The Common Ground

— J. Chr. de Vries

[Posthumous Texts]

Foreword

I found the text The Common Ground among J. Chr. de Vries’ posthumous texts. I manage his estate and am authorized as the publisher to release his work. I’ve had long-standing doubts about whether I should publish the text; De Vries had always opposed its publication. On one hand, there’s the personal, thus private, matter that asks, or even dictates, not to publish the text; on the other hand, there’s the public interest that requires precisely that. The case of Franz Kafka’s estate is famous (or infamous) – he had entrusted his friend and executor, Max Brod, to destroy his unpublished manuscripts, which Brod did not do; he published them. There are more examples of authors or artists who withdrew or even destroyed their work, and it always raises the issue of public interest. Where does the boundary of copyright lie? Incidentally, this dilemma is the subject of De Vries’ text. The text takes the form of a story; you could call it an essay in the form of a story, or vice versa, a story in the form of an essay, assuming that an essay may contain fictional aspects. The title of the story alludes to this: what determines the area where the personal and the public intersect? Regardless of how you interpret it, if you are reading this, then I have apparently made a decision. For now, I imagine that, while you, as a fictional reader, consume the text, I can still contemplate what lies ahead for me…

— Iete Vreugd, Publisher; Den Haag, February 25, 2052

I — Heimat

We both gazed directly into the eyes of two small deer standing just a few meters away in the snow from the sheltered porch; for a moment, all four of us remained motionless in our spots. Suddenly, the two deer leaped away with elegant, graceful bounds and disappeared into the bushes towards the forest beside the house. Taunis Haas turned his head in my direction and looked at me with a blank expression, he had nothing to say about deer. Nor did he have any comments about dogs, cats, or birds. I had noticed that here, in the house in the Bavarian Forest that Haas rented, there were far fewer songbirds than at my country house in the Dordogne. Perhaps it was due to the different vegetation. There were mainly crows, an occasional pigeon, magpie, or jay, but no blackbirds or thrushes. The house that Haas rented was located about ten kilometers outside the town of Viechtach, not far from the Czech border. The house consisted of a main building with two separate living levels, each equipped with a living room, kitchen, bedrooms, a bathroom, and an additional toilet; there was also a basement and an attic. Next to the main building was a garage with a studio on top, containing a living/bedroom, kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower and toilet. Technically, Haas rented this studio, but when the owners were not around, which was the case for much of the year, he could use the main building. Both buildings had whitewashed walls, partially adorned with ochre-yellow wooden paneling. The lower level had a spacious, partially covered terrace, and there was also a bay window with glass walls on two sides. A separate wood stove was situated there.

I felt like a stranger in Haas’s house. He welcomed me, but I didn’t feel welcomed at all. He said it with the same empty gaze as he did later with the deer. Maybe I was a deer. Or a dog. It was January and cold. I had traveled by train from Brive to Regensburg in the second week of January, a journey of over twelve hours through Paris, Stuttgart, and Munich, and from there, by taxi to the house near Viechtach. The taxi couldn’t go the final stretch to the house due to the snowfall overnight. Fortunately, I only had a backpack and a small suitcase with me. And snow boots, as Haas had warned me. The house was situated in a small, forest-surrounded valley, where two other homes were located, a simple farmhouse, and another house. The wind was blowing strongly, and the air was icy cold. A weather vane on the farmhouse’s chimney was spinning around. The creaking and squeaking reminded me of the train journey; the train had departed around six in the morning, and I had left my house in Bonnemort at four in the morning by taxi, dozing off half-asleep on the train. As you are half-aware of the rhythmic rattling of the wheels, after a while, it seems like you are traveling in the opposite direction, a kind of ‘Täuschung’, a hallucination of your mind. My eyes began to tear up, and I felt the warm tears freezing on my cheeks. Luckily, the house was only about a hundred meters away. I could barely ring the doorbell due to my semi-frozen fingers.

Half a year earlier, I had received an email from Haas in my house near Bonnemort. The email contained a text, consisting of twelve relatively short fragments, which documented a discussion between two individuals named R. and Z. The discussion revolved primarily around the topics of art, quality, truth, and power. Haas had provided me with very little background information about these two individuals, leaving it up to me to decide what to do with it. He did mention that the text had once been on his website, but he had since withdrawn it, along with all of his other texts. He no longer wanted his texts in the public domain. His fragments seemed to be a response to the text I had sent him approximately a month earlier, an essay on those exact subjects discussed by R. and Z. I wasn’t confident in the quality of my own text and was curious about his feedback. I should have known that Haas would respond in his typical self-assured style. I decided not to reply to his text immediately but to first determine the form in which I would respond.

In the autumn, I devised a plan. I would combine his text and mine into a new text, an essay in the form of a story. I emailed him my proposal and received a prompt response: he asked if I would like to come stay with him in Viechtach so that we could discuss the texts and my proposal. It was winter, a time when it was cold enough to think clearly. And, by the way, he insisted that his contribution should, under no circumstances, be published.

“Is Reilwies your Heimat? Or Wiesing, Viechtach, or maybe the Bayerische Wald?” We spoke in English, even though Haas could read Dutch well, and I had a certain level of understanding of German, but neither of us spoke each other’s language fluently.
“Heimat is a complex concept; it’s more than just the place you live, more than the place you feel at home; it encompasses your roots, your culture, your memories – your life, really.” Haas looked at me briefly and continued, “But neither this area, nor this village or house is my Heimat, even though I hold that Linden tree at the beginning of the driveway so dear… Die Liebe liebt das Wandern. For me, Heimat is the act of being on the way, not the possession or attribute itself.” He gazed inward for a while at the snow-covered valley in front of us.
“Is that why you removed all your texts from your website, because that website was a false Heimat?”
“That’s an elegant way to look at it, but the reason for taking down the texts is more prosaic.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he remained silent. “We’ll have to talk about it sometime,” I finally said, “especially since you believe you have the right to deny me the publication of my text.”
“Kommt Zeit, kommt Tat,” he replied with a sly smile. His sense of humor, as I had experienced before, was unparalleled.
I raised both my hands in a gesture of helplessness but decided not to pursue the matter further.

Our first conversation after my arrival yielded nothing; it seemed like Haas was evasive. I wasn’t sure whether this was because of me or if he was uncertain about something. I also didn’t sense any openness in him to discuss it, so I waited to see what would transpire. The following morning, before breakfast, I took a walk through the forest, which was a challenging endeavor due to the deep snow. I reached a frozen stream after trudging along, and only then did I notice the silence; the sound of the water had ceased. Perhaps I needed to first thaw the frozen stream within Haas to get our conversation going. It seemed like his ‘Sehnsucht’ (longing) had frozen to the point where only the snow could grip it. I walked back to the house where Haas had set up breakfast.

We sat in the small, pentagonal bay window at the front of the house, with a simple, round table where we had our breakfast. The windows in the four corners turned the intimate bay window into a bright space, making it a pleasant place to be. After breakfast, at Haas’s request, we moved to the bay window at the back of the house, which was much darker due to the surrounding forest. But this bay window was more spacious. Haas had lit the wood stove, and it was comfortably warm inside. On the table in the middle of the bay window, he had placed a manuscript, which he handed to me. “A new version,” he said. “Read it through first, and we’ll discuss it later this afternoon.”

I opened it and immediately noticed that the new text was much more extensive than the version he had sent me by email, now consisting of twenty-four fragments. The names had also been changed; R. was now Robin M., and Z. had become Zoē W. The first section seemed to be broadly similar to the earlier version, though the order was different in places. Haas suggested that I use the rest of the morning to read the text, and we could discuss it after lunch. Without waiting for my response, he left the bay window and disappeared somewhere in the house. He didn’t reappear for the rest of the morning. I read the text, carefully compared it to the initial version, made notes, and jotted down some questions. Occasionally, I walked to the kitchen, made an espresso, and smoked a cigar on the porch. Around half-past twelve, I had had enough; I believed I had sufficiently understood the text. I sat down on the porch for the second time, with a double espresso and a cigar. I had taken only two sips and a single puff from my cigar when I saw a man approaching the house on the path, skiing. Cross-country skiers, I deduced from the alternating upward movement of the heels. I could tell he was a skilled cross-country skier from his smooth movements. The man wore a backpack, a hat, and ski goggles. It wasn’t until he was very close to the house that I recognized him as Taunis Haas. He had apparently been shopping.

We had lunch in the same small bay window where we had breakfast. Haas had bought hard rolls, cheese, cold cuts, fresh orange juice, and six eggs, of which he had prepared an omelet for both of us. When I asked if he had skied all the way to Viechtach, he initially responded with just a wry smile. But after a few bites of his omelet, he said he had gone to Wiesen, which was only a few kilometers from the house, and there, he knew of a farm where they sold the necessary provisions. He had also stopped by the fire department to inquire if they could clear the path to the house of snow. It was quite inconvenient without a car. They would likely come by this afternoon, or else, tomorrow morning.

After lunch, we returned to the other bay window. We had just settled in with the texts spread around us when we heard a tremendous commotion from outside, a noise resembling a tractor, with a loud rattling as a counterpoint. We went to the porch and saw a massive contraption coming up the path, the promised snowplow. The machine had menacing-looking blades that whirled around wildly and a tall pipe that pointed towards the adjacent forest. From it, a deluge of snow sprayed over the trees. Suddenly, a number of crows took flight from the trees, seemingly startled by the unexpected snow shower. Cawing loudly, the crows circled closely above the man operating the snow blower, and then, with a final burst of caws, they flew away. Die Krähen warfen Bäll’ und Schlossen auf seinen Hut…, Haas quoted from somewhere in his memory.

II — Translation

The text jumped right into the conversation, with no title, context, or introductory explanation. It was just a dialogue between two individuals, of whom we only knew the first names and, presumably (but I’m not entirely sure about this, to be honest), the first letter of their last names. The numbering of the fragments is my own. The text was originally written in English, undoubtedly a translation from Haas’s original German, and had been translated into Dutch by me.

• [01]

• Zoē W. — ‘A Chinese philosopher speaks Chinese, but what does he say?’
• Robin M. — ‘What the Chinese philosopher says cannot be separated from the fact that he says it in Chinese.’

[Since these are two quotations from Igor Stravinsky in his ‘Dialogues and a Diary’, published together with Robert Craft in 1963, I have left them in English in my Dutch translation.]

• Zoē W. — Are you suggesting that a translation inevitably fails because we miss too much of the style and context?
• Robin M. — No, of course not, but we must be very careful about the meaning we attach to that translation.
• Zoē W. — Well, those statements by Stravinsky about Schönberg and his own statement about that Chinese philosopher will be sufficiently close in English, German, and Chinese, so there can be no misunderstandings here, right? Or am I mistaken?
• Robin M. — I don’t know; the English and German versions will undoubtedly be close since they are Germanic languages, but as for Chinese, I’m not so sure. I don’t know how irony works in those statements in Chinese.
• Zoē W. — As if Chinese culture doesn’t know irony. And besides, even for those proficient in English, it’s still a question whether that irony will be recognized. If it’s even there. Maybe that’s your thing.
• Robin M. — Don’t you see any irony in this?
• Zoē W. — Not in the first statement. Not necessarily in the second statement.
• Robin M. — But, of course, it’s about the combination of the two. The second one, due to the first, takes on an ironic connotation.
• Zoē W. — Because you know where these statements come from; the first one is not really from Schönberg but is attributed to him by Stravinsky. Stravinsky is essentially talking to himself. That’s what makes it ironic. This irony only works within this context.

“Am I correct in saying that these Robin and Zoē are two fictional characters?”
I asked.

“Why do you think that? It’s not the case; they are two real individuals, students from my aesthetics class,” Haas replied.

“Because of the beginning, they both start with a quotation; it’s quite an unusual way to start a discussion, it seems scripted.”

“It was scripted; by me. I had them act out all those differences between Schönberg and Stravinsky like a little play when this topic came up in class. Such as ‘Schönberg’ saying, The way to the future, and then ‘Stravinsky’ saying, The uses of the past. Or An inclusive view of the past versus An exclusive (highly selective) view of the past. And so on. I used the one about the Chinese philosopher as the last one. I compiled all the sessions into a report.”

I had my doubts, but I decided to keep them to myself. “Well, let’s move on to the next fragment then.”

• [02]

• Robin M. — There’s a very interesting issue concerning a quote by Arnold Schönberg that Pierre Boulez references in his text Schönberg est mort from 1951. He translated the quote into French, which reads as follows: Dans mes premières œuvres du nouveau style, ce sont surtout de très fortes licences expressives qui m’ont guidé en particulier et en général dans l’élaboration formelle, mais aussi, en non pas en dernier lieu, un sens pour la forme et la logique hérité de la tradition et bien éduqué par l’application et la conscience. The complete text by Boulez is translated into German by Bärenreiter Verlag and published in the 1979 collection Pierre Boulez, Anhaltspunkte. The German version of the quote reads as follows: In meinen ersten Werken des neuen Stils sind es vor allem sehr starke ausdrucksmäßige Freiheiten, die mich sowohl im Besonderen wie im Allgemeinen bei der Ausarbeitung der Form geleitet haben, aber auch – und nicht zuletzt – ein von der Tradition ererbter und durch Fleiß und Gewissenhaftigkeit anerzogener Formsinn. However, the original text by Schönberg is different: In meinen ersten Werken des neuen Stils haben mich insbesondere sehr starke Ausdrucks-gewalten bei der Formgebung im einzelnen und im ganzen geleitet und nicht zuletzt ein durch die Tradition gewonnener und durch Fleiß und Gewissenhaftigkeit gut ausgebildeter Sinn für Form und Logik. This quote is from 1925 and was published a year later in the article Gesinnung oder Erkentnisse in the Jahrbuch 1926, 25 Jahre Neue Musik by Universal-Edition, uitgeverij Universal-Edition.
• Zoē W. — It’s a tremendous blunder on the part of Bärenreiter to create a back-translation instead of using the original text. The most absurd aspect of this issue is that the Bärenreiter translation means something different from the original version. The main difference in meaning lies in the phrase sowohl im Besonderen wie im Allgemeinen bei der Ausarbeitung der Form in the back-translated text. Here, the distinction between ‘the particular and the general’ refers to the process of elaborating the form. In Schönberg’s original text (where it says der Formgebung im einzelnen und im ganzen), this distinction pertains to the technique of form itself. The original text also does not mention starke Freiheiten (licenses) but rather starke Ausdrucks-gewalten, which directly refers to form-building. Nevertheless, this is a mistake that is unrelated to the translation issue per se.
• Robin M. — It clearly illustrates the problem we encounter when translating. If you’re not careful for a moment, things can go wrong. In this case, it’s akin to a game of ‘Chinese whispers’, which exacerbates the matter.

“Het betreft inderdaad eerder een vertalingsfout dan een vertalingsprobleem,” zei Haas. “En het geeft ook aan hoe oppervlakkig er over het vertalen wordt gedacht. Dat niemand op het idee kwam om de oorspronkelijke tekst te zoeken — het automatisme dat erachter verborgen ligt.”

“It is indeed more of a translation error than a translation problem,” Haas said. “It also indicates how superficially translation is often considered. The fact that no one thought to look for the original text is the hidden automatism behind it.”
“Perhaps they did try to find the original text and were unsuccessful. Back-translating is then less effort. Or, another possibility is that they wanted to stay close to Boulez’s translation, which is, after all, colored by his interpretation.”

“I don’t believe that. They could have provided the original text as a footnote if that were the case. I think it was laziness or ignorance. It wasn’t the only mistake Bärenreiter made in that issue. In that publication, the source citation claims that Boulez delivered his text during the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in the summer of 1951, after Schönberg’s death. However, the summer courses in Darmstadt took place from June 22 to July 10, 1951, and Schönberg died on July 17 of that year. So either Boulez had an exceptionally prophetic vision, or wishful thinking was at play. I inquired about this via email with the Ferienkurse organization, and the person who responded, Jürgen Krebber, described it as a ‘Sandwich Monkey’, as you would say in Dutch [’Broodje aap’]. The first time Boulez appeared in Darmstadt was a year later, in 1952, and the text was never delivered there.”

Well, the bold monkey that came out of the sleeve wasn’t composed of the two errors from that renowned publishing house. It was the joke that Haas decided to pin on my sleeve next. This fragment, which I numbered as [03], he had added to the earlier version he had sent me in the summer. The reason for this was immediately clear to me. But first, I will present Haas’s fragment without further comment. I don’t want to influence the reader too much.

• [03]
  
• Robin M. — The next quote is from the story ‘The Last Story’ by the Dutch writer J. Chr. de Vries.
• Zoē W. — Okay, the quote: Alle verhalen zijn al verteld, ontelbare malen. Over de dieren, de Aap, de Beer en de Coyote; over de bomen, de Doodsbeenderenboom, de Eik en de Fijnspar; over Grappen, Herders, Imkers en Jagers; over Ketels, Leder en Manden; Natheid, Openheid, Popsterren, Querulanten, Raadsels, Stupiditeiten, Tafels, Uren, Vrouwen, Wolken; over Xenos, Yin & Yang, Zeno. Our task was to translate this into English. The translation reads as follows: All the stories have already been told, countless times. About animals, the Ape, the Bear and the Coyote; about trees, the Bones tree, the Oak and the Fir; about Jokes, Shepperds, Beekeepers and Hunters; about Cauldrons, Leather and Baskets; Wetness, Openness, Popstars, Troublemakers, Riddles, Stupidities, Tables, Hours, Women, Clouds; about Xenos, Yin & Yang, Zeno.
• Robin M. — That’s a poor, because literal translation that doesn’t take the alphabetical structure into account. The following translation does and is by far the preferable one in my view: All stories have already been told, countless times. About animals, the Ape, the Bear, and the Coyote; about trees, the Dogwood, the Elm, and the Fir; about Games, Hunters, Illustrators, and Jokes; about Kettles, Leather, and Machines; Noices, Openness, Popstars, Queer People, Riddles, Stupidities, Tables, Universe, Values, Women; about Xenos, Yin & Yang, Zeno.
• Zoē W. — I disagree, the translation should be literal, and you should be able to rely on it being exactly as in the original text. If the alphabetical structure disappears, it can be explained in a footnote. It’s not that difficult to imagine a series of words arranged in some order. The same goes for wordplay.
• Robin M. — So poetry becomes untranslatable.
• Zoē W. — Yes, translated poetry, I see it more as a variation, a kind of paraphrase.
• Robin M. — So translators should be poets themselves. There’s something to be said for that, but our quote is not poetry; it’s a story, fiction. In my view, the translator can play with it as long as it’s in the spirit of the story. The translation should be as organic and alive as the original text; otherwise, you create a corpse.
• Zoē W. — Then you might as well write your own story. Why go through the detour of translating an existing text?
• Robin M. — Because we want to learn from the great storytellers. Borges wrote in Spanish, Chekhov in Russian, I don’t know those languages, so I’m grateful for a translation, and preferably one where the sentences flow well.
• Zoē W. — A good translator writes in well-constructed sentences. That’s not the point here. The question is how much they can deviate from the original text, how much they can add and remove. I understand that this can be tricky, especially with humor based on wordplay, but then the translator should explain in a note how it all works.
• Robin M. — It can be the other way around as well, so keep the alphabet in the alphabetical list and provide the literal translation in a note. With wordplay, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and then you can’t avoid a footnote.
• Zoē W. — Important texts need to be translated tightly, for leisure reading, it’s not necessary. What kind of texts does De Vries actually write?

