No sooner had Donald Trump secured the presidency for a second time than the commentators began commentating and the prophets began prophesying. Trump would criminalize microplastics; he would build the long-awaited wall; he would Make America Great Again, again, maybe this time for good. Meanwhile, an elite coterie insisted that he would do something that he had never mentioned, even in his most meandering speeches: he would revitalize Culture.
How was he going to do this? It wasn’t clear, but the moment that a crestfallen CNN anchor called Wisconsin, at approximately 5:30 a.m. on the morning of November 6th, a new era of unfettered creativity and ambitious artmaking dawned, or so enthusiasts proclaimed. Jonathan Keeperman, founder of the new-right imprint Passage Publishing, wrote on his Substack that Trump, a “Great Man,” would be an antidote to the “spiritual emptiness that has hollowed modern life to its core.” The writer Walter Kirn tweeted—or Xed, as we are now obliged to say—“Who would you be under freedom, if you weren’t afraid of the scolds and thought police and the internal censor you installed, perhaps unconsciously? What would you say and do and make? Time to consider this deeply—and act accordingly. Epic opportunity, America.”
This outpouring of optimism was hard to credit, because art did not flourish during Trump’s first term, as even the most fervent MAGA-culture warriors would freely acknowledge. Indeed, the last time around, paranoia reached a fever pitch, and the scolding sensibility of so-called resistance liberalism colonized vast swaths of American cultural life. This is not to say that resistance liberals were entirely misguided, of course: for all of their failures of affect and imagination—their humorlessness, their incuriosity, their imperviousness to irony, their apparently bottomless appetite for articles about the patrons of diners in the Rust Belt—they were not wrong to worry. Trump’s first term was chaotic and to some extent ineffectual, but he still managed to install the judges who would eventually imperil reproductive autonomy by overturning Roe v. Wade, and his blood-and-soil rhetoric still emboldened bona fide white nationalists. It was reasonable to revile him; it was understandable, if inadvisable, to panic.
More dubious and less sympathetic, however, was the increasingly aggressive insistence that art was no more than an outpost of the all-important project of anti-MAGA propagandizing. In one characteristic salvo published in the New York Times, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen warned writers (white writers especially) against withdrawing from politics when Biden assumed power in 2021. The Trump presidency, he suggested, was politically catastrophic but aesthetically salutary, insofar as it “destroyed the ability of white writers to dwell in the apolitical.” Confronted with a pandemic and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, “everyone had to make a choice.” The owners of well-appointed houses clambered to let everyone know what choice they’d made by installing signs in their vast, manicured yards that announced “Love Is Love” and “We Believe the Science.” Would artists follow suit?
Unfortunately, they would. Despite Nguyen’s call for literature that would transcend an “empty form of politics,” the aesthetic fruits of the political awakening he celebrated were usually not much better than in-this-house homilies. There was Don’t Look Up, a heavy-handed commentary on right-wing climate denial that strained desperately to be cute; there was Amanda Gorman, whose cloyingly anodyne and moistly inspiring verses (“That even as we grieved, we grew, / That even as we hurt, we hoped”) were mercifully ignored by most critics; there was American Dirt, a feel-good novel about immigration in which “the heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous,” as the critic Parul Seghal observed in her review. And then there was that triumph of liberal self-congratulation, the musical Hamilton, which premiered a year before Trump took office but embodied the outlook that would thrive under his regime.
Everyone had to make a choice, but did they have to choose such cheap didacticism? The problem was not that Gorman’s poems or Don’t Look Up were, in some sense, political. All art is political in one way or another: it is produced under political conditions, and insofar as it is about anything resembling human life, it is about political situations. The problem, in part, was that resistance liberals evinced bad politics. Their smugness about their own righteousness was patronizing, at times even anti-democratic; their simplified worldview, in which Trump voters were evil and they were faultless, was Manichean; perhaps cruelest of all was their conviction that the symbolic currency of representation could take precedence over the bread-and-butter of material redistribution. But if they were wrong about what good politics looked like, their art was unsuccessful for a second reason: they were also wrong to suppose that political and aesthetic value were one and the same.
