Conference: Phenomenology, Reality and Essences (November 16-17, 2023)

Irene Breuer – Essence intuition in Conrad-Martius’ aesthetics

Watch the talk here

Conrad-Martius’ enquiries into aesthetics can be traced back to her article “Farben. Ein Kapitel aus der Realontologie“ published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch in 1929. However, her main contributions to the subject are her reflections dating back to 1938 as published in 1962, titled “Die Irrealität des Kunstwerkes” and “Licht und Geist”. In all these essays, Conrad-Martius adheres to Husserl’s eidetic enquires. However, her research into the determination of essential contents shows a deeper insight into the process of artistic representation. She begins by distinguishing between the different ways realistic and impressionistic art represent material reality, based on their respective grasping of an “average of being (Seinsdurchschnitt)” (CM 1965c, 254). The intuitive determination of this average has the effect of disclosing the essence
of beings in their “immediate transparency”.

For this purpose, the artist should grasp the given in some “section of essence (Wesensschnitt)” and shape it into the factual material of expression, that is, through the pure expressive language of color, form and light. Here, she critically recurs to Goethe’s theory of colors to enquire into their real essence based on the inner polarity of light and darkness: In agreement with Frieling, she claims that colors “express something of the essence of the things in which they appear”, such that, they do not reveal material properties as Schapp claims, but essentially different ontic layers according to the effects that matter has on light. Hence, the sensuous givenness of manifestation coincides with the self-announcement of its essence and its essential constitutive layers.

The determination of these layers presupposes the determination of the “intuitively seized essential center of essence (Wesensmittelpunkt)”,
which not only concerns a general, typical essence of things, but also a particular one that grasps a “contingent section of the appearance (zufälligen Erscheinungsausschnitt)”. Through this continuous reference to a “center of essence” in the Aristotelian sense there emerges the unified and whole organism that characterizes the creative work. This means that contrary to her eidetic enquiry into the real reality, the essence of artworks may not only be constituted by permanent and invariable features, as Aristotle would have it, but also by exclusively contingent ones. The latter being the case, we may infer that this essence varies according to the transient features that are selected for representation, an issue that she does not touch despite its relevance for phenomenology and aesthetics alike.

In this context, we may recall that Husserl also reviews his statements in Ideas I about the invariability of essences: In the Ideas II he claims that the qualitative determinations of essences may vary according to circumstances. In any case, that what clearly distinguishes her approach from Aristotle’s and Husserl’s is the determination of contingent features as exclusive constituents of the center of the essence of artworks. In conclusion, for Conrad-Martius the specific task of art is to “transfigure reality”, which amounts to a sensuous revelation of its essence, which in turn roots in the essential primal grounds of being: This defines the “deepest truth” of art and its ethical import.