“Yes, what kind of texts does De Vries actually write?” My sarcastic undertone was hard to miss. Haas understood what I was getting at.

“Sorry, but I couldn’t resist this one; the example was too usable, and I thought you might appreciate the joke,” Haas grinned broadly, a gesture he didn’t often make, intended as a form of apology.

He knew, of course, that I would realize he had concocted this fragment himself. I had written my ‘Last Story’ two years ago, while that little class with Robin and Zoē could have taken place up until 2011 and probably earlier. He had taken his website with all his texts offline in 2011. The question that remained now was whether all those fragments of Robin and Zoē were products of his imagination. He had denied it earlier.

“I still need to do some shopping; the road is finally clear,” Haas suddenly said. “We can continue with this topic of ‘Translation’, or we can discuss it further tonight, whichever you prefer. You can also come along, of course.”

“I suggest we finish this topic first; it shouldn’t take more than half an hour. After that, I’ll take a bath. I’m too tired from the journey to go to Viechtach now,” I replied.

• [04]
  
• Zoē W. — There’s an intriguing issue related to the renowned Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. He claimed to have proven the so-called ABC conjecture, and the proof was presented in a five-hundred-page-long text. The problem was that no one could understand his proof.
• Robin M. — Hmm, and how does this relate to our topic of translation?
• Zoē W. — It’s about translating from mathematics.
• Robin M. — But that can only be in mathematical terms and formulas. Or do you mean translating from mathematics into everyday language?
• Zoē W. — No, I mean translating from a specific mathematical language into a language that other mathematicians can comprehend. Because, if I understood correctly, that was the issue. He had designed specific mathematical tools with which he claimed to provide his proof. I’m not a mathematician, so I don’t know about this, but the issue is clear in itself. Someone claims a proof, but that person is the only one who can follow the proof. Is that proof then valid or not?
• Robin M. — Alright, let’s ‘translate’ this issue into our topic. Someone speaks a specific language that only they understand and writes a story in it. No one else can read it. What does this story mean? And to whom does it mean anything? I would think it means something only to the author. It doesn’t communicate. That happens only when someone else learns that language. Going back to Mochizuki, that proof still needs to be confirmed, or else it doesn’t count. Truth needs to be shared.
• Zoē W. — That means Galilei was wrong with his theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around.
• Robin M. — No, it doesn’t mean that at all. Galilei wasn’t alone; it was primarily the Roman Catholic Church that found his views blasphemous. He was able to smuggle his manuscript to the Netherlands to be published there. Shinichi Mochizuki is truly alone.
• Zoē W. — I disagree. 1 + 1 = 2, even if no one else agrees.
• Robin M. — That’s purely theoretical!
• Zoē W. — Well, not really. I’ve experienced this before, where someone who didn’t agree with my statement used as an argument that I was the only one saying it, even though my statement was demonstrably correct. But it just didn’t suit the other person.
• Robin M. — In that case, the other person was using a fallacy, but that’s not the subject. Anyway, we’re drifting away because this is about the concepts of truth and power. I assume they will come up again at some point.

I was trying to remember when this issue with Mochizuki was happening, but I couldn’t recall it, and I would have to look it up on the internet later. However, I suspected that it was after 2011. The next fragment was certainly from a later date. It came from a letter from me to Haas, dated 2013. I had raised the issue, but he omitted an essential part of it.

• [05]
  
• Zoē W. — More about Japan: it concerns a text by the Dutch essayist Rudy Kousbroek, about the Japanese writer Junichirō Tanizaki. The text, Donker licht (Dark Light), is included in the collection Restjes, Anathema’s 9. The main subject of the text is the different ways in which Western and Eastern cultures deal with light — and therefore darkness or shadow, at least during Tanizaki’s time, the first half of the twentieth century. In his text, Kousbroek briefly digresses, and that immediately touches upon our topic of the phenomenon of translation. Kousbroek quotes himself from an interview he gave in 2002.
• He discusses an English translation of Tanizaki’s essay In’ei raisan, In Praise of Shadows. In this translation, there is an extensive description of the traditional Japanese toilet, a wooden structure outside the house. Quoting from Kousbroek’s text: ‘With that passage, something peculiar is going on. In Edward Seidensticker’s English translation, In Praise of Shadows, it says: The novelist Sōseki Natsume counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, “a physiological delight’” he called it. In Japanese, it literally says that Natsume compared it to the pleasant sensation of being buried alive. The translator probably thought: Never mind, I won’t try to translate that literally. Japanese is very difficult, at least for me. You can often translate a sentence in three or four ways, and all ways are plausible, or in no way at all.’ A beautiful example of poetic license…
• Robin M. — And what is your point? That the English translator should have translated that Japanese sentence literally? For what purpose?
• Zoē W. — This seems to be a repetition of a previous discussion. Yes, indeed, I think that the translator should have explained the Japanese context in a footnote. This is what is written, and at least this way we learn something about that culture.
• Robin M. — I think you could be doing that forever. There is always something in every expression that means something slightly different in one language compared to another. All those footnotes disrupt the flow of the argument and, in the end, yield too little. Especially for languages that are far apart, like Japanese and Dutch.
• Zoē W. — I think that’s not so bad; you can put those footnotes in a different, smaller font. You can skip them if you want to keep the reading flowing. I don’t understand your problem. Can’t you choose?
• Robin M. — Even concrete, everyday statements can mean a world of difference. Take, for instance, the question Kom je morgen bij mij op de koffie? (Are you coming over for coffee tomorrow?). In German, that could be translated as Trinkst du morgen eine Tasse Kaffee mit mir? (Will you drink a cup of coffee with me tomorrow?). But you lose the connotation that exists in Dutch. Op de koffie komen (coming over for coffee) in Dutch also means missing out on something. So, this invitation has a sarcastic undertone. It’s not a genuine invitation, at least it doesn’t have to be.
• Zoē W. — Well, that sarcastic undertone would certainly be evident from the entire context of the text. You should explain it only when it’s there. But if it’s just about having a cup of coffee, then it’s not necessary. You can make an issue out of everything. But I agree that we’re repeating ourselves.

“You used a quote from my letter to you from 2013. But you omitted the punchline. I checked Kousbroek’s comment about ‘being buried alive’ with one of my Japanese students. There’s nothing in the Japanese text that comes even close to that. The only explanation could be that Kousbroek misinterpreted the description of the toilet, which is four wooden walls in the open nature, as a coffin, hence the ‘being buried alive.’ I wrote that to you as well.”

“Oh, don’t get so worked up. I used your letter to explore the topic of translation with my students. It was about the issue of untranslatability: what remains when the untranslatable elements are adjusted? The fact that Kousbroek apparently didn’t understand Japanese wasn’t relevant to that discussion. It wasn’t about your letter.”

“That may be the case, but you’re misleading me with your so-called students. The last three fragments are all based on information from after you withdrew your texts in 2011. Mochizuki, I just checked, took place in 2012. That letter about Kousbroek was from 2013. Why don’t you just admit that Robin and Zoē are your inventions? It doesn’t matter for the discussion on translation and other topics, does it?”
Haas shook his head. “It’s true that I withdrew all my texts from my website in 2011, the entire website, in fact. But I continued with that class, including Robin and Zoē, for over two more years until the summer of 2013. Robin and Zoē were indeed my students, and I discussed and debated all these issues with them in our class. Yes, I paraphrased the reports I made of that class in a new text, and I took some liberties to create a useful text, but only to further the discussion on these topics. You can choose to believe it or not; that’s up to you. Now, I’m off to the village for groceries. See you later.”

I had no desire to go with him to Viechtach; I was going to take a bath to relax. I heard him leaving the house, starting the car, and driving away. The bathroom was quite spacious, equipped with a bathtub, a separate shower, a bidet, and a toilet. I filled the bathtub, added a drop of lavender oil, and settled in. After half an hour, I’d had enough, stepped out of the bath, dried myself, and grabbed clean clothes from my suitcase. I walked to the kitchen, took a cold can of beer from the fridge, and settled on the veranda. There, I lit a cigar and gazed into the valley. It had become dark by then, and I could only see the vague outlines of the forest surrounding the valley. After a while, I noticed something strange. It hadn’t caught my attention immediately, but now I really saw it: a yellowish moving object among the trees. ‘Could that be a UFO?’ I jokingly thought. But after some time, I got up to get a better look at the light. It was indeed a will-o’-the-wisp! The light appeared to be moving, sometimes disappearing for a moment but then reappearing. Despite its motion, it didn’t seem to be changing its position significantly. I couldn’t leave it alone, so I walked off the terrace and headed towards the will-o’-the-wisp through the driveway and the path into the forest. It took a while to find it, hidden behind the trees. It turned out to be a street lamp. The ‘motion’ was caused by the branches of the trees swaying in the wind.

I had quickly walked back to the house. Sitting in the chair on the veranda once more, I realized that I didn’t want to be caught by Haas during my little expedition. I had no desire to confess my mistake about the ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ to him. A while later, I saw the headlights of his car turning onto the driveway. I put on my most relaxed expression. Haas had brought, among other things, two pre-baked pizzas, which he immediately put in the oven. He also brought two ready-made salads. He stored the rest of the groceries. Haas suggested that we eat the pizzas and salads in the dungeon at the back while continuing our conversation on the next topic.

“The next topic is that of ‘interest’,” Haas said after taking his first bite of pizza. “In his Critique of Judgement Kant uses this term to make a fundamental distinction between the three aesthetic judgements. The German word he uses for the English concept ‘interest’ is ‘Interesse’. Just to be safe, I added a note from the ‘translator’… “

(Well, this is, of course, the poetic license that I wished to allow myself because Haas didn’t use the Dutch word ‘belang’, we were speaking in English, and in that language, the word is ‘interest’, which is close to the German term.)

“Before you kick against the pricks again, in the first fragment, I used two terms from the text you sent me last year, so those terms weren’t used in my class, but the concepts ‘object’ and ‘subject’ were.”

III — The Interest

• [06]
  
• Zoē W. — To say something meaningful about the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘power’, and thus ultimately about the artistic quality judgement, we must first delve deeper into the concept of ‘interest’. To do that, we need to explore the difference between the concepts ‘object’ and ‘subject’. This is related to two other concepts that date back to the beginning of our eras: in actus versus in effectus. This distinction was made in the first century by the Spanish-Roman rhetorician Quintilian. Art that leads to an object, such as a painting, sculpture, or novel, he calls in effectus. Art that takes place in an action, for example, a concert or dance performance, is then called in actus. We can call ‘in effectus’ objectwise and ‘in actus’ subjectwise.
• Robin M. — I can understand ‘objectwise’ since artistic actions lead to an ‘object’, but you’ll need to explain ‘subjectwise’.
• Zoē W. — The action involves subjects who interact with each other, react to one another, and this interaction is central. I’ll give you a simple example. When a (small) group of people are having a conversation or a discussion, and at some point, one of them talks about one of the others in the third person, this is an objectwise action. For example: John can’t handle criticism. When John is addressed in the second person, John, I think you can’t handle criticism, this is subjectwise. In an objectwise action, a person, but it can also relate to a subject or a process, is turned into an ‘object’; it becomes a ‘thing’. In the case of people, this can, in the worst case, lead to a form of dehumanization.
• Robin M. — I understand this, but it’s still a problematic distinction. Especially French philosophers in the previous century problematized this distinction because, according to them, it’s ultimately difficult to separate one concept from the other. Let’s take the example of the Mexican Flu around 2009. From a scientific perspective, the virus is considered an object because it comes from nature, and then governments worldwide take measures because the World Health Organization [WHO] labeled the epidemic as a ‘pandemic’. The criticism could then be that the virus – the ‘object’ – and the measures – taken by the ‘subjects’ – ultimately form a hybrid entity. The ‘object’ is more than just the ‘thing’; it encompasses a multitude of issues, insights, research, measures, legal consequences, and so on. The distinction is artificial and ultimately clouds more than it helps to solve things. Bruno Latour then talks about ‘quasi-objects’.
• Zoē W. — Yes, I’ve come across that term, and I think it originated with Michel Serres. I understand that criticism because, of course, all subjects are ultimately ‘hybrid’. However, that’s not what I’m aiming at. What concerns me is the moment at which something becomes an object or, more precisely, is designated as an object. In your example, the virus is not an object to me but part of a global praxis of how we deal with the environment, economy, politics, law, science – in all these fields, I advocate for a subjectwise analysis and action, while the established practice is mostly objectwise. My distinction is polemical.
• Robin M. — Well, we’ll see. You claim that creating a painting or sculpture is objectwise because the artistic action leads to an object, in contrast to a concert that unfolds in time and only exists in our memory after it’s over. But for that concert, a score was used, and that is indeed an object. Both visual arts and performing arts are hybrid forms, which don’t ultimately differ much from each other.
• Zoē W. — You’re making the same mistake as before. The sheet music itself is indeed an object. The musicians’ instruments are objects too. Just like the easel, the brush, and the paint. But what matters is how and for what purpose these objects are used. To do this, I distinguish between the creation of the painting or the sheet music, which is an artistic act, and what happens with them afterward. The painting is an object that may be sold, for instance. The sheet music isn’t sold but used for the concert, just like the instruments. That’s where the crucial difference lies. The painting is material; the concert is immaterial.
• Robin M. — No! The painting doesn’t have to be sold at all; it can be displayed somewhere, and then someone looks at it. I call that an artistic act. It’s not fundamentally different from listening to a concert. Tickets are bought for both, just as they are for the museum where the painting is exhibited. In both cases, there are financial aspects associated with the artwork, but they are independent of the artistic act.
• Zoē W. — That means we need to further examine that artistic act. Even a concert can ultimately turn out to be in effectus. It’s not just about the act itself, but also about the context in which the act takes place.

I actually found it quite endearing how Haas used the Mexican Flu to explain something, even though he could have used the much better example of Covid-19. But for some reason, he seems determined to stick to the fairy tale of his aesthetics class. It’s clear that the text I sent him ended up in his own text on a fundamental level. That’s certainly flattering, but why this almost obstinate attempt to downplay the compliment, as if he had thought of everything himself ten years ago, through his so-called students? For now, I decided to ignore this issue.
“Do you have any comments, or shall we move straight on to the next topic?” Haas looked at me with his inscrutable deer-like eyes.
“Let’s move on to the next fragment,” I replied. “I’m curious if I’ll come across any familiar insights.” I couldn’t resist.

• [07]
  
• Zoē W. — We need to further discuss the artistic act, viewed in light of ‘virtue’ and the ‘good’. By virtue, I mean, following the Ancient Greeks, ‘aretē’, or ‘excellence’, so not what it’s commonly understood as today, a form of bourgeois respectability. Virtue, as Aristotle writes, takes place in the act. It’s not an inherent quality but something you do, and it occurs when you do it. Therefore, the good arises because you do something good.
• Robin M. — That seems to resonate with what Alain Badiou says about truth, that it can occur in an ‘event’ and then disappears when it’s named. It’s complex, but that’s what I get from it.
• Zoē W. — Yes, and it also seems similar to what Hannah Arendt writes about the good, that it disappears the moment it’s given a name. We should not aim for the good, as it would then result from a purpose. Kant also writes something similar. That we should pursue the good out of duty to the law. But not as a ‘propensity’. Kant gives the example of a merchant who charges his customers fair prices, meaning a viola player can expect the same price as a composer. But, Kant asks, does this merchant do it out of duty to the law or because he ultimately benefits from it? The latter, of course, making his honesty spring from a propensity. Examples such as a white lie for a good cause or running a red light in an emergency are mentioned. This ultimately leads to Kant’s formulation of his famous categorical imperative. However, just as you’re not a Badiou expert, I’m not a Kant expert, so perhaps I’m just spouting nonsense.
• Robin M. — If you’re speaking only for yourself, I agree.
• Zoē W. — You’re quite witty.
• Robin M. — Indeed, I am. But I suggest we keep the great philosophers out of this and continue speaking purely for ourselves. What’s the next aspect we should discuss now? Are we ready to talk about the concept of ‘interest’?
• Zoē W. — Yes, we must now address the concept of ‘interest’. I consider something an interest when there is some desire involved. It can be a political interest, a financial interest, an educational interest, a societal interest — but in all cases, it pertains to a legal interest. Because there is always a public element involved, some legal principle is always associated with it.
• Robin M. — Desire can occur outside the realm of the law, can’t it? I feel like having a beer and walk to the fridge.
• Zoē W. — In the private domain, that might be conceivable, but even there, the law applies. However, I was referring to the public space, where there is always an inevitable legal connection, whether you like it or not.
• Robin M. — Why do you insist on associating this concept with the law when talking about ‘interest’? Can’t we just discuss these various interests without categorizing it under the law? It seems as if you want to place this concept under the umbrella of the law. Why is that?
• Zoē W. — Yes, that’s correct. I think when we try to formulate criteria, ultimately for the artistic quality judgement, we should do it as elementarily as possible, meaning with as few different elements as possible. Occam’s razor, so to speak.
• Robin M. — You’ll have to explain that ‘razor’, although I think I understand it. But you still need to clarify why this is essential for the concept of ‘interest’ and why this concept is even relevant to our discussion.
• Zoē W. — I’ll come back to that razor when we specifically discuss the quality judgement, the specific criteria.
• Robin M. — Fine. But now, this ‘interest’, what exactly do you want to convey with it? For example, do you mean to say that the ‘good’ is not connected to an interest? Given what you said earlier about Hannah Arendt and Kant. That doesn’t seem like a tenable statement.
• Zoē W. — No, that would be untenable. The good is undoubtedly linked to an interest. With Arendt and Kant, the point is that you don’t make that interest your goal; it’s more of a consequence. At least, that’s how I understand it. I want to use the concept of ‘interest’ to make a fundamental distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘power’. I’ll explain that shortly. The fact that interest is fundamentally a legal interest only makes that distinction clearer. That’s the razor.
• Robin M. — I doubt the latter, as there are also personal interests in the private sphere. I just mentioned that beer.
• Zoē W. — Once again, I’m specifically concerned with the public space where the artistic quality judgement is passed, for instance, in an examination or a subsidy application. In the end, there’s always a legal interest in play, and that interest allows for the fundamental separation between, on the one hand, the judgement of those interests, the extent to which they are served, and on the other hand, the artistic quality judgement, which, by definition, is independent of those interests.
• Robin M. — That remains to be seen, but I believe we’re skipping a few steps. We were discussing the concepts of truth and power. For that, the concept of interest would be crucial. Well, go ahead then, how does that work?
• Zoē W. — In a nutshell: truth is always, and by definition, without interest; and power is always linked to an interest.