●
Some of the evangelists of the new cultural revolution appear to be gunning, during Trump 2.0, for resistance liberalism in reverse—for art that is doggedly doctrinal, just in the opposite direction. In this house we believe… that science is disenchanting the world; that modernity was wrongheaded; that liberal anomie is destroying wholesome communities; that love isn’t love unless it’s cozily marital and gruelingly traditionalist; and so on. Keeperman’s maudlin commendation of Trump as a Great Man is a sample of the sort of sentimental kitsch we’re in for from this crowd.
Other critics, nominally more serious, believe that resistance liberalism erred in permitting aesthetics to carouse with ethics in the first place. Last time, artistic value was reducible to political value; this time, then, we must prevent aesthetic and politics from enjoying any acquaintance whatsoever. The most vocal (or at least the most visible) proponent of this view is the critic and Dimes Square-adjacent man-about-town Dean Kissick, who proclaimed in a recent Harper’s cover story, “I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing.” The ostensible occasion for this outburst was a visit to an underwhelming exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, but Kissick’s target is evidently much broader. His essay contains not only an indictment of the art of the past decade but a theory of art as such. “Art is often best when it’s absolutely deranged,” he writes. “Art should do more than communicate.” What it should not do is mean anything, and by extension, make any sort of political point.
In effect, Kissick is calling for a revival of l’art pour l’art, a demand that has been characterized by both detractors and enthusiasts as neo-Romantic. What he “wants is Romanticism, or something like it,” remarked the art critic Jonathan T. D. Neil on Substack; Kissick yearns “for artists to return to romantic ideals,” wrote the curator Saul Ostrow in the “blogazine” Two Coats of Paint. Neither of these commentators used the term as an honorific, but some of the usual suspects have embraced the label nonetheless. Matthew Gasda, author of the play Dimes Square and avowed raw-milk guzzler, writes a Substack newsletter by the name of “Novalis,” the pseudonym of one of the most important participants in Frühromantik, the earliest phase of the German Romantic movement (lasting from the summer of 1797 through summer of 1801).
But Kissick, alas, is no Novalis. His repeated descriptions of artists as “researchers” hardly inspire fits of passion, and when he praises artists who display “the freedom of absolute purposelessness,” he sounds less like the poet and more like the stodgy figure that the Romantics hoped to supplant: that giant of the Enlightenment, a man who was born middle-aged, Immanuel Kant. It goes without saying that Kant’s system, developed in often punishing detail over the course of three notoriously difficult volumes, is more elaborate than Kissick’s, advanced in just one middling article. But Kant, too, believed that art made no ethical claims on us, and Kant, too, was intent on severing the aesthetic from the moral. The beautiful and the good had been passionate bedfellows since Plato detailed their intimacy in the Symposium some 2,200 years ago, but in Kant’s intricate and rather byzantine Critique of Judgment, they could make only indirect and analogical contact, like people pressing their palms against opposite sides of a window.
It is no exaggeration to say that the entirety of German Romanticism was an attempt to reunite them. Under Kantianism, Kissick’s preferred ideology prevailed: art could not mean a thing. Romanticism began when Novalis and his friend and interlocutor, Friedrich Schlegel, set out to show that, on the contrary, art meant everything.
●
At first (and perhaps even final) glance, the Romantics’ conception of beauty seems to be an artifact of its era. It grew out of Kant’s controversial claim that beauty is “the symbol of morality.” This declaration was already a costly admission for a philosopher bent on sundering the ethical from the aesthetic. Still, it represented the sort of gentle concession one makes to a willful child. Beauty could be a symbol of morality, but never the genuine article.
Far from celebrating the sudden estrangement of the moral and aesthetic, the Romantics were ardent dissenters. For Kant, beauty was at most the appearance (not the reality) of freedom; for the proto-Romantic Friedrich Schiller, it was “freedom of appearance,” as he wrote in a letter in 1793. Two years later, in his seminal On the Aesthetic Education of Man, he proposed that beauty is “living form.” It is no mere symbol but actual freedom, transmuted into something we can perceive.
Schiller’s Aesthetic Education is arguably the founding document of German Romanticism, and many of its assumptions are a touch eccentric. The book begins with a lament about the schism between reason and sensuality, which bifurcates “not merely individual persons but whole classes of human beings.” The masses, by Schiller’s lights, are too impulsive, too rough, too coarse—too subservient to the indulgent imprecision of the senses. The elites, on the other hand, are too cerebral, too effete, too bloodlessly civilized—too beholden to the cool severities of reason. In Schiller and the subsequent Romantics’ view, the fault lines that divided the people of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century posed both a spiritual and a political problem: until the continents’ citizenry was perfected, an ideal polity seemed out of the question.
