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Aesthetics
Aesthetics (or esthetics)
may be vaguely defined as the philosophical study of beauty and taste. To define
its subject matter more precisely is, however, immensely difficult. Indeed, it
could be said that self-definition has been the major task of modern aesthetics.
We are acquainted with an interesting and puzzling realm of experience: the
realm of the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, and the elegant; of taste,
criticism, and fine art; and of contemplation, sensuous enjoyment, and charm. In
all these phenomena we believe that similar principles are operative and that
similar interests are engaged. If we are mistaken in this impression, we will
have to dismiss such ideas as beauty and taste as having only peripheral
philosophical interest. Alternatively, if our impression is correct and
philosophy corroborates it, we will have discovered the basis for a
philosophical aesthetics.
This article seeks to clarify the nature
of modern aesthetics and to delineate its underlying principles and concerns.
Although the article focusses on Western aesthetic thought and its development,
it surveys some of the seminal features of Marxist and Eastern aesthetics.
Aesthetics is broader in scope than the
philosophy of art, which comprises one of its branches. It deals not only with
the nature and value of the arts but also with those responses to natural
objects that find expression in the language of the beautiful and the ugly. A
problem is encountered at the outset, however, for terms such as beautiful and
ugly seem too vague in their application and too subjective in their meaning to
divide the world successfully into those things that do, and those that do not,
exemplify them. Almost anything might be seen as beautiful by someone or from
some point of view; and different people apply the word to quite disparate
objects for reasons that often seem to have little or nothing in common. It may
be that there is some single underlying belief that motivates all of their
judgments. It may also be, however, that the term beautiful has no sense except
as the expression of an attitude, which is in turn attached by different people
to quite different states of affairs. (see also beauty)
Moreover, in spite of the emphasis laid
by philosophers on the terms beautiful and ugly, it is far from evident that
they are the most important or most useful either in the discussion and
criticism of art or in the description of that which appeals to us in nature. To
convey what is significant in a poem we might use such terms as ironical,
moving, expressive, balanced, and harmonious. Likewise, in describing a
favourite stretch of countryside, we may find more use for peaceful, soft,
atmospheric, harsh, and evocative, than for beautiful. The least that should be
said is that beautiful belongs to a class of terms from which it has been chosen
as much for convenience' sake as for any sense that it captures what is
distinctive of the class.
At the same time, there seems to be no
clear way of delimiting the class in question--not at least in advance of
theory. Aesthetics must therefore cast its net more widely than the study either
of beauty or of other aesthetic concepts if it is to discover the principles
whereby it is to be defined. We are at once returned, therefore, to the vexing
question of our subject matter: What should a philosopher study in order to
understand such ideas as beauty and taste?
Three broad approaches have been
proposed in answer to that question, each intuitively reasonable:
1. The study of the aesthetic concepts,
or, more specifically, the analysis of the "language of criticism," in
which particular judgments are singled out and their logic and justification
displayed. In his famous treatise On
the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund
Burke attempted to draw a distinction between two aesthetic concepts,
and, by studying the qualities that they denoted, to analyze the separate human
attitudes that are directed toward them. Burke's distinction between the sublime
and the beautiful was extremely influential, reflecting as it did the prevailing
style of contemporary criticism. In more recent times, philosophers have tended
to concentrate on the concepts of modern literary theory--namely, those such as
representation, expression, form, style, and sentimentality. The study
invariably has a dual purpose: to show how (if at all) these descriptions might
be justified, and to show what is distinctive in the human experiences that are
expressed in them.
2. A philosophical study of certain
states of mind--responses, attitudes,
emotions--that are held to be involved in aesthetic
experience. Thus, in the seminal work of modern aesthetics Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; The
Critique of Judgment), Immanuel Kant located
the distinctive features of the aesthetic in the faculty of "judgment,"
whereby we take up a certain stance toward objects, separating them from our
scientific interests and our practical concerns. The key to the aesthetic realm
lies therefore in a certain "disinterested" attitude, which we may
assume toward any object and which can be expressed in many contrasting ways.
(see also psychology,
cognition , perception)
More recently, philosophers--distrustful
of Kant's theory of the faculties--have tried to express the notions of an
"aesthetic attitude" and "aesthetic experience" in other
ways, relying upon developments in philosophical psychology that owe much to
G.W.F. Hegel, the Phenomenologists, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (more precisely, the
Wittgenstein of the Philosophical
Investigations [1953]). In considering these theories (some of which are
discussed below) a crucial distinction must be borne in mind: that between
philosophy of mind and empirical psychology. Philosophy is not a science,
because it does not investigate the causes of phenomena. It is an a priori or
conceptual investigation, the underlying concern of which is to identify rather
than to explain. In effect, the aim of the philosopher is to give the broadest
possible description of the things themselves, so as to show how we must
understand them and how we ought to value them. The two most prominent current
philosophical methods--Phenomenology and conceptual analysis--tend to regard
this aim as distinct from, and (at least in part) prior to, the aim of science.
For how can we begin to explain what we have yet to identify? While there have
been empirical studies of aesthetic experience (exercises in the psychology of
beauty), these form no part of aesthetics as considered in this article. Indeed,
the remarkable paucity of their conclusions may reasonably be attributed to
their attempt to provide a theory of phenomena that have yet to be properly
defined.
3. The philosophical study of the
aesthetic object. This approach reflects the view that the problems of
aesthetics exist primarily because the world contains a special class of objects
toward which we react selectively and which we describe in aesthetic terms. In
effect, the existence of such objects constitutes the prime phenomenon;
aesthetic experience should thus be described according to them and the meaning
of aesthetic concepts be determined by them. The usual class singled out as
prime aesthetic objects is that comprising works of art. All other aesthetic
objects (landscapes, faces, objets trouvés,
and the like) tend to be included in this class only because, and to the extent
that, they can be seen as art (or so it is claimed).
If we adopt such an approach, then there
ceases to be a real distinction between aesthetics and the philosophy of art;
and aesthetic concepts and aesthetic experience deserve their names through
being, respectively, the concepts required in understanding works of art and the
experience provoked by confronting them. Thus Hegel,
perhaps the major philosophical influence on modern aesthetics, considered the
main task of aesthetics to reside in the study of the various forms of art and
of the spiritual content peculiar to each. Much of recent aesthetics has been
similarly focussed on artistic problems, and it could be said that it is now
orthodox to consider aesthetics entirely through the study of art.
The third approach to aesthetics does
not require this concentration upon art. Even someone who considered art to be
no more than one manifestation of aesthetic value--perhaps even a comparatively
insignificant manifestation--may believe that the first concern of aesthetics is
to study the objects of aesthetic experience and description and to find in them
the true distinguishing features of the aesthetic realm. Unless we restrict the
domain of aesthetic objects, however, it becomes extremely difficult to maintain
that they have anything significant in common beyond the fact of inspiring a
similar interest. This means that we should be compelled to adopt the second
approach to aesthetics after all. And there seems no more plausible way of
restricting the domain of aesthetic objects than through the concept of art.
The three approaches may lead to
incompatible results. Alternatively, they may be in harmony. Once again, it can
only be at the end point of our philosophy that we shall be able to decide.
Initially, it must be assumed that the three approaches may differ
substantially, or merely in emphasis, and thus that each question in aesthetics
has a tripartite form.
Whichever approach we take, however,
there is an all-important question upon the answer to which the course of
aesthetics depends: the question of the recipient. Only beings of a certain kind
have aesthetic interests and aesthetic experience, produce and appreciate art,
employ such concepts as those of beauty, expression, and form. What is it that
gives these beings access to this realm? The question is at least as old as
Plato but received its most important modern exposition in the philosophy of
Kant, who argued, first, that it is only rational beings who can exercise
judgment--the faculty of aesthetic interest--and, second, that until exercised
in aesthetic judgment rationality is incomplete. It is worth pausing to examine
these two claims. (see also thought)
Rational beings are those, like us,
whose thought and conduct are guided by reason; who deliberate about what to
believe and what to do; and who affect each other's beliefs and actions through
argument and persuasion. Kant argued that reason has both a theoretical and a
practical employment, and that a rational being finds both his conduct and his
thought inspired and limited by reason. The guiding law of rational conduct is
that of morality, enshrined in the categorical
imperative, which enjoins us to act only on that maxim which we can at
the same time will as a universal law.
By virtue of practical reason, the
rational being sees himself and others of his kind as subject to an order that
is not that of nature: he lives responsive to the law of reason and sees himself
as a potential member of a "kingdom of ends" wherein the demands of
reason are satisfied. Moreover, he looks on every rational being--himself
included--as made sacrosanct by reason and by the morality that stems from it.
The rational being, he recognizes, must be treated always as an end in himself,
as something of intrinsic value, and never as a mere object to be disposed of
according to purposes that are not its own.
The capacity to see things as
intrinsically valuable, irreplaceable, or ends in themselves is one of the
important gifts of reason. But it is not exercised only practically or only in
our dealings with other reasoning beings. It may also be exercised contemplatively
toward nature as a whole. In this case, practical considerations are held in
abeyance, and we stand back from nature and look on it with a disinterested
concern. Such an attitude is not only peculiar to rational beings but also
necessary to them. Without it, they have only an impoverished grasp of their own
significance and of their relation to the world in which they are situated
through their thoughts and actions. This disinterested contemplation and the
experiences that arise from it acquaint us, according to Kant, with the ultimate
harmony that exists between the world and our faculties. They therefore provide
the ultimate guarantee, both of practical reasoning and of the understanding, by
intimating to us directly that the world answers to our purposes and corresponds
to our beliefs.