“Robin is quite a sarcastic fellow, or am I wrong? Just shooting arrows all the time,” I said.
Haas looked at me pityingly. “How can you be so sure that Robin is a man? Robin Hood was indeed a man.”
That hit the mark, I had indeed been thinking of that famous bandit leader and had totally forgotten that it was a gender-neutral name. I raised my hands apologetically and said, “Mea culpa. But aside from that, is it correct?
“I don’t think so, Robin is a critical mind, and by the way, they get along with each other excellently. Let’s continue.”

• [08]
  
• Zoē W. — Because truth is disinterested, and power is always linked to an interest, both concepts are diametrically opposed to each other. Truth cannot transform into power, and vice versa. Truth is, by definition, powerless, and power does not possess truth.
• Truth is, therefore, not related to desire; I do not desire the truth. However, the truth can be of interest; it can arouse an interest and prove to be of great significance. Truth is indicative, and power is imperative – something must be done.
• You cannot force anyone to understand that the statement 1 + 1 = 2 is true. You can force someone to say it out loud, but that does not become an essential part of his or her knowledge; it is not subjectively internalized. Someone who, under the compulsion of power, assumes that 1 + 1 = 2 is true has turned that truth into an object. That person has not internalized this knowledge; but has merely absorbed it as information to appease power.
• When a certain truth receives that name and becomes visible, it becomes an object and is no longer true, as it is then linked to an interest. That truth is then, as with the ‘good’, dissolved in its name.
• Robin M. — You are lumping together two kinds of truth: the truth that arises from a proposition and ontological truth.
• Zoē W. — I believe that when we talk about ‘true love’ or ‘true art’, the criterion of interest is still applicable. ‘True love’ is ‘unconditional love’, for instance, the love of parents for their child. There is no interest connected to it.
• Robin M. — There is, of course, an interest connected to it: parents have the best interest of their child at heart. They are interested in ensuring a safe environment, good and healthy food, a proper education, and so on. They have an interest in their child’s well-being.
• Zoē W. — Of course, that interest exists, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Unconditional love is not an object; it has no name, just like the ‘good’ that Arendt talks about. The interest arises only when you give it a name.
• Robin M. — That’s very theoretical; you sound like a scholar or an ayatollah.
• Zoē W. — That’s hardly an argument.
• Robin M. — No, you’re right. Let me rephrase it. It seems like what I consider an interest in unconditional love, you see as a ‘tendency’, [Neigung] to briefly reference Kant. But I think this Kantian distinction is artificial. Ultimately, what you call unconditional love is a hybrid phenomenon. The disinterest is theoretical.

“They are repeating themselves,” I said.
“That’s inevitable in these kinds of discussions,” Haas replied. “Shall we move on to the next fragment then?”

• [09]
  
• Zoē W. — We need to distinguish between personal and public interests. An artist has a personal interest in earning an income. This income can be obtained through their work, although not necessarily. What matters is that this should not influence their artistic action, at least not if they want to keep their artistic expression pure. The moment they make concessions to their artistic principles due to financial interests, the work is no longer pure. But it may still be good.
• Robin M. — If I understand you correctly, a work of art is ‘true’ (or ‘pure’) when the artistic action itself is not related to an interest. And the qualification ‘pure’ or ‘impure’ has nothing to do with the artistic quality being ‘good’ or ‘bad’?
• Zoē W. — It’s more complicated. True art occurs in an action and does not have that name in that action. When it is given that name, the truth in that name has been dissolved, ‘aufgehoben’. Then I call it ‘pure’. For both, it means that it is disinterested. This indeed means that the artistic action was not connected to any interest. And the qualification ‘good’ or ‘bad’ has nothing to do with it on its own. Art that is ‘engaged’ can be good, and ‘disinterest’ art can be ‘bad’.
• Robin M. — Okay, so we have to discuss these principles of qualification separately later. Initially, you are concerned with the distinction between disinterested and engaged, apart from artistic value. I still don’t understand why this is so important to you.
• Zoē W. — This distinction is crucial to me because of the quality judgement passed in the public domain, such as in subsidy procedures or examination evaluations. In current practice, this distinction is overlooked, and, furthermore, a specific interest is even demanded. This results in the purity of artistic expression being clouded, or more precisely: it obstructs artistic expression.
• Robin M. — Yes, that may be the case, but isn’t it up to the artist? They must remain faithful to their artistic principles.
• Zoē W. — That’s easier said than done, but in the current practice, this is made impossible. For instance, a composer depends on the musicians who perform his work and the venues and organizations that make this possible. However, all of these are linked to those same public interests. The government influences artistic expression in an unacceptable way. My fundamental distinction makes this clear.

I was about to label Zoē as a ‘feisty girl’, but I held myself back in time. I could already hear Haas saying, ‘How can you be so sure Zoē is a woman?’ I didn’t know either; Zoē was a gender-neutral name. It reinforced my belief that Haas had made it all up. Gender-neutral names, typically something for him.

Haas seemed to guess my thoughts and said with his deer-like gaze, “So, don’t you find Zoē a bit of a stubborn girl?”

For a moment, I considered packing my bags and returning to France; I had had enough of that self-righteous commentary, especially that quasi sprezzatura attitude. But I held back and said, “Let’s continue with the next fragment.”

• [10]
  
• Robin M. — Your quest reminds me of an issue around the Franciscan Order in the 13th century. This order rejected any form of ownership and aimed for a life of the highest poverty. This led to a fierce conflict with the Roman Curia, a legal battle over the distinction between use and possession. The Franciscans claimed actual use [usus facti] separate from legal use [usus iuris]. This raised the question of who owns the goods being used. Is the horse the owner of the grass it eats? The Curia, through a bull issued by Pope John XXII, ultimately concluded that use is separated from ownership by attaching ownership to a right. The ownership of direct use (the horse’s grass, or the clothing and housing of the Friars Minor) is immediately destroyed in its use and therefore cannot exist outside the law. Perhaps artists should follow this example by becoming independent of public subsidies to safeguard their artistic principles. Artists should live in the highest poverty.
• Zoē W. — This means that pure art withdraws into the private domain. By doing so, it loses an important role, that of being exemplary. A society should not want this. But maybe it’s the only option, at least for now.
• Robin M. — I’m not so sure about that. Weren’t the Franciscans exemplary?
• Zoē W. — Perhaps, but their mission failed; the Curia rejected their ideal.
• Robin M. — Then artists must find an adequate response to that.
  
  [11]
• Zoē W. — You should hopefully now realize that it ultimately revolves around legal interests. The issue with the Franciscan Brothers was a legal one. They lost their case on legal grounds, and as a result, their religious praxis was lost because their religious acts became legal acts.
• Robin M. — Is that really such a bad thing in the end? They could still do their thing. The same goes for artists; they can create whatever they want, even if they aren’t necessarily paid by the government. And if they do want to be paid, then they should meet certain conditions. So what? The government is allowed to set conditions for its subsidies.
• Zoē W. — The problem that emerged from the issue with the Franciscan Brothers was that use was inherently linked to a right. This corrupted the actual use because it wasn’t so much denied by the Pope’s bull but rather transformed into a form of consumption that gets destroyed in its use. The use was thus converted into a right. This also means that art in its use has ultimately been reduced to a right. This politicized the artistic action. In fact, every artistic action has become objectwise, anchored in a right. A subjective action cannot coexist with this. In this sense, the legal issue surrounding the Friars Minor is a precursor to current neoliberal policies and, consequently, art policies.
• Robin M. — Why couldn’t the law be a subjective praxis? I understand that a legal code is an object in itself, but laws should be interpreted by a judge, and that could very well happen in a subjective manner, right?
• Zoē W. — In practice, that’s not how it works. Everything is tested against the law, especially procedures. As a result, there are sometimes judgements that many find morally incomprehensible, but the law does not make moral judgements. There is no subjective answer to such problems in legal practice. And it may be impossible, if only for practical reasons; there is simply not enough manpower, which ultimately boils down to a matter of money. Similarly, the law does not make artistic judgements; the judgement of artistic quality is not a matter of the law. This is precisely why we should make the distinction I proposed using the principle of interest. And this is the problem caused by the ‘Highest Poverty’ issue, as I tried to explain to you earlier. In the continuum of ‘use’, the artistic judgement has become a right without this right making artistic judgements. It seems like an aporia.
• Robin M. — But examination and subsidy committees constantly make judgements about artistic quality, and these judgements, in themselves, have nothing to do with a legal principle, right? Of course, the judgement procedures should be correct, which is related to legal principles, but the artistic judgements themselves are not, are they?
• Zoē W. — In any case, the assessments of subsidy committees are, because specific interests are placed in the subsidy conditions that override artistic quality. That means, and that’s my point, that these conditions and artistic quality become mixed.
• Robin M. — Unless the artist withdraws from this system. And so the circle is complete. On to the next point.

II heard a sort of popping sound. I stood up and walked to the window, seeing that it was a large icicle that had fallen from the roof into the snow. The icicle had a strange green color, and I didn’t immediately understand what caused it. But when I looked at the roof’s edge, I saw some moss growing there, and a part of it had fallen down with the icicle, creating a surreal effect. It was remarkable how this moss managed to survive.
“Do you think you’ll find the ultimate answers to our problems there?” Haas asked grumpily.
“Yes,” I replied, “right here. At my fingertips.”

• [12]
  
• Zoē W. — Alright, so the question is, if the artist withdraws, where would they end up? It should be an environment where the influence of the law is minimized. A complete isolation from the law is impossible in our society, as the law applies even in the private domain on various levels. But perhaps we can preserve artistic expression from it.
• Robin M. — This is only possible or desirable if your assumption that the artistic judgement can be independent of interests, lawful or otherwise, is true. I’m not convinced of that. How can you be so sure that a specific artistic choice isn’t related to some interest in some way? Can artistic articulation truly be detached from every societal interest? In visual arts, this seems challenging to maintain because the imagery being created often references some societal situation, except perhaps with purely abstract images. But even abstraction can be seen as a societal statement.
• Zoē W. — Abstraction. Let’s take this phenomenon as a starting point. A similar revolution occurred in music, particularly with the so-called ‘atonality’ of Schoenberg and, following in his footsteps, those like Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen during the period known as ‘serialism’. Undoubtedly, there are societal interests connected to these artistic principles, and especially opponents of these aesthetic movements have articulated this frequently. Roger Scruton was arguably one of the key representatives of these critics. I will put aside for now whether we can classify this musical movement as ‘abstract’ since I believe music itself is abstract in the sense that music cannot articulate itself in language.
• But that doesn’t matter for our discussion. Let’s assume, for a moment, that it’s true that abstract art is an articulation of some societal meaning. Does that, by definition, mean that artistic expression is part of it? I dare to doubt this. I believe that, regardless of the societal connotations, it’s possible to provide a pure artistic judgement of ‘abstract’ art. Moreover, I think we owe it to art to pass this judgement. How to do it is a different matter.
• Robin M. — For the sake of argument, you assume that this judgement is not inherently related to an interest. I dare to doubt this again. Is that judgement based on some analytical method? But are we sure that it isn’t influenced by a cultural context? Modes of thought, it seems to me, are culturally determined. How universal is such a judgement?
• Zoē W. — If universal judgements are inherently impossible because our way of thinking, in our case, is determined by the culture of Western Europe, then you might as well throw the laws of Cantor or Einstein in the trash.
• Robin M. — Whoa! Scientific judgements are of a different order than artistic judgements. When we drop a stone from our hand, it will fall to the ground in any place on Earth, in any culture. But proving that a Vermeer painting or a piece of music by Bach has universal quality is a different matter. Because it’s culturally meaningful. In fact, this is what Kant asserts, or at least that’s what can be deduced from his views. Beauty, in his eyes, is not connected to a concept. Gravity is. We can’t prove that the St. Matthew Passion is a universal masterpiece, at least not in a way we can demonstrate the laws of Archimedes or Pythagoras.
• Zoē W. — That may seem so, but I am free to believe that it is possible. And even if we might need to introduce a cultural nuance into that judgement, we can still conclude that the judgement is valid within a specific culture. In that case, the judgement might not have universal validity, but it does have fundamental validity. I propose we investigate whether the artistic quality judgement can claim fundamental validity. Then we can later explore whether the judgement can even possess universal validity. If both prove to be impossible, then we are at the mercy of market power.

II got up and stretched my arms. I needed some movement and wanted to take a walk, a break from Haas.

“Let’s go to the village and do some shopping there,” Haas said. “I need your wallet.” He grinned wickedly.

I grunted something that sounded like an agreement, made a double espresso, and sat on the veranda with a cigar. I saw a postal van coming up the driveway, the sound of snow chains rattling. Haas walked to the hall. The van parked at the front door, and the mail carrier got out, handing Haas a letter, apparently registered mail because Haas had to sign for it. The man got back in his van, turned around, and drove back down the lane. Haas came into the living room, placed the letter on a table, made himself an espresso, and joined me on the veranda. It was a clear day, cold but pleasant. Weather that cleanses the body. I sipped my coffee and puffed on my cigar.

“Important mail?” I asked, not out of politeness but out of curiosity. I had noticed he looked troubled. He didn’t answer.

We finished the last of our coffee, I smoked my cigar, and when I dumped the butt in the ashtray, he stood up. “Let’s go,” he said curtly. It was only now that I noticed his hair had turned almost gray. There were a few black streaks left, but he suddenly seemed like an old man. Could it be because of that letter, I wondered, but I didn’t dare bring it up again. Obediently, I followed him outside.

We drove down the lane, turned onto the forest road leading to the main road to Viechtach. Suddenly, a hefty load of snow fell from a spruce tree onto the car’s windshield, the branches swayed dangerously, and a group of crows dispersed from the tree, cawing loudly. Haas cursed vigorously as he slammed on the brakes. “A good start is half the work,” I muttered to myself in Dutch. Haas glared at me briefly and hit the gas again.

Viechtach was quiet. We parked the car first at the budget supermarket to buy water, beer, bread, toilet paper, and other items that cost double at the neighbor’s store. Then we drove to the shop next door for better wines and cheeses. I paid in both stores, under Haas’s approving gaze. Afterward, we headed to the town center, where Haas parked the car in the village square. He felt we had earned a hearty mug of beer and walked to his favorite café. We had just entered the street leading to the little café when I heard music from the other side of the street. It sounded like a small brass band, but there was nothing to be seen, yet the sound grew nearer. A moment later, a funeral procession turned into the street across from us. The casket was carried by six men in Bavarian attire, Lederhosen, green jackets, and feathered hats. The band behind them played a funeral march that couldn’t quite compare to the Angelic Choir of the Lord of Lords, but who cares about perfection when death is at play?

“That quality judgement is our last hope,” I said while holding a hefty beer mug with both hands. “If we can’t a priori make this judgement, then power is the only criterion that will make the judgement, the power of numbers, the market, politics, or otherwise. Then art is left at the mercy of the laws of the jungle.”
“It might also be that we’re witnessing the end of Romanticism, or perhaps even broader, the end of Western European civilization. Then you’re essentially in a struggle for survival.” Haas looked at me seriously, not unkindly.

I sipped thoughtfully at my beer. He had a point, it might very well be true. I didn’t have a quick answer for that. We silently finished our beers, I paid, and we walked back to the car. A dog barked behind a house window that we passed; everyone was asleep, but only the dogs seemed to pay attention to my concerns. We still drove back to Viechtach in silence, and Haas parked the car in front of the house in silence. I got out, and as he opened the garage door, I walked inside, straight to the table in the living room. The letter was gone. I went to the bathroom to flush the beer down the drain, made a double espresso, and then settled on the veranda with my coffee and a cigar. I didn’t have the faintest clue how to respond to his suggestion that we might be witnessing the end of Romanticism or, worse yet, the end of our entire Western European civilization.

IV — The Quality Judgement

• [13]
  
• Robin M. — Before we can discuss the quality judgement, you’ll need to explain what you mean by the concept of ‘quality’.
• Zoē W. — The term ‘quality’ is used in two ways: as a Property or as a Benchmark. In the case of quality as a benchmark, it refers to a State of affairs that must either be met or improved. In Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, Quality is one of the four Classes, alongside Quantity, Relation, and Modality. The class of Quality is further divided into three Categories: Reality, Negation, and Limitation. For example, this rose is red [reality, true]; this rose is not red [negation, false]; this rose has no smell [limitation or exclusion, which in itself says nothing about other qualities]. Quality as a Property cannot be ‘improved’. The ‘redness’ of that one rose is a given, just like the property of a circle, namely, a closed line in which every point is equidistant from another point, the ‘center’. How could this quality be improved?
• Robin M. — Let me guess, for your artistic quality judgement, you use ‘quality’ as a property, since a masterpiece cannot be improved.
• Zoē W. — For the purely artistic quality judgement, I indeed use the concept of ‘quality’ as a property. The judgement makes a statement about whether the quality of a work is excellent or not. If the quality is excellent, then it is also exemplary.
• Robin M. — So, your quality judgement does not make statements about mediocre works. There is no gradation. Why is that?
• Zoē W. — Mediocre works are often associated with some interest. For example, the government may want to support a specific target audience, and in such cases, the quality of the work is less important than the interest it serves. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it’s not what I’m focusing on in this research. I’m solely concerned with works that are excellent, and such a work is, by definition, disinterest. It is ‘true’ at the moment of its creation, and once it is named as such, it becomes ‘pure.’ We’ve discussed the distinction between these two concepts — ‘true’ and ‘pure’ — before.
• Robin M. — Can’t a ‘true’ artwork still fail? That is, the creative process is, on its own, true, but it leads to a failure. So, the process was ‘true’, but the result failed. Operation successful, patient deceased; to put it cynically.
• Zoē W. — An interesting question. First of all: a cow is an animal, but not the other way around. So, the creation of an excellent work is true, but a pure artwork does not have to be excellent. Of course, I am primarily interested in those excellent works. However, there are examples of works that have failed but whose failure is very interesting. These works are instructive.
  
