HERE can be no doubt that the process of distinction of art, which I have summarily traced from the facts and the acts with which it has been and is confused, necessitates no small mental effort; but this effort is rewarded with the freedom which it affords in respect to the many fallacious distinctions that disfigure the field of Æsthetic. Although these do not present any difficulty, indeed, at first they seduce by their very facility and deceitful self-evidence, yet they prevent all profound understanding of what art truly is. Many people, desirous of repeating vulgar traditional distinctions, voluntarily resign themselves to to knowing nothing. We, on the contrary, reject them all as a useless hindrance in the new task to which the new theoretic position that we have attained invites and leads us, and thus enjoy the greater comfort which comes from feeling rich. Wealth is not only to be obtained by acquiring many objects, but also by getting rid of all those that represent economic indebtedness.
Let us begin with the most famous of these economic debts in the circle of aesthetic: the distinction between content and form, which has caused a celebrated division of schools in the nineteenth century: the schools of the Æsthetic of the content (Gehaltsaesthetik) and that of the Æsthetic of form (Formaesthetik). The problems from which these opposed schools arose were, in general, the following: Does art consist solely of the content, or solely of the form, or of content and form together? What is the character of the content and what that of the aesthetic form? Some replied that art, the essence of art, is all in the content, defined in turn as that which pleases, or as what is moral, or as what raises man to the heaven of religion or of metaphysic, or as what is historically correct, or, finally, as what is naturally and physically beautiful. Others maintained that the content is indifferent, that it is simply a peg or hook from which beautiful forms are suspended, which alone satisfy the aesthetic spirit: unity, harmony, symmetry, and so on. And both sides attempted to attract the element that each had previously excluded from the essence of art as subordinate and secondary: those for the content admitted that it was an advantage to the content (which, according to them, was really the constitutive element of the beautiful) to adorn itself also with beautiful forms, and to present itself as unity, symmetry, harmony, etc.; and the formalists, in their turn, admitted that if art did not gain by the value of its content, its effect did, not a single value, but the sum of two values being thus set before us. These doctrines, which attained their greatest scholastic importance in Germany with the Hegelians and the Herbartians, are also to be found more or less everywhere in the history of Æsthetic, ancient, mediaeval, modern, and most modern, and what matters most, in common opinion, for nothing is more common than to hear that a play is beautiful in “form,” but a failure in “content”; that a poem is “most nobly” conceived, but “executed in ugly verse”; that a painter would have been greater had he not wasted his power as a designer and as a colourist upon “small unworthy themes,” instead of selecting rather those of a historical, patriotic, or sociological character. It may be said that fine taste and true critical sense of art have to defend themselves at every step against the perversions of judgment arising from these doctrines, in which philosophers become the crowd, and the crowd feels itself philosophical, because in agreement with those crowd-philosophers. The origin of these theories is no secret for us, because, even from the brief explanation that we have given, it is quite clear that they have sprung from the trunk of hedonistic, moralistic, conceptualistic, or physical conceptions of art: they are all doctrines which, having failed to grasp that which makes art art, were obliged somehow to regain art, which they had allowed to escape them, and to reintroduce it in the form of an accessory or accidental element; the upholders of the theory of the content conceived it as an abstract formal element, the formalists as the abstract element of the content. What interests us in those aesthetics is just this dialectic, in which the theorists of the content become formalists against their will, and the formalists upholders of the theory of the content; thus each passes over to occupy the other’s place, but to be restless there and to return to their own, which gives rise to renewed restlessness. The “beautiful forms” of Herbart do not differ in any way from the “beautiful contents” of the Hegelians, because both are nothing.