Disinterested contemplation forms, for
Kant, the core of aesthetic experience and the ultimate ground of the judgment
of beauty. He thus concludes (1) that only rational beings have aesthetic
experience; (2) that every rational being needs aesthetic experience and is
significantly incomplete without it; and (3) that aesthetic experience stands in
fundamental proximity to moral judgment and is integral to our nature as moral
beings.
Modern philosophers have sometimes
followed Kant, sometimes ignored him. Rarely, however, have they set out to show
that aesthetic experience is more widely distributed than the human race. For
what could it mean to say of a cow, for example, that in staring at a landscape
it is moved by the sentiment of beauty? What in a cow's behaviour or mental
composition could manifest such a feeling? While a cow may be uninterested, it
cannot surely be disinterested, in the manner of a rational being for whom
disinterest is the most passionate form of interest. It is in pondering such
considerations that one comes to realize just how deeply embedded in human
nature is the aesthetic impulse, and how impossible it is to separate this
impulse from the complex mental life that distinguishes human beings from
beasts. This condition must be borne in mind by any philosopher seeking to
confront the all-important question of the relation between the aesthetic and
the moral.
The third approach to aesthetics begins
with a class of aesthetic objects and attempts thereafter to show the
significance of that class to those who selectively respond to it. The term
aesthetic object, however, is ambiguous, and, depending on its interpretation,
may suggest two separate programs of philosophical aesthetics. The expression
may denote either the "intentional" or the "material" object
of aesthetic experience. This distinction, a legacy of the Scholastic
philosophers of the Middle Ages, has played a major role in recent
Phenomenology. It may be briefly characterized as follows: When someone responds
to object O, his response depends upon
a conception of O that may, in fact,
be erroneous. O is then the material
object of his response, while his conception defines the intentional object.
(The term intentional comes from the Latin intendere,
"to aim.") To cite an example: A person is frightened by a white cloth
flapping in a darkened hall, taking it for a ghost. Here, the material object of
the fear is the cloth, while the intentional object is a ghost. A philosophical
discussion of fear may be presented as a discussion of things feared, but if so,
the phrase denotes the class of intentional objects of fear and not the
(infinitely varied and infinitely disordered) class of material objects. In an
important sense, the intentional object is part of a state of mind,
whereas the material object always has independent (and objective) existence. If
the expression "aesthetic object" is, therefore, taken in its
intentional construction, the study of the aesthetic object becomes the study,
not of an independently existing class of things, but of the aesthetic
experience itself. It is in this sense that the term occurs in the writings of
Phenomenologists (e.g., Mikel
Dufrenne, La Phénoménologie
de l'expérience esthétique [1953; The
Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience] and Roman Ingarden, Das
literarische Kunstwerk [1931; The
Literary Work of Art]), whose studies of the aesthetic object exemplify not
the third, but the second, of the approaches considered above. (see also intentionality)
Which of those two approaches should be
adopted? We can already see one reason for adopting the approach that puts the
aesthetic experience first and examines the aesthetic object primarily as the
intentional object of that experience. It is, after all, to experience that we
must turn if we are to understand the value of the aesthetic realm--our reason
for engaging with it, studying it, and adding to it. Until we understand that
value, we will not know why we ought to construct such a concept as the
aesthetic, still less why we should erect a whole branch of philosophy devoted
to its analysis. (see also understanding)
A further reason also suggests itself
for rejecting the approach to aesthetics that sees it merely as the philosophy
of art, because art, and the institutions that sustain it, are mutable and
perhaps inessential features of the human condition. While we classify together
such separate art forms as poetry, the novel, music, drama, painting, sculpture,
and architecture, our disposition to do so is as much the consequence of
philosophical theory as its premise. Would other people at other times and in
other conditions have countenanced such a classification or seen its point? And
if so, would they have been motivated by similar purposes, similar observations,
and similar beliefs? We might reasonably be skeptical, for while there have been
many attempts to find something in common--if only a "family
resemblance"--between the various currently accepted art forms, they have
all been both contentious in themselves and of little aesthetic interest.
Considered materially (i.e., without
reference to the experiences that we direct to them), the arts seem to have
little in common except for those properties that are either too uninteresting
to deserve philosophical scrutiny (the property, for example, of being
artifacts) or else too vast and vague to be independently intelligible.
Consider the theory of Clive
Bell (Art, 1914) that art is
distinguished by its character as "significant form." Initially
attractive, the suggestion crumbles at once before the skeptic. When is form
"significant"? The only answer to be extracted from Bell is this:
"when it is art." In effect, the theory reduces to a tautology. In any
normal understanding of the words, a traffic warden is a significant form, at
least to the motorist who sees himself about to receive a ticket. Thus, to
explain Bell's meaning, it is necessary to restrict the term significant to the
significance (whatever that is) of art.
Moreover, it is of the greatest
philosophical importance to attend not only to the resemblances between the art
forms but also to their differences. It is true that almost anything can be seen
from some point of view as beautiful. At the same time, however, our experience
of beauty crucially depends upon a knowledge of the object in which beauty is
seen. It is absurd to suppose that I could present you with an object that might
be a stone, a sculpture, a box, a fruit, or an animal, and expect you to tell me
whether it is beautiful before knowing what it is. In general we may say--in
opposition to a certain tradition in aesthetics that finds expression in Kant's
theory--that our sense of beauty is always dependent upon a conception of the
object in the way that our sense of the beauty of the human figure is dependent
upon a conception of that figure. Features that we should regard as beautiful in
a horse--developed haunches, curved back, and so on--we should regard as ugly in
a man, and those aesthetic judgments would be determined by our conception of
what men and horses generally are, how they move, and what they achieve through
their movements. In a similar way, features that are beautiful in a sculpture
may not be beautiful in a work of architecture, where an idea of function seems
to govern our perceptions. In every case, our perception of the beauty of a work
of art requires us to be aware of the distinctive character of each art form and
to put out of mind, as largely irrelevant to our concerns, the overarching
category of art to which all supposedly belong. But if that is so, it is
difficult to see how we could cast light upon the realm of aesthetic interest by
studying the concept of art. (see also learning)
Whether or not that concept is a recent
invention, it is certainly a recent obsession. Medieval and Renaissance
philosophers who approached the problems of beauty and taste--e.g.,
St. Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, and even Leon Battista Alberti--often wrote
of beauty without reference to art, taking as their principal example the human
face and body. The distinctively modern approach to aesthetics began to take
shape during the 18th century, with the writings on art of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Charles Batteux, and Johann Winckelmann and the theories of taste
proposed by the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames (Henry
Home), and Archibald Alison. This approach materialized not only because of a
growing interest in fine art as a uniquely human
phenomenon but also because of the awakening of feelings toward nature,
which marked the dawn of the Romantic movement. In Kant's aesthetics, indeed,
nature has pride of place as offering the only examples of what he calls
"free beauty"--i.e., beauty
that can be appreciated without the intermediary of any polluting concept. Art,
for Kant, was not merely one among many objects of aesthetic interest; it was
also fatally flawed in its dependence upon intellectual understanding.
Even without taking that extreme
position, it is difficult to accept that the fragile and historically determined
concept of art can bear the weight of a full aesthetic theory. Leaving aside the
case of natural beauty, we must still recognize the existence of a host of human
activities (dress, decoration, manners, ornament) in which taste is of the
essence and yet which seems totally removed from the world of fine art. It has
been common, following the lead of Batteux, to make a distinction between the
fine and the useful arts, and to accommodate the activities just referred to
under the latter description; but it is clear that this is no more than a
gesture and that the points of similarity between the art of the dressmaker and
that of the composer are of significance only because of a similarity in the
interests that these arts are meant to satisfy.
Such considerations point toward the
aforementioned approach that begins with the aesthetic
experience as the most likely to capture the full range of aesthetic
phenomena without begging the important philosophical questions about their
nature. Can we then single out a faculty, an attitude, a mode of judgment, or a
form of experience that is distinctively aesthetic? And if so, can we attribute
to it the significance that would make this philosophical enterprise both
important in itself and relevant to the many questions posed by beauty,
criticism, and art?
Taking their cue from Kant, many
philosophers have defended the idea of an aesthetic attitude as one divorced
from practical concerns, a kind of "distancing," or standing back, as
it were, from ordinary involvement. The classic statement of this position is
Edward Bullough's " 'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an
Aesthetic Principle," an essay published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1912. While there is certainly
something of interest to be said along those lines, it cannot be the whole
story. Just what kind of distance is envisaged? Is the lover distanced from his
beloved? If not, by what right does he call her beautiful? Does distance imply a
lack of practical involvement? If such is the case, how can we ever take up an
aesthetic attitude to those things that have a purpose for us--things such as a
dress, building, or decoration? But if these are not aesthetic, have we not paid
a rather high price for our definition of this word--the price of detaching it
from the phenomena that it was designed to identify?
Kant's own formulation was more
satisfactory. He described the recipient of aesthetic experience not as
distanced but as disinterested, meaning that the recipient does not treat the
object of enjoyment either as a vehicle for curiosity or as a means to an end.
He contemplates the object as it is in itself and "apart from all
interest." In a similar spirit, Arthur
Schopenhauer argued that a person could regard anything aesthetically so
long as he regarded it in independence of his will--that is, irrespective of any
use to which he might put it. Regarding it thus, a person could come to see the
Idea that the object expressed, and in this knowledge consists aesthetic
appreciation (Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [1819; The World as Will and Idea]).
Of a piece with such a view is the
popular theory of art as a kind of "play"
activity, in which creation and appreciation are divorced from the normal
urgencies of existence and surrendered to leisure. "With the agreeable, the
good, the perfect," wrote Friedrich Schiller,
"man is merely in earnest, but with beauty he plays" (Briefe
über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen [1794-95; Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man]).