• [14]
  
• Robin M. — So, the artistic quality judgement determines whether the creation of the artwork was not linked to an interest, therefore the judgement is a pure artistic judgement, and then concludes whether the work is excellent or not. If this is the case, then it is exemplary. Whether the process of creation is true or not does not matter for this judgement.
• Zoē W. — In the sense that it is not taken into account in the final judgement. That truth disappears in its name anyway.
• Robin M. — Let me summarize: True art occurs in the action, in the artist at work, behind the worktable, in the studio, in the rehearsal space, and on the stage. When the creation of the true artwork has taken place, it disappears in its name, and thus it crystallizes into a pure artwork, a score, poem, painting, sculpture, installation, film, or documentation; an object that can be exemplary. Now, my question, based on the concept of ‘quality’ we just discussed: I called this excellent and exemplary work a ‘masterpiece’ that cannot be improved; is it then perfect?
• Zoē W. — No, excellence should not be confused with perfection. Perfection is untouchable and unsuitable for an act because this act, by definition, destroys perfection. The perfect is objectwise; hence, it is toxic. The excellent, on the other hand, invites action, and it can only occur in that action; it is subjectwise. The subjective is never perfect; it is always on the way. But that doesn’t mean it can be improved, as this would mean that the work was born out of unfreedom.
• Robin M. — You’ll need to explain that; this sounds too cryptic to me. Where does this concept of freedom suddenly come from? And why ‘toxic’?
• Zoē W. — A perfect artwork would be one that was predetermined. The artistic process could only lead to one work: that perfect work. But then the work would not have been born in freedom. Everything was already fixed.
• The interesting thing is that the work does articulate the suggestion of perfection. When we hear the first part of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, we think it could only have been composed that way, even though Beethoven could have made other choices.
• I used the word ‘toxic’ because something that can only exist in one way is born out of unfreedom. There were no choices, there was no freedom, everything was fixed and, therefore, it is dead. The Sirens were deadly with their perfect song.

Haas’s mobile phone started vibrating. He glanced at it, stood up, and walked briskly out of the bay window. I waited for a few minutes, but he didn’t return. To pass the time, I decided to make an espresso and enjoy a cigar, so I headed to the kitchen. Through the living room window, I noticed that the garage was open, and Haas’s car was gone. I shook my head, brewed the coffee, and settled on the veranda. My mind pondered the two ‘students’ of Haas, and by now, I was convinced that they were a product of Haas’s imagination. Their so-called discussion followed my text closely, and it was evident that he had simply rephrased my text in a different form. The only thing I couldn’t fathom was why he was being so secretive about it, as if I would disapprove of his paraphrasing. It was the form he found suitable for his commentary on my text, and I had no issue with it. In fact, I could have done the same thing myself. As for that strange letter, was it threatening?

I got up and went into the living room, pulling open all the drawers of the cabinets in the hopes of finding the letter. Nothing. I walked to his room, knocked just to be polite, and pushed down the door handle to enter the room. The door was locked. Normally, I would feel guilty about snooping in someone’s house, but Haas was an exception, and I had no qualms. I returned to the veranda to ponder. Armed with a fresh supply of coffee and a cigar, it was clear that he had something to hide, for why else would you lock your room? I entered the house again and took a sheet of paper from the printer drawer. Seated behind the large dining table on the veranda, I retrieved a pencil from my pocket and began to write a list of questions:

1. Why was Haas secretive about his fictional characters Robin M. and Zoē W.?
2. What was the reason behind Haas’s annoyance regarding the registered letter?
3. Why did Haas invite me here to discuss my text in the first place?

There was one more point that troubled me, a substantial one from the discussion: Robin’s argument that the criteria in the artistic quality judgement might be culturally determined. If this argument held, my entire research would fall apart. I needed to come up with strong counterarguments, but I hadn’t figured it out yet, and I couldn’t quite grasp it.

4. How can I prove that the criteria on which the artistic quality judgement was based are universally valid or, at least, fundamentally?

I took a photo of the list and tore the paper into pieces. I didn’t want Haas to be able to read the list, so I went to the kitchen to throw the scraps in the paper bin. When I opened the bin, I saw the remnants of an envelope, I took the pieces out of the bin and saw that it was the envelope from the registered letter. I laid the pieces out like a puzzle. Haas’s address was still readable. I took a photo of it, flipped the pieces, and also took a photo of the back. Then I carefully placed the pieces back into the waste bin. I decided to destroy my own scraps, but not to put the remnants in the paper bin. I burned the scraps in the ashtray and emptied it into the wood stove. I grinned to myself about my cunning behavior. Back on the veranda, I looked at both photos. The front didn’t provide me with useful information, but when I looked at the photo of the back of the envelope, I was shocked. The sender had the letters ‘Z. W.’ The address was no longer readable, only the city of Nuremberg was decipherable. Nuremberg, the city Haas came from. If Z. W. stood for Zoē, then my theory that Robin and Zoē were fictional characters was incorrect! I gazed thoughtfully ahead for a while, wondering whether I should confront Haas with my discovery. In the end, I decided not to do it immediately; I would wait to see how things would develop. The questions from my list were still valid.

At six o’clock in the evening, Haas still hadn’t returned. I had tried to call him, but his mobile was presumably turned off, and I received an automatic response in German, stating that the receiver’s phone was unreachable. I decided to cook something for myself. In the freezer, I found a pizza, which I put in the oven. I inspected the wine stock and found a fine, dry white Riesling. I sat on the veranda with the bottle, took the pizza out of the oven after twenty minutes, and ate it outside. No sign of Haas yet. When the bottle was empty, I went to the cabinet in the dining room behind the kitchen, where there was a variety of alcoholic drinks. I grabbed a partially consumed bottle of cognac, a cognac glass, and made one more espresso. The last one, I decided. When this bottle was also empty, I staggered to the bathroom and took a bath. After a while, I felt myself drifting off and just managed to pull myself out of the bath. I stumbled to my bed and almost immediately fell asleep.

I dreamt that I was walking outside in the snow, and it was storming heavily. I had to bend my head forward to protect my eyes from the snow. I saw a bright flash of lightning that briefly illuminated the sky, followed by a massive clap of thunder. After this, I woke up, disoriented, and sat up in my bed. My head was pounding, and sharp pains shot behind my eyes. I checked my mobile and saw that it was around 2:30 AM. I got up from bed with some difficulty.

I walked through the kitchen into the living room, and through the window, I saw that the garage door was closed. Haas had apparently returned home. Perhaps the thunder in my dream had been caused by the garage door or the front door. I grabbed a beer from the fridge, put on my jacket, a hat, and went to sit on the veranda. I had a hunch, so I took my mobile and googled Haas’s name in combination with the Friedrich-Alexander University in Nuremberg. Haas had indeed been a lecturer at that university, until the year 2014. He had ended his position in that year, and there was no information about why. As far as I knew, he hadn’t reached retirement age at that time. I also googled the names Zoē W. and Robin M, but there were no matches. I didn’t find any more useful information. He would have to tell me himself, if there was anything to tell, or maybe I was just imagining that something had happened there back then.

Suddenly, outside at the end of the road to the forest, I saw a moving light again. It wasn’t the light from the streetlamp, which was higher up; this light was close to the ground. It went off and then on again, and there was no doubt it was moving. Using the steps at the end of the veranda, I walked to the road, keeping the flashlight on my mobile off for now. I was sure there was someone out there, and I wanted to surprise him or her. I cautiously walked down the road in the direction of the light. But it suddenly disappeared.

I stopped at the edge of the forest, and there was no trace of the light anymore. I listened for a while, but there was no sound other than the rustling of the branches in the forest. After about fifteen minutes, I gave up and walked back to the house. This time, I used the flashlight on my mobile. I returned to the veranda and finished my beer. I considered the possibility that I had imagined it, and maybe it was a remnant from my dream. It felt as if that storm was taking place inside my head, in a big jumble.

The next morning, around eleven, I walked into the kitchen with a significant hangover. Haas was at the stove.
“Feel like a nice omelet?” he asked, turning his head toward me. He had a cheerful, upbeat look in his eyes.
I wondered what I owed this to. Had he solved a problem satisfactorily yesterday? I grunted in agreement, indicating that I wouldn’t mind an egg, and then went out to the veranda with a cup of coffee and a cigar.

A little while later, Haas joined me. He placed a plate with two slices of omelet-topped bread in front of me, fetched his own plate, and brought a teapot with two cups.
“Helps with the hangover,” he said with a grin. I wondered if it had been so obvious, but then I noticed the empty wine and cognac bottles placed conspicuously near the kitchen door. We moved back to the bay window at the back after breakfast. There was no explanation forthcoming.

• [15]
  
• Robin M. — We have formulated three conditions that a pure artwork must meet: its creation must be disinterested, at least regarding the artistic contribution; it must be excellent, thus exemplary. The question we are facing now is whether valid criteria can be formulated to establish these conditions and, above all, whether these criteria are universal. Or, at the very least, valid within a particular cultural context, in which case, we would call these criteria fundamental. Is that a correct summary?
• Zoē W. — Absolutely. I will discuss three criteria: concept, context, and consistency. These criteria are interrelated and, I believe, universal. I will address each one individually and then connect them.
• Concept — This criterion pertains to the artistic foundation of the work, or the basic idea. For every work, a concept can be identified. When the concept is unclear, the work will fail. This doesn’t mean the concept must be clear to the artist from the beginning; often, clarity emerges during the creative process. But at some point, that clarity will reveal itself, and the work can then reach its conclusion. All the material will ‘fall into place’; often, much will need to be omitted. Not all the material, however beautiful on its own, will prove useful in expressing the concept optimally. The concept determines the structure, form, and content of the work.
• Robin M. — May I react now? First of all, it seems like you’re primarily reasoning from the perspective of music.
• Zoē W. — Yes, that’s correct. But I believe it can ultimately be applied to other art forms.
• Robin M. — We will see, but first something else. You claim that a ‘concept’ is a universal concept, so that every artwork in every culture is based on a concept. In my opinion, this is still up for debate. How can you be so sure? Don’t there exist artworks based on multiple ideas? Isn’t this ‘basic idea’ a typically Romantic concept?
• Zoē W. — I think the latter is not relevant. At most, it speaks to the analysis method but not to the artwork itself. Perotinus’s organum Viderunt Omnes, for instance, is based on the rhythmic concept of the ‘First Rhythmic Mode’, specifically a long note followed by a short one. This is the rhythmic concept, consistently applied, nearly eight centuries before the Romantic era. There are various technical aspects in music that have been applied, consciously or not, over the centuries, and a technical explanation may have been provided centuries later. Even when this explanation is adjusted or replaced with another, these artworks remain the same, and the principles upon which they are based do as well. A concept can also be unconsciously applied.
• Regarding your previous question, I believe you can indeed have multiple ideas on which a work is based, but you can also find a meta-idea that determines the coherence of those ideas. If that’s not the case, the work falls apart like ‘loose sand’. But even that ‘loose sand’ could still be the basic idea.
• Robin M. — You’ll need to explain that last part; it seems like a trick, otherwise you could call anything a basic idea.
• Zoē W. — No, not at all! Of course, you have to substantiate that concept of ‘loose sand’ in the artwork. It doesn’t mean you can just mess around with it. Somehow, the work must optimally express this loose sand as an artistic idea.
• Robin M. — Hmm… that seems rather theoretical to me, but okay. Then, this other issue: that the applied analysis methods are separate from the artwork. Does that imply you’re radically against the premise that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’? Beauty, or truth, if you will, resides in the artwork, and it’s up to the audience to recognize that beauty.
• I have a question for you in this regard. Did humanity have an unconscious before Freud? Setting aside whether he coined the term, which was, I believe, a Frenchman’s doing, but that’s not relevant to this question.
• Zoē W. — That is an interesting question in itself. If you answer it in the affirmative, then Freud (or that Frenchman) discovered the unconscious. If you answer it in the negative, then he invented it. Both answers provide interesting possibilities. With the affirmative answer, the unconscious becomes a universal phenomenon. With the negative answer, the unconscious becomes part of language. But however you look at it, if you hit your thumb with a hammer due to a stimulus from the unconscious, you experience pain in both cases. And you also understand that you need to avoid it in the future.
• For the issue of our artistic judgement, it doesn’t really matter. My statement about the concept is related to that hammer. If the concept fails, your artwork shatters. And, by the way, we should realize that the concept is related to the other two criteria: context and consistency. It’s about their coherence. Once we take them into account, we can address your concerns more effectively. I suggest we first examine the other two criteria.
• Robin M. — Fine by me, but my point about the culturally determined perspective regarding the ‘concept’ criterion still stands for now.
• Zoē W. — Alright. Now, the second criterion, I’ll discuss it separately first, and then we’ll move on to the third criterion. Please hold your questions for now, as I believe it will ultimately be faster, given that it’s about the coherence.
• Context — By this, I mean the relationships of the artwork on various levels: within the work, how different materials relate to each other and to the concept, and beyond it, how the work relates to other works (including the artist’s own work), and how it relates to the past, including period, style, and genre. This criterion also determines whether there is a significance. Your cultural reservations are also part of this criterion. It’s complex.
• Consistency — This criterion involves the consistent application and optimal utilization of materials. This means both the relationship of the material to the concept and a consistent awareness of the context. I will provide some examples.
• To start with the last point, suppose you want to write a string quartet in C major, in the style of, let’s say, Haydn or Mozart, then there’s a significant chance that the work won’t exceed the qualification of being a ‘pastiche’. At best, it’s a clever imitation, but without the cultural connotations that works from that period possess, which, in my opinion, is an essential element of art. However, I certainly don’t want to claim that it’s an impossible task. The composer just needs to be aware of this issue and have an artistic response, which should also be somehow audible when the work is performed. Something similar applies to a work that’s a repetition of a previous piece by the same artist. If you only create variations of a particular form, it doesn’t add much to the original version. It quickly becomes a mannerism, a process that leads to mass production. It’s not a subject of art.
• But even writing a string quartet in itself, one that’s not directly related to an existing form, has contextual relations with the past due to the nature of the ensemble. The composer needs to be aware of this too. Composers who think they can write a piece for a computer or other digital technology without context because the ‘instrumentation’ which is used is free from historical connotations are deluding themselves. Technology is a loaded instrument that requires careful consideration. The work of Dick Raaijmakers is a good example in this regard.
• Then, there’s the matter of material usage. This concerns a musical work’s rhythm, harmony, melody, instrumentation, and so on. But it also involves form, sentence structure, and themes. I’ll say more about this later when we address the criteria in their interplay.
• Finally, in this section, there’s an interesting issue. In 2011, Scott Rickard delivered a TED talk titled The World’s Ugliest Music (you can find it on YouTube). Rickard argued that repetition is essential for creating beauty. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was his prime example. As a counterexample, he presented a piano piece with no repetition at all; each note of the piano sounds only once, with a unique duration for all notes. Furthermore, the order of the notes has no repeated patterns, neither in pitch, nor in duration. This piece employed the mathematical principle of the sonar system used by submarines. According to Rickard, this resulted in the ugliest piece of music ever. However, he made a crucial mistake by stating that Beethoven elevated repetition as a principle in his Fifth Symphony and not understanding that the ‘ugliest piece in the world’ employed non-repetition as its principle. This principle, as he explained in the video, isn’t based on chance or randomness but on an extremely consistent mathematical formula. This is an articulation of beauty. So, repetition isn’t the criterion for artistic quality; it’s the consistency of it.
• Robin M. — Well, that’s quite a story. But I assume I should wait with my comments?

• [16]
  
• Zoē W. — Yes, please bear with me a little longer.
• Robin M. — Sure, but you’re bringing up so many points; it’s challenging to keep track.
• Zoē W. — We’ll get through it. The first point I want to address now is the principle known as ‘Occam’s Razor’. This principle also provides an excellent example of how these criteria are interconnected. Paraphrased for artwork, it might read as follows: The number of different material forms should serve the optimal expression of the work’s overarching concept. In most cases, this means having the minimum possible number of distinguishable material forms. To provide an example: a sonata form has two themes, which is the optimal number to express the dialectical concept of this form, namely the juxtaposition of those themes, their elaboration and development, and their synthesis. In contrast, a fugue ideally has one theme. The overarching concept can be described with the term mentioned earlier: optimal yield. The fugue is about achieving the optimal yield from this theme. In this case, one theme is optimal. Conversely, the opposite is also conceivable: not a minimum of material forms, but the use of as much different material as possible. However, this means that the overarching concept aims to express precisely this, namely this excess. We can see that the criterion of consistency applies directly alongside the concept and context criteria. After all, the material should optimally express the concept, and the context is also fundamentally important, and consistency is essential for this. Et voilà.
• Robin M. — Alright, rapid-fire time. Where should I start?
• Zoē W. — Same rule applies here: establish your concept, consider the context, and shoot with consistency.
• Robin M. — You joker! Okay, I won’t attack your theory point by point; that’s a futile effort. I keep coming back to my earlier question about your claim of universality for your criteria. In my view, it’s not really a theory; it seems more like a method, or perhaps even a methodology. What you’re describing with your criteria is how you believe artwork should be created. It’s not a genuine analysis. Therefore, it’s not universal, and not even fundamental. In fact, it’s anecdotal, and I think that’s the main point of my critique. Short and sweet.