This sorry state of affairs does not, however, license a return to our halcyon yet unsophisticated premodern condition. “Little as individuals could derive any profit from this dismemberment of their being, yet the race could have made progress in no other way,” Schiller assures us. “There was no other way of developing the manifold capacities of Man than by placing them in opposition to each other.” Fragmentation turns out to be a means to the end of a higher form of integration—one in which both reason and the senses are developed to their utmost yet harmonized with each another. (To describe the eventual harmonization of the sensuous and rational drives, Schiller uses the verb aufheben, in the sense of sublation, for perhaps the first time in the history of German letters.) And only at the highest stage of human development can the moral law so beloved by the elites be reconciled with vitality of the masses. Such a foundation can at last support the weight of a healthy governmental apparatus. “The conduct of the state depends upon the public ethos,” Novalis mused. “The ennoblement of this ethos is the only basis for the genuine reform of the state.”
But how to “ennoble” the public ethos? How to enact a “genuine reform of the state”? What is necessary, according to Schiller and his acolytes, is “a third character which, related to these other two, might pave the way for a transition from the realm of mere force to the rule of law.” This third character is the aesthetic. Because beauty is “living form,” it unites the sensuous (the living) and the rational (the formal), thereby inducing us to harmonize our warring faculties in its image. Beauty is “freedom in appearance” insofar as it models how we might balance and blend our conflicting drives, teaching us “to make this combination perfect, to accomplish it so purely and completely that both conditions entirely disappear in a third.”
Unsurprisingly, the Romantics are quite clear that politics are (or at least ought to be) aestheticized. Their utopia is a heady amalgamation of material innovation and high-minded ideals, which is to say, a work of art. Novalis mused in his notebooks that “the poetic state is the true perfect state,” and Schlegel went so far as to insist that the state is the ultimate aesthetic object: “The highest work of art for man is the state … politics is the height of aesthetics” (emphasis his). Though the Romantics took many cues from Plato, they vehemently rejected the political vision sketched in the Republic, in which the poets retreat into exile and the philosophers take charge. Instead of expelling artists, Novalis and Schlegel invited them to occupy the citadels of power. The exemplary politician in the Romantics’ ideal state was a figure Schiller called the “statesman-artist.”
If the political is aesthetic, is the aesthetic political? For Schiller, the answer is a tentative yes. Aesthetic success is a prerequisite for political success, because only people perfected by encounters with beauty are “ennobled” enough to embrace the dictates of an enlightened government. But even in this account, the content of a work of art is irrelevant to its political power. Its formal properties—its ability to model and inspire the harmonization of the faculties—are the sole source of its elevating effects. The beautiful is not properly political so much as preparatory: it shapes us into the sort of people who could one day take political action or draw moral conclusions, but it offers no concrete directives on its own authority. Schiller’s emendation, however, was mild compared to that of the first generation of the Romantics, who rejected even the pretense of Kantianism. They were devotees of Plato’s metaphysics if not his politics, and for them, the good and the beautiful were continuous with one another.
Still, the Romantic view diverges from the resistance liberals’ view, in which the aesthetic and the political collapse into a single undifferentiated slush. Plato regarded the good and the beautiful as coextensive and co-constitutive but not synonymous, and the Romantics followed his lead. Though the two categories are conceptually distinct in their eyes, the presence of one without the other is unthinkable. The schism between the beautiful and the good, so forcefully maintained by Kant, had been surpassed at last.
●
There is much in the Romantic picture that we jaded hyper-moderns would be wise to retire. Their mawkish fetishization of “the people” smacks of polite condescension; their caricature of the “elites” is unconvincing; and, in general, the idea that entire demographics share a unified character is naïve. Besides, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mania for carving the mind up into discrete faculties is by now obsolete.
But there is also much in the Romantic worldview that remains appealing. In particular, they understood the cost of amputating art from life. They knew that if literature was to be more than an effete nicety, then it would have to be part of the world, which meant it would have to wade without embarrassment into the muck of politics. Much of the best art of the centuries that followed did exactly that. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is about the founding of the Second Empire and the political about-faces that fashionable Parisians made as they weathered the onslaught of de rigueur ideologies; Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise is about the displacement of small stores by chains and the making of the modern city; Celan’s stammering poetry is about the way that the Holocaust shattered the German language. Who could possibly want to excise political meaning from these texts? If Kissick likes art that doesn’t mean a thing, then he doesn’t like most of modernity’s best art.
