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  • Parenthyrsos:On the Medium Which Is Not One
  • Zachary Sng

In the hands of the poet, a robe [Gewand] is not a robe at all, for it hides nothing from the imagination. It is therefore of little import whether Laocoön is depicted clothed or naked in his dying agony, since every part of his body—robed, exposed, or wrapped in serpentine bulk—reveals the same depth of intolerable suffering to the poetic gaze. This is what Lessing's Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) celebrates as the greatest triumph of poetry over the visual arts: a sartorial indifference that one who works with paint or marble can only dream about (Laocoön 38; "Laokoon" 51). Caught between the insuperable materiality of his medium and the demands of his craft, the visual artist makes a series of increasingly desperate sacrifices, giving up convention for expression, and expression for beauty (Laocoön 39; "Laokoon" 51). He is compelled to portray Laocoön unclothed, although this contravenes what one would expect of a high-priest in the midst of a sacrificial ceremony. He even has to forgo any depiction of the death-scream, the most powerful expression of Laocoön's profound agony. Nothing that he offers up, though, can ever win him the same amount of freedom as the poet with his perfectly translucent signs. Unlike the visual arts, poetry inhabits the "limitless field" of the imagination and operates with incorporeal forms which, "though varied and great in number, may exist simultaneously without concealing or damaging each other, as would the objects themselves or their natural symbols in the narrow confines of space or time" (Laocoön 40; "Laokoon" 53). Where sculpture and painting [End Page 1029] labor under the burden of the material, poetry soars through realms loftier and more rarified.

In contrast to Hegel, who subsumes medial distinctions among the arts to a narrative about the history of art in general (see Aesthetics), Lessing submits the quarrel between ancients and moderns to a more fundamental question: how are the individual arts determined by their different medial possibilities and limitations? In other words, how do linguistic and visual signs differ in the ways that they interpose themselves between two poles, how do these differences affect their ability to transport from one pole to the other? Despite their disagreements about Laocoön's scream, a concern with mediality turns out to be common ground shared by Lessing and his Scottish contemporary, Adam Smith. To cry out in bodily pain is "unmanly and unbecoming," according to Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and potentially disruptive to sympathy (35). This is because sympathy is dependent on two related forms of the middle that are both put at risk by the body. The first is a necessary moderation: the propriety of passion required for sympathy can be achieved only if the sufferer produces in his pain a "pitch" that is identical with a "certain mediocrity" (32). The problem is that such a mediocrity—an intermediate that is neither too much nor too little1—is "different in different passions," for it is "high in some and low in others" (33). Sympathy is thus aligned with the concept of moderation [mesotēs] formulated in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which defines virtue as "a mean state between two vices, one of excess and one of defect." This mean is, however, "not one and the same for everybody" and must be worked out by each individual in each specific situation (2.6.5, 2.6.15).

The second form of the middle that Smithian sympathy relies upon is the medium which enables acts of imaginative identification to be performed. Sympathy only occurs when a certain set of conditions for proper sight are met: the spectators must not only be able to see suffering, but the sufferer must be able to see himself being seen by the spectator.2 Given the complex bi-directional task that sight must perform in the production of sympathy, passions that "take their origin from the body" are far less reliable than passions that originate in the imagination, because the imagination is "more ductile" and makes...

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