• [17]
  
• Zoē W. — Well, we’ll see. What do you exactly mean by the terms you’re using: universal, fundamental, and anecdotal?
• Robin M. — I believe I mean the same as you. Universal means something that is valid for all people, fundamental means it’s valid within a particular culture, and anecdotal pertains to purely personal validity. The latter contrasts with the first two, which always relate to the public sphere, while the anecdotal is about the private sphere, roughly speaking.
• Zoē W. — Yes, I can agree with that. The question then is whether my theory – or, as you call it, method – is exclusively based on my personal findings. This would mean that none of my criteria is valid. To put it maliciously, it would be nothing more than a recipe book. But the same would apply to my many analyses. I dare to refute this, based on a few examples, through a brief description. However, I have provided detailed analyses in previous texts. In my opinion, there’s no way to poke holes in them because the analyses aren’t based on anecdotal hermeneutics but purely on the level of the notes, as they should be. So, with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it’s not about a ‘fate motif’, and in my analyses of Debussy’s preludes, the term ‘impressionism’ doesn’t appear because it’s borrowed from painting and has nothing to do with his music. Everything can be formulated in musical terms.
• Beethoven, Symfony nr. 5, First Part
• In this work, the concept and the material are in excellent balance. The underlying structure and the ‘superimposed’ form express the narrative in an exemplary manner. The employed ‘form type’ — the ‘sonata form’ (or ‘main form’) — involves the confrontation of two elements, the ‘first theme’ and the ‘second theme’. The interplay with these two themes articulates a ‘dialectical’ (or ‘synthetic’) story. The themes are presented, then elaborated and developed, ultimately leading to a sublimation (or synthesis). Interestingly, in this section, the themes themselves are not used for the synthetic process, but their announcement (I use the term ‘motto’ for it). The ultimate synthesis is a synthesis between the two mottos. The moment this takes place is a true miracle: after a modulation process of twelve perfect fifths downward, from G major to A-double-flat major, this key instantly transforms into its enharmonic counterpart, the dominant of C, precisely during the synthesis of both mottos. A Borgesian Aleph.
• Beethoven, Sonate nr. 5, op. 10 nr 1, First Part
• It is interesting to examine this sonata movement more closely because it fails to conform to the conventional structure. In the development section, a third theme is introduced in the key of F minor. Although this theme bears some resemblance to the transition phrase and the second theme, it has a distinct character of its own. Except for the beginning of the development section, where the first theme reappears in a major key, the majority of this section is based on this third theme. This theme appears to have emerged from an improvisational approach, but from the subsequent section — the ‘Reprise’ — it becomes evident that Beethoven viewed it as a problem. I can’t explain the differing key of the return of the second theme in any other way; the distinct key is F major, the major counterpart of the key of the third theme. The contrast between major and minor tonalities plays a significant role in this movement. The first theme, which is in the main key of C minor, returns in C major at the beginning of the development section. Since the main key is minor, the second theme is in the parallel key of E-flat major. With the differing key of F major, Beethoven can temporarily retain the major character of the second theme in the Reprise. After this additional theme entry, the conventional version in the main minor key follows. It seems that Beethoven felt the need to legitimize the introduction of a third theme. The inclusion of a third theme contradicts the principle of optimal efficiency. The fact that Beethoven (and others) rarely employed a third theme in a sonata-allegro form can be seen as a confirmation of this principle.
• Schubert, Winterreise
• I consider this work to be a pure piece of art of exceptional and exemplary quality, which was, apart from the magnificent music, partly caused by a misunderstanding. Initially, Schubert used the wrong, incomplete text by Müller, consisting of twelve poems. Subsequently, he acquired the complete text, now comprising twenty-four poems. Moreover, Müller had changed the order of the entire cycle. This allowed Schubert to make an adjustment and thus elevate the text to a higher level. By moving the song Die Nebensonnen to the second-to-last song, the entire cycle takes on a different and more dramatic dimension. In this way, the terminally ill Schubert could project his life onto the protagonist of the cycle, where the love being abandoned represents life, and the songs he asks the old hurdy-gurdy man to keep playing are his own works. Thus, he made the text of the cycle entirely his own. If Schubert had had the correct version from the start, he probably would not have changed the order of the cycle, just as he had not done so with the first version.
• Schubert, Symfony in B-minor
• Schubert’s Symphony in B Minor, also known as the ‘Unfinished Symphony’, I find not excellent, nor exemplary, despite its charm. The work primarily fails in the concept because its structure is based on a sonata form, without, however, incorporating the essence of it into the composition. The use of the sonata form is anecdotal and therefore objectwise. I have extensively analyzed and described both of Schubert’s works in previous texts. Here, as with Beethoven, I provide these brief descriptions.
• Debussy, Prelude VI, first volume
• II believe that this prelude (… des pas sur la neige) is directly influenced by the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The concept of this prelude seems to be borrowed from this symphony. I am referring to the dialectical treatment of the mottos of the two themes from that symphony, which, at the end of the development section, lead to a synthesis, namely a mixture of the two mottos. In the prelude, something similar happens with the two tonal areas, that of the Aeolian D minor (using C instead of C-sharp) and the tonal area around the dominant seventh chord of C-sharp (also notated as D-flat; Debussy uses enharmonic notation as he pleases). There are four layers to distinguish in the prelude: firstly, the half-note motion, mostly on the note D, sometimes expanded into a parallel descending triad motion. Secondly, the triplet motif that fills in a minor third. Thirdly, the melody that begins in bar 2, which returns with some variations. Fourthly, the quarter-note motion, consisting of a few chromatic notes followed by a perfect fourth or fifth. At the end of the prelude, we see the C-sharp appearing in the motif based on the triplet motif from the first bars; D Aeolian has now become D Harmonic, the synthesis. This synthesis follows another synthesis: the faux-bourdon series in D-flat. This parallel motion refers to the parallel triads from the first layer but in the opposite direction, in the quarter-note rhythm of the fourth layer. The synthesis of D Aeolian and harmonic follows immediately after.
• Dick Raaijmakers, De Grafische Methode Fiets [Graphical Method Bike]
• This is a very good example of pure art, and it articulates its value particularly well. The piece was supposed to be performed only once, and afterward, it should be neatly packed away and stored in an attic, as the artist once mentioned in an interview. The performance took place in 1979 as part of a May- concert organized by the composition department of the Royal Conservatory. In 2008, despite the earlier announcement, a reconstruction of the work was performed several times. The piece is a commentary on technology, specifically the use of the camera. It demonstrates the relationship between the effort required, for instance, to take a photo (a simple press of a button with a finger suffices), and the effort required by the subject of the photo when it is actually executed. It involves a kind of reversal of Etienne-Jules Marey’s plague fixe. We see a naked cyclist connected to various wires attached to his body to make his breathing, heartbeat, and muscle tension audible. The bicycle is connected to a motor, which slowly pulls the cyclist over a distance of approximately ten meters. The bicycle is a nineteenth-century model without a coaster brake. Dismounting the bicycle requires a special technique. In the half-hour duration of the performance, the pedal rotates only once, the motion within which the dismounting must occur. All sounds are amplified loudly in the space. All movements of the cyclist are extremely slow, and we can hear his heart rate increase when he for instance decides to slightly adjust a finger’s position. It’s an incredibly suspenseful piece.
• Robin M. — Hallelujah! I must say, your analyses are quite impressive. Congratulations! I don’t have a music theory background myself, but it all sounds convincing. As analyses. But whether they transcend the anecdotal, I’m not so sure. Perhaps they have a fundamental level, but I doubt their universality. There will undoubtedly be other analyses that are also brilliant but based on different criteria and grounds. You claim that only one form of analysis is possible, and I question that. As for that Beethoven symphony, it immediately reminds me of a famous critique by E.T.A. Hoffmann, not just anyone, a brilliant mind! His critique was highly commendatory. It’s in a text about instrumental music.
• Zoē W. — Here, in my computer: “What instrumental work of Beethoven’s confirms all this to a higher degree than the exceedingly glorious, profound Symphony in C minor? How this wonderful composition leads the listener irresistibly onward into the realm of the infinite, in an ever-increasing climax! Nothing could be simpler than the main theme of the first Allegro, consisting of only two bars, which, at first in unison, does not even determine the key for the listener. The character of anxious, restless yearning that this movement carries is made even clearer by the melodic second theme! The heart, oppressed and anxious, seems to want to forcibly release itself in cutting tones, but soon a friendly figure comes shining forth and illuminates the deep, fearful night. (Das liebliche Thema in G-Dur, das erst von dem Horn in Es-Dur berührt wurde.)” Hoffmann may indeed be a very brilliant mind, but this ‘critique’ doesn’t even deserve the term ‘analysis’. That ‘fearful, restless yearning…’ is quite absurd. And what about that ‘lovely theme in G major’, what on earth does he mean? I suspect it’s what I call the ‘motto of the second theme’, which is a variation of what he calls the ‘main idea’ of the Allegro, but he doesn’t establish the connection between the two, let alone talk about that synthesis. And that G major, it makes me chuckle. Just as the initial motto doesn’t confirm the key of C minor, this second motto doesn’t indicate G major. It refers more to the dominant of C minor, but of course, it’s not confirmed because the second theme is in the parallel key of E-flat major. And then that ‘melodic second theme’ — if there’s anything unmelodic, it’s the second theme. It’s a building block repeated several times. That is precisely the strength of this symphony; nothing ‘melodic’, everything serves the structure, and for that architectural work, the architect uses bricks, not fussy, silk garlands.
• Robin M. — Okay. Maybe this text wasn’t a good example, but the point is that a fundamentally different analysis is possible.
• Zoē W. — We’re constantly bombarded with that kind of armchair criticism. If you genuinely believe that, you should provide that analysis yourself and not use some sort of ‘what about you?’ response. If you say A, then you should say B, and not hide behind the alphabet. I provide an analysis; if you disagree, then provide a counter-analysis.

I had to revise my view of the Robin/Zoē matter. Apparently, they did exist, or at least Zoē seemed like a real person. However, the texts I was reading here were so directly derived from my own texts that I had sent to Haas over time that I had strong doubts about the discussion between these two antagonists. Haas had modified my texts, and all the analyses presented here were taken directly from my texts, with some minor edits. It could be both true: Robin and Zoē might be real individuals, but the discussion seemed to be a fabrication by Haas. I decided to try to provoke him, saying, “They don’t seem to be reaching a conclusion, but what do you actually think?”

“I’ve forfeited the right to have an opinion on this.” He looked at me in silence, and I thought I saw a cold glare in his eyes for a moment, but it soon reverted to that empty deer-like gaze of his. “Let’s take a break.” Haas stood up without paying any more attention to me and walked out of the bay window. I could tell from the sound of the espresso machine that he was in the kitchen. I got up to get an espresso as well.

V — The Unrepeatable

We silently drank our coffee. I thoughtfully exhaled the smoke, and I noticed Haas was bothered by it from his waving hands, but he didn’t say anything. He never did. I pondered over his strange remark about having forfeited the right to have an opinion in a discussion that he had even orchestrated himself.

What did those two students, or whatever they were, have to do with him? Had something happened between them? That mysterious letter must be related to this, that was as clear as day to me. But how precisely? His deer-like gaze, it seemed like the look of a dead person, I suddenly realized. I looked at him, but he was apparently absentmindedly playing with his espresso cup, turning it back and forth until he spilled some coffee on his pants. He cursed, stood up, and disappeared into the house. And then there was that will-o’-the-wisp in the middle of the night, which I wasn’t sure if I had just imagined. I had to get him talking.

Haas opened the kitchen door, poked his head around the door, and said, “We’re continuing, are you coming?” I noticed that he had not only changed his pants for clean ones but also put on a different shirt and sweater, presumably because of the color combination. At least he hadn’t lost his vanity yet. I got up and obediently followed him.

• [18]
  
• Robin M. — Our discussion about whether your analyses are based on universal criteria leads to another topic: that of uniqueness and, with it, the phenomenon of unrepeatability. There are a, admittedly limited, number of works that are entirely unique and unrepeatable. They do not tolerate imitation. John Cage’s work 4’33” is a good example of this. A variation, such as 3’44”, would be utterly ridiculous. The question then is whether this uniqueness has universal significance.
• Zoē W. — Hmm, an interesting issue, but I can’t think of another example right away. La Valse and Bolero by Maurice Ravel seem to come close. Piano Phase by Steve Reich also seems like a useful example, although Clapping Music is actually a repetition. But the concept of ‘imitation’ is problematic. You could consider Ferdinand Ries’ Fifth Symphony as an imitation of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and he fails miserably at it. According to Kant’s concept of genius, imitation is essentially futile. However, allowing oneself to be influenced by a particular work is possible, provided it goes beyond mere pastiche.
• Robin M. — The question that arises is what causes this uniqueness. You previously gave the example of Debussy’s prelude, which in a sense is an imitation of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’s Allegro, but only in terms of the concept. Perhaps this is the key, the concept I mean, that determines uniqueness. In the case of the Fifth Symphony, it may not be unrepeatable, because Debussy could handle the concept well, and Ries was just a bungler. This would mean that there are concepts suitable for repetition, and are therefore extremely fertile. The sonata form is one such concept. Dance forms like waltzes and tangos and the concept of a particular instrumentation, such as a symphony orchestra or a string quartet, are other examples.
• Zoē W. — Then the follow-up question is whether 4’33” is indeed unique and unrepeatable. Can the concept truly not be used in any way for another piece? Your example of 3’44” is much too dull. You need to come up with something better.
• His work 0’00” could very well be considered a new, different version, one that is certainly not a pastiche. In that case, it’s about the quality of the concept, and both works are entirely singular. Beethoven’s ‘Fifth’, however, has a multiple concept. The idea of synthesis itself is singular, but its execution is not because there is so much variety possible in terms of musical material. This is not the case for both of Cage’s pieces. This explains why so many symphonies and sonatas could be written and clarifies Debussy’s prelude.
• Robin M. — I’m not entirely clear on this yet. Let’s further examine the concept of both Cage’s works and see if these pieces are indeed unique and unrepeatable. And whether one is or isn’t a variation of the other. I’ve witnessed 4’33” live once. Every concert is always preceded by a moment of silence, the hall lights go off, the conductor and musicians prepare, set their focus, and then the piece begins. That was no different in that performance of 4’33”. It’s this announcement, the concentration preceding every performance, that makes the piece work. The only difference is that no notes are played. It seems like the work is a long announcement without ever truly beginning. But that’s not entirely true either because in the performance I attended, the opening and closing of the piano lid marked the time and emphasized it.
• Zoē W. — You could say that the concept of 4’33” tries to express ‘nothing’, not so much the silence, but something more fundamental. This also applies to 0’00”, where ‘an event in which a disciplined action is performed to the maximum (without feedback)’ can also be understood as an articulation of ‘nothing’. As such, the uniqueness is essentially perfect and therefore deadly.
• Robin M. — It works the other way around too; death is both unique and unrepeatably so.
• Zoē W. — A beautiful conclusion to this topic.

“Death is at the end of a one-way street,” Haas said. I thought I saw his eyes welling up, but I didn’t get a chance to examine it more closely. He had quickly risen and walked out of the bay window. A while later, I saw him through the bay window, sitting on the porch with a generous glass of whiskey. It seemed wise to leave him alone for a while. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down in the small bay window at the front of the house. A new thought occurred to me: could he possibly have a terminal illness? The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Of course! That must be it; he was seriously ill. Maybe the letter was about that, bad news from his doctor. On the other hand, wouldn’t such news be delivered in person? You don’t get something like that in a letter, right? I contemplated asking him outright but decided to hold off for now. It was cowardly, and I was aware of it, but he seemed too cocooned in his own world.

I heard the kitchen door, and Haas entered the living room. He saw me sitting in the bay window and asked, “Shall we continue?”
“Are you doing okay?” I asked, “You’ve seemed a bit down the past few days.” There, I had brought it up.
“I’m perfectly fine, thank you,” was his evasive response. I had tried, and my conscience was appeased for the moment.

• [19]
  
• Robin M. — Let’s try to summarize the things we have discussed so far and clarify where we agree and disagree. Based on this, we can proceed with our research.
• Zoē W. — Very well. Firstly, we established that there is one primary principle for distinguishing between the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘power’, and that principle is ‘interest’. From this, we determined that truth is disinterested, while power is fundamentally linked to an interest. The next step was applying this criterion to art.
• Robin M. — Hold on! It’s certainly clever to use the ‘we’ form, but stick to yourself. These are your hypotheses, and I’m just being gallant by acting as your chaperone. But go on, please.
• Zoē W. — Understood. Let’s continue. When we apply this principle of truth to art, we can — I mean — I can speak about ‘true art’, which is art that can only take place in an action or an event, and its creative process is not related to an interest. Because this art exists exclusively in the action, it cannot concern objects.
• Robin M. — I can follow all of this well, regardless of whether I agree with it. I believe I’ve also understood the next step: because true art doesn’t involve objects, but we want to be able to speak and judge art objects, you introduced the category of ‘pure art’. This is true art that has crystallized into an object, like a painting, a book, a sculpture, or a score. I understand it to some extent, but I also find it quite artificial. Where is Ockham’s Razor in all of this?
• Zoē W. — If you dissect too many elements from your argument, nothing fundamental remains. Truth inevitably receives a name, and that name refers to an action or event, but naming it engraves it in our memory. I’m not against objectwise matters; I just want them to be clear in relation to subjectwise acts. We need things we can grasp. The truth of death is intangible, but at least we can still partially grasp the truth of life and art. Am I making some sense?
• Robin M. — Yes, indeed, I’m following you closely. Death is intangible, life can be grasped through objects or objectwise thinking. The subjectwise matters of life, which can be ‘true’, such as art, love, and religion, can ultimately only be approached through the objectwise. I understand that from your argument. It still feels artificial to me, but I get your point.
• Zoē W. — So, the next step we discussed is the artistic quality judgement. To do this, I use the concept of ‘quality’ as a characteristic and not as a yardstick because my primary concern is whether the artwork is excellent and, therefore, exemplary. I have proposed three criteria for this: concept, context, and consistency. I won’t repeat the specific elaboration of these criteria; I just want to address our point of contention: do these criteria have universal significance, or are they, as you claim, purely anecdotal? A middle ground is also possible, meaning that they can have fundamental significance, i.e., they are universally valid within a specific cultural context. We haven’t reached a conclusion on this yet, and it will be the next topic we need to discuss.
• Robin M. — Okay, that is a bit of a ‘giant leap for mankind’, but it suffices as a summary. To investigate this issue of the ‘fundamental’, I think it would be better to find out if there is a ‘common ground’ where your criteria can be meaningful and where other methods can coexist. Your analysis method has something exclusive about it that I don’t like. At the same time, I find it attractive, so there must be a foundation where it can work without excluding other methods and perspectives. One way to find out if I’m right is to explore what art is excluded by your method. And it doesn’t have to be on a global scale; we can focus on Western art, and it’s probably even better to be more specific: European classical music.

I had noticed that Haas had been restlessly shifting in his chair during the last quarter of an hour. After we had finished the current fragment, he quickly took his phone out of his pocket, glanced at it, stood up, mumbled something inaudible, and walked out of the bay window with brisk steps. He returned a little while later, stuck his head around the door, and said he was going to have lunch in Viechtach and meet someone there. I should figure out what I wanted to do, he didn’t know when he’d be back. “We’ll finish the last part tomorrow,” he announced and strode away again.

“At your service, Your Majesty,” I called after him, but he was already gone. I checked the fridge and found a frozen pizza. Under the stairs in the hallway, I discovered a crate of beer, took a few bottles out, and placed them in the fridge. Then I made a double espresso and headed to the veranda. There, I enjoyed my coffee with a cigar. A little over half an hour later, I put the pizza in the oven and grabbed a bottle of beer, which wasn’t very cold yet, but better than nothing. While I waited for the pizza to be ready on the veranda, I contemplated whether to make another attempt to see if Haas’s room was still locked. I entered the kitchen and opened the trash can, which had been emptied. I walked to Haas’s room, knocked on the door, and then felt the doorknob. The room was indeed locked.

VI — The Common Ground

Haas didn’t show up for the rest of the day. This gave me some time to critically review the discussion between Robin and Zoē. The conclusion of the nineteenth fragment, about the ‘exclusivity’ of Zoē’s method, wasn’t part of my text; it was an addition by Haas. Still believing that the entire discussion was penned by Haas and that those two adversaries weren’t his actual students, I decided to check how the so-called report from the two had summarized my text. Although it accurately conveyed the general idea, the discussion was now reaching a point where it was starting to deviate from my original text. I was curious about what Haas would make of this, as I had only read those final fragments relatively quickly, not thoroughly. Besides, he hadn’t contributed much to the discussion in the past few days, for reasons only partially visible on the surface and carefully concealed from me within. Haas had never been open with me, always reserved, but over the last few days, he had become a completely closed book. I had to admit I felt some concern for him, but my knowledge didn’t go much further than that. I would be glad when this stay came to a close, even if my curiosity about what was happening wasn’t satisfied. I tried unsuccessfully to reach Haas on the phone. Afterward, I smoked one last cigar on the veranda and then moved to the bay window with two cold beers and a bag of chips.

