine, Relation abregee d'un voyage dans I'interieur de I'Amerique meridionale (Paris, 1745), 67. Peter A. Hoyt has discussed the figure of the savage in the music theory of Sulzer and his contemporaries; see his 'On the Primitives of Music Theory: The Savage and Subconscious as Sources of Analytical Authority', Musk Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding (Cambridge, 2001), 197-212 (pp. 205-7).


OVILIZING THE SAVAGE 17

People who have not yet crossed the threshold of self-consciousness, the step that brings with it freedom, reason and cognitive activity, have no use for diversity. In the music of the Native Americans - which he would have known only through the second-hand reports of

eighteenth-century Europeans - Sulzer believes he finds evidence of acute cognitive underdevelopment.

What effect, then, would the beautiful have on this human being? With such a passive soul, he or she would surely meet it with indiffer- ence. Its elaborate diversity would be wasted, because this person is indifferent to the promise of future cognitive activity. Perhaps the accidental forces would have some effect, in that they would momentarily capture the compulsive attention. But only the essential forces, and in

particular the beautiful, can sustain the attention in the act of

Empfinden and thus successfully accomplish the task of moral cultivation. Judging by this article alone, it would appear that the fine arts do not accomplish the initial emancipation from savagery. While the half- bestial human being is for Sulzer a historical reality - indeed, he believed that some remained even in the eighteenth century in non-

European cultures - the arts seem capable of overcoming only the

metaphorical beast lurking within the soul of a rational being. This judgment is indeed sound if we accept Sulzer's explicit enumer-

ation of aesthetic forces to be exhaustive. Yet the theory as a whole, especially when considered in relation to the Orpheus myth, seems to demand a different outcome. Surely the fine arts, the 'primary tools for the happiness of humanity',70 cannot lapse into impotence when they are most needed? The alternative interpretation, however, requires that a new aesthetic force be found, a force which is categorized neither as essential nor as accidental, and which is capable of capturing the atten? tion of the savage and initiating a striving after the good.

In the AUgemeine Theorie, the aesthetic forces are neatly divided into essential and accidental, and Sulzer never openly announces the exist? ence of such a special force, though, as will become clear, he strongly hints at it on a number of occasions. However, in an earlier essay on aesthetic force (which he then also referred to as 'energy' (Energie)), written before he had introduced the essential/accidental distinction, he had described a very direct force with a strong impact on the human nervous system. While other forces can operate only after passions 'have taken root in the soul' ('Wurzel in der Seele geschlagen haben'), this one does not depend at all on the ethical character of the person on whom it acts. And it is most present in sounds:

Those [objects] which stir the ear have, through their simplicity, a force which nothing can equal. A single tone of voice, an inarticulate cry, can penetrate the heart and instantly fill it with sorrow, pity or fear ... The musician who understands how to combine the energy of characteristic tones and harmonies with that which arises from the succession of notes is in a position to elicit the strongest effects on the heart.

The energy of visible objects has rather less inner strength.71 70 Sulzer, 'Schone Kunste', 612. 71 Sulzer, 'Von der Kraft', 136-7.


18 MATTHEWRBLEY

This indicates a slightly different approach to the concept of force from that most evident in the Allgemeine Theorie. There the forces were defined and justified purely with reference to characteristics of the human soul. They could apply equally to any ofthe arts. Here, however, Sulzer describes a force which varies in its effect according to the nature of the physical medium that carries it. This suggests a potential hierarchy ofthe arts, a possibility he was eventually to fulfil in the later, general theory.

The reason for this discrepancy on the level ofthe aesthetic medium is clarified by Sulzer's early essay on the nature of sensations. Here he

provides a physiological explanation of the process of sensation.72 A sensation arises from movements in the nerves that are associated with the senses. These movements are caused by 'matter' (Materie) entering the sense organs. There is a one-to-one relationship between move? ments and sensations: different movements give rise to different sen? sations. Each sense responds to a particular kind of matter, and Sulzer

adopts a hierarchy of the senses according to whether this matter is 'fine' ('fein') or 'coarse' ('grob'). He then refers to the senses them? selves and their corresponding nerves as fine or coarse, stressing however that this designation reflects the kind of matter to which they react, not their own physical makeup. The nerves of sight are the finest, on this account, followed by those of hearing. Next come smell and taste, and finally touch. In practice, Sulzer is primarily interested in the senses of sight and hearing; he denigrates the coarser senses.73

