A
METAPHYSIC OF MODERN ART
187
after referring to the "irreducible order of death and the stars" in
Egyptian art, and the order of "blood" in Assyrian art, Malraux re–
turns to the Greek: "The sacred dance in which the Hellenic figure
appears is that of man, finally released from his destiny."
I t would be possible to quote many more such passages on Greek art
from Malraux, filled with a dithyrambic enthusiasm totally unexpected
in a partisan of the moderns; passages which are, perhaps, the first
affirmative words written about the Greeks by an important non-aca–
demic writer since the turn of the century. What has happened, of
course, is that Malraux, like Hegel, finds the freedom of man's spirit,
the "suppression of destiny," most translucently expressed by Greek
art. And it is literally true to say of this style-as Malraux tries to say
of art in general -that its creation was "the rupture of an anterior rc–
lation between man and the world." For Ernst Cassirer, in his great
work on the categories of mythical thought, has confirmed the intuitions
of Hegel and Malraux about Greek art. Primitive man, Cassirer ex–
plains, has no clear consciousness of "the human" as a genus apart and
separate from the world of plants and animals; like them, he is im–
mersed in the general life of nature; he feels identity rather than in–
dependence. In the figures of his gods, therefore, "tqe features of God,
man and animal are never sharply di tinguished from each other."
And Cassircr remarks that mythical thought, by itself, might never have
arrived at the creation of a separate category of "the human," distinct
from the life of nature, if not for the intervention of Greek art. "It
was only art which, by helping man to his own im::tge, in a certain
sense discovered the specific idea of man." Greek art is truly a "sup–
pression of destiny" in this profound sense, "the unmistakable symptom
of a spiritual transformatioll, a crisis in the development of man's self–
consciousness."* No wonder that Malraux, time after time, poses against
the glorification of the human in Greek art the dehumanized quality of
primitive and transcendental styles; which, rather than suppressing
destiny, submit the human in one way or another to an imperious, in–
human cosmos.
With this in mind, we are in a position to understand the inner
dialectic by which Malraux's panegyric of modern art reveals itself as a
last-ditch defense, whether consciously or not, of the very values whose
style modern art has rejected. Malraux's metaphysics springs, unquestion–
ably, from the humanist values of the Greco-Roman tradition; yet he
*
Ernst Cassirer:
Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen ,
Vol. II,
Das
My–
thische Denken,
p.
240-241.