• [20]
  
• Zoē W. — Let’s return to the topic of translation first, as it also ties into the issue of common ground. Naturally, every language has its own stylistic forms, expressions, and wordplay that may not translate well or at all. But ultimately, regardless of language and metaphors used, when one lover dies, the other is left inconsolable. Human emotions and expressions like love, hate, fear, joy, sorrow, anger, laughter, and tears are universal. These are part of the common ground. You might even advise writers seeking an international career to avoid untranslatable wordplay.
• Robin M. — But taking into account the untranslatability of certain expressions influences the content of your text.
• Zoē W. — Every text is always influenced by various factors; I don’t see anything wrong with that, as long as the core of your argument is clearly, and ideally beautifully, expressed. It should be remembered.
• Robin M. — Now you’re changing your stance! When you advise a writer to consider potential translation issues in the text, that text is tied to a purpose. Therefore, it can never lead to the pure art you aim for.
• Zoē W. — Touché! You’re right; a writer aspiring to an international career who takes translation into account does link their work to a purpose. So, as part of this topic of common ground, let’s examine how it might affect the artistic quality of the work. To what extent is that quality influenced by this purpose?

I couldn’t help but think about my initial letter exchange with Haas when he had written to me, requesting correspondence about art. It was a peculiar request as I had never heard of him before, and I wondered if it might be a joke. The opening of his letter reinforced that feeling: Geachte Heer De Vries, mijn naam is Haas. — By the way, that saying is derived from German. The anecdote about the origin of this expression goes as follows: Victor von Hase, a German law student from Heidelberg, assisted a fellow student in 1855 who had killed his rival in a duel and wanted to flee to France to escape prosecution by providing him with his student ID card to cross the border. He reported to the university’s administration that he had lost his card. The trigger-happy student indeed managed to escape to France but lost the ID card there. The card was found and returned to the University of Heidelberg. Hase had to answer to the court for how that card ended up in France. To extricate himself from this situation, he used the following legal formula: ‘Mein Name ist Hase, ich verneine die Generalfrage, ich weiß von nichts.’ (‘My name is Hase, I deny involvement in the alleged offense, I know nothing.’) Did Haas intend a pun, or was the reference purely coincidental? After all, his name doesn’t mean ‘hare’ in German, which is ‘Hase’. The ambiguity of his greeting only works in Dutch. In response to my query, he wrote: ‘Mein Name ist Haas, nicht Hase. Auf Niederländisch: Mijn naam is Haas, niet haas.’

• Robin M. — The question of how much an interest affects artistic quality is something you’ll have to answer for yourself; it’s your area of expertise.
• Zoē W. — Let’s take an example in English: two people have a political dispute, one identifies as left and progressive, the other is a staunch conservative and identifies as right. The latter makes a pun and says, ‘Left is never right!’ This is untranslatable into German; it becomes something like ‘Links hat niemals Recht’, but it doesn’t work as effectively as in English. So, the author of the text may decide to remove the joke to avoid putting the potential translator in a bind. Maybe they can come up with a pun that works in all languages, making the text universal, and it might even improve the text here. For instance, ‘Left – right, wrong – right’ becomes ‘Links – rechts, Unrecht – Recht.’ The text then becomes universal instead of anecdotal. I admit it’s not a very strong example, but it’s the meaning behind it. Limitation can lead to a masterpiece, as I would paraphrase the great master, allowing the problems of translation to shape the content of the text makes the text tighter, even more consistent. The interest has become an artistic instrument.
• Robin M. — That’s an eloquent piece of rhetoric, but it doesn’t convince me at all. Therefore, I’ll present my own rhetorical flourish in response, paraphrasing another master. When a writer allows their text to be entirely determined by making its translation easily possible in all languages, that limitation could lead to the Cow of Myron or the Doryphoros of Polycleitos.
• Zoē W. — A cow is an animal, but an animal is not a cow — but in a different sense. Kant’s ‘norm idea’ cow.
• Robin M. — Exactly! I read somewhere that years ago, there was a large-scale study on how the most beautiful woman and most handsome man should look based on elements from the faces of attractive movie stars. The eyes of one, the lips of another, a nose here, an ear there, and so, the most beautiful human was concocted. In the chapter about the beauty ideal, Kant gives the example of the ‘thousand men’, how the idea of the norm can be determined based on averages, leading to a ‘mediocre’ human, but we ‘need not expect something called genius’. This danger arises when you filter out all the aspects that are typical for one specific language.
• Zoē W. — That’s what happens when Kant hasn’t been read for a long time.
• Robin M. — Time for a new topic.

It was beginning to seem like Haas would ultimately make no choice between one viewpoint or the other, and that way, he would deviate from my text. He had actually admitted to this with his remark that he had forfeited the right to it. The curious thing about this was that by being so secretive about it, he kept all of this within the anecdotal space. Or even more so, I thought, something had happened — that letter! — which had caused him to forfeit his right to the public domain. And precisely for this reason, it had to remain hidden from me. It was beginning to look like a drama, a tragedy.

This meant that I had to accept that I would never know the background of this issue. But then why invite me? What was the reason for that, if he didn’t want to reveal his views on my text, and, in particular, not about his views regarding it? This put me in an impossible position, didn’t it? This could only lead to one conclusion: he had never intended to have a real debate with me about my text; the paraphrasing of my text through his fictional aesthetics class would turn out to be the best outcome for me. He was merely using me.

• [21]
  
• Zoē W. — Let’s take music as a starting point for the issue of common ground. With a specific example, not in general terms. This means we’ll have to limit ourselves. I suggest examining a solo keyboard work by Bach. This way, we won’t be discussing jazz, pop music, dance music, or folk music, but rather a specific work from classical music. I don’t think this is a problem because it will likely illustrate something that can be transformed in some way into other musical styles or periods. This is not about a specific fugue, but about the phenomenon of interpretation that arises when different musicians perform it. This occurs in notated music. It might seem like a significant limitation at first, but even in jazz, pop, or folk music, certain things are fixed and used in a cover, like a chord progression, a melody, specific rhythmic patterns, instrumentation, or sound, and so on.
• Robin M. — Alright, I’m following you. The score is then the common ground, something that is fixed, and something similar can be found in other musical styles. I agree. A good example for Bach would be the different interpretations of Glenn Gould and Gustav Leonhardt. Their approaches are quite opposed, I must say. Gould comes from the romantic tradition, while Leonhardt is one of the pioneers in what is now called the ‘historically informed performance practice’. The score of the work on their music stands is the same, but what you hear is completely different. Well, not completely, of course, because they both play the same notes, but they sound very different. Can we identify the differences and also name the similarities?
• Zoē W. — Without delving too deep into the details, this is not about a musical judgement of their way of playing but solely about the common ground between them. It might be useful to first name the differences and then the similarities.
• Robin M. — Maybe, I don’t know, we can see what happens, complement each other, and perhaps even name similarities when they initially appeared different. There will undoubtedly be borderline cases. I’ll mention a few differences: instrument, tempo, tempo changes, articulation and phrasing, and dynamics — these are the most noticeable differences in my opinion. Did I forget anything?
• Zoē W. — We’ll see. The instrument is undoubtedly a key difference. Gould played a modern piano, which was certainly abhorrent to Leonhardt, who played a harpsichord from Bach’s time, or perhaps, if necessary for practical reasons, a replica of it.
• Robin M. — Ah! This brings up another important difference I forgot to mention: temperament. By the way, I realize now that we don’t need to name all the differences and similarities; this is solely about the concept.
• Zoē W. — Indeed. Temperament is indeed a crucial difference, even more important than whether the harpsichord was a historical instrument or not. The temperament used, one of many possible meantone temperaments in Leonhardt’s case, results in a significant difference in sound, especially noticeable in the thirds. The equal temperament that Gould used is actually the temperament for mediocrity, quite literally!
• Robin M. — Tempo then. Until Bach’s time, little is known about precise tempo use, if there was any at all. Terms like allegro, adagio, and andante are more character indications than precise tempo markings. Even in Beethoven, who was one of the first composers to use metronome markings, those metronome values sometimes prove to be highly unreliable. Another case is that of tempo changes, particularly rubato, ritardando, and accelerando. The tempo changes in Gould’s interpretations are typically Romantic. A rubato can extend over several bars. Leonhardt would never do this; when he, for example, extends the first of a longer group of sixteenth notes, the notes in the rest of the beat will be accelerated, so the tempo of each beat, and thus each bar, remains consistent.
• Zoē W. — This is related to the fact that Bach’s music is always linked to rhetorical principles. Leonhardt understands this and uses those principles as the basis for his interpretations. There is always a connection to the text in Bach’s music, whether direct or indirect.
• Robin M. — But it’s even more complex; the nature of the instruments plays a role as well. A modern piano has many more dynamic possibilities, with each note individually capable of different dynamics. This allows for crescendos and decrescendos, accents, staccato, and so on. A harpsichord lacks this property and can only create a slight difference in dynamics when there’s a double keyboard, with the help of different registers. What a piano can easily achieve, a harpsichordist must do through phrasing and rhythmic refinement. In scores based on the original manuscripts, we rarely or never see phrasing marks. Publishers from later times have added them based on Romantic performance practice. It’s this practice that Gould uses as a basis.
• Zoē W. — We’ve covered most of the differences; what about the similarities? If differences in notes, sound, tempo, rhythms, dynamics, instruments are so clearly audible, what are the constant factors that immediately make us recognize which fugue or sarabande we’re hearing, whether it’s Gould or Leonhardt?
• Robin M. — Yes, that does seem quite mysterious. Of course, there’s the score, but that’s just a piece of paper with codes. It’s as if playing that score is a form of embellishment that leaves the core unchanged. The solution to this mystery must be found in that score. For example, if you play a piece by Bach at half the tempo, you can still recognize it. Maybe this doesn’t work for another composer, and he’s a special case.
• Zoē W. — The common ground is in the score, but determining what that entails exactly is not without problems. The rhythm and pitch are the main ingredients that are fixed, but we’ve seen that four sixteenth notes are played differently by Gould and Leonhardt. No musician will play those rhythms as precisely as a computer, and that’s a good thing. The pitch, as we’ve already established, depends on the instrument’s temperament. What remains is the harmonic structure, the chord progressions, the modulations, and, for example, in a fugue, the polyphonic structure of the different voices. So, we might conclude the following: the form of the work lies outside, and the structure within the common ground.
• Robin M. — The distinction you make between form and structure intrigues me; these terms are often used interchangeably.
• Zoē W. — Ah… yes, indeed. I can give you a lengthy explanation, but to put it briefly: form concerns the exterior, structure the interior.
• Robin M. — So the structure seems to be the determining factor, giving the piece its identity, giving it its soul. Now, one last point about the consideration between the two interpretations, in connection with your criteria. The differences can be significant; the only thing that matters is having a clear concept in which the context is evident, and the interpretation is consistent. This determines the quality of the performance, not whether it’s historically accurate, for instance.
• Zoē W. — Conclusion: The common ground is objectwise. Genius, meaning the talent that determines artistic quality, is subjectwise.
• Robin M. — That’s a bit fast for me. We had just concluded that structure determines the common ground, which we derive from the score. Okay, the score is an object, but does this immediately make the common ground entirely objectwise? That structure is also a product of genius, and you just called it objectwise. How does that work?
• Zoē W. — Genius is undoubtedly subjectwise. This genius is at work in both composition and performance, at least if we consider excellence. But genius can also lead to objects, such as a score, and it’s precisely that score that ensures a constant factor among the various interpretations of the work. That constant is objectwise.

Haas was still nowhere to be found. I must admit that I was quite content with this. It allowed me to read the text more calmly without being distracted by his somber and sometimes disapproving looks. I decided to take a walk, as the weather was reasonably sunny. I locked up the house with the spare key hanging next to the front door, took Haas’s ski poles from the garage, and walked in the direction of the forest. I strolled through the snowy woods, making good use of the poles because the paths were not clearly visible. I noticed that there were no sudden crows flying out of the trees, the wind vane on Haas’s neighbor’s chimney hung motionless, and no dogs could be heard. It was as if all the animals had disappeared from the little valley with Haas.

Despite my strong intention, I couldn’t help but think about my peculiar host. It was clear to me now that everything about my visit had been orchestrated by him. This also applied to his absence over the past few days; everything he had to say about my text was already in the text of the two adversaries. The turn the text had taken now surprised me less; it had also been planned. And I must admit that I had gradually become impressed. While my text primarily focused on Zoē’s view, Haas had managed to formulate a kind of synthesis between both views. Although I hadn’t finished reading the text yet, it was now clear to me in which direction it was developing, especially after seeing that Kant’s antinomy on the judgement of taste would be addressed. I found that to be a challenging text, so I was curious to see what Haas would make of it.

Just as I opened the front door, I heard the ping of my text message. I read the message on the veranda after making an espresso first. Haas, of course — who else? — reported that he had traveled to Nuremberg and would likely return to Viechtach the day after tomorrow. I replied with just ‘ok.’ and received no further messages from him. I hadn’t expected any. I considered it good news; now I had the house to myself, there was enough food in the fridge and pantry, plenty of drinks and cigars, so I could freely read the text at my own pace.

• [22]
  
• Zoē W. — Kant discusses the ‘antinomy of taste’ in his Critique of Judgement, which I think is relevant to our discussion about the common ground. It’s challenging for me, but perhaps we can make some use of it together.
• Robin M. — Certainly. From what I understand, Kant argues that judgements of taste are not based on concepts. You can never prove or demonstrate your ‘good taste’. But at the same time, taste can be disputed, he says. This means that there must be a ground on which this ‘dispute’ can have meaning. But, on the other hand, Kant claims that judgements of taste are based on concepts. That’s the antinomy.
• Zoē W. — Yes, I understood that. But then he explains how the thesis and antithesis can lead to a synthesis. All I grasp from that is that the fact that judgements of taste are based on concepts (the antithesis) doesn’t necessarily mean that these judgements can be demonstrated or proven based on concepts (the thesis). It seems to involve two types of concepts, the ‘concept of the understanding’ and the ‘transcendental concept of the supersensible’. This is supposed to resolve the contradiction.
• Robin M. — Indeed, he summarizes it as follows: the thesis is that judgements of taste are not based on definite concepts, and the antithesis is that they are based on an indefinite concept, namely, that of the ‘supersensible substrate of appearances’. In other words, things that transcend everyday sensory experiences, such as the concepts of ‘soul’ and ‘God’.
• Zoē W. — What are we really gaining from this? According to Kant, there is some common ground or consciousness that makes us collectively agree on what is beautiful and what is ugly. But we have no way to prove it. This doesn’t bode well for my judgement of artistic quality. It makes my method irrelevant.
• Robin M. — By the way, Kant calls that common ground Gemeinsinn. And yes, he even explicitly states that we can ‘do no more than to obviate this contradiction between the thesis and antithesis.’ But it also means that as humanity, we share the judgement of taste, just as we share concepts like love and hate, life and death. There is something we share that makes us human. That is a lot! It also means that judgements of taste go beyond the sheer arbitrariness of numbers. While we can’t prove these judgements with our concepts, we don’t have to conform to the laws of the market, which are part of that knowledge concept. As for your method, I wouldn’t give up on it just yet.
• Zoē W. — What do you suggest then?
• Robin M. — I suggest that we take a closer look at three possible forms of art.

• [23]
  
• Zoē W. — We’ve talked about true art and pure art, both of which are not concerned with a purpose. I assume that the third form could be called engaged art, art that is concerned with a purpose.
• Robin M. — Exactly! Well, I’m hesitating now whether true art must necessarily be without a purpose.
• Zoē W. — Why are you suddenly doubting this? I thought we agreed on the disinterestedness of truth.
• Robin M. — I think we should consider this in light of the distinction between the objectwise and the subjectwise. Reflecting on our conclusion about the essence of the common ground, namely that it’s objectwise, and truth, which occurs disinterestedly in the action, is subjectwise. With this, we might have the keys to a decisive conclusion about artistic judgement.
• Zoē W. — But now you’re contradicting yourself: if true art can potentially be concerned with a purpose, then it can’t simultaneously be disinterested. This sounds like a Kantian antinomy! So, what’s your thesis and antithesis?
• Robin M. — Alright, I’ll go along with you: the antinomy of true art. 

  Thesis: Truth can only occur in a disinterested act and is therefore subjectwise. 

  Antithesis: True art can also involve engaged art, art concerned with a purpose.
• Zoē W. — And now you’re probably going to explain that both statements are based on different forms of understanding or something like that?
• Robin M. — Ha, ha. No, I’m going to formulate a synthesis that shows the opposition can be resolved, so watch this!
• Synthesis: When engaged art occurs in a true act, this involvement dissolves in that truth, and thus, the original purpose becomes irrelevant from the perspective of artistic quality, specifically concerning artistic articulation.
• Zoē W. — What does this have to do with the distinction between objectwise and subjectwise? Honestly, it seems like a bit of a trick to me. You’re shifting the perspective from one aspect, that of the purpose, to the other, that of truth. In any case, we had already established that a true artwork, whether it was engaged or not, disappears as soon as it is given that name. Is a true artwork that was originally engaged, when that truth is named and thereby dissolved in its name, also a pure artwork? And what is the counterpart of a true artwork, an untrue work?
• Robin M. — I’d call that a ‘duty-bound’ artwork, a work that is irrelevant. But let’s explore this issue in one final discussion block, where we attempt to formulate the ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it will turn out that I was wrong about my statement regarding engaged, true art. It’s worth investigating, don’t you think?
• Zoē W. — I think everything is worth investigating, but some things more than others… I suggest we take a break now, I need some time to critically reflect on all of this. Don’t you think?

I agreed with Zoē that Robin’s sudden twist unnecessarily complicated things. But I assumed that Haas had thought this through. I also decided to take a break because I needed food. I inspected the pantry and the fridge and decided to make a simple pasta with a tomato salad and wine.

I found some green onions in the fridge, an opened pack of spaghetti in the pantry, a sad can of pitless green olives, a dismal can of mushrooms, and a can of anchovies that was only a month past its expiration date. During the meal, which I enjoyed in the small bay window, I heard the notification on my mobile phone, indicating that I had received an email. I glanced at my phone briefly and saw that it was from Haas. I didn’t feel like reading it immediately; I would do that later on the veranda. No Haas for the time being!

