Weltschmerz: Schellingian Reflections of C.D. Frederick’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Mists (1818)
Weltschmerz: Schellingian Reflections of C.D. Frederick’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Mists (1818)[1].
by P.A.Q.
Solitude in reflection upon an absolute landscape; the traveller encounters nature so as to encounter himself, for in the loneliness of his vantage point there are but two objects, the finitude of embodied existence and the infinite expanse of nature. We understand the figure to be a traveller, a wanderer who has made his way from the streets and towns somewhere below, his origin is the busy world of everyday life but he has risen up, up through the landscape, he has pierced through the veiling mists and now surveys the world. His travels have purified his horizons, they have removed the clutter of a life that is absorbed in the mundane but necessary tasks which sustain his finitude and brought him to a point where he might survey and reflect upon the site of that existence. Embodied finitude and sublime infinity reflect into one another and in that reflection the two extremes are subsumed, their interplay ceases to be that of two opposed forces and becomes a total vista.
Much is obscured from our view. The traveller is only partially revealed to us, we see him only from behind, no hint of his expression, his pose the only indication of his mood. The art historian assures us that the figure before us is the artist himself projected into the landscape[2]. Of course this may be so, yet all we see is the figure of a man absorbed in a meditative encounter with nature. We could project an image of the figure, we could posit an identity, yet this would go beyond what is present to us, it would go beyond what our perspective allows. We accept the finitude of our perspective but we allow our thoughts to explore the possibilities.
The landscape itself is only partly revealed; the wanderer’s journey has indeed provided a broader horizon then he could have found below but total clarity has not been achieved. The rocks and peaks jutting through the sea of mist at first appear as isolated and independent moments, a series of natural objects, the mist concealing the underlying unity. From our perceptive this fundamental unity cannot be known, for we cannot see what lies behind the fog, we could project from what we see towards that unity and indeed we know it even though we cant see it. But with what right do we do so, what is before us seems to be a fragmentary landscape, obscured by mist and so once more we have to accept that truth lies in excess of our perspective.
From his transcendent vantagepoint the traveller has a view whereby he can infer, yet not hold, the ultimate unity of the landscape he surveys, if he moved back down from the hights the immediacy of the things of the world would suddenly crowed around him, he would become embedded in the world, unconsciously embedded in the nature he now encounters, consumed in the infinite. Natures immediacy would prevent him from viewing it, it would prevent his reflection upon it, it is only in moving out of the realm of the everyday world that he can reach a point where he can adequately reflect upon nature. His journey has not only been a movement through space and time but also a movement in thought and perspective. So the nature he encounters is the same nature as he encounters in his everyday life, only his mode of reflection has changed.
He is still embedded in nature he is still part of what he surveys, but now nature opens up to him in an auratic sense, it returns his gaze and engages him in such a way as to… His vista is Revelation, it offers a pantheistic insight into ultimate truth, for from this rich precipice he can gaze into the infinite and see the truth of his being - wave after wave of cloud, rolling hills and swirling mists, steady earth, defiant rock and open sky an interplay of being and becoming a sea of constant change stabilised by a unity he knows but cannot see. He can look into nature and see himself, his highs and lows, his fluxing moods, the movement of his life juxtaposed against the unity of his being, a unity he knows but cannot hold. The excess which he detects in nature, that indeterminable and auratic presence evidences the truth of his finitude and also affirms his unity with the infinite; evidences the paradox of his being.
We no longer need to worry about the identity of the traveller for the traveller has become identical with his object. Now the cosmic pain[3] that is expressed by the landscape reflects to us the mood of its interlocutor just as the rich green of his costume reflects the verdural richness of the valleys which the mists conceal. The landscape is no longer fragmentary but a unified vision, an interplay of land and mist, being and becoming. The human subject coming to know itself through reflections on nature.
2. With reference to Schelling
The image is indeed a pantheist vision, it is a vision of the unity of human being and natural being, it shows the human subject, a pinnacle of natural complexity surveying nature. It is an encounter with the self; the subjects encounter with nature is an encounter with itself, it is an aspect of an infinite and self-developing substance looking back on itself, looking back at the nature from which it has emerged. As a finite aspect of an infinite nature there will always be an excess in this encounter. Knowledged can never know itself completely there is always mist, there is always limit. Religious thinkers thought that the intellectual revolutions of their day threatened to separate human existence from ultimate realities - yet this could only be the case for those whose deity is projected out beyond the frame of nature into some transcendent realm beyond space and time. Yet if nature is itself the ultimate reality then human being is always and primarily embedded within ultimate reality.
In the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling claimed that art is the only way of communicating philosophy’s highest[4] a clear display of his pessimism about the capacity to discursively articulate ultimate insights about the nature of reality. Ultimately Schelling is seeking some relation to ultimate realities, even from his earliest essay’s at Tübingen this seems to be his goal yet he also carries a pessimistic despair at ever being able to articulate his intuitions about that reality. An early essay on Plato’s Timeaus bares the following quote from Plato as a refrain “It is difficult to find the author and father of the universe, and impossible, after one has found him to proclaim him to all”[5]. Art thus becomes the vehicle whereby these ultimate realities can be brought to presence, yet Schelling does seem to have moved away from metaphysics, it is not the a transcendent god or any supernatural reality that his philosophy seeks rather nature itself which becomes that ultimate reality. In bringing forth the notion of a self-developing realm of nature, an immanent naturalist teleology he reintroduces a notion of ’spiritualised’ nature. Human life becomes part of a natural movement and the hope that we might share a common purpose with nature once again becomes a possibility. For as part of the natural realm our encounter with nature is an encounter with ourselves.
[1] My completely amateur excursion into the realm of Romantic Art is supported by a philosophical understanding of the work of Schelling rather than a thorough understanding of art history and theory. Given, however, that Frederick and Schelling where not only almost exact contemporaries but actually met in Dresden I feel that my Schellingian reflections on this piece are not entirely unusal.
[2] Craske, Mathew. Art In Europe 1700-1830: A History of the Visual Arts in an Era of Unprecedented Urban Economic Growth. Oxford University Press. Oxford. (1997). p 67-8
[3] Toman, Rolf. Neoclassicism and Romanticism: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting and Drawings 1750-1848. Könemann. Cologne. 2000. p 441.
[4] Op cit. Schelling (1800). p 14.
[5] Op cit. Baum. P 201