Such thoughts have already been
encountered. The problem is to give them philosophical precision. They have
recurred in modern philosophy in a variety of forms--for example, in the theory
that the aesthetic object is always considered for its own sake, or as a unique
individual rather than a member of a class. Those particular formulations have
caused some philosophers to treat aesthetic objects as though they were endowed
with a peculiar metaphysical status (see below The work of art). Alternatively, it is sometimes argued that the
aesthetic experience has an intuitive character, as opposed to the conceptual
character of scientific thought or the instrumental character of practical
understanding.
The simplest way of summarizing this
approach to aesthetics is in terms of two fundamental propositions:
1. The aesthetic object is an object of
sensory experience and enjoyed as such: it is heard, seen, or (in the limiting
case) imagined in sensory form. (see also sense)
2. The aesthetic object is at the same
time contemplated: its appearance is a matter of
intrinsic interest and studied not merely as an object of sensory pleasure but
also as the repository of significance and value.
The first of these propositions explains
the word aesthetic, which was initially used in this connection by the
Leibnizian philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in Meditationes
Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (1735; Reflections
on Poetry). Baumgarten borrowed the Greek term for sensory perception (aisthesis)
in order to denote a realm of concrete knowledge (the realm, as he saw it, of
poetry), in which a content is communicated in sensory form. The second
proposition is, in essence, the foundation of taste. It describes the motive of
our attempt to discriminate rationally between those objects that are worthy of
contemplative attention and those that are not.
Almost all of the aesthetic theories of
post-Kantian Idealism depend upon those two
propositions and try to explain the peculiarities of aesthetic experience and
aesthetic judgment in terms of the synthesis of the sensory and the intellectual
that they imply--the synthesis summarized in Hegel's theory of art as "the
sensuous embodiment of the Idea." Neither proposition is particularly
clear. Throughout the discussions of Kant and his immediate following, the
"sensory" is assimilated to the "concrete," the
"individual," the "particular," and the
"determinate," while the "intellectual" is assimilated to
the "abstract," the "universal," the "general,"
and the "indeterminate"--assimilations that would nowadays be regarded
with extreme suspicion. Nevertheless, subsequent theories have repeatedly
returned to the idea that aesthetic experience involves a special synthesis of
intellectual and sensory components, and that both its peculiarities and its
value are to be derived from such a synthesis.
The idea at once gives rise to
paradoxes. The most important was noticed by Kant, who called it the antinomy
of taste. As an exercise of reason, he argued,
aesthetic experience must inevitably tend toward a reasoned choice and therefore
must formulate itself as a judgment. Aesthetic judgment, however, seems to be in
conflict with itself. It cannot be at the same time aesthetic (an expression of
sensory enjoyment) and also a judgment (claiming universal assent). Yet all
rational beings, by virtue of their rationality, seem disposed to make these
judgments. On the one hand, they feel pleasure in some object, and this pleasure
is immediate, not based, according to Kant, in any conceptualization or in any
inquiry into cause, purpose, or constitution. On the other hand, they express
their pleasure in the form of a judgment, speaking "as if beauty were a
quality of the object," and so representing their pleasure as objectively
valid. But how can this be so? The pleasure is immediate, based in no reasoning
or analysis. So what permits this demand for universal agreement?
However we approach the idea of beauty,
we find this paradox emerging. Our ideas, feelings, and judgments are called
aesthetic precisely because of their direct relation to sensory enjoyment.
Hence, no one can judge the beauty of an object that he has never encountered.
Scientific judgments, like practical principles, can be received "second
hand." I can, for example, take you as my authority for the truths of
physics or for the utility of railways. But I cannot take you as my authority
for the merits of Leonardo or Mozart if I have not seen or heard works by either
artist. It would seem to follow from this that there can be no rules or
principles of aesthetic judgment, since I must feel the pleasure immediately in
the perception of the object and cannot be talked into it by any grounds of
proof. It is always experience, and never conceptual thought, that gives the
right to aesthetic judgment, so that anything that alters the experience of an
object alters its aesthetic significance as well. As Kant put it, aesthetic
judgment is "free from concepts," and beauty itself is not a concept.
Such a conclusion, however, seems to be
inconsistent with the fact that aesthetic judgment is a form of judgment. When I
describe something as beautiful, I do not mean merely that it pleases me: I am
speaking about it, not about myself, and, if challenged, I try to find reasons
for my view. I do not explain my feeling but give grounds for it by pointing to
features of its object. Any search for reasons has the
"universalizing" character of rationality: I am in effect saying that
others, insofar as they are rational, ought to feel exactly the same delight as
I feel. Being disinterested, I have put aside my interests, and with them
everything that makes my judgment relative to me. But, if that is so, then
"the judgment of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise there could be
no room even for contention in the matter, or for the claim to the necessary
agreement of others."
In short, the expression aesthetic
judgment seems to be a contradiction in terms, denying in the first term
precisely that reference to rational considerations that it affirms in the
second. This paradox, which we have expressed in Kant's language, is not
peculiar to the philosophy of Kant. On the contrary, it is encountered in one
form or another by every philosopher or critic who takes aesthetic experience
seriously, and who therefore recognizes the tension between the sensory and the
intellectual constraints upon it. On the one hand, aesthetic experience is
rooted in the immediate sensory enjoyment of its object through an act of
perception. On the other, it seems to reach beyond enjoyment toward a meaning
that is addressed to our reasoning powers and that seeks judgment from them.
Thus criticism, the reasoned justification of aesthetic judgment, is an
inevitable upshot of aesthetic experience. Yet, critical reasons can never be
merely intellectual; they always contain a reference to the way in which an
object is perceived.
Two related paradoxes also emerge from
the same basic conception of the aesthetic experience. The first was given
extended consideration by Hegel, who argued, in his Vorlesungen
über die Aesthetik (1832; "Lectures on Aesthetics";
Eng. trans., Philosophy of Fine Art), roughly as follows: Our sensuous
appreciation of art concentrates upon the given "appearance" -- the "form."
It is this that holds our attention and that gives to the work of art its
peculiar individuality. Because it addresses itself to our sensory appreciation,
the work of art is essentially concrete, to be understood by an act of
perception rather than by a process of discursive thought. At the same time, our
understanding of the work of art is in part intellectual; we seek in it a
conceptual content, which it presents to us in
the form of an idea. One purpose of critical interpretation is to expound this
idea in discursive form--to give the equivalent of the content of the work of
art in another, nonsensuous idiom. But criticism can never succeed in this task,
for, by separating the content from the particular form, it abolishes its
individuality. The content presented then ceases to be the exact content of that
work of art. In losing its individuality, the content loses its aesthetic
reality; it thus ceases to be a reason for attending to the particular work of
art that first attracted our critical attention. It cannot be this that we saw
in the original work and that explained its power over us. For this content,
displayed in the discursive idiom of the critical intellect, is no more than a
husk, a discarded relic of a meaning that eluded us in the act of seizing it. If
the content is to be the true object of aesthetic interest, it must remain
wedded to its individuality: it cannot be detached from its "sensuous
embodiment" without being detached from itself. Content is, therefore,
inseparable from form and form in turn inseparable from content. (It is the form
that it is only by virtue of the content that it embodies.) (see also essence)
Hegel's argument is the archetype of
many, all aimed at showing that it is both necessary to distinguish form from
content and also impossible to do so. This paradox may be resolved by rejecting
either of its premises, but, as with Kant's antinomy, neither premise seems
dispensable. To suppose that content and form are inseparable is, in effect, to
dismiss both ideas as illusory, since no two works of art can then share either
a content or a form--the form being definitive of each work's individuality. In
this case, no one could ever justify his interest in a work of art by reference
to its meaning. The intensity of aesthetic interest becomes a puzzling, and
ultimately inexplicable, feature of our mental life. If, on the other hand, we
insist that content and form are separable, we shall never be able to find,
through a study of content, the reason for attending to the particular work of
art that intrigues us. Every work of art stands proxy for its paraphrase. An
impassable gap then opens between aesthetic experience and its ground, and the
claim that aesthetic experience is intrinsically valuable is thrown in doubt.
A related paradox is sometimes referred
to as the "heresy of paraphrase," the words being those of the U.S.
literary critic Cleanth Brooks (The
Well Wrought Urn, 1949). The heresy is that of assuming that the meaning of
a work of art (particularly of poetry) can be
paraphrased. According to Brooks, who here followed an argument of Benedetto
Croce, the meaning of a poem consists precisely in what is not translatable.
Poetic meaning is bound up with the particular disposition of the words--their
sound, rhythm, and arrangement--in short, with the "sensory
embodiment" provided by the poem itself. To alter that embodiment is to
produce either another poem (and therefore another meaning) or something that is
not a work of art at all, and which therefore lacks completely the kind of
meaning for which works of art are valued. Hence no poetry is translatable, and
no critic can do better than to point to the objective features of the poem that
most seem to him to be worthy of attention. Yet, that result too is paradoxical.
For what does the critic see in those objective features and how is his
recommendation to be supported? Why should we attend to poetry at all if nothing
can be said about its virtues save only "look!"? Why look at a poem
rather than an advertisement, a mirror, or a blade of grass? Everything becomes
equally worthy of attention, since nothing can be said that will justify
attention to anything. (see also literature)
Such paradoxes suggest the need for a
more extensive theory of the mind than has been so far assumed. We have referred
somewhat loosely to the sensory and intellectual components of human experience
but have said little about the possible relations and dependencies that exist
between them. Perhaps, therefore, the paradoxes result only from our
impoverished description of the human mind and are not intrinsic to the subject
matter of aesthetic interest.
Many modern philosophers have at this
point felt the need to invoke imagination, either as a distinct mental
"faculty" (Kant) or as a distinctive mental operation by virtue of
which thought and experience may be united. For Empiricist philosophers (such as
David Hume, Joseph Addison, Archibald Alison, and Lord Kames), imagination
involves a kind of "associative" process, whereby experiences evoke
ideas, and so become united with them. For Kant and Hegel, imagination is not
associative but constitutive--part of the nature of the experience that
expresses it.