In an age of grand systems and multivolume treatises, the Romantics were defiantly anti-foundationalist—hence their predilection for the fragment, a form that is conspicuously unfinished. They sought no final formulas, and they would not have minded (and would probably have relished) the chaos that is loosed when art and politics are unleashed on one another. Those who would flatten aesthetics into politics and those who would prize the two apart are united in having hit upon a universal diagnosis. No matter the question, the answer is always the same: either the art is good because the politics are, or the two categories run entirely parallel to one another. But those of us who recognize that every combination of aesthetics and politics is possible can make few general claims.
Sometimes—I suspect quite often—art fails aesthetically because it fails politically: James Baldwin argued that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “a very bad novel” because of its “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality,” and much the same can be said of the literature of resistance liberalism. But sometimes art is good precisely because its politics are bad: Portnoy would be a flatter character, after all, if he were a feminist. Sometimes art is good despite its bad politics, not because of them (Anna Karenina can withstand even the saccharine sections about the moral simplicity of peasants), and sometimes art is good despite its good politics (it’s only possible to enjoy the depravity of Dangerous Liaisons when you disregard its dutifully moralizing preface). If art and politics do not have a fixed rapport with one another, there is not much we can know about their relations in advance. Our only option is a careful consideration of each work in the wild.
Unlike many MAGA boosters, I am not in the prediction business: I have no idea what cultural horrors the second Trump term will bring, though if I had to guess, I’d imagine that it will become harder for the socialites of Dimes Square to pass their desperately edgy creations off as transgressions at a time when reactionary politics are the preserve of tech oligarchs and other emissaries of the establishment. But who knows? I’m no prophet; I’m in the criticism racket. It is my job to say exactly how aesthetics and ethics intersect in specific cases. There is no purity at this violent junction, which Lionel Trilling calls “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet,” but I’m glad that art can still matter enough to wound and maim. It is a great merit to be able to bleed.
Art credit: Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1825-30.
No sooner had Donald Trump secured the presidency for a second time than the commentators began commentating and the prophets began prophesying. Trump would criminalize microplastics; he would build the long-awaited wall; he would Make America Great Again, again, maybe this time for good. Meanwhile, an elite coterie insisted that he would do something that he had never mentioned, even in his most meandering speeches: he would revitalize Culture.
How was he going to do this? It wasn’t clear, but the moment that a crestfallen CNN anchor called Wisconsin, at approximately 5:30 a.m. on the morning of November 6th, a new era of unfettered creativity and ambitious artmaking dawned, or so enthusiasts proclaimed. Jonathan Keeperman, founder of the new-right imprint Passage Publishing, wrote on his Substack that Trump, a “Great Man,” would be an antidote to the “spiritual emptiness that has hollowed modern life to its core.” The writer Walter Kirn tweeted—or Xed, as we are now obliged to say—“Who would you be under freedom, if you weren’t afraid of the scolds and thought police and the internal censor you installed, perhaps unconsciously? What would you say and do and make? Time to consider this deeply—and act accordingly. Epic opportunity, America.”
This outpouring of optimism was hard to credit, because art did not flourish during Trump’s first term, as even the most fervent MAGA-culture warriors would freely acknowledge. Indeed, the last time around, paranoia reached a fever pitch, and the scolding sensibility of so-called resistance liberalism colonized vast swaths of American cultural life. This is not to say that resistance liberals were entirely misguided, of course: for all of their failures of affect and imagination—their humorlessness, their incuriosity, their imperviousness to irony, their apparently bottomless appetite for articles about the patrons of diners in the Rust Belt—they were not wrong to worry. Trump’s first term was chaotic and to some extent ineffectual, but he still managed to install the judges who would eventually imperil reproductive autonomy by overturning Roe v. Wade, and his blood-and-soil rhetoric still emboldened bona fide white nationalists. It was reasonable to revile him; it was understandable, if inadvisable, to panic.
