TY - JOUR
AU - Guyer, Paul
AB - I. introduction What have I learned from studying the history of modern aesthetics? Let me put it in borrowed words. First, from Irving Babbitt's New Laokoon of 1910: “Let us have a wholesome distrust of aesthetic monists as well as of monists of every kind. Monism is merely a fine name that man has invented for his own indolence and one sidedness and unwillingness to mediate between the diverse and conflicting aspects of reality.”1 Next, from Edward Bullough's often misunderstood essay on “Psychical Distance” of two years later: “In so complex a phenomenon as Art, single causes can be pronounced almost a priori to be false.”2 Third, from Dieter Henrich's Essay on Art and Life, published at the start of the present century: “We have from the outset declared ourselves against methodological monism in the theory of art and thus against any way of proceeding that remains restricted to a single explanatory approach.”3 And finally, from my own father: “My painting creed is simplicity itself… . I stand before the centuries of brother and father artists and observe a vast mosaic. I can reject none of them; I embrace them all. I have learned something from each I have known.”4 In other words, why restrict the proper grounds for the appreciation of art and nature to a single approach, particularly if that is done just to provide a neat demarcation between aesthetic appreciation and the rest of our experience, or just to increase the probability of agreement in taste, when a less restrictive approach will not only provide a fuller explanation of the ways in which art and aesthetic experience have been important to human beings, but also allow ourselves more ways in practice to enjoy art and nature and in which to create art? Why sacrifice the wealth of reality for the poverty of a theory? I obviously cannot recount all of the details of a narrative spread over three volumes in this short space. But I will try to say enough about the arc of that narrative and some of its highlights to let you see why I have drawn from it the simple moral that I have just stated. And since I have just impugned the project of attempting to define art and the aesthetic, let me start with nothing other than the first attempt to do just that. As we all know, the name for the pursuit (I will not cave in to current academic fashion and say “discipline”) that brings us together was coined by the twenty one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his 1735 master's thesis, Philosophical Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry. Baumgarten appealed to the “Greek philosophers and church fathers” who “always carefully distinguished between the aiesthēta and the noēta,” the objects of sense perception and the objects of intellection, and then, in analogy to logic, the science of the latter, he introduced the term ‘aesthetics’ as the name for the science of the former, the “science of cognizing something by means of the senses” or the “science of the perfect presentation of sensory representations.”5 I will return to the question of whether Baumgarten's own approach to aesthetics is actually as solely cognitivist as these quotations suggest in Section II; what I first want to do is to suggest that Baumgarten's further attempt to define the newly named discipline in his Aesthetica of 1750 and 1758 (as far as I know, the first textbook to carry the name of our field) reflects the pluralism rather than monism of approaches to aesthetics that actually emerged in the course of the eighteenth century. For in the first paragraph of the Aesthetica, Baumgarten repeats his definition that aesthetics is the “science of sensory cognition,” but at the same time indicates openness about the extension of this definition by the parenthetic equation of aesthetics with “the theory of the liberal arts, the doctrine of inferior cognition, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogue of reason.”6 It would take a while to make precise what Baumgarten meant by each of these terms, if it could be done at all. But it seems to me that they could not all be explained in strictly cognitivist terms, and that this is how it had to be, because what had happened by 1750 is that the cognitivist model of aesthetic experience that had prevailed since the time of Aristotle was supplemented by at least two other approaches, namely, the idea that the pleasure of such experience comes not from pleasure in knowledge, but from the enjoyment of the emotional impact of art, and the idea that the pleasure of aesthetic experience comes from the free play of our mental powers triggered by works of art or nature, a free play that even when it involves our cognitive powers cannot be reduced to actual cognition. My view is that the wisest aestheticians of the eighteenth century and since were those who felt no need to choose among these approaches, whether for the sake of a precise demarcation of the aesthetic and nonaesthetic or in order to increase the probability of uniformity in taste, but who instead recognized that works of art and nature could please us in all these ways. Now you might think that once the benefits of a pluralistic rather than monistic approach to aesthetics had been demonstrated, it would have been widely appreciated and become the norm for the field, but that is not what happened. Rather, at the start of the nineteenth century, above all in German Idealism, aesthetics largely reverted to a purely cognitivist approach, with a particularly metaphysical flavor, and it took most of the rest of the century for pluralism to be reestablished; only at the