This hierarchy does not seem especially favourable to the sense of

hearing: of the two important senses it is the coarser. Yet Sulzer's

theory involves another set of values, this time predicated on sensations as such. A sensation possesses vivacity or liveliness (Lebhafiigkeit) or, equivalently, 'strength' (Stdrke) according to the amount of movement in the nerve that causes it at the relevant moment. There is no reason to suppose that the finer the nerve, the stronger the sensation that it

typically produces. Indeed, as indicated by the last quotation, Sulzer had hinted at the opposite, claiming that the aesthetic force of visible

objects had less 'inner strength' than that of audible objects. Sulzer develops the possibilities offered by his physiological theory

at the opening of his Allgemeine Theorie article 'Music' ('Musik'). He begins by stating a version of the common eighteenth-century belief that music was a 'natural sign'.74 This means that the connection

72 Sulzer, 'Untersuchung', 54-6. Norton discusses this passage and its relevance to Herder's aesthetics; Herder's Aesthetics, 190-1.

73 This way of thinking about nerves was very characteristic of the second half of the eighteenth century, and to an extent underlies the literary cult of sensibility. The principle - inherited from the late seventeenth century - that the soul was located in the brain meant that nerves seemed to offer the crucial link between body and soul. People were thought to possess a delicate sensi? bility to the extent that they had a 'refined' or 'exquisite' nervous system. See George S. Rousseau, 'Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origin of Sensibility', Studies in the Eighteenth Century III, ed. Robert F. Brissenden and John C. Eade (Toronto and Buffalo, 1976), 137-57 (p. 152). 74 On this eighteenth-century concept, see especially Wellbery, Lessing's Laocoon, 24-30. It was applied to music by the abbe Du Bos and die Encyclopedists as well as by many of Sulzer's German contemporaries; see Riley, 'Attentive listening', 84-7.



between musical signifiers and signifieds - sounds and emotions - is innate in human nature and is instantly recognized by everyone, regardless of education or culture. Music, unlike verbal language, does not depend on humanly instigated conventions:

Nature has established an absolutely direct connection between ear and heart; each passion gives rise to particular tones, and these very tones awaken in the heart of a person who hears them the passionate sentiment from which they arose. A cry of fear puts us in terror while joyful tones cause happiness.75

As before, he contrasts the finer senses of sight and hearing with the coarser- smell, taste and touch. Objects apprehended through the first two senses tend to have a greater effect on us:

The coarser senses - smell, taste and touch - can awaken nothing but blind pleasure or displeasure, and consume themselves with enjoyment or revulsion respectively without any effect on the elevation of the soul; their goal concerns only the body. But that which hearing and sight let us sense aims at the activity of the spirit and heart, and in these two senses lie [the] mainsprings of rational and ethical actions.76

Sulzer's point here is that the three coarser senses can cause pleasure of a kind, but are incapable of unleashing the soul's 'mainsprings' and thus setting off a purposeful appetitive response. Only the ear and eye give rise to impressions that 'elevate' the soul in this way. (The con? nection between the two quotations lies in the fact - taken for granted by a Wolffian - that the appetitive work of the lower faculties is precisely the same thing as the passions that music naturally awakens.)

Sulzer's next move is to distinguish between the two finer senses. Just as in the essay on aesthetic force, he predicates the term 'strength' on force itself, which, given the evidence of his physiological theory, seems to refer to the strength of the sensation that it arouses (that is, the vivacity of the underlying representation). All other things being equal, as it were,77 audible impressions have the greater force:

However, of these two noble senses hearing has by far the stronger force. An out-of-tune note which is comparable in disharmony to a clashing colour is incomparably more disagreeable and disturbing, and the lovely harmony in the colours ofa rainbow has much less force on the mind than equivalently harmonious tones, for instance, the harmonic triad on a well- tuned organ. Hearing is therefore by far the most suitable sense for awakening passion.78

The reason for this, ironically, is the very coarseness (in relation to sight) of the sense of hearing. Air, as a 'coarser' material, delivers a more powerful impact to the ear than does light to the eye:

This difference undoubtedly arises because the material from which the nerves ofthe ear receive their activity, namely air, is much coarser and more

75 Sulzer, 'Musik', 781. 76 Ibid 77 Sulzer does not address the obvious (to a modern reader) question of how all other things

ever could be equal, or, as he puts it, how colours could be comparable in disharmony to notes. 78 Sulzer, 'Musik', 781.