More dubious and less sympathetic, however, was the increasingly aggressive insistence that art was no more than an outpost of the all-important project of anti-MAGA propagandizing. In one characteristic salvo published in the New York Times, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen warned writers (white writers especially) against withdrawing from politics when Biden assumed power in 2021. The Trump presidency, he suggested, was politically catastrophic but aesthetically salutary, insofar as it “destroyed the ability of white writers to dwell in the apolitical.” Confronted with a pandemic and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, “everyone had to make a choice.” The owners of well-appointed houses clambered to let everyone know what choice they’d made by installing signs in their vast, manicured yards that announced “Love Is Love” and “We Believe the Science.” Would artists follow suit?
Unfortunately, they would. Despite Nguyen’s call for literature that would transcend an “empty form of politics,” the aesthetic fruits of the political awakening he celebrated were usually not much better than in-this-house homilies. There was Don’t Look Up, a heavy-handed commentary on right-wing climate denial that strained desperately to be cute; there was Amanda Gorman, whose cloyingly anodyne and moistly inspiring verses (“That even as we grieved, we grew, / That even as we hurt, we hoped”) were mercifully ignored by most critics; there was American Dirt, a feel-good novel about immigration in which “the heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous,” as the critic Parul Seghal observed in her review. And then there was that triumph of liberal self-congratulation, the musical Hamilton, which premiered a year before Trump took office but embodied the outlook that would thrive under his regime.
Everyone had to make a choice, but did they have to choose such cheap didacticism? The problem was not that Gorman’s poems or Don’t Look Up were, in some sense, political. All art is political in one way or another: it is produced under political conditions, and insofar as it is about anything resembling human life, it is about political situations. The problem, in part, was that resistance liberals evinced bad politics. Their smugness about their own righteousness was patronizing, at times even anti-democratic; their simplified worldview, in which Trump voters were evil and they were faultless, was Manichean; perhaps cruelest of all was their conviction that the symbolic currency of representation could take precedence over the bread-and-butter of material redistribution. But if they were wrong about what good politics looked like, their art was unsuccessful for a second reason: they were also wrong to suppose that political and aesthetic value were one and the same.
●
Some of the evangelists of the new cultural revolution appear to be gunning, during Trump 2.0, for resistance liberalism in reverse—for art that is doggedly doctrinal, just in the opposite direction. In this house we believe… that science is disenchanting the world; that modernity was wrongheaded; that liberal anomie is destroying wholesome communities; that love isn’t love unless it’s cozily marital and gruelingly traditionalist; and so on. Keeperman’s maudlin commendation of Trump as a Great Man is a sample of the sort of sentimental kitsch we’re in for from this crowd.
Other critics, nominally more serious, believe that resistance liberalism erred in permitting aesthetics to carouse with ethics in the first place. Last time, artistic value was reducible to political value; this time, then, we must prevent aesthetic and politics from enjoying any acquaintance whatsoever. The most vocal (or at least the most visible) proponent of this view is the critic and Dimes Square-adjacent man-about-town Dean Kissick, who proclaimed in a recent Harper’s cover story, “I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing.” The ostensible occasion for this outburst was a visit to an underwhelming exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, but Kissick’s target is evidently much broader. His essay contains not only an indictment of the art of the past decade but a theory of art as such. “Art is often best when it’s absolutely deranged,” he writes. “Art should do more than communicate.” What it should not do is mean anything, and by extension, make any sort of political point.
In effect, Kissick is calling for a revival of l’art pour l’art, a demand that has been characterized by both detractors and enthusiasts as neo-Romantic. What he “wants is Romanticism, or something like it,” remarked the art critic Jonathan T. D. Neil on Substack; Kissick yearns “for artists to return to romantic ideals,” wrote the curator Saul Ostrow in the “blogazine” Two Coats of Paint. Neither of these commentators used the term as an honorific, but some of the usual suspects have embraced the label nonetheless. Matthew Gasda, author of the play Dimes Square and avowed raw-milk guzzler, writes a Substack newsletter by the name of “Novalis,” the pseudonym of one of the most important participants in Frühromantik, the earliest phase of the German Romantic movement (lasting from the summer of 1797 through summer of 1801).