Dear Mr. De Vries,

My plans to return to Viechtach the day after tomorrow have changed due to unforeseen developments. I have been forced to terminate my lease on the house in Viechtach due to circumstances. As far as I know, my belongings have already been removed from the house; I had gathered them in my room, and the caretaker has taken care of them. I assume you have fully read the dialogue between Robin and Zoē, and I hope you find it useful. I regret that I couldn’t experience the end of the text with you. The house will be rented out again at the end of next week, and the ‘Inn’ will be fully booked in two weeks, so you have a few more days to pack your things, and then you’ll need to vacate the house. The caretaker will come by next week to handle all necessary matters, such as cleaning, resetting the heating system, and so on. I wish you good Mut!

Kind regards, Taunis Haas.

Sitting on the veranda, enjoying a glass of dry white wine and a cigar, I read Haas’s email with growing amazement. After reading the message for the second time, I walked to Haas’s room. The door wasn’t locked, and I opened it to find the room completely empty, except for an empty wardrobe, a table, a chair, and a bed. When had his belongings been removed from here? It could only have happened during my walk since I had been at home for the rest of the time. I found it a eerie thought, removing things from the house, at least Haas’s belongings, without contacting me. I suddenly thought of that strange will-o’-the-wisp I had seen in the middle of the night. Did it have something to do with this? Ultimately, I couldn’t imagine it, and I needed to keep my imagination in check. I walked back to the veranda, poured myself another glass, and grabbed a fresh cigar. There was little I could do now. I would certainly try to call him, but I didn’t expect him to answer. I decided to finish reading the text first and then decide if and what I would email him. I was at a loss for the moment. I would definitely respond to him, at least send a reaction to the Robin and Zoē text. I knew nothing about those ‘unforeseen developments’, and I wouldn’t unless he provided an explanation. But I didn’t expect him to do that; otherwise, he would have done it much earlier.

• [24]
  
• Robin M. — We haven’t answered one of my previous questions: which works are excluded by your method? Let’s limit ourselves to classical music for simplicity. Can we name a piece that we consider excellent, but your criteria don’t apply to? I’ll give an example: the famous Adagio in G by Tomaso Albinoni.
• Zoē W. — Ha! You’d better have mentioned Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The ‘Adagio of Albinoni’ isn’t even composed by the seventeenth-century composer but by the twentieth-century musicologist Remo Giazotto. He claimed to have based it on a bassline by Albinoni, but that’s controversial. It dates back to 1945, if I recall correctly, and is a pastiche. Barber’s Adagio is also a pastiche, from 1936, and it might have influenced the other adagio. Both pieces sound very appealing, at least to many, but they are by no means excellent; they’re ‘noble kitsch’. So, both pieces fail at least with respect to the context criterion. Attractiveness is a matter of personal taste.
• Robin M. — I suspect that you could point out a failure in one or more of your criteria for any example I give. This emphasizes that it’s a personal method. If works considered excellent worldwide don’t meet your analysis, you can certainly question it, right? Your method doesn’t align well with the world’s taste, to say the least.
• Zoē W. — My analysis method is independent of global taste. It must be about consistency of concepts, right? I can perfectly explain with my method why the world thinks those pieces are fantastic, and also why those romance novels placed at supermarket checkouts sell so well. But we’ve already discussed this extensively; we’re repeating ourselves.
• Robin M. — Okay, let’s continue. There’s another way to approach my question: Can a piece with a clear, unambiguous concept and entirely consistent application of context still result in a work that isn’t excellent? I’m thinking of that TED talk piece you mentioned. It meets all your criteria, but is the work still excellent? Shouldn’t a work need to have something askew to be excellent? Shouldn’t there be an exception to the rule, to your consistency, to make that consistency true? Isn’t that the role of genius? Otherwise, you get mediocrity.
• Zoē W. — Yes, and no. It’s more nuanced. The ‘askew’ can also be incorporated into the material, the concept, or the context, while still being consistently applied; they are internal. Yet external exceptions, like with rules, don’t necessarily undermine that consistency. It comes down to a consistent balance in exceptions. Not everything works. However, exceptions can strengthen the concept and, in that sense, become part of the material.
• But there’s another issue that arises here: that of artificial intelligence or AI. AI will increasingly and fundamentally interact with our lives, support and even provide diagnoses for diseases, rapidly provide us with factual knowledge and information, and create works of art. Your question is very relevant in this context. Can AI do anything other than provide purely consistent works, and are these excellent by default? Or can that ‘askew’ element, the deviation, be programmed into AI? Is it possible for AI to possess or acquire genius? At this point, I don’t think so, but perhaps in the future. Or perhaps the deviations are so subtle that they are entirely consistent but beyond our human capacity to discern, making them subjectively experienced as such.
• However, we are now drifting quite far from our plan. We were investigating how and to what extent the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity relate to the categories of the true and the powerful, and therefore to the concepts of ‘true’, ‘pure’, and ‘engaged’ art. I suggest we get back on track with that, or this exercise will become endless.
• Robin M. — Yes, let’s move on. We haven’t resolved the AI issue yet, but I admit we still know too little at this point, so discussing it now would only lead to vague speculations.
• Zoē W. — I propose that you provide a summary of the concepts just mentioned, along with a practical perspective.
• Robin M. — We start with a work that occurs disinterestedly in an artistic act. Whether the work was possibly engaged with a legal interest in the initial phase remains undecided. We experience the work as ‘true’ during the artistic process. Afterward, we examine the result, and it becomes an object in any form, which we then call pure. Subsequently, we pass judgement on its potential excellence, which can only be made on objectwise grounds.
• Zoē W. — Yes, to the extent that we can, and must, also formulate a judgement during the artistic act, which is then subjective. It always occurs, as the artistic process is always subject to a critical eye; otherwise, art cannot be created. However, this criticism doesn’t come from external sources like critics, teachers, or jury members. It doesn’t originate from a ‘Man of Taste’, to reference Agamben. This criticism exclusively comes from the artists themselves.
• Robin M. — But that means the objectwise criticism is by definition linked to an interest, namely that of the client, the jury member, or anyone who has an interest in the work. Therefore, your objectwise method is not disinterested.
• Zoē W. — That’s just a matter of perspective. I believe that the method itself can be considered disinterested. The analysis is solely based on musical concepts (in this case). However, an interest can indeed be attached to that analysis. This is not inconsistent with my theory. Something inherently disinterested can still give rise to an interest.
• Robin M. — Then the next issue: does the genius still work in that objectwise analysis, or does the method only establish that this genius was at work? A retrospective judgement, in other words. I admit it seems like a trick question.
• Zoē W. — It is a trick question… The trick lies in using the concept at two levels, first at the level of the artist, and then at the level of the assessor. The latter case is an interesting matter: does genius play a role in passing judgement, in other words, is the act of judgement part of a creative process? This, however, might take us off course again, perhaps unavoidably.
• Robin M. — Perhaps we don’t need to dwell on this issue too much. The case of the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki demonstrates that specific knowledge is required to pass a specific judgement. This also applies to passing a musical judgement or an artistic judgement in general. It means that this artistic element must be present in the assessor’s knowledge, and thus, there may (and perhaps should) be a creative element in the assessment. Otherwise, every judgement would be sterile, which can never be the intention. In my view, this doesn’t mean that this judgement becomes arbitrary, and that anything is possible. I believe your criteria ensure the boundaries of the judgement.
• Zoē W. — All right, but where do we stand now? The objectwise judgement may contain subjectwise elements within certain limits. What’s next?
• Robin M. — The burning question is whether the quality judgement is universally valid. Something that Kant believes, if I understand correctly, is the case, but it cannot be proven; it is purely based on what he calls Gemeinsinn, a kind of common ground. Have we made any progress toward answering Kant’s question?
• Zoē W. — I’m not entirely confident. Current views on art, both in government policy and public opinion, are not very encouraging. I see little Gemeinsinn. Any form of universal thinking is out of the question for both the right and the left. The right, as a result of neoliberal practices, solely focuses on personal taste, the left can only operate from a relativistic power perspective, and the government tries to please everyone. And artists choose the middle ground.
• Robin M. — I’m a bit less pessimistic, although I understand your reservations well. Ultimately, there are two different aspects to consider: on the one hand, your analytical method, which must be evaluated on its own merits; on the other hand, what that method can achieve in the current neoliberal climate.
• Zoē W. — Okay, let’s examine these two perspectives separately. From your relatively optimistic standpoint, I gather that we have found some kind of answer to Kant. That answer should then be within my analytical method. I’m curious…
• Robin M. — Well, there’s a significant difference between the application of your criteria and all previous methods of prescriptions about what ‘correct’ art or artistic techniques are. In your case, aesthetics are not a prescription, not a recipe book; they exist at a transcendental level.
• Think about Giovanni Artusi’s criticism of Claudio Monteverdi, through that diatribe about Monterdi’s madrigal Cruda Amarilli. Artusi criticizes Monteverdi for his use of dissonance, for his excessive freedom in breaking all the rules of the great masters of the past. At some point, it becomes surreal when he claims the following, through a fictional character, by the way; the critique is wrapped in a dialogue between the master Vario and the student Luca (let me get my laptop…):
  • Even if you were to wish for the dissonance to become consonance, it remains necessary that it remains opposed to consonance; by nature, it is always dissonant, and, therefore, it can only become consonant if consonance becomes dissonance. This results in nothing but impossibilities, although these new composers may believe that they will one day discover a new method in which dissonance becomes consonance and consonance becomes dissonance.
• Artusi predicts Webern. Unlike the critics of the 20th century who criticized post-World War II modern music, mainly on the basis of flawed, inconsistent arguments, Artusi’s critique is at least still fundamental and therefore much more interesting. He does not condemn the use of dissonance as such, but he criticizes the context, namely the erroneous application of voice-leading principles by Monteverdi, because he believed these principles to be God-given, eternal principles. Artusi’s criticism should not have focused on Monteverdi’s deviations from the principles but rather on whether they were applied consistently.
• That is the great advantage of your method, which considers everything in context and not through ‘God-given principles’. This allows for everything to be possible. You can work in any style, and there is no absolute aesthetic standard, at least not for the use of materials, techniques, or the like. There are only transcendental criteria that indicate the conditions the work’s construction must meet. Freedom is maximized, while at the same time, limits are set to prevent that freedom from becoming boundless and meaningless.
• Zoē W. — Who cares about this freedom nowadays, and especially about any form of fundamental meaning? Everyone wants absolute freedom and anything but constraints. Nothing of what lies beyond one’s own ego matters. Freedom is the gift to deal with limitations; choices are made in freedom. But it’s currently a comfortable misconception to think that freedom is a deficiency, namely a lack of choices, and therefore the right to everything.
• Robin M. — Let’s evaluate the various domains one by one, where quality judgements are made, regardless of their level?
• Zoē W. — Off the top of my head: exams, grant applications, awards, and reviews. The most important are the first two. The level is undoubtedly abominably low, especially in recent years for grant applications due to political connections. Awards have always been something of a lottery, so that’s that. Reviews have lost a lot of quality, primarily because of the greatly reduced space for argumentation.
• Robin M. — What needs to happen to improve the quality of the judgement, apart from your pessimism?
• Zoē W. — A lot needs to happen. The most crucial thing is to create a separate space for purely artistic and therefore disinterested work within the judgement. This doesn’t have to come at the expense of legitimate political interests, but nowadays, art is often treated as a fifth wheel on the wagon. Even in works where those interests should play a role, in the ‘engaged artworks’, the balance between the purely artistic and those political interests should be considered. Even if it’s just by indicating how these two criteria relate to each other. There’s currently no method for this. Additionally, there should be more emphasis on quality judgement in education. Everyone does and thinks whatever they want, and students are fine with it as long as they get a 9. It’s quite poor.
• Robin M. — By the way, there’s still the unresolved issue of whether a true artwork can initially be an engaged work, where the engagement dissolves in its truth. Is this issue still relevant here in any way?
• Zoē W. — Well, I just said that when forming a judgement on an engaged artwork, there should be a consideration between the purely artistic part and those legal interests; in other words, the purely artistic part should be identified and evaluated. It could be possible that the original legal interest, in practice, becomes irrelevant due to the artistic truth.
• Let me give you an example. I would classify Bach’s St. Matthew Passion as an engaged artwork because it is intended for religious expression and is thus engaged with a (religious) interest. This interest goes beyond a superficial pretext; the music is deeply shaped by the text and its meaning. His music essentially raises the question of whether it can be understood (and thus judged) by someone who does not share his religious background and therefore cannot empathize. Bach’s music indeed celebrates the Protestant divine essence. At the same time, even though I am not religious, I experience it as an excellent musical expression that is exemplary. Although I cannot judge the religious engagement, I cannot help but classify the work as an engaged artwork. This, in my opinion, does not matter for the artistic judgement. As far as I’m concerned, that engagement is dissolved in the excellence of the work.
• Robin M. — But by doing that, you’re taking the work out of its own context and then ascribing it to your own.
• Zoē W. — We have no other choice. It’s impossible to fundamentally sense, let alone comprehend, the context from centuries ago. The question is whether this is a problem. Just as you already pointed out about the transcendental level of my judgement method, you can argue that the context in which I place the work is part of the context of judgement. All we should demand is that this contextual interpretation is consistent. Something that went wrong with Artusi, for example.
• Robin M. — And despite that, you remain pessimistic; you don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel? All doom and gloom?
• Zoē W. — I don’t see any signs of a turnaround, mainly because there’s no longer any sense of solidarity among artists; everyone is fighting for their own piece of the pie. Given the neoliberal practice, it’s not surprising, but I don’t see how this practice is ever going to come to an end. Unless it’s through a global catastrophic disaster, like the climate crisis or a war that spirals out of control. But what good will it do if there’s no one left who cares about art?
• Could it be that Zoē’s final lament was the reason for the wish at the end of Haas’s email, Keep courage! Or was it a reference to the song Mut! from Winterreise? Will kein Gott auf Erden sein, sind wir selber Götter! The God of art, I mean Romantic art, is dead; we will have to regulate the criteria for artistic quality judgements ourselves. But I fear that I share Zoē’s pessimism: for whom in God’s name?
• Towards the end, the roles of Robin and Zoē got somewhat mixed up, which I found sloppy. But perhaps it was due to time constraints because of the apparent threatening situation revealed in that letter. It reinforced the thought I’d had for a while that Haas was indeed the author of the text and that the aesthetics class was largely fictitious.
• At this point, I couldn’t form a definitive judgement about Haas’s text and its conclusion. I must admit that I had mixed feelings, but this might also be due to sharing Zoē’s pessimism.

Could it be that Zoē’s final lament was the reason for the wish at the end of Haas’s email, Keep courage! Or was it a reference to the song Mut! from Winterreise? Will kein Gott auf Erden sein, sind wir selber Götter! The God of art, I mean Romantic art, is dead; we will have to regulate the criteria for artistic quality judgements ourselves. But I fear that I share Zoē’s pessimism: for whom in God’s name?

Towards the end, the roles of Robin and Zoē got somewhat mixed up, which I found sloppy. But perhaps it was due to time constraints because of the apparent threatening situation revealed in that letter. It reinforced the thought I’d had for a while that Haas was indeed the author of the text and that the aesthetics class was largely fictitious.

At this point, I couldn’t form a definitive judgement about Haas’s text and its conclusion. I must admit that I had mixed feelings, but this might also be due to sharing Zoē’s pessimism.

VII — Winterreise

The next morning, I was once again sitting on the veranda with my espresso and cigar. I had slept restlessly, which made me decide to stay in the house in Viechtach for another two full days, both to reread Haas’s text calmly and to get everything sorted in my mind. I had tried to call Haas, and as expected, he didn’t pick up. His phone turned out to be disconnected, as an automated voice message informed me in German. An email I sent him bounced back, saying the account no longer existed. I had no means of contact with him anymore. It gave me an uneasy feeling and also distressed me, but there was nothing I could do. I contemplated waiting for the caretaker to arrive, thinking he might have Haas’s contact information, but ultimately, I refrained from doing so because the man was very likely hired by the landlord, not by Haas. Fortunately, there was enough food in the house, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

The rest of the morning, I gathered my belongings, did some laundry so most of my clothes could go into the suitcase clean. Luckily, there was both a washing machine and a dryer. I spent the afternoon largely rereading Haas’s text. I did so in the large bay window, enjoying the warmth of the wood stove. In the freezer, I found a package of lasagna, which I heated up and had for dinner in the small bay window.

The next day, I woke up early, at least early for my standards. I started with a long bath, followed by a hearty breakfast on the veranda. I tried to understand the meaning of Haas’s text again, especially its conclusion. Initially, I was somewhat disappointed, but after a night’s sleep, the bath, and breakfast, I was a bit more lenient in my judgement. His text undoubtedly had its roots in Kant’s views more than mine did, but his conclusion did go beyond Kant’s ideas of Gemeinsinn. At least, that’s what I gathered, trying not to be carried away by his — albeit cautiously — positive comments about what he called my ‘method’. I wasn’t immune to his compliments, especially since they came from him. My analytical method for artistic judgement opened up more room regarding Kant’s ‘indefinite concept’, as if within this indefinite element, some space had emerged for more ‘definite’ concepts, also due to the transcendental aspect of those concepts, namely my three criteria and the distinction of significance.

I personally had little desire for the link to Kant; in my text, I had made a reference to him, but not much beyond distinguishing the three aesthetic judgements: the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful. The latter stood apart from the other two because it was the only one not linked to any interest. This was the main element I had borrowed from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. The other references were Haas’s responsibility.

However, Haas’s references did lead me to scrutinize my text more critically. His argument about the indefiniteness of aesthetic judgement was rather convincing. Kant didn’t offer a very strong solution for its application, and the argument regarding Gemeinsinn wasn’t very robust. My analytical method at least provided some concrete room to transcend the limitless and uncritical nature of current artistic judgement. But this would require a willingness and critical ability within Gemeinsinn, and in that regard, I shared Zoē’s pessimism. I couldn’t see this happening in the short term, if ever.

Musing and pondering, I sat on the veranda with a beer and a cigar, my initially cheerful morning mood gradually giving way to my familiar gloomy state of mind. I had nearly fallen into a deep depression when the ringing of a bell startled me. I sat rooted to my chair in despair for at least a minute when the bell rang again. The doorbell, I thought. I walked to the end of the veranda and saw a car parked next to the garage. The caretaker? I wondered, but doesn’t he have a key? I hurried to the hall and opened the front door. Before me stood a young woman in a kind of ski suit, wearing a beanie and gloves. Although I was curious about who she was and what she was doing here, my aesthetic judgement was quicker than me. My eyes had taken full control of my speech, and I examined her face closely. Was she beautiful?