20 MATTHEW RILEY

physical than the aesthetic element of light that affects the eye. The nerves of the ear, owing to the power of the impacts they receive, can thus spread their effect to the whole system of nerves, which does not happen with vision. Thus it can be understood how, through tones, one can exercise powerful force on the whole body, and consequendy also on the soul.79

Sulzer's argument is a delicate (if not precarious) one. The sense of hearing is fine enough for music to qualify as an art, but coarser than

sight, thus resulting in a stronger aesthetic force. This is not the only article in which Sulzer singles out music from the

rest of the arts. In 'Fine Arts', he introduces each art in turn, begin? ning with music:

Hearing is the first of the senses that sends into our soul sensations whose origin and causes we are able to know. Tenderness, benevolence, hatred, rage, despair and other passionate utterancefs] of a moved soul lie in sound. For this reason one soul can become sensible to another through sound, and only this type of sensation can make heightened impressions on our heart. Here begins the realm ofthe fine arts. The first and most forceful of them is that which makes its way to the soul through the ear: music.m

Again he stresses that music is more forceful than the other arts. This time, however, he even calls it the 'first' of the arts: strong words in what is the keynote article of the whole Allgemeine Theorie*1 Clearly, Sulzer's high estimation of music is not confined to the articles in which he might legitimately be expected to praise it.

It is later in the article 'Music', however, that Sulzer gives the clear- est insight of all into the nature ofthe special aesthetic force. He notes the many ancient legends about the wonderful effects of music, and criticizes those who scoff at them. Whether they testify to literal historical fact is relatively unimportant; they contain a profound poetic truth. Music has 'an effect on sensitive nerves of which no other art is

capable'.82 Finally, he turns once again to the Orpheus myth. This time, however, Orpheus is not the representative of all the fine arts together. Even his role as poet is neglected. He is specifically a musician: 'The Greek tradition of Orpheus, which says that, through music, he

dragged the Greeks out of their savagery, is certainly not all myth. What other means could one use to bring a savage people to some degree of attention and to sentiment?'83 So the question of the true role of the

79 Sulzer, 'Musik', 781. 80 Sulzer, 'Schone Kunste', 623. 81 Peter Schnaus interprets 'erste' as 'unterste' (lowest), which would imply that Sulzer is here describing music as the most primitive of the fine arts. 'Sulzer, Johann Georg', Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume, xii (Leipzig, 1965), cols. 1733-8 (col. 1753). I hope to have shown by the end of this article that Sulzer's view was rather more generous than this. 82 Sulzer, 'Musik', 789. 83 Ibid. Despite Van der Zande's awareness of the importance of the figure of Orpheus in Sulzer's thought, he makes no reference to this passage and does not recognize that Sulzer changes the meaning of the myth when it comes to music. Similarly, he is aware of the concept of attention in Sulzer's theory, but does not explain its significance or make a definite link with Orpheus ('Orpheus in Berlin', 203). Sulzer was not the only thinker in Berlin at this time to praise the art of music by referring to the Orpheus myth. With Lessing, according to James Upton ('The Music Esthetics of G. E. Lessing', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1969, 93), the legend 'seems at times to have become an obsession', and it appears in many of his poems.


OVIUZING THE SAVAGE 21

fine arts is resolved. It is indeed possible to influence the 'real' savage human being. But music is the only art capable of doing this. Only music can induce within the savage that characteristic combination of attention and sentiment that is the mark of Sulzer's Empfinden. Sulzer

proceeds to explain exactly why this is the case:

Such a people has everything which belongs to the satisfaction of physical necessities, but it does not have [the powers of] reason and reflection [with which] to listen to anything that would speak to it of morals, religion or social arrangements. Thus one cannot stimulate it through the promise of greater abundance. Poetry and eloquence can do nothing with it; nor can painting, which it would consider at best to be beautiful colours which say nothing. But music penetrates because it touches the nerves and speaks, because it can awaken definite sentiments. For this reason, those tales are completely true to nature, whether or not they are historically false.84

Just as in 'Diversity', Sulzer affirms that human beings who have not acquired a faculty of reason, who have not taken the critical step out of the initial, static condition of passivity, cannot be stimulated through the promise of sustained activity. The beautiful is therefore impotent and those arts that largely depend on it for their aesthetic force are ineffective.