But Kissick, alas, is no Novalis. His repeated descriptions of artists as “researchers” hardly inspire fits of passion, and when he praises artists who display “the freedom of absolute purposelessness,” he sounds less like the poet and more like the stodgy figure that the Romantics hoped to supplant: that giant of the Enlightenment, a man who was born middle-aged, Immanuel Kant. It goes without saying that Kant’s system, developed in often punishing detail over the course of three notoriously difficult volumes, is more elaborate than Kissick’s, advanced in just one middling article. But Kant, too, believed that art made no ethical claims on us, and Kant, too, was intent on severing the aesthetic from the moral. The beautiful and the good had been passionate bedfellows since Plato detailed their intimacy in the Symposium some 2,200 years ago, but in Kant’s intricate and rather byzantine Critique of Judgment, they could make only indirect and analogical contact, like people pressing their palms against opposite sides of a window.
It is no exaggeration to say that the entirety of German Romanticism was an attempt to reunite them. Under Kantianism, Kissick’s preferred ideology prevailed: art could not mean a thing. Romanticism began when Novalis and his friend and interlocutor, Friedrich Schlegel, set out to show that, on the contrary, art meant everything.
●
At first (and perhaps even final) glance, the Romantics’ conception of beauty seems to be an artifact of its era. It grew out of Kant’s controversial claim that beauty is “the symbol of morality.” This declaration was already a costly admission for a philosopher bent on sundering the ethical from the aesthetic. Still, it represented the sort of gentle concession one makes to a willful child. Beauty could be a symbol of morality, but never the genuine article.
Far from celebrating the sudden estrangement of the moral and aesthetic, the Romantics were ardent dissenters. For Kant, beauty was at most the appearance (not the reality) of freedom; for the proto-Romantic Friedrich Schiller, it was “freedom of appearance,” as he wrote in a letter in 1793. Two years later, in his seminal On the Aesthetic Education of Man, he proposed that beauty is “living form.” It is no mere symbol but actual freedom, transmuted into something we can perceive.
Schiller’s Aesthetic Education is arguably the founding document of German Romanticism, and many of its assumptions are a touch eccentric. The book begins with a lament about the schism between reason and sensuality, which bifurcates “not merely individual persons but whole classes of human beings.” The masses, by Schiller’s lights, are too impulsive, too rough, too coarse—too subservient to the indulgent imprecision of the senses. The elites, on the other hand, are too cerebral, too effete, too bloodlessly civilized—too beholden to the cool severities of reason. In Schiller and the subsequent Romantics’ view, the fault lines that divided the people of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century posed both a spiritual and a political problem: until the continents’ citizenry was perfected, an ideal polity seemed out of the question.
This sorry state of affairs does not, however, license a return to our halcyon yet unsophisticated premodern condition. “Little as individuals could derive any profit from this dismemberment of their being, yet the race could have made progress in no other way,” Schiller assures us. “There was no other way of developing the manifold capacities of Man than by placing them in opposition to each other.” Fragmentation turns out to be a means to the end of a higher form of integration—one in which both reason and the senses are developed to their utmost yet harmonized with each another. (To describe the eventual harmonization of the sensuous and rational drives, Schiller uses the verb aufheben, in the sense of sublation, for perhaps the first time in the history of German letters.) And only at the highest stage of human development can the moral law so beloved by the elites be reconciled with vitality of the masses. Such a foundation can at last support the weight of a healthy governmental apparatus. “The conduct of the state depends upon the public ethos,” Novalis mused. “The ennoblement of this ethos is the only basis for the genuine reform of the state.”
But how to “ennoble” the public ethos? How to enact a “genuine reform of the state”? What is necessary, according to Schiller and his acolytes, is “a third character which, related to these other two, might pave the way for a transition from the realm of mere force to the rule of law.” This third character is the aesthetic. Because beauty is “living form,” it unites the sensuous (the living) and the rational (the formal), thereby inducing us to harmonize our warring faculties in its image. Beauty is “freedom in appearance” insofar as it models how we might balance and blend our conflicting drives, teaching us “to make this combination perfect, to accomplish it so purely and completely that both conditions entirely disappear in a third.”
Unsurprisingly, the Romantics are quite clear that politics are (or at least ought to be) aestheticized. Their utopia is a heady amalgamation of material innovation and high-minded ideals, which is to say, a work of art. Novalis mused in his notebooks that “the poetic state is the true perfect state,” and Schlegel went so far as to insist that the state is the ultimate aesthetic object: “The highest work of art for man is the state … politics is the height of aesthetics” (emphasis his). Though the Romantics took many cues from Plato, they vehemently rejected the political vision sketched in the Republic, in which the poets retreat into exile and the philosophers take charge. Instead of expelling artists, Novalis and Schlegel invited them to occupy the citadels of power. The exemplary politician in the Romantics’ ideal state was a figure Schiller called the “statesman-artist.”