Once again it is useful to begin from
Kant, who distinguished two uses of the imagination: the first in ordinary
thought and perception, the second in aesthetic experience. When I look before
me and see a book, my experience, according to Kant, embodies a
"synthesis." It contains two elements: the "intuition"
presented to the senses and the "concept" ("book"),
contributed by the understanding. The two elements are synthesized by an act of
the imagination that constitutes them as a single experience--the experience of
seeing a book. Here imagination remains bound by the concepts of the
understanding, which is to say that how I see the world depends upon my
disposition to form determinate beliefs about it--in this case, the belief that
there is a book before me. In aesthetic experience, however, imagination is free
from concepts and engages in a kind of free play. This free play of the
imagination enables me to bring concepts to bear on an experience that is, in
itself, free from concepts. Thus there are two separate ways in which the
content of experience is provided: one in ordinary perception, the other in
aesthetic experience. In both cases the operative factor, in holding thought and
sensation together, is the imagination.
Whether such theories can cast light on
the mysterious unity between the intellectual and the sensory that we observe in
aesthetic experience remains doubtful. The argument for saying that there is a
single process of imagination involved in all perception, imagery, and
remembering seems to consist only in the premise (undoubtedly true) that in
these mental processes thought and experience are often inseparable. But to
suppose therefore that there is some one "faculty" involved in forging
the connection between them is to fail to take seriously the fact that they are
inseparable.
Nevertheless, even if we find this
general invocation of imagination, as the "synthesizing force" within
perception, vacuous or unilluminating, we may yet feel that the imagination has
some special role to play in aesthetic experience and that the reference to
imagination has some special value in explaining the precise way in which a
content and an experience become "fused" (to use George Santayana's
term). Whether or not Kant was right to refer to a free play of imagination in
aesthetic experience, there certainly seems to be a peculiarly creative
imagination that human beings may exercise and upon which aesthetic experience
calls. It is an exercise of creative imagination to see a face in a picture,
since that involves seeing in defiance of judgment--seeing what one knows not to
be there. It is not in the same sense an imaginative act to see a face in
something that one also judges to be a
face. This creative capacity is what Jean-Paul Sartre
is referring to in L'Imaginaire:
Psychologie phénoménologique de l'ima-gination
(1940; "The Imaginary: The Phenomenological Psychology of the
Imagination"; Eng. trans., The
Psychology of Imagination) when he
describes imagining as "the positing of an object as a
nothingness"--as not being. In memory and perception we take our experience
"for real." In imagination we contribute a content that has no reality
beyond our disposition to "see" it, and it is clear that this added
content is frequently summoned by art when, for example, we see the face in a
picture or hear the emotion in a piece of music. (see also Existentialism)
Recent work in aesthetics, to some
extent inspired by the seminal writings of Sartre and Wittgenstein, has devoted
considerable attention to the study of creative imagination. The hope has been
to provide the extra ingredient in aesthetic experience that bridges the gap
between the sensory and the intellectual and at the same time shows the relation
between aesthetic experience and the experience of everyday life--an enterprise
that is in turn of the first importance for any study that seeks to describe the
moral significance of beauty.
Consider, for example, the spectator at
Shakespeare's King Lear. He sees
before him an actor who, by speaking certain lines and making certain gestures,
earns his bread. But that is not all that he sees. He also sees a hoary king,
cast down by age, pride, and weakness, who rages against the depravity of man.
Yet the spectator knows that, in a crucial sense, there is no such king before
him. It is intellectual understanding, not psychical distance, that prevents him
from stepping onto the stage to offer his assistance. He knows that the scene he
enjoys is one that he contributes, albeit under the overwhelming compulsion
induced by the actor and his lines. The spectator is being shown something that
is outside the normal commerce of theoretical and practical understanding, and
he is responding to a scene that bears no spatial, temporal, or causal relation
to his own experience. His response is quintessentially aesthetic. For what
interest could he have in this scene other than an interest in it for its own
sake, for what it is in itself? At the same time, what it is in itself involves
what it shows in general. In imaginatively conjuring this scene the spectator
draws upon a wealth of experience, which is brought to mind and, as it were,
condensed for him into the imaginative perception of the play. (Hence, Aristotle
believed poetry is more general than history, since its concreteness is not that
of real events, but rather of imaginary episodes constructed so as to typify
human destiny in exemplary representations.)
Such an exercise of the imagination
clearly has much to tell us about the nature of aesthetic experience. Whether or
not it could found a theory of the "missing link" between sensory
enjoyment and intellectual understanding, it at least provides a paradigm of the
relation between aesthetic experience and the experience of everyday life. The
former is an imaginative reconstruction of the latter, which becomes interesting
for its own sake precisely because--however realistic--it is not real.
It is natural to suppose that a
spectator's response to King Lear is
at least in part emotional, and that emotion plays a crucial role both in the
enjoyment of art and in establishing the value of art. Moreover, it is not only
art that stirs our emotions in the act of aesthetic attention: the same is or
may be true of natural beauty whether that of a face or of a landscape. These
things hold our attention partly because they address themselves to our feelings
and call forth a response which we value both for itself and for the consolation
that we may attain through it. Thus we find an important philosophical tradition
according to which the distinctive character of aesthetic experience is to be
found in distinctively "aesthetic" emotions.
This tradition has ancient origins.
Plato banished the poets from his ideal republic partly because of their
capacity to arouse futile and destructive emotions, and in his answer to Plato,
Aristotle argued that poetry, in particular
tragic poetry, was valuable precisely because of its emotional effect. This idea
enabled Aristotle to pose one of the most puzzling problems in aesthetics--the
problem of tragedy--and to offer a solution. How
can I willingly offer myself to witness scenes of terror and destruction? And
how can I be said to enjoy the result, set store by it, or accord to it a
positive value? Aristotle's answer is brief. He explains that by evoking pity
and fear a tragedy also "purges" those emotions, and that is what we
enjoy and value: (see also catharsis,
literature)
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an
action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language
embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found
in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through
pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.
Aristotle implies that this purgation (katharsis)
is not unpleasant to us precisely because the fictional and formalized nature of
the action sets it at a distance from us. We can allow ourselves to feel what we
normally shun to feel precisely because no one is really threatened (or at least
no one real is threatened).
Attractive though that explanation may
seem, it immediately encounters a serious philosophical problem. It is a
plausible tenet of philosophical psychology that emotions are founded on
beliefs: fear on the belief that one is threatened, pity on the belief that
someone is miserable, jealousy on the belief that one has a rival, and so forth.
In the nature of things, however, these beliefs do not exist in the theatre.
Confronted by fiction, I am relieved precisely of the pressure of belief, and it
is this condition that permits the Aristotelian katharsis.
How, then, can I be said to experience pity and fear when the beliefs requisite
to those very emotions are not present? More generally, how can my responses to
the fictions presented by works of art share the structure of my everyday
emotions, and how can they impart to those emotions a new meaning, force, or
resolution?
Various answers have been proposed to
that question. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for
example, argued that our response to drama is characterized by a "willing
suspension of disbelief," and thus involves the very same ingredient of
belief that is essential to everyday emotion (Biographia Literaria, 1817). Coleridge's phrase, however, is
consciously paradoxical. Belief is characterized precisely by the fact that it
lies outside the will: I can command you to imagine something but not to believe
it. For this reason, a suspension of disbelief that is achieved
"willingly" is at best a highly dubious example of belief. In fact,
the description seems to imply, not belief, but rather imagination, thus
returning us to our problem of the relation between emotions directed to reality
and those directed to merely imaginary scenes.
This is part of a much larger
problem--namely, that of the relation between aesthetic and everyday experience.
Two extreme positions serve to illustrate this problem. According to one, art
and nature appeal primarily to our emotions: they awaken within us feelings of
sympathy, or emotional associations, which are both pleasant in themselves and
also instructive. We are made familiar with emotional possibilities, and,
through this imaginative exercise, our responses to the world become illuminated
and refined. This view, which provides an immediate and satisfying theory of the
value of aesthetic experience, has been espoused in some form or other by many
of the classical British Empiricists (Shaftesbury, Hume, Addison, Lord Kames,
Alison, and Burke, to cite only a few). It is also related to the critical
theories of writers such as Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and F.R. Leavis, whose
criticism would make little or no sense without the supposition that works of
art have the power to correct and corrupt our emotions.
According to the opposite view,
aesthetic interest, because it focusses on an object for its own sake, can
involve no interest in "affect." To be interested in a work of art for
the sake of emotion is to be interested in it as a means and, therefore, not
aesthetically. In other words, true aesthetic interest is autonomous, standing
outside the current of ordinary human feeling--an attitude of pure contemplation
or pure "intuition" that isolates its object from the stream of common
events and perceives it in its uniqueness, detached, unexplained, and
inexplicable. This position has been taken in modern times by Benedetto
Croce and, following him, by R.G. Collingwood,
whose resolute defense of the autonomy of aesthetic experience was also
associated with a theory of the autonomy of art. Art is not only seen as an end
in itself but it is an end in itself, in a profound and significant sense that
distinguishes art from all its false substitutes (and, in particular, from
craft, which for Collingwood is not an end but merely a means).
Between those two poles, a variety of
intermediate positions might be adopted. It is clear, in any case, that many
questions have been begged by both sides. The aesthetic of sympathy, as Croce
called it, has enormous difficulties in describing the emotions that are
awakened in aesthetic experience, particularly the emotions that we are supposed
to feel in response to such abstract arts as music. With what am I sympathizing
when I listen to a string quartet or a symphony? What emotion do I feel?
Moreover, the position encounters all the difficulties already noted in forging
a link between the imaginary and the real.