end of the century did thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey in Germany and George Santayana in the United States clearly reconstruct the pluralistic approach to aesthetics of the best eighteenth century thinkers, Dilthey explicitly stating that “the interpretation of literary works as presently dominated by Hegelian aesthetics must be opposed” and Santayana suggesting more irenically that “Such value as belongs to metaphysical derivations of the nature of the beautiful, comes to them not because they explain our primary feelings, which they cannot do,” but because if we have already accepted the metaphysics for other reasons, then we can use them “to express, and in fact constitute, some of our later appreciations.”7 With such advocates, the pluralistic rather than monistic approach to aesthetics might have been expected finally to have secured its status as the default mode for the subject in the twentieth century, but alas, history has a tendency to repeat itself, the second time, as we know, as farce, and in much of this century reductionist approaches to aesthetics continued to dominate. Repeating the mistake of German Idealism, predominantly cognitivist approaches to aesthetics flourished in the hands of Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood, although the latter was too wise to remain within the straightjacket of Crocean cognitivism even for the length of one whole book, and also in the hands of the existentialist Martin Heidegger, the Marxist Lukács, the “critical theorist” Theodor Adorno, and the analytical pragmatist Nelson Goodman, different from one another as they were in other regards; this time, however, reductionistically formalistic approaches also flourished, perhaps not so much among academic philosophers as among philosophical critics such as Clive Bell and later Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Within academic aesthetics, a few pluralistic and therefore in my view wiser voices did survive, such as the now forgotten DeWitt Parker, T. M. Greene, and D. W. Gotshalk as well as the happily not forgotten Monroe Beardsley; but their influence was diminished, and in the first three cases even their names were effaced by the impact of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1950s and 1960s, which initially did not so much return aesthetics to just one of its three traditional approaches as to eliminate the traditional subject matter of aesthetics, namely, aesthetic experience, altogether, thereby restricting the permissible topics for the field to the logic of aesthetic discourse and the definition of art, supposedly public matters that did not run the risk of being irrelevant if not nonexistent beetles in boxes. Once again, however, wiser voices, in part themselves influenced by Wittgenstein—but by Part II of the Philosophical Investigations rather than by Part I—began to make themselves heard and may be providing a model for what I regard as the healthy pluralism of contemporary aesthetics. Here I will have space to comment on just one of these recent pluralists, namely, Richard Wollheim. II. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY I said at the outset that the prevailing approach in aesthetics from its inception until it was actually named in the eighteenth century was largely cognitivist. What I have in mind is epitomized and takes its inception from Aristotle's remark in our surviving fragment of the Poetics that “poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singular”—a remark that, at least at our historical distance, we may presume to be directed against Plato's argument in the Republic that imitations, in the first instance those in paintings and then by analogy those in poetry, are at “three removes” from truth.8 My claim is that the idea that art or in some cases a special experience of nature is a vehicle of truth—either a special kind of truth or a special kind of vehicle, perhaps one more gripping than others—was the central idea of aesthetics from the time of Aristotle until early modernity. This idea hardly disappeared in the eighteenth century, but it was joined, either in competition or in cooperation, by the ideas that we appreciate art and in some cases nature because of their emotional impact on us—precisely what Plato feared most, of course, as a number of eighteenth century authors emphatically point out—or because of the pleasurable free play of our mental powers triggered by works of art or nature. Both the old idea and the new clearly appear in what I regard as the formative years of modern aesthetics, the decade from 1709 to 1720, thus shortly before Baumgarten gave the newly enlivened field its adult baptism. In this period, Shaftesbury and Christian Wolff can be seen as cognitivists, Jean Baptiste Du Bos clearly finds the value of art to lie in its emotional impact upon its audience, while Joseph Addison can be seen as introducing the theory of free play in his account of at least one of the three sources for the pleasure of the imagination that he recognizes. Shaftesbury may be best remembered for his introduction of the concept of disinterestedness into the discourse of aesthetics, but by this he meant only that our pleasure in beauty is not based on the expectation of personal use or consumption, a point he wanted to make in support of his campaign against a “mercenary” conception of moral motivation, and not that the pleasure of aesthetic experience is unconnected to the larger cognitive and in turn practical interests of human beings.9 On the contrary, the foundation of his Neo Platonic aesthetics is thoroughly cognitivist: