17 - On independence

Summary

Beethoven … plainly said: ‘Music must strike fire from the spirit of a man; emotionalism is only meant for women.’ Few remember what he said; the majority aim at emotional effects. They ought to be punished by being dressed in women's clothes.

(Schumann)

Towards the turn of the eighteenth century, the all-embracing male ego was discontented. It was not enough simply to absorb femininity within its body, it wanted to slip out of the body like a mirror to conceptualise the senses in a radical act of self-consciousness. Revolution was in the air and history had to be made. The body could not just lie passively in the movement of time, vibrating with its delusions of natural innocence; it needed the action of a Geist that would capture the spirit of the age and master nature as its own history. A new construction of masculinity was inspired by the French Revolution, in which man disconnected himself from nature by objectifying his body as a solid, imperturbable structure. And this new body needed a new aesthetic. To this end, the notion of ‘disinterested contemplation’ was revived by philosophers such as Kant, to enable the subject to sever all sympathetic identification with the object in an act of formal alienation. In this aesthetic, nature was deemed beautiful in its play of form precisely because it was distanced from the subject as a work of art; instead of art imitating nature, nature was redeemed by culture.