The aesthetic of autonomy, as we may
call it, encounters complementary difficulties and, in particular, the
difficulty of showing why we should value either aesthetic experience itself or
the art that is its characteristic object. Moreover, it assumes that whenever I
take an emotional interest in something, I am interested in it for the sake of
emotion, a false inference that would imply equally that the lover is interested
only in his love or the angry man only in his anger. Collingwood thus dismisses
"amusement art," on the spurious ground that to be interested in a
work of art for the sake of amusement is to be interested not in the work but
only in the amusement that it inspires. That is to say, it is to treat the work
as a means to feeling rather than as an end in itself. Such a conclusion is
entirely unwarranted. Amusement is, in fact, a species of interest in something
for its own sake: I laugh not for the sake of laughter, but for the sake of the
joke. While I may be interested in an object for the sake of the emotion that it
arouses, the case is peculiar--the case, in fact, of sentimentality, often
dismissed by moralists as a spiritual corruption and equally by critics as a
corruption of the aims of art.
The difficulties for both views are
brought out by a fundamental aesthetic category: that of enjoyment.
Whatever the ultimate value of aesthetic experience, we pursue it in the first
instance for enjoyment's sake. Aesthetic experience includes, as its central
instance, a certain kind of pleasure. But what kind of pleasure? While our
emotions and sympathies are sometimes pleasurable, this is by no means their
essential feature; they may equally be painful or neutral. How then does the
aesthetic of sympathy explain the pleasure that we take, and must take, in the
object of aesthetic experience? And how does the aesthetic of autonomy avoid the
conclusion that all such pleasure is a violation of its strict requirement that
we should be interested in the aesthetic object for its own sake alone? Neither
theory seems to be equipped, as it stands, either to describe this pleasure or
to show its place in the appreciation of art. (see also psychology)
As the above discussion illustrates, it
is impossible to advance far into the theory of aesthetic experience without
encountering the specific problems posed by the experience of art. Whether or
not we think of art as the central or defining example of the aesthetic object,
there is no doubt that it provides the most distinctive illustration both of the
elusive nature and the importance of aesthetic interest. With the increasing
attention paid to art in a corrupted world where little else is commonly held to
be spiritually significant, it is not surprising that the philosophy of art has
increasingly begun to displace the philosophy of natural beauty from the central
position accorded to the latter by the philosophers and critics of the 18th
century. Nor is this shift in emphasis to be regretted; for the existence of art
as a major human institution reminds us of the need for a theory that will
attribute more to aesthetic experience than enjoyment and that will explain the
profundity of the impressions that we receive from beauty--impressions that may
provide both meaning and solace to those who experience them. It is thus worth
reviewing some of the special problems in the philosophy of art that have most
influenced contemporary aesthetics.
The use of the concept of understanding
in describing the appreciation of art marks out an interesting distinction
between art and natural beauty. A person may understand or fail to understand
T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets,
Michelangelo's "David," or Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, but he cannot understand or fail to understand the Highlands of
Scotland, even when he finds them beautiful or ugly. Understanding seems to be a
prerequisite to the full experience of art, and this has suggested to many
critics and philosophers that art is not so much an object of sensory experience
as an instrument of knowledge. In particular, art seems to have the power both
to represent reality and to express emotion, and some argue that it is through
appreciating the properties of representation and expression that we recognize
the meaning of art. At least, it might be supposed that, if we speak of
understanding art, it is because we think of art as having content, something
that must be understood by the appropriate audience.
The most popular approach to this
concept of understanding is through a theory of art as a form of symbolism.
But what is meant by this? Is such symbolism one thing or many? Is it a matter
of evocation or convention, of personal response or linguistic rule? And what
does art symbolize--ideas, feelings, objects, or states of affairs?
Various theories have been proposed in
answer to these questions, the most popular being that the forms of art are
similar to language and are to be understood as language is understood, in terms
of conventions and semantic rules. A few examples of contemporary theories that
have described art in this way include Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic
forms, Susanne K. Langer's theory of presentational symbols, and the works on
semiology and semiotics, largely inspired by the writings of Roland Barthes,
that have been fashionable in continental Europe. It seems important to review
some of the arguments that have been employed both for and against the overall
conception of art that such theories share.
In favour of the view, it is undeniable
that many works of art are about the world in somewhat the way that language may
be about the world. This is evident in the case of literature (which is itself
an instance of natural language). It is no less evident in the case of painting.
A portrait stands to its sitter in a relation that is not unlike that which
obtains between a description and the thing described. Even if the majority of
pictures are of, or about, entirely imaginary people, scenes, and episodes, this
is no different from the case of literature, in which language is used to
describe purely imaginary subjects. This relation between a work of art and its
subject, captured in the word "about," is sometimes called representation--a
term that owes its currency in aesthetics to Croce and Collingwood, who used it
to draw the familiar contrast between representation and expression.
The concept of expression
is variously analyzed. Its principal function in modern aesthetics, however, is
to describe those aspects and dimensions of artistic meaning that seem not to
fall within the bounds of representation, either because they involve no clear
reference to an independent subject matter or because the connection between the
subject and the artistic form is too close and inextricable to admit description
in the terms appropriate to representation. Therefore, it is widely recognized
that abstract art forms--music, abstract painting, architecture--may yet contain
meaningful utterances, and most frequently philosophers and critics use terms
such as expression in order to describe these elusive meanings. Music, in
particular, is often said to be an expression of emotion and to gain much of its
significance from that. Expression in such a case is unlike representation,
according to many philosophers, in that it involves no descriptive component. An
expression of grief does not describe grief but rather presents it, as it might
be presented by a face or a gesture.
Expression must be distinguished from
evocation. To say that a piece of music expresses melancholy is not to say that
it evokes (arouses) melancholy. To describe a piece of music as expressive of
melancholy is to give a reason for listening to it; to describe it as arousing
melancholy is to give a reason for avoiding it. (Music that is utterly blank
expresses nothing, but it may arouse melancholy.) Expression, where it exists,
is integral to the aesthetic character and merit of whatever possesses it. For
similar reasons, expression must not be confused with association, in spite of
the reliance on the confusion by many 18th-century Empiricists.
The distinction between representation
and expression is one of the most important conceptual devices in contemporary
philosophy of art. Croce, who introduced it, sought to dismiss representation as
aesthetically irrelevant and to elevate expression into the single, true
aesthetic function. The first, he argued, is descriptive, or conceptual,
concerned with classifying objects according to their common properties, and so
done to satisfy our curiosity. The second, by contrast, is intuitive, concerned
with presenting its subject matter (an "intuition") in its immediate
concrete reality, so that we see it as it is in itself. In understanding
expression, our attitude passes from mere curiosity to that immediate awareness
of the concrete particular that is the core of aesthetic experience.
Later philosophers have been content
merely to distinguish representation and expression as different modes of
artistic meaning, characterized perhaps by different formal or semantic
properties. Nelson Goodman of the United States
is one such philosopher. His Languages of
Art (1968) was the first work of analytical philosophy to produce a distinct
and systematic theory of art. Goodman's theory has attracted considerable
attention, the more so in that it is an extension of a general philosophical
perspective, expounded in works of great rigour and finesse, that embraces the
entire realm of logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science.
Goodman, like many others, seeks the
nature of art in symbolism and the nature of symbolism in a general theory of signs.
(This second part of Goodman's aim is what Ferdinand de Saussure called semiology,
the general science of signs [Cours de
linguistique générale, 1916; Course
of General Linguistics]). The theory derives from the uncompromising
Nominalism expounded in Goodman's earlier works, a Nominalism
developed under the influence of two other U.S. philosophers, Rudolf Carnap and
W.V. Quine, but also showing certain affinities with the later philosophy of
Wittgenstein. According to Goodman's general theory of signs, the relation
between signs and the world can be described, like any relation, in terms of its
formal structure, the objects related, and its genealogy. But, apart from that
formal and factual analysis, there is nothing to be said. Words are labels that
we attach to things, but the attempt to justify that practice merely repeats it:
in using words, it presupposes precisely the justification that it aims to
provide.
A corollary of this view is that
relations of identical logical structure and identical genealogy between
relevantly similar terms are really one and the same relation. Thus, if we
assume that paintings, like words, are signs, then portraits stand to their
subjects in the same relation as proper names to the objects denoted by them.
(This is the substance of Goodman's proof that representation is a species of
denotation.) We should not worry if that leads us to no new understanding of the
relation (e.g., if it leads to no
procedure for decoding the painted sign), for Goodman believes the search for
such procedure is incoherent. The meaning of a sign is simply given, along with
the artistic practice that creates it.
Goodman proceeds to generalize his
theory of symbolism, using the word reference to express the relation between
word and thing. (We might well characterize this relation as labelling.)
Denotation is the special case of reference exemplified by proper names and
portraits--a case in which a symbol labels one individual. When a single label
picks out many things, then we have not a name but a predicate.
Sometimes the process of labelling goes
both ways. A colour sample is a sign for the colour it possesses--say, the
colour red. It therefore refers to the label red, which in turn refers back to
the sample. In this case, the predicate red and the sample mutually label each
other. Goodman calls this relation exemplification, and analyzes expression as a
special case of it--namely, the case where the exemplification of a predicate
proceeds by metaphor. For example, a piece of music may refer to sadness; it may
also be metaphorically sad. In this case, Goodman argues, we may speak of the
music as expressing sadness.
The economy and elegance of Goodman's
theory are matched by its extreme inscrutability. On the surface it seems to
provide direct and intelligible answers to all the major problems of art. What
is art? A system of symbols. What is representation? Denotation. What is
expression? A kind of reference. What is the value of art? It symbolizes
(displays) reality. What is the distinction between art and science? A
distinction between symbol systems but not between the matters they display.
