Cartesian character is a Thing-in-itself, a Kantian noumenal interiority understandable only through its phenomenal outer manifestations. Its supreme attempt to become a Thing-for-us, indeed a Thing-and-Image-for-the-Community, is heroism. It is well known that Brecht hated heroism deeply. The community must be extremely bad, he argued repeatedly in his plays, if it asks for the Subject’s sacrifice unto death. Obversely, the ethical consolation that this is post mortem idealistically compensated by tragic glory (or assumption into Paradise) looked to him as wedded to the concept of individualist character and therefore as hopelessly unrealistic. Notoriously, Brecht preferred the materialist comedy, which he upgraded from the depths of repressed and often alienated short semiotic forms as a great subversive form. As the fulminations of Sloterdijk against metaphysical subjectivity (the “Self”) have it,
“[in] the confrontation between the mega-thinker Plato and the gutter mime Diogenes....[t]he clown as philosopher shows the philosopher that there is an alternative to the spiritually heroic ascent into the life of ideas.... [A]t the time of the breakdown of metaphysics, the voices of [such] wisdom are becoming audible again. These are the voices of the oldest dissidence, they belong to women, children, ecstatics, rogues, plain people....” (209-10)
Brecht put it pithily as the title and upshot of his seminal 1930 Herr Keuner story: “Weise am Weisen ist die Haltung” (Haltung Is the Wisdom of the Wise, GKA 18: 13); this coincidence too testifies to Brecht’s pertinence for our times. And as Benjamin found out on the material of the “plays for learning,” the Brechtian protagonist is not a traditional hero, the athlete of fixed certainties, but a quick and changeable, that is wise, learner—including teachers who can still learn (776). As the learning teacher in The Naysayer remarks of the Boy’s refusal to die unless upon an extremely good and defensible cause: “What the boy says is reasonable, even if it is not heroic” (cf. Suvin, “Use-Value”). Conversely, when such cause exists, when it is the salvation of the Mother and the res publica as in The Yeasayer, or of the children of Halle as in Mother Courage and Her Children, then the Boy’s or Kattrin’s death are, their heroism is (exceptionally!) necessary. But even then, it testifies to the contrary rule that ought to prevail on a habitable planet.
2.3. Body—>Death—>Politics
Sub-thesis: Character is disembodied (a laicization of soul), personality is indivisible from body:
Dialectically, the affirmation (or with Spinoza, the determination) can best be gauged from the negation, as convex from concave. Does the elimination of Self, of individualist character—as in the re-mountable (ummontierbar) Galy Gay—also necessarily mean the elimination of Subject or personality? This may be a central theme in Brecht’s plays, foregrounded from Baal and Man Is Man through Mahagonny and all the Lehrstücke to the large post-Hitler plays. Descartes would say it does: he taught that “this ‘me,’ that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body”; “I am a thinking thing,” proclaim the Meditations, whereas “I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined” (1:101 and 190). But in a Brechtian (or Marxian) optic, if Self disappears, the Subject’s body does not. It remains the Subject’s anchorage and validation for saying “here” or “now,” for inscribing the Subject’s time and space into the socially recognized time and space. This holds not only for location and dating but also for the name (cf. Ricoeur 64-65) and what Brecht often—especially in the Lehrstücke—calls, in the Chinese tradition, “the face.” The body, phenomenologically pinpointing and validating the “inscription” of its here, now, and name/face into the central collective categories of space, time, and agency, grows in a devaluation of Self not less but much more important. How does it relate to other bodies, how does it perceive the natural and social universe? We can call the perception question (even etymologically) esthetics, and the relationship question politics. Clearly, there is no wall between them, since (for example) sexual relations belong to both; as explained earlier, they subtend and suffuse much of Brecht’s work, though he did not choose to focus on sexual relationships in his later plays. On the other hand, however, both the esthetics of rightly perceiving the world of bodies and their stances, and the politics of collective bodies and their interplay with, including shaping of, singular bodies (cf. Suvin, “Subject” and “Polity”), became for Brecht necessarily foregrounded discourses and domains.
Furthermore, most of Brecht’s plays, with a few important exceptions, end with an actual or a living death, and the Lehrstücke usually with a killing. The immensely significant Baden Lehrstück on Consenting, for example, turns on the question of who is able to die: and Brecht noted that from the answer “Nobody” there follows the necessity of turning everything upside down, of a radical all-sided revolution (BBA 827/25, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Lehrstück 24). That people should become able to die properly—presumably with a wise consent to a proper community which will go on—seems therefore one of the main anthropological reasons for personal and political radicalism. Once more the surprising modernity of Brecht’s horizons, here comparable to Bakhtin’s account of the people’s immortal body and its breakup under the bourgeoisie in his Rabelais book, becomes apparent.
I do not have spacetime here to discuss at appropriate length even the third corollary of my general thesis about Brecht’s agents: Character is a dogmatic or ideologically aprioristic, mononuclear interiority, only rational (as opposed to senses and emotion); while personality is a bipolar spread of possibilities permeated by an ensemble of relationships, and reposing on a union of reason and emotion, senses and sensorium.
3. A Conclusion: Emotions Intertwining with Haltung as Basis for Acting
3.1. Here would be the place for an extended argument just why and how emotions are not split from cognition, and how Brecht may help us to understand emotion. I have written about this at length in a separate essay (Suvin, „Emotion”). Here I shall repeat from it merely Brecht’s foundational diary note of November 15, 1940, where he defined his theatre “in emotional categories...for a change” from the usual “bad definitions as especially intellectualistic”:
This is possible without any problems, since in the epic theatre the emotional line and the intellectual line remain identical in the actor and in the spectator. It would be necessary [for such a defining] to build on the basis of curiosity and helpfulness a set of emotions which balances the set based on terror and pity. Of course, there are other bases for emotions too. There is above all human productivity, the noblest of them all. (GKA 26: 441)
I have tried to indicate how a whole Brechtian theory of personality, including emotionality, could be reconstructed around such a stance. It is variously associated not only with curiosity and productivity but also with happiness, friendliness, love, and “indignation, this socially highly productive affect” (GKA 27: 140). A constant tenor of Brecht’s may be found in his defense of a certain type of flexible but critical reason, refusal of uncritical submersion in both stupidity and corrupt emotions, and attempt at contradictory reconciliations of emotion and reason in a proper Haltung.
While it is important to show some serious—though not central—blind, and sometimes black, spots in Brecht’s treatment of the female gender in life or in effigy, it is at least equally important to show that he had an understanding of subjecthood or personality that refused the patriarchal or militaristic downgrading as well as the Hollywoodian or philistine misuse of emotion. This understanding crystallized out of Brecht’s own cognitive emotions and insights as the image and concept of Haltung.5
Haltung is akin to Halten, “to stand” in the sense of Was ist haltbar?, what may withstand or stand up (to pressure etc.). Brecht is much exercised with flexibility and a Daoist softness winning over rigidity; this is perhaps most memorably encapsulated in his poem Legend on the Coming About of the “Tao-te-king” Book. But understanding leads to withstanding: the insistence on durability is also of supreme importance to Brecht, one of whose favourite slogans was “Steel stood,” taken from an ad for a skyscraper that withstood the 1923 Tôkyô earthquake (GKA 22.2: 801). Thus, emotion is an integral part of any action; in any consideration of agency, such as Brecht’s meshing or intervening thinking, emotion cannot be split from cognition, from thought in the widest sense.
How