If the political is aesthetic, is the aesthetic political? For Schiller, the answer is a tentative yes. Aesthetic success is a prerequisite for political success, because only people perfected by encounters with beauty are “ennobled” enough to embrace the dictates of an enlightened government. But even in this account, the content of a work of art is irrelevant to its political power. Its formal properties—its ability to model and inspire the harmonization of the faculties—are the sole source of its elevating effects. The beautiful is not properly political so much as preparatory: it shapes us into the sort of people who could one day take political action or draw moral conclusions, but it offers no concrete directives on its own authority. Schiller’s emendation, however, was mild compared to that of the first generation of the Romantics, who rejected even the pretense of Kantianism. They were devotees of Plato’s metaphysics if not his politics, and for them, the good and the beautiful were continuous with one another.
Still, the Romantic view diverges from the resistance liberals’ view, in which the aesthetic and the political collapse into a single undifferentiated slush. Plato regarded the good and the beautiful as coextensive and co-constitutive but not synonymous, and the Romantics followed his lead. Though the two categories are conceptually distinct in their eyes, the presence of one without the other is unthinkable. The schism between the beautiful and the good, so forcefully maintained by Kant, had been surpassed at last.
●
There is much in the Romantic picture that we jaded hyper-moderns would be wise to retire. Their mawkish fetishization of “the people” smacks of polite condescension; their caricature of the “elites” is unconvincing; and, in general, the idea that entire demographics share a unified character is naïve. Besides, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mania for carving the mind up into discrete faculties is by now obsolete.
But there is also much in the Romantic worldview that remains appealing. In particular, they understood the cost of amputating art from life. They knew that if literature was to be more than an effete nicety, then it would have to be part of the world, which meant it would have to wade without embarrassment into the muck of politics. Much of the best art of the centuries that followed did exactly that. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is about the founding of the Second Empire and the political about-faces that fashionable Parisians made as they weathered the onslaught of de rigueur ideologies; Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise is about the displacement of small stores by chains and the making of the modern city; Celan’s stammering poetry is about the way that the Holocaust shattered the German language. Who could possibly want to excise political meaning from these texts? If Kissick likes art that doesn’t mean a thing, then he doesn’t like most of modernity’s best art.
In an age of grand systems and multivolume treatises, the Romantics were defiantly anti-foundationalist—hence their predilection for the fragment, a form that is conspicuously unfinished. They sought no final formulas, and they would not have minded (and would probably have relished) the chaos that is loosed when art and politics are unleashed on one another. Those who would flatten aesthetics into politics and those who would prize the two apart are united in having hit upon a universal diagnosis. No matter the question, the answer is always the same: either the art is good because the politics are, or the two categories run entirely parallel to one another. But those of us who recognize that every combination of aesthetics and politics is possible can make few general claims.
Sometimes—I suspect quite often—art fails aesthetically because it fails politically: James Baldwin argued that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “a very bad novel” because of its “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality,” and much the same can be said of the literature of resistance liberalism. But sometimes art is good precisely because its politics are bad: Portnoy would be a flatter character, after all, if he were a feminist. Sometimes art is good despite its bad politics, not because of them (Anna Karenina can withstand even the saccharine sections about the moral simplicity of peasants), and sometimes art is good despite its good politics (it’s only possible to enjoy the depravity of Dangerous Liaisons when you disregard its dutifully moralizing preface). If art and politics do not have a fixed rapport with one another, there is not much we can know about their relations in advance. Our only option is a careful consideration of each work in the wild.
Unlike many MAGA boosters, I am not in the prediction business: I have no idea what cultural horrors the second Trump term will bring, though if I had to guess, I’d imagine that it will become harder for the socialites of Dimes Square to pass their desperately edgy creations off as transgressions at a time when reactionary politics are the preserve of tech oligarchs and other emissaries of the establishment. But who knows? I’m no prophet; I’m in the criticism racket. It is my job to say exactly how aesthetics and ethics intersect in specific cases. There is no purity at this violent junction, which Lionel Trilling calls “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet,” but I’m glad that art can still matter enough to wound and maim. It is a great merit to be able to bleed.
Art credit: Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1825-30.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.