Yet, at each point we feel at a loss to know what we are learning about art in
being told that it is essentially symbolic.
In this respect, Goodman's theory is
similar to many semantic theories of art: it proves that expression, for
example, describes a symbolic relation only by giving a theory of symbolism that
is so general as to include almost every human artifact. It becomes impossible
to extract from the result a procedure of interpretation--a way of understanding
a work of art in terms of its alleged symbolic function. In particular, we
cannot extend to the discussion of art those theories that show how we
understand language in terms of its peculiar syntactic and semantic structure,
for such theories always seem to rely precisely on what is peculiar to language
and what distinguishes language from, say, music, painting, and architecture.
A similar result can be found in an
earlier theory upon which Goodman's is to some extent modelled--the one proposed
by Langer in her Philosophy
in a New Key (1942) and Feeling
and Form (1953). She argues that works of art symbolize states of
mind ("feelings"), but that the relation is not to be explained in
terms of any rule of reference such as operates in language. Works of art are,
Langer says, "presentational symbols" whose relation to their objects
is purely morphological. The symbol and its object are related by virtue of the
fact that they possess the same "logical
form." It follows that what the symbol expresses cannot be restated
in words; words do not present the "logical form" of individuals but
rather that of the properties and relations that characterize them. (Here again
is the familiar view that art presents the individuality of its subject matter
and is therefore not conceptual or descriptive.) With such a view we can no
longer explain why we say that a work of art expresses a feeling and not that
the feeling expresses the work; for the relation of expression, explained in
these morphological terms, is clearly symmetrical. Moreover, like other semantic
theories, Langer's analysis provides no procedure for interpretation, nothing
that would give application to the claim that in understanding a work of art we
understand it as a symbol.
Notwithstanding these difficulties for
semantic theories of art, most philosophers remain convinced that the three
categories of representation, expression, and understanding are all-important in
making sense of our experience of art. They have become increasingly persuaded,
however, with Croce and Collingwood, that the differences between representation
and expression are more important than the similarities. In particular, while
representation may be secured by semantic rules (as in language itself), there
cannot be rules for the production of artistic expression. To think otherwise is
to imagine that the difference between a Mozart and a Salieri is merely a
difference of skill. Expression occurs in art only where there is
expressiveness, and expressiveness is a kind of success to be measured by the
response of the audience rather than by the grammar of the work. This response
crucially involves understanding, and no theory of expression that is not also a
theory of how expression is understood can be persuasive.
Expression and representation form part
of the content of a work of art. Nonetheless, it is not only content that is
understood (or misunderstood) by the attentive recipient. There is also form, by
which term we may denote all those features of a work of art that compose its
unity and individuality as an object of sensory experience. Consider music. In
most cases when a listener complains that he does not understand a work of
music, he means, not that he has failed to grasp its expressive content, but
that the work has failed to cohere for him as a single and satisfying object of
experience. He may put the point (somewhat misleadingly) by saying that he has
failed to grasp the language or logic of the composition he hears. What matters,
however, is that the appreciation of music (as of the other arts) depends upon
the perception of certain "unities" and upon feeling the inherent
order and reasonableness in a sequence (in this case, a sequence of tones). It
is this perception of order that is fundamental to understanding art, whether
abstract or representational, and that to many philosophers and critics has
seemed more basic than the understanding of content. When Clive
Bell wrote of art as "significant form," he really meant to
defend the view, first, that form is the essence of art and, second, that form
must be understood and therefore understandable (i.e.,
significant). Other philosophers have espoused one or another version of formalism,
according to which the distinguishing feature of art--the one that determines
our interest in it--is form. Part answers part, and each feature aims to bear
some cogent relation to the whole. It is such facts as these that compel our
aesthetic attention. (see also music
theory)
The study of form must involve the study
of our perception of form. A considerable amount of work on this subject has
been inspired by the theories of the Gestalt
psychologists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang
Köhler, and Kurt Koffka, whose
semiempirical, semiphilosophical researches into the perception of form and
pattern seem to make direct contact with many of the more puzzling features of
our experience of art. The influence of the Gestalt psychologists is also
apparent in works of visual aesthetics; e.g.,
Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception (1954), which explores the significance of
such well-known Gestalt phenomena as the figure-ground relationship and the
perception of completed wholes for our understanding of pictures.
Fruitful though this emphasis on the
"good Gestalt" has been, it cannot claim to have covered in its
entirety the immensely complex subject of artistic form. For one thing, the
theories and observations of the Gestalt psychologists, while evidently
illuminating when applied to music and painting, can be applied to our
experience of literature only artificially and inconclusively. Furthermore, it
is impossible either to subsume all formal features of music and literature
under the idea of a Gestalt or to demonstrate why, when so subsumed, the
emotional effect and aesthetic value of form is made intelligible. Too much of
aesthetic importance is left unconsidered by the study of the Gestalt, so that
formalist critics and philosophers have begun to look elsewhere for an answer to
the questions that concern them. (see also perception)
One recurring idea is that the operative
feature determining our perception of form is "structure," the
underlying, concealed formula according to which a work of art is constructed.
This idea has had considerable influence in two areas, music theory and literary
criticism, the former through the Austrian music theorist Heinrich
Schenker and the latter through the Russian formalists and the
structuralist linguists of Prague and Paris. Schenker argued in Harmonielehre
(1906-35; Harmony) that musical form
can be understood as generated out of musical "cells," units that are
expanded, repeated, and built upon in ways that create a web of significant
relationships, including a background and a foreground of musical movement.
Certain structuralist critics, notably Tzvetan Todorov and Roland Barthes, have
tried to perceive the unity of works of literature in terms of a similar
development of literary units, often described tendentiously as
"codes," but perhaps better understood as themes.
These units are successively varied and transposed in ways that make the whole
work into a logical derivation from its parts. (see also leitmotiv)
Against this approach it has been argued
that in neither case does structural analysis succeed in making contact with the
real source of artistic unity. This unity lies within the aesthetic experience
itself and so cannot be understood as a structural feature of the work of art.
Once again the temptation has been to enshrine in a body of rules what lies
essentially beyond the reach of rules: a unity of experience that cannot be
predicted but only achieved. Structuralist aesthetics has therefore come under
increasing criticism, not only for its pedantry but also for its failure to make
genuine contact with the works of art to which it is applied.
In general, the study of artistic form
remains highly controversial and fraught with obstacles that have yet to be
overcome. This area of the theory of art remains difficult and inaccessible
equally to the critic and the philosopher, both of whom have therefore tended to
turn their attention to less intractable problems.
One such problem is that of the
ontological status of the work of art. Suppose that A has on the desk before him
David Copperfield. Is David
Copperfield therefore identical with this book that A can touch and see?
Certainly not, for another copy lies on B's desk, and a single work of art
cannot be identical with two distinct physical things. The obvious conclusion is
that David Copperfield, the novel, is identical with no physical thing.
It is not a physical object, any more than is a piece of music, which is clearly
distinct from all its performances. Perhaps the same is true of paintings. For
could not paintings be, in principle at least, exactly reproduced? And does not
that possibility show the painting to be distinct from any particular embodiment
in this or that area of painted canvas? With a little stretching, the same
thought experiment might be extended to architecture, though the conclusion
inevitably becomes increasingly controversial.
The problem of the nature of the work of
art is by no means new. Such an argument, however, gives it a pronounced
contemporary flavour, so that both Phenomenologists and Analytical philosophers
have been much exercised by it, often taking as their starting point the clearly
untenable theory of Croce. According to Croce, the work of art does not consist
in a physical event or object but rather in a mental "intuition,"
which is grasped by the audience in the act of aesthetic understanding. The
unsatisfactory nature of this theory, sometimes called the "ideal"
theory of art, becomes apparent as soon as we ask how we would identify the
intuition with which any given work of art is supposedly identical. Clearly, we
can identify it only in and through a performance, a book, a score, or a canvas.
These objects give us the intuition that cannot exist independently of them.
(Otherwise we should have to say that the world contains an uncountable number
of great works of art whose only defect is that they have never been
transcribed.)
Clearly then, the physical embodiment of
the work--in sounds, language, scores, or other inscriptions--is more
fundamentally a part of it (of its "essence") than the ideal theory
represents it to be. What then is the work of art, and what is its relation to
the objects in which it is embodied? These questions have been discussed by
Richard Wollheim in Art and Its Objects
(1968), and again by Goodman in Languages
of Art (see above). Wollheim argues that works of art are "types"
and their embodiments "tokens." The distinction here derives from the
U.S. philosopher and logician C.S. Peirce, who
argued that the letter a, for example,
is neither identical with any particular token of it (such as the one just
written) nor distinct from the class of such tokens. Peirce therefore calls a
a type (i.e., a formula for producing tokens). (see also universal)
Wollheim's theory is open to various
objections. For example, works of architecture
are not, as things stand, tokens of types but physical objects, and to make them
into types by endlessly reproducing them would be to destroy their aesthetic
character. To identify an object in terms of a process that destroys its
character is not in any evident sense to identify it. The theory, moreover,
seems to be unable to distinguish a musical performance containing a wrong note
from a performance of a new work of music containing precisely that note as part
of its type.
Goodman's
theory is more technical and displaces the question of the nature of art in
favour of that of the nature of an inscription: Just what is it for a particular
set of marks to identify a work of art? Other philosophers have concentrated on
the question of identity: What makes this work of art the same as that one? Some
argue, for example, that works of art have a distinct criterion of identity, one
that reflects the peculiar nature and demands of aesthetic interest. Others
dismiss the search for a criterion of identity as both aesthetically
insignificant and illusory in itself. Still others, notably the Phenomenologist Roman
Ingarden, argue that the work of art exists on several levels, being
identical not with physical appearance but with totality of interpretations that
secure the various formal and semantic levels that are contained in it.