In the light of these remarks, it seems especially ironic, and indeed unfair, that modern writers should so frequendy east Sulzer as

spokesman for the negative view of instrumental music that was preva- lent in the eighteenth century. Perhaps it would now be best to see his comments in that regard as the reiteration of a standard trope, and of limited significance for his broader view of music. To be sure, earlier in the article 'Music', Sulzer had mentioned Orpheus's song as a con? trast to the contemporary instrumental music that he so roundly criti- cized.85 But, as I have argued, he was praising the qualities of simplicity and emotional directness rather than insisting on the need for words in all music. Indeed, by again invoking Orpheus - a musician and poet - at the key point of his argument concerning the special force of music, Sulzer could have taken the opportunity to reassert the primacy of words and music in combination. Yet instead he offered an argu? ment about the effect of pure notes.

Sulzer's philosophical position on music may be summarized as follows.86 In general it is the task of the fine arts to civilize the human race, cultivating our natural but unsteady love for the good and hatred of the evil and thus helping us to attain true happiness. They do this

84 Sulzer, 'Musik', 789. 85 Ibid., 788. 86 I should emphasize that my conclusions here by no means exhaust the possibilities for

research into Sulzer's views on music. For instance, it would be instructive to examine his ideas about music's effect on the body as opposed to the soul in the light of the special aesthetic force (I am grateful to Daniel Chua for pointing this out to me); his notion of Empfinden in terms of the values of eighteenth-century German Evangelical Pietism, which highlighted the need to contemplate one's own soul and experience inner spiritual rebirth; and his theory of aesthetic forces in general as a counterpart to the Prussian State's robust efforts to stamp out 'irrational' practices among its citizens and 'enlighten' them even against their wills.


22 MATTHEW RILEV

by stimulating the soul with aesthetic forces in such a way that the atten? tion is fixed on inner sentiments and we become conscious of ourselves as moral beings. The chief force is the beautiful, which induces

pleasure mixed with desire through the promise of future cognitive activity. Yet Sulzer also relies on a special force, peculiar to music, which affects the human soul in a unique way. This force helps him to deal with the problems associated with a central concept in his writings on aesthetics: the savage or beast. Are the fine arts capable of civilizing from scratch what Sulzer and his contemporaries imagined as the real historical savage, or do they merely diminish the principle of inactivity within people who have already left the state of nature? Sulzer's answer is that, considered as a whole, the fine arts can manage only the latter: the beautiful stimulates only a being whose cognitive faculties are at least partly active. Music alone can stimulate the 'real' savage. Just as Orpheus aroused stones and trees with his song, so music as an art possesses a unique aesthetic force, which arouses attention and sentiment in the most passive of human souls.

ABSTRACT

Johann Georg Sulzer's AUgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste (1771-4) exerted considerable influence on late eighteenth-century German musical writers. But for many modern commentators, it typifies the negative attitude to instru? mental music characteristic of much Enlightenment rationalism. A reassessment of Sulzer, taking account of his philosophical background in Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten, shows that in fact he considered music the first ofthe fine arts. The arts have an ethical, civilizing role; but while most can affect only people who are already partly civilized, music possesses a special 'aesthetic force' which energizes the minds of cognitively passive people or 'savages'.


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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 127, No. 1 (2002), pp. 1-152Front MatterCivilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the 'Aesthetic Force' of Music [pp. 1-22]Metaphors for Meyerbeer [pp. 23-43]'Alienated from His Own Being': Nietzsche, Bayreuth and the Problem of Identity [pp. 44-71]Mahler, Victim of the 'New' Anti-Semitism [pp. 72-94]The Case of Compensating Rubato [pp. 95-129]Review ArticleReview: Over the Rainbow? On the Quest for 'The Social' in Musical Analysis [pp. 130-146]

Back Matter [pp. 147-152]

sulzer and the aesthetic force of music (art)

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