A few jet-black locks peeked from under her hat, emphasizing her eyes. Her gaze was intense, as if her eyes wanted to draw mine into hers. Despite her regular features, I wouldn’t call her beautiful, but she was very attractive. I wondered if this attractiveness was enhanced, or perhaps even caused, by the pain emanating from her face; pain can have something very attractive, something stemming from the essence of life, something that seeks protection and nurturing.

“Herr De Vries?” the woman asked. She didn’t seem to care about my exercise in Kant’s aesthetic judgement, and she apparently knew who I was, which was disconcerting. “Ich möchte gerne mit Ihnen reden.”
“Mr. Haas is not at home,” I replied, “are you sure you want to speak to me?” A silly question, but I was too stunned by her appearance. Both her appearance and her sudden appearance at Haas’s house. Who was she?
“I know that Mr. Haas is not at home, he is in Nuremberg, and I want to speak to you,” she said.
I invited her inside, offered her something to drink, and she only wanted a glass of water. We went out to the veranda to sit together. I needed a cigar, and she would have to put up with it. I hadn’t asked for her company, and after the whole Haas affair, I had no reserves of politeness left in me. We sat at the table, and she immediately lit a cigarette.

She had introduced herself as Esther Woszec, Zoē’s sister. ‘Aha, so that’s what the W. stands for behind Zoē in Haas’s text,’ I remarked. But she contradicted me, ‘Woszec is my ex-husband’s name, from whom I’ve been separated for a while. But we’re on good terms, and keeping that name is important for me in a professional context.’ That was none of my business, and I didn’t quite understand her disclosure. I let it be. After we had taken a seat on the veranda, we remained silent for a while, gazing at the little valley. Since she had come to see me, I waited for her to say something, but she seemed to struggle to find the right words. She pulled her cigarette hurriedly, and when she extinguished it in the ashtray, she lit a new one immediately. She was nervous, and I couldn’t find the right words to put her at ease.

“Does Herr Haas know you’re here?” I asked, more to break the silence than for the possible answer.
“Nein,” she replied, “at least, I don’t think so, but he might suspect. I don’t care, though.”
“Can we switch to English, my German is a bit rusty,” I asked, putting on a charming smile.
“Sure, I can try, but my English is probably even more rusty than your German.” She attempted to return my smile. She spoke with a strong accent, which significantly enhanced her attractiveness. She took a deep drag of her cigarette.

I couldn’t help but wonder why a strong accent, preferably German, Russian, or French, increased a woman’s attractiveness. Hollywood understands that very well. I immediately thought of a remark by Burke in his famous essay on the beautiful and the sublime, where he explains that beauty is not caused by perfection, and that women understand this well by learning to lisp and pretending to have weaknesses and even illnesses. I realized right away that the phrase where he explains this would be grist for the mill of sensitivity readers in a reissue. My thoughts went even further. How would it go with texts in which that phrase is quoted?

My train of thought was abruptly interrupted: “Did you finish reading the text of Herr Haas?”
I nodded. “I read it several times.”
“Could you tell me what you thought of the text? I don’t mean so much the philosophical content but what you thought of its setting.” She used that word precisely: ‘setting’. “So what you thought of the way Herr Haas presented this text to you, the form of the dialogue between Robin and Zoē, the setting of that aesthetics class. The overall form, really.”

Her English was far from flawless, but the confused wording might have been due to her nervous state. She took a final, deep drag of her cigarette, extinguished it with a vigorous gesture in the ashtray, and blew a remarkably beautiful smoke ring into the air. She saw my admiring gaze and laughed. Finally, some of the tension was broken.

I told her about Haas’s aesthetics class, how he claimed to have discussed my text with his students, Robin and Zoē, and that I initially believed this, but as I read the dialogue between Robin and Zoē, doubts arose about the truth of Haas’s story. I explained that I eventually became convinced that the two young people were fictional characters created by Haas. I confronted Haas about this, and he insisted that they were real students of his. I also shared the story of the registered letter and how Haas seemed to be disturbed by it but refused to discuss it with me. The atmosphere in the house had become seriously strained. Haas became more and more distant and would disappear for many hours at a time.

“Then I found the envelope of that letter,” I said at the end of my explanation, “by chance, torn into pieces in the trash bin. However, I saw the initials ‘Z.W.’ on the back of that envelope. That’s when I understood that at least Zoē was a real person, and therefore, Robin was very likely real as well. All of this deeply troubled me. It was clear that there was a connection between Haas’s altered mental state and that letter, but it probably had something to do with the aesthetics class, at the very least with your sister, Zoē.” To give myself a sense of composure, I lit a new cigar. Or so I convinced myself. “Does this answer your question?” I added.

Esther looked at me thoughtfully for a few moments, then averted her gaze and searched in her purse for her cigarettes. I guessed she needed a moment to gather her thoughts. “Yes,” she said after finding and lighting a cigarette. “It’s what I had suspected. Herr Haas deceived you in many ways, but not everything was a lie. That aesthetics class was real, and Zoē and Robin were part of it. I don’t rule out that he may have discussed your text in class, but I don’t have all the details…” She broke off her sentence and fell silent.

“Can you offer me another glass of water?” she suddenly said. “I will tell you the whole story. It’s not pretty.”

I walked to the kitchen and grabbed a half-full bottle of sparkling water and a bottle of white wine from the fridge, placing them on the table in front of her. Then I returned to the kitchen, picked up two wine glasses, and brought them with the wine back to the veranda. “I think we can use some of this,” I said. She smiled and nodded in agreement.
We clinked glasses, our eyes locking for a moment, and then we each took a sip. Esther began her story.

“Initially, Haas’s class had about ten students, including Zoē and Robin. But over the course of maybe a year to a year and a half, the class dwindled until Zoē and Robin were the only ones left, along with Haas, of course. I don’t know exactly when or how it began, but the relationship between the three of them became increasingly intense and personal.”
She paused, briefly making eye contact with me, and quickly hid her eyes behind her wine glass by taking a few sips.

“At some point, as I mentioned, I’m not exactly sure when this started, the three of them became entangled in a love triangle. Haas moved the class meetings from the university to his home. The discussions were accompanied by food, drinks, and eventually, sex. Aesthetics, ethics, theory, and practice all became a tangled web of philosophical debate, desire, orgies, and who knows what else. Often, the two young people would stay overnight at Haas’s, probably all three of them in the same bed.”

Esther shrugged and said, “Well, I’m not a prude, and I have a very open mind, but there were certainly some boundaries crossed here, it seems to me.” I nodded reassuringly but didn’t say anything. “And so, what you could expect eventually happened. Inevitably.” She paused and took a sip of her wine. “When you push boundaries without having any idea where they are, it can only end with you falling.”
She took another sip. “In short, they all fell in love with each other, but in an incredibly uncomfortable way. Robin had discovered his homosexuality through the erotic adventures and had fallen madly in love with Haas. Zoē, on the other hand, was head over heels in love with Robin, even from before the time of the aesthetics class, but that class undoubtedly intensified her feelings. Lastly, Haas had fallen hard for Zoē. And so, the three lovestruck fools revolved around each other in a desperate dance.”

I decided not to comment for now; I sensed that this was far from the whole story. There was more to come, and I suspected it would be tragic and extremely painful. I could tell by everything she radiated.

“It was a hopeless and amoral situation, if you ask me. Haas was the teacher, and Robin and Zoē got entangled in this unbalanced power dynamic. It was inevitable that this would eventually explode. What you could foresee did indeed happen: fellow students at school got wind of what was happening between the three of them, and, as is inevitable in such cases, gossip started circulating. Haas was summoned by the university’s director. He didn’t deny anything but was reprimanded, not dismissed. However, he had to immediately discontinue his aesthetics class. Robin and Zoē were furious, not at Haas but at the director. They tried to confront him, but, of course, it was in vain. The case was further investigated by a trust committee, but because Robin and Zoē refused to turn against Haas, the committee couldn’t take any action. No criminal offenses had been committed.”

I didn’t want to say anything to move her narrative along. “The director’s reprimand must have escalated the situation, I presume. Haas was forced to do something about it.”
“You could say that, yes. The class was terminated, but not the gatherings. The three still saw each other regularly at Haas’s place, but there was a change in Haas’s behavior. He took the situation to heart.”
“Did he feel he had crossed a line?” I asked. “Was there any sign of self-awareness or self-critique?”“He wanted to end the love triangle, but found it very difficult due to his feelings for Zoē. It was a painful process of pushing and pulling from all three sides, and one day, it happened… I don’t know if it was inevitable; it feels like something from a novel, but a badly written one, as often happens in real life.”

She swallowed some emotions with her wine and continued, “They decided to take a trip to the mountains, rent a cabin somewhere, and try to make a decision about how to proceed. During a hike, something happened; I’m not exactly sure how, but at some point, there was probably some kind of altercation, not really a fight but some pushing and shoving. Then Robin stumbled and pulled the other two with him into a ravine. Fortunately, it wasn’t very deep; they must have fallen about ten feet, but Robin landed badly, hitting his head on a rock, and he died instantly. Haas broke his leg, and Zoē was on top of both others, seemingly unharmed but in shock. Haas couldn’t move, and Zoē was unresponsive. They were found the next day by some hikers who called an ambulance, and they were eventually airlifted to a nearby hospital. There, it was discovered that Zoē, likely due to the fall, had a miscarriage; she was three months pregnant.”

“My God,” was all I could utter. I was curious, but I didn’t dare ask whose child she was carrying.
“Of course, both Zoē and Haas were questioned by the police, but ultimately, no official report was filed. The conclusion was that it was a tragic accident. Haas didn’t mention any altercation; the word ‘fight’ was never used. But it should be noted that very little comprehensible came out of her mouth. Most of the time, she sat there apathetically, staring blankly. The attending physician eventually prohibited further questioning. Even afterwards, she never uttered a single accusatory word against Haas. She didn’t want to know who the father was; it could have been either Robin or Haas. I think she hoped it was Robin, but she didn’t want to face the possibility that it might be Haas.” Esther got up from her chair and walked to the veranda’s railing, leaning on the wooden edge as she gazed at the valley for a while. She returned to her seat shortly after and lit another cigarette.

“If Zoē didn’t tell the police or anyone else about an altercation, how do you know then?” My tone was harsher than intended.
Esther looked momentarily surprised and then said, “Of course, she did tell me about it, just not to the police or others. I believed that the decision was up to her. If she wanted to spare Haas, it was her right.”

Maybe because of the pregnancy? I wondered; after all, Haas could be the father. I decided to keep this thought to myself

“But the story isn’t over yet,” she said in a hoarse voice. She looked at me for a while, and suddenly I saw a few tears rolling down her cheeks. I wanted to walk over to her, hold her, comfort her, but something in her gaze held me back; in some way, she conveyed that she wouldn’t welcome the slightest physical contact. I remained seated, didn’t speak a word, but didn’t avoid her gaze for a second. Only when she indicated that she had regained some composure did I dare to move. I took a sip of my wine and grabbed a cigar.
“She took her own life early last week,” she said abruptly.
“Oh, no!” I looked at her in astonishment.

She suddenly pushed her chair back and stormed into the house. Fifteen minutes later, she returned, her mascara, which had run due to tears, had been restored, and she had managed to conjure up a hint of a smile. “Let’s move on,” she said with a somewhat overly cheerful voice. I gave her an encouraging look.
“It went downhill with Zoē for a while, and I couldn’t get through to her. She started drinking, taking drugs, refused therapy, or any other help; she was completely unreachable. And then she made that fateful decision. I didn’t see it coming, of course. She was doing poorly, but I didn’t see any signs indicating a death wish.”

I wanted to say she shouldn’t blame herself or something equally trite, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“I blamed myself for a while for not picking up on the signs, but eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was not only futile but also unjust. It was her decision, and I couldn’t have prevented it anyway. This was also evident from the letter she left behind. You may read it if you want, but you must not quote it anywhere.”

Esther handed me the letter, and I began to read it carefully. At one point, she got up to do something in the kitchen. I immediately took out my phone and discreetly snapped a photo of the letter. I was certain that if I had asked for permission, she would have refused. I glanced nervously at the kitchen door, but it took a while before she returned to the veranda. I felt like a sneaky eavesdropper, and I tried to convince myself that I could always undo my low behavior by deleting the photo. But, of course, I was fooling myself; the action had already been taken and couldn’t be undone. Some actions are irreversible. I had to live with it. After I finished reading the letter, I placed it back on the table, next to her wine glass, pretending innocence. I hoped she wouldn’t notice, but I wasn’t confident; I felt like a slacker. Esther reappeared.

“Well, what can we say now?” she asked, “I have no words.” She raised her hands in a helpless gesture.

Dear, dear Esther, dear sister of mine,

If you’re reading this letter, I’ve embarked on a path from which no one ever returns. I made the choice to take this path with full awareness, not in a moment of desperation. I deliberately tried my best to keep my plan hidden from you. I didn’t want you to feel guilty because my act would become a form of victimhood and emotional blackmail. I don’t consider myself a victim.

I don’t hold the slightest bit of resentment toward Taunis and Robin either. Everything was an unfortunate play of fate. Our love was not meant to be. I look back with great gratitude on those nine intense months we spent together.

The primary reason for leaving this life behind is that I no longer feel at home in the world. Of course, the tragic outcome of our relationships plays a role, not having the privilege to bring a child of Robin or Taunis into the world. But fundamentally, the world we live in no longer provides me with the solace and strength to bear my fate. Everything that held value for me — art, truth, depth, consistency, clarity in thought — all has disappeared into the voracious jaws of Hydra, that many-headed monster that goes by the name ‘Neoliberalism’. I suspect, with near certainty, that it will never be defeated. Heracles is gone for good.

Dear Esther, these are my final words. Forgive me, and take care of yourself.

With gratitude for having known you, Zoē.

I slowly sipped my wine, not only because I needed time to find the right words but also to wash away my guilt about taking that photo. The words I ultimately found weren’t the most appropriate, but I couldn’t contain my curiosity. “Did Herr Haas read this letter?” I asked with a sounding-neutral tone.
Esther looked at me with a discerning gaze. I thought for a moment that she found the question entirely inappropriate, but then she answered, “Yes, he did indeed. Of course, I let him read the letter. Zoē meant everything to him.” She hesitated for a moment before continuing. “He sang a line from ‘Die Nebensonnen’: Ja, neulich hatt’ ich auch wohl drei; nun sind hinab die besten zwei. Esther sang it as well, with a beautiful alto voice and an elegant, slight vibrato.

Esther offered to drive me to the station in Regensburg, which was on the way to Nuremberg. After I had packed my things and tidied up a bit, we left the house. I locked the front door and put the key in the mailbox. Esther started the car, and a little while later, we were heading towards Viechtach. It was a little over an hour’s drive to Regensburg. For the first part of the journey, we didn’t speak, but once we got on the Autobahn, Esther told me that she was worried about Haas and that she would visit him tomorrow. I emphasized to her not to feel responsible for him. I suddenly thought of the ‘will-o’-the-wisp’. “Were you at the house around half past three in the morning a few days ago?” She nodded.

Postscript

Two weeks later, in the morning, I walked past my mailbox, which stood by the road next to the gate. This was usually a redundant act because I didn’t receive much mail, apart from the occasional information leaflet from the Mairie and some advertising flyers. But on this day, there was a letter with a disturbing gray edge on the front. I opened the envelope and took out the funeral card. Taunis Haas had passed away, apparently on a date of his choosing, which made me ponder… February 22, 2022.

There was another letter in the envelope, a personal message from Esther. She wrote that after that one line from ‘Die Nebensonnen’, Haas had sung one more line, the following and concluding line of the song. She didn’t want to tell me this that day in the house in Viechtach, but this was why she had been worried about Haas. She didn’t quote the line because she, of course rightly, assumed that I would know that line. I sang it softly to myself as I walked back to my house: Ging’ nur die dritt’ erst hinterdrein! Im dunkeln wird mir wohler sein. I grabbed a bottle of wine and a cigar and sat under the large parasol in the garden with the letter. It was gloomy weather, but fortunately, the forecast was that it would remain dry. I reread the letter more calmly this time. Besides that confession about the second line from ‘Die Nebensonnen’, she had briefly described how Haas had chosen his end. He had literally followed Zoē’s path, ‘in a hot bath with a bottle of whiskey and a razor…’

Esther’s cold description hit me hard. I was immediately relieved of my guilt over that photo. But there was something else in her letter, something that Haas had written in his farewell letter, addressed to me. A copy of the letter itself was not included, but there was that one sentence: ‘Tell Mr. De Vries that I have thought of him, Willst zu meiner Liedern deine Leier dreh’n? Suddenly, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, and I stared ahead in amazement for a few minutes. I now understood why Haas had invited me to his house in Viechtach, why he had temporarily rented that house, the reason behind the text with the dialogue between Robin and Zoē, everything had been conceived and orchestrated from the beginning. The starting point was undoubtedly the death of Robin, and I could safely assume that his unexpected death had set Haas’s plans in motion, leading to the new, expanded version of the text. The initial version of twelve fragments had indeed been discussed in Haas’s aesthetics class, but it was the second, rewritten version that was fictional and part of the plan. That last sentence, addressed by Haas to me, that question to the Leiermann, explained everything: I was the Leiermann for Haas, and he was asking me to continue playing his ‘songs’. That’s why he had put so much effort into that text, providing my text with critical yet constructive feedback — he had integrated his song into mine. Like his beloved Zoē, he was also fed up with the world, for the same reasons. Hence: ‘Mut!’

— J. Chr. de Vries, Bonnemort, Februari 22, 2022

Appendix

Over twenty-one months ago, I was still unsure whether to make De Vries’s text public. Today, I have made the decision, after much contemplation, accompanied by numerous doubts and burdened with an almost unbearable sense of guilt. However, there were plenty of excuses to do so: all the parties involved have since passed away — Robin M., Zoē W., Taunis Haas, and De Vries. Even Zoē’s sister, Esther, is no longer with us; she passed away prematurely due to an incurable illness. In the years following De Vries’s death, I did have several contacts with her. On several occasions, she expressly asked me not to publish this text. I have now ignored all these explicit wishes, as mentioned, and it weighs heavily on me. Another plausible excuse was that today marks the 100th birthday of De Vries. He would have ruthlessly dismissed this argument to the trash, the paper bin, or otherwise. The argument that De Vries himself did not handle others’ confidences with great discretion, such as those covert photos of him, is ultimately a fallacy. Of course, I also convinced myself that we should be grateful for Max Brod’s decision regarding Kafka’s manuscripts, and that a good example should be followed. This is, in fact, a form of moral appropriation.

However, the decisive factor came from Taunis Haas, through his final reference shortly before his impending death. Who am I to reject and ignore the sigh of the dying? Willst zu meiner Liedern deine Leier dreh’n?

— Iete Vreugd, Publisher; Den Haag, December 9, 2053