Questions that so obviously lend
themselves to the procedures of modern philosophy have naturally commanded
considerable attention. But whether they are aesthetically significant is
disputed, and some philosophers go so far as to dismiss all questions of
ontology and identity of art as peripheral to the subject matter of aesthetics.
The same could not be said, however, of the question of the value of art, which,
while less discussed, is evidently of the first importance.
Theories of the value of art are of two
kinds, which we may call extrinsic and intrinsic. The first regards art and the
appreciation of art as means to some recognized moral good, while the second
regards them as valuable not instrumentally but as objects unto themselves. It
is characteristic of extrinsic theories to locate the value of art in its
effects on the person who appreciates it. Art is held to be a form of education,
perhaps an education of the emotions. In this case, it becomes an open question
whether there might not be some more effective means to the same result.
Alternatively, one may attribute a negative value to art, as Plato did in his Republic,
arguing that art has a corrupting or diseducative effect on those exposed to it.
(see also moralism)
The extrinsic approach, adopted in
modern times by Leo Tolstoy in Chto takoye iskusstvo? (1896; What
Is Art?),
has seldom seemed wholly satisfactory. Philosophers have constantly sought for a
value in aesthetic experience that is unique to it and that, therefore, could
not be obtained from any other source. The extreme version of this intrinsic
approach is that associated with Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the French
Symbolists, and summarized in the slogan "art for art's sake." Such
thinkers and writers believe that art is not only an end in itself but also a
sufficient justification of itself. They also hold that in order to understand
art as it should be understood, it is necessary to put aside all interests other
than an interest in the work itself.
Between those two extreme views there
lies, once again, a host of intermediate positions. We believe, for example,
that works of art must be appreciated for their own sake, but that, in the act
of appreciation, we gain from them something that is of independent value. Thus
a joke is laughed at for its own sake, even though there is an independent value
in laughter, which lightens our lives by taking us momentarily outside
ourselves. Why should not something similar be said of works of art, many of
which aspire to be amusing in just the way that good jokes are? (see also humour)
The analogy with laughter--which,
in some views, is itself a species of aesthetic interest--introduces a concept
without which there can be no serious discussion of the value of art: the
concept of taste. If I am amused it is for a
reason, and this reason lies in the object of my amusement. We thus begin to
think in terms of a distinction between good and bad reasons for laughter.
Amusement at the wrong things may seem to us to show corruption of mind,
cruelty, or bad taste; and when it does so, we speak of the object as not truly
amusing, and feel that we have reason on our side.
Similarly, we regard some works of art
as worthy of our attention and others as not. In articulating this judgment, we
use all of the diverse and confusing vocabulary of moral appraisal; works of
art, like people, are condemned for their sentimentality, coarseness, vulgarity,
cruelty, or self-indulgence, and equally praised for their warmth, compassion,
nobility, sensitivity, and truthfulness. (The same may apply to the object of
natural beauty.) Clearly, if aesthetic interest has a positive value, it is only
when motivated by good taste; it is only interest in appropriate objects that
can be said to be good for us. All discussion of the value of art tends,
therefore, to turn from the outset in the direction of criticism: Can there be
genuine critical evaluation of art, a genuine distinction between that which
deserves our attention and that which does not? (And, once again, the question
may be extended to objects of natural beauty.)
All aesthetic experience, whether of art
or nature, seems to be informed by and dependent upon an exercise of taste. We
choose the object of aesthetic experience, and often do so carefully and
deliberately. Moreover, we are judged by our choices, not only of works of art
but also of colour schemes, dresses, and garden ornaments, just as we are judged
by our manners and our sense of humour. By his taste an individual betrays
himself: not merely a small part of himself but the whole. Yet, the relation
between taste and morality is by no means straightforward. There seems, in fact,
to be a puzzling question as to the precise nature of the relation between
aesthetic and moral values, and between the good taste that discerns the first
and the good conduct that responds to the second. If there is no relation, the
enormous amount of human energy that is invested in art and criticism
may begin to seem rather pointless. If the relation is too close, however, the
result is an intolerable moral elitism that makes refinement the sole standard
of acceptable conduct, as for example, the elitism depicted by Villiers de
L'Isle-Adam in Axel, by J.K. Huysmans
in À Rebours, and by Oscar
Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The aesthete is one who puts aesthetic values above all others and who seeks for
a morality that conforms to them. But like his opposite, the philistine, he
fails to see that the relation between the aesthetic and the moral is not one of
priority; each informs and is informed by the other, without taking precedence
and without dictating the choice that belongs within the other's sphere.
Contemporary aesthetics has been less
disposed to discuss the idea of taste than that of criticism. But clearly, the
two ideas are so closely related that anything said about the one has a direct
bearing on the other. In both cases, the approach has been the first of those
outlined at the beginning of this article: the approach that starts with a study
of the concepts and modes of argument employed in discussing beauty and tries to
grasp the distinctive problems of aesthetics through a study of the logical and
ideological puzzles that these concepts and arguments arouse.
Philosophers often distinguish between
two kinds of critical discussion--the interpretative and the evaluative--and two
classes of concepts corresponding to them. In describing an object of natural
beauty or a work of art, we may use a host of so-called aesthetic terms, terms
that seem to have a particular role when used in this context and that
articulate the aesthetic impression which it is the first task of criticism to
convey. Among such terms we may notice affective terms--moving, frightening,
disturbing; terms denoting emotional qualities--sad, lively, mournful, wistful;
terms denoting the expressive or representational content of a work of art, its
formal features, and its overall artistic genre--comic, tragic, ironic. Some of
these terms can be applied meaningfully only to works of art; others may be
applied to the whole of nature in order to articulate an aesthetic experience.
The examination of their logic has had an increasingly important role in
analytical aesthetics. Frank N. Sibley, for example, has argued that such terms
are used in aesthetic judgment in a peculiar way, without conditions (i.e.,
without a reasoned basis), and in order to describe aesthetic properties that
are discernible only by the exercise of taste. This sophisticated reminder of
Kant's theory that aesthetic judgment is free from concepts has been criticized
as creating too great a gap between the language of criticism and the language
of everyday life. But it is of considerable interest in itself in attempting to
revive a conception of taste that was highly influential in 18th-century
aesthetics. As noted above, taste is, according to this conception, a faculty
not of evaluation but of perception.
In aesthetics, however, evaluative
judgments are inescapable. Theories avoiding the implication that taste is a
form of discrimination, which naturally ranks its objects according to their
merit, are peculiarly unsatisfying, not the least because they have so little
bearing on the practice of criticism or the reasons that lead us to assign such
overwhelming importance to art.
What then of the concepts employed in
aesthetic evaluation? Burke introduced a famous
distinction between two kinds of aesthetic judgment corresponding to two orders
of aesthetic experience: the judgment of the beautiful and that of the sublime.
The judgment of beauty has its origin in our
social feelings, particularly in our feelings toward the other sex, and in our
hope for a consolation through love and desire. The judgment of the sublime has
its origin in our feelings toward nature, and in our intimation of our ultimate
solitude and fragility in a world that is not of our own devising and that
remains resistant to our demands. In Burke's words,
Whatever is fitted in any sort to
excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort
terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner
analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of
the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
Burke's distinction emerges as part of a
natural philosophy of beauty: an attempt to give the origins of our sentiments
rather than to explain the logic of the judgments that convey them. In Kant, the
distinction is recast as a distinction between two categories of aesthetic
experience and two separate values that attach to it. Sometimes when we sense
the harmony between nature and our faculties, we are impressed by the
purposiveness and intelligibility of everything that surrounds us. This is the
sentiment of beauty. At other times, overcome by the infinite greatness of the
world, we renounce the attempt to understand and control it. This is the
sentiment of the sublime. In confronting the sublime, the mind is "incited
to abandon sensibility"--to reach over to that transcendental view of
things that shows to us the immanence of a supersensible realm and our destiny
as subjects of a divine order. Thus, from the presentiment of the sublime, Kant
extracts the ultimate ground of his faith in a Supreme Being, and this is for
him the most important value that aesthetic experience can convey.
The distinction between the sublime and
the beautiful is now less frequently made than at the time of Burke and Kant.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that aesthetic judgment exists in many
contrasting forms, of both praise and condemnation. A philosopher who sought to
account for the idea of beauty without attending to those of the elegant, the
refined, the great, the delicate, the intelligent, the profound, and the lovely
would be unlikely to provide us with much understanding of the nature and
function of criticism. There may be, however, something that these judgments
have in common which might be used in order to cast light on all of them. Kant
certainly would have thought so, since he argued that all such judgments share
the distinctive features of taste revealed in his antinomy. In other words, they
are all grounded in an immediate ("subjective") experience, while at
the same time being "universal"--i.e., held forth as valid for all rational beings irrespective of
their particular interests and desires. Thus, the critic tries to justify his
aesthetic judgments, seeking reasons that will persuade others to see what he
sees as elegant or beautiful in a similar light.
Could there be a genuine critical
procedure devoted to that enterprise of providing objective grounds for
subjective preferences? This question is integrally connected to another that we
have already discussed: the question of the value of aesthetic experience. If
aesthetic experience is valueless, or if it has no more value than attaches to
idle enjoyment, then it becomes far less plausible to insist on the existence of
objective evaluation than if aesthetic experience has the kind of importance
attributed to it by Kant.
Modern considerations of this
exceedingly difficult question tend to concentrate on the criticism of art and
on the role of the critic of art. What is a critic doing when he discusses a
work of art, what does he look for, and with what purpose? It might be said that
a critic should first of all study the artist's intention, since this will show
the real meaning of his work, the real content that he is trying to communicate.
The U.S. critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe
C. Beardsley, however, argue that there is a fallacy (the so-called intentional
fallacy) involved in this approach. What is to be interpreted is the work
of art itself, not the intentions of the artist, which are hidden from us and no
subject for our concern. If judgment is to be aesthetic, it must concern itself
with the given object, and the meanings that we attribute to the object are
those that we see in it, whatever the artist intended.
The existence of an intentional fallacy
has been doubted. Some argue, for example, that Wimsatt and Beardsley make too
sharp a distinction between an intention and the act that expresses it, assuming
the intention to be a kind of private mental episode forever hidden from an
observer rather than a revealed order in the work itself. But when a critic
refers to the artistic intention, it is not clear whether he means anything more
than the general purposiveness of the work of art, which can be interpreted by a
critic without supposing there to be some intention beyond that of producing the
precise work before him. (Indeed, in Kant's view, there can be purposiveness
without purpose, and this phenomenon provides the central object of aesthetic
interest whether in aesthetic interest whether in art or in nature.) The dispute
here is tortuous and obscure. Nevertheless, the move away from intentionalism,
as it is called, has been regarded as imperative by most modern critics, who
tend to see the role of criticism in either one of two ways: (1) criticism is
devoted to the study and interpretation of the aesthetic object rather than of
the artist or the recipient; and (2) criticism is devoted to the articulation of
a response to the work of art and to the justification of a particular way of
seeing it.
Underlying both these conceptions is the
fashionable preoccupation with art as the principal object of critical judgment.
Nevertheless, in suggesting that the choice which lies before the critic is
between the aesthetic object and the experience that it arouses, the two views
ensure that the artist is kept hidden. As a consequence, it is not difficult to
adapt them to a wider view of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic experience--to a
view that makes room for natural beauty and for the aesthetics of everyday life,
as it is manifested in dress, manners, decoration, and the other useful arts.
It might be thought that only the first
of the two conceptions can give rise to an objective critical procedure, since
it alone requires that criticism focus on an object whose existence and nature
is independent of the critic. The most important contemporary defense of an
objective criticism, that of the British literary critic F.R.
Leavis, has relied heavily on the second idea, however. In a celebrated
controversy with his U.S. counterpart, René Wellek, Leavis argued that it
is precisely because criticism is devoted to the individual response that it may
achieve objectivity. Although there may be objectivity in the scientific
explanation of the aesthetic object--i.e.,
in the classification and description of its typology, structure, and semiotic
status--this is not, according to Leavis, the kind of objectivity that matters,
for it will never lead to a value judgment and will therefore never amount to an
objective criticism. Value judgments arise out of, and are validated by, the
direct confrontation in experience between the critical intelligence and the
aesthetic object, the first being informed by a moral awareness that provides
the only possible ground for objective evaluation. (see also moralism)
If criticism were confined to the study
of nature, it would look very peculiar. It is only because of the development of
artistic and decorative traditions that the habit of aesthetic judgment becomes
established. Accordingly, contemporary attempts to provide a defense of
aesthetic judgment concentrate almost exclusively on the criticism of art, and
endeavour to find principles whereby the separate works of art may be ordered
according to their merit, or at least characterized in evaluative terms. Leavis'
"objective" criticism is expressly confined to the evaluation of
literary works taken from a single tradition. The reason for this narrowness can
be put paradoxically as follows: Criticism can be objective only when it is
based in subjectivity. Criticism is the justification of a response, and such
justification requires a frame of reference that both the critic and his reader
can readily recognize. The successful communication and justification of a
response are possible only by reference to the canon of works accepted within a
common culture. The canonical works--what Matthew Arnold called the touchstones
of criticism--provide the context of relevant comparisons, without which no
amount of detailed analysis could convey the quality of the individual work.
Critical reasoning is an attempt to place works of art in relation to one
another, so that the perceived greatness of the one will provide the standard of
measurement for the other. At the same time, the individual quality of feeling
in each work must be elicited and discussed exactly as we might discuss the
quality of feeling in everyday life, praising it for its intensity, exactness,
and generosity, and criticizing it for its sentimentality, obscurity, or lack of
seriousness. All of the moral categories that we apply to human feeling and
character we may therefore apply equally to art, and the basis of an objective
criticism will be no different from the basis (whatever it might be) for an
objective morality. The value of art, on this account, resides partly in the
fact that it gives exemplary expression to human feeling and character, and so
enables us to measure our own lives and aspirations against their imaginary
counterparts.
These ideas are vague and have been
frequently criticized for their moralistic overtones as well as for the seeming
narrowness of their application. Even if they apply to the criticism of
literature, what do we say about the criticism of music, of architecture, of
dress and decor, of natural beauty? In the nonliterary arts much criticism is
directed first to form, style, and workmanship, and only secondly to the moral
content of the works under consideration. There are exceptions to this rule, and
once again the principal exception is English--namely, John Ruskin's profoundly
moralized criticism of architecture. Nevertheless, the extreme difficulty
experienced in extending the Leavisite procedures of practical criticism (in
which the reader's response becomes the principal focus of critical attention)
to the nonliterary arts has given sustenance to the view that this
"moralized" criticism is really only one kind of criticism and not
necessarily the most widely applicable or the most important. If such is the
case, it cannot really claim to have discovered a basis for the objective
exercise of taste. (see also cognition
)
The two greatest Greek philosophers, Plato
and Aristotle, shared a sense of the importance of aesthetics, and both regarded
music, poetry, architecture, and drama as fundamental institutions within the
body politic. Plato notoriously recommends the banning of poets and painters
from his ideal republic and in the course of his argument provides an extended
theory of imitation (mimesis), along with spurious
reasons for thinking that imitation derogates both from the laws of morality and
from the rational cognition of the world. Much of Aristotle's extended and
diverse reply to Plato is concerned with rehabilitating imitation as the
foundation of moral education (Ethica
Nicomachea), as the origin of a necessary katharsis
(Poetica), and as the
instrument--through music, dance, and poetry--of character formation (Politica).
Plato's more mystical writings, notably
the Timaeus,
contain hints of another approach to aesthetics, one based on the Pythagorean
theory of the cosmos that exerted a decisive influence on the Neoplatonists.
Through the writings of St. Augustine, Boethius, and Macrobius, the Pythagorean
cosmology and its associated aesthetic of harmony were passed on to the thinkers
of the Middle Ages. The Aristotelian theory of imitation and the concern with
the expressive and emotionally educative aspect of aesthetic experience were not
truly influential until the 17th century. At that time much attention was also
paid to another classical work, the Hellenistic treatise on the sublime ascribed
to Longinus, which is perhaps the most
interesting and extended piece of antique literary criticism to have been passed
on to the modern world.
St. Thomas Aquinas
devoted certain passages of his Summa
Theologiae (c.
1266-73) to the study of beauty. To his thinking, man's interest in beauty is of
sensuous origin, but it is the prerogative of those senses that are capable of
"contemplation"--namely, the eye and the ear. Aquinas defines beauty
in Aristotelian terms as that which pleases solely in the contemplation of it
and recognizes three prerequisites of beauty: perfection, appropriate
proportion, and clarity. Aquinas' position typifies the approach to aesthetics
adopted by the Scholastics. More widely diffused
among medieval thinkers was the Neoplatonist
theory, in which beauty is seen as a kind of divine order conforming to
mathematical laws: the laws of number, which are also the laws of harmony.
Music, poetry, and architecture all exhibit the same conformity to a cosmic
order, and, in experiencing their beauty, we are really experiencing the same
order in ourselves and resonating to it as one string to another. This theory,
expounded in treatises on music by St. Augustine and Boethius, is consciously
invoked by Dante in his Convivio (c. 1304-07; The Banquet).
In this piece, generally considered one of the first sustained works of literary
criticism in the modern manner, the poet analyzes the four levels of meaning
contained in his own poems.
The Neoplatonist emphasis on number and
harmony dominated aesthetics during the early Renaissance as well and was
reaffirmed by Leon Alberti in his great treatise
on architecture, De Re Aedificatoria (1452;
Ten Books on Architecture). Alberti also advanced a definition of beauty,
which he called concinnitas, taking his terminology from Cicero. Beauty is for
Alberti such an order and arrangement of the parts of an object that nothing can
be altered except for the worse. This kind of definition can hardly stand alone
as a basis for aesthetics, for what does the word worse mean? The obvious
answer, "less beautiful," at once reduces the definition to
circularity.
Francis Bacon wrote essays on beauty and
deformity, but he confined his remarks to the human figure. René
Descartes produced a treatise on music, although it contains little that would
be recognized as aesthetics in the modern sense. During the first decades of
modern philosophy, aesthetics flourished, not in the works of the great
philosophers, but in the writings of such minor figures as Baltasar Gracián,
Jean de La Bruyère (who began the study of taste
that was to dominate aesthetics for a century), and Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte
de Buffon.
It was not until the end of the 17th
century that the distinctive concerns of modern aesthetics were established. At
that time, taste, imagination, natural beauty, and imitation came to be
recognized as the central topics in aesthetics. In Britain the principal
influences were the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and
his disciples Francis Hutcheson and Joseph Addison. Shaftesbury, a follower of
the political and educational philosopher John Locke, did more than any of his
contemporaries to establish ethics and aesthetics as central areas of
philosophical inquiry. As a naturalist, he believed that the fundamental
principles of morals and taste could be established by due attention to human
nature, our sentiments being so ordered that certain things naturally please us
and are naturally conducive to our good (Characteristiks
of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711). Taste is a kind of balanced
discernment, whereby a person recognizes that which is congenial to his
sentiments and therefore an object of pleasurable contemplation. Following
Locke, Shaftesbury laid much emphasis on the association
of ideas as a fundamental component in aesthetic experience and the crucial
bridge from the sphere of contemplation to the sphere of action. Addison
adopted th |