what we enjoy in beauty is the insight into the order of the universe and even more of the divine mind behind that order that we are afforded by its experience. Shaftesbury supposes that the experience of beauty is contemplation of order in the universe small and large, and that the ultimate object of knowledge in our experience of beauty is nothing other than God, the latter particularly clearly in a passage in which he describes the ascent of our appreciation from “Dead Forms” to “Forms which Form; that is, which have Intelligence, Action, and Operation,” in other words, human artists, to “that third Order of Beauty, which forms not only such as we call mere Forms, but even the Forms which Form,” the “Principle, Source, and Fountain of all Beauty.”10 This passage, no doubt inspired by Plato's Symposium rather than by the Republic, makes clear that for Shaftesbury, pleasure in beauty depends upon knowledge of its ultimate source. Wolff's teleological treatise on the Intentions of Natural Things argues that human beings were created so that the glory of God and his creation can be known and appreciated by something other than God himself, and in spite of all the differences in rank and style he was thus part of the same intellectual world from which Shaftesbury came.11 But it was passages from his metaphysics, Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man, first published in 1720, as well as his subsequent Latin treatise on Psychologia empirica, that provided the framework for German aesthetics through much of the rest of the eighteenth century. Here Wolff, in turn following Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, defined pleasure as the sensory cognition of perfection, “nothing other than an intuition of perfection” or “the intuition or intuitive cognition of any kind of perfection,” and beauty, correspondingly, as “the perfection of a thing, insofar as it is suitable for producing pleasure in us,” being cognized through the senses.12 Now, Wolff's definition of perfection, as the consonance or harmony of the parts of a thing to its end or purpose, is abstract, but certainly not equivalent to any kind of propositional content, and so in describing aesthetic experience as the sensory cognition of perfection he is not obviously describing it as knowledge of truth in any ordinary sense. But when it comes to cases, Wolff's account is straightforwardly cognitivist: the purpose of painting on his account is representation, so “the perfection of a painting consists in its similarity” to its intended object, and in order for us to enjoy a painting we therefore have to have knowledge of such resemblance, and likewise a “connoisseur of architecture” enjoys a building only if he “cognizes” the “perfection” of its construction in accordance with the rules of that discipline (although in Wolff's treatise on architecture in his mathematical encyclopedia, his only book length work in aesthetics, he displays his allegiance to the Vitruvian truism that a building must be comfortable as well as beautiful, and it is not clear that our enjoyment of the comfort of a building depends upon any knowledge that it has been constructed in accordance with rules, even the rules for comfort itself).13 I would contend that the cognitivist approach to aesthetics has actually remained dominant in German aesthetics from Wolff's time until recently, although the object of aesthetic cognition has changed from “perfection” to “spirit” (as in Hegel) or “Platonic Ideas” (Schopenhauer) to “Being” (Heidegger) to the contradictions of capitalism (Lukács) or of human existence in general (Adorno). But for the moment I remain in the eighteenth century because I still need to describe the new approaches to aesthetic experience that emerged in that period rather than the old one that continued. The idea that what is central to art in particular is our enjoyment of its emotional impact can be associated above all with Du Bos, whose immensely influential Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music appeared in 1719 (and was translated into English in 1748).14 Du Bos argued that our greatest enemy is boredom, that the most effective antidote to boredom is the arousal of our passions, but that whereas many ways of arousing passions, such as gambling, have high costs, the arousal of the passions by the arts does not. Du Bos asks, entirely rhetorically, Since the most pleasing sensations that our real passions can afford us, are balanced by so many unhappy hours that succeed our enjoyments, would it not be a noble attempt of art to endeavour to separate the dismal consequences of our passions from the bewitching pleasure we receive in indulging them? Might not art contrive to produce objects that would excite artificial passions, sufficient to occupy us while we are actually affected by them, and incapable of giving us afterwards any real pain or affliction? An attempt of so delicate a nature was reserved for poetry and painting.15 By “artificial passions” it is clear that Du Bos does not mean make believe passions, even though we may well know that it is only representations and not real things that are inducing those passions in us; that knowledge does not undermine the reality of the passions, but is merely what allows us to indulge our pleasure in them without worrying about any costly consequences. If the passions induced by art were not real, although relatively low cost, there would be no explanation of why we enjoy art and seek it out. Du Bos makes it clear that he does not accept Aristotle's answer to Plato, that we go to art to learn important truths, for “Men will always be fonder of books that move them, than of those that instruct them”; and he likewise makes it clear that he is not moved by Plato's argument that some may abuse the emotional impact of the arts—after all, some may abuse the products of the vine, but Plato nowhere bans wine from his republic.16 Du Bos's equation of aesthetic experience with passion is thus a radical alternative to the Neo Platonism of Shaftesbury or the more attenuated Neo Platonism of Wolff, but it might well be argued that it is equally monistic or reductionist. Back in Britain, however, and a few years before, Addison had suggested a more complex account of aesthetic experience, or “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” and one that includes an initial intimation of the theory of free play. Addison, an essayist and not a systematic philosopher, devoted only a few pages each to his categories of “Greatness, Novelty, or Beauty,” but his triad remained influential until it was replaced with the dyad of the beautiful and the sublime at the hands of Burke and Kant.17 It might even be thought that his triad of aesthetic objects already represents the triad of approaches to aesthetics that I am describing, perhaps with greatness pleasing us cognitively, because of the profound ideas it evokes, beauty pleasing us emotionally, especially in the case in which we directly or sympathetically find something sexually attractive, and novelty pleasing us because it sets our mental faculties to play without any ulterior motive. That is not quite how things line up, however; while sexually attractive properties, whether in our own species or others, do play a role in Addison's explanation of beauty, it is his account of novelty, “which fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possesst,” that seems most cognitive, while it is in his account of greatness that the idea of free play, or at least an idea of freedom, is introduced.18 It is here that Addison says that The Mind of Man naturally hates everything that looks like a Restraint upon it, and is apt to fancy itself under a sort of Confinement, when the Sight is pent up in a narrow Compass… . On the contrary, a spacious Horison is an Image of Liberty, where the Eye has room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the Immensity of its Views, and to lose it self amidst the Variety of Objects that offer themselves to its Observation.19 Addison, like many after him, argues that beauty is primarily an object for sight and only secondarily for other sensory modalities, and here he seems to make the same assumption about the sublime. But what is important is that he here suggests that anything that gives us an experience of freedom is enjoyable for that reason alone, whether there is any further cognitive or practical significance to be assigned to that experience. Addison thus introduces the idea of free play as a source of pleasure into eighteenth century aesthetics, and at the same time shows at least by example that there is no reason why this source of pleasure should not be combined with others among the pleasures of the imagination as a whole. As the century progressed, various thinkers combined the alternative approaches in various ways. Let me mention two who combined only two of the three approaches—namely, Baumgarten again and then Kant—before saying a word about one who I think combined all three, namely, Lord Kames. Baumgarten might be supposed to be a pure cognitivist simply working out the details of a Wolffian aesthetics, although his formula “the perfection of sensory cognition,” as contrasted to Wolff's formula “the sensory cognition of perfection,” at least leaves room for the appreciation of the sensory properties of the artistic representation as well as its content. But Baumgarten's list of sensory “perfections” is complex, including “aesthetic wealth,” “aesthetic magnitude” (his term for the sublime), “aesthetic truth,” “aesthetic certitude,” “aesthetic light,” and even though he died before he could describe what he had in mind with a further category, “the life of aesthetic cognition,” his disciple Georg Friedrich Meier made it clear that what this referred to was nothing other than the emotional impact of art. In fact, already in his master's thesis Baumgarten had asserted that “Since affects are noticeable levels of displeasure and pleasure … [i]t is poetic, to arouse affects,” and Meier made it explicit that what Baumgarten had meant by “the life of aesthetic cognition” was nothing other than that “the touching” or “moving,” das Rührende: successful works of art must appeal not only to our cognitive powers, but also to our emotions.20 The Baumgartian approach thus recognized room for both cognitive and emotional impact in our experience of art. But while Kant, by contrast, first argued in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” that the “pure” experience of beauty can be nothing other than a pleasure engendered solely by the free play of cognitive powers, without reference to either the material of a beautiful object or its conceptual content, in his actual theory of fine art, which comes only much later in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, he clearly synthesized the free play theory, which had come to him by way of Alexander Gerard's Essay on Taste, with the traditional cognitivist approach. In the “Analytic,” Kant describes our experience of beauty as the “sensation of the effect that consists in the facilitated play of … imagination and understanding … enlivened through mutual agreement,” and infers from this that the “beautiful … pleases universally without a concept,” thus that paradigmatically pure beauties are such things as “the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise,” and, if works of art at all, then only works of art without any content for cognition, thus “designs à la grecque, foliage for borders or on wallpapers … fantasias (without a theme) indeed all music without a text.”21 But when Kant comes to describe what gives a work of fine art its “spirit” (Geist), then he insists that this can be only an “aesthetic idea,” which is not merely a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it,” but which also “seek[s] to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas)”; thus, “[t]he poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas” such as “the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, … death, envy, … love, fame,” and so on.22 In other words, in our experience of works of fine art (and Kant subsequently goes so far as to claim this about the experience of natural beauty as well, after all), we play with ideas of great importance; in his actual theory of art, Kant thus synthesizes traditional aesthetic cognitivism with the new theory of free play.23 Yet Kant also goes to considerable lengths to keep the new emphasis on the emotional impact of art at arm's length: in his original account of pure beauty, he famously says that “[t]aste is still barbaric when it needs the addition of charms and emotions [Rührungen] for satisfaction”; in his highly moralized account of the dynamical sublime, which he himself admits is “subtle” and may even seem “far fetched,” he proposes that the core of this experience is awe at our own free will, but also treats this as an experience we can get only from nature, not from art; and when he does make moral ideas the paradigmatic content of art after all, in his theory of aesthetic ideas, he simply makes no mention of the fact that we might find works of art to stir a wide range of human emotions in us.24 Just as Baumgarten synthesized only two out of the three prevalent approaches to aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century, so did Kant, only he left out precisely the one that Baumgarten added to his basic cognitivism in his claim that it is “highly poetic to arouse affects.” But at least a few eighteenth century aestheticians did take a more fully comprehensive approach to the sources of pleasure in our experience of both art and nature. Here let me mention just Kames, the very title of whose chief work in aesthetics, Elements of Criticism without any restrictive article, already suggests a nonreductive approach.25 In his first chapter, Kames suggests that one source of our pleasure in aesthetic experiences is a free but harmonious flow of “Perceptions and Ideas in a Train,” which is an experience like our experience of nature in general but which need not be produced only by an imitation of nature, in which case it is noncognitive, enjoyed for its own sake, and like a form of mental play.26 In some cases, however, we enjoy the experience of “Resemblance and Dissimilitude” because to our motives of reason and interest, “nature hath providently superadded curiosity, a vigorous propensity, which … attaches us to every new object; and incites us to compare objects, in order to discover their differences and resemblances,” and this experience both presupposes cognition and is enjoyed because of the cognition it delivers.27 But the second longest of Kames's chapters, exceeded only by his chapter on the “Beauty of Language,” is his chapter on “Emotions and Passions,” in which he maintains that “[t]he principles of the fine arts … open a direct avenue to the heart of man. The inquisitive mind beginning with criticism, the most agreeable of all amusements, and finding no obstruction in its progress, advances far into the sensitive part of our nature; and gains imperceptibly a thorough knowledge of the human heart, of its desires, and of every motive to action.”28 The emotional impact of art, brought about by the ability of literature, visual art, and their synthesis in theater to create the effect of “ideal presence” in varying degrees, is both emotional and cognitive: we achieve “thorough knowledge of the human heart” by experiencing the full range of human emotions through art.29 Kames thus synthesizes the cognitive, emotional, and free play approaches to aesthetic experience in a way that only a few others in his time did (I would suggest that Moses Mendelssohn was another and, at the end of the century, Richard Payne Knight), and that Kant certainly did not. One might have thought that the response to Kant in Germany, where Kames was well known, would have been to add to his twofold synthesis the third element he had rejected, namely, the emotional impact of art as well as nature. But the predominant response to Kant was not to add the element of emotional impact to his twofold account of aesthetic experience, but rather to reject his idea of free play and revert to a strictly cognitivist and highly metaphysical account of aesthetic experience. Let me briefly describe the two most influential examples of that tendency, Hegel and Schopenhauer, before I suggest that it was only at the end of the nineteenth century and in a few cases in the twentieth that the grip of such aesthetic monism was broken. III. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Hegel and Schopenhauer display in spectacular fashion the risks of aesthetic monism. Hegel famously states that art “points through and beyond itself, and itself hints at something spiritual of which it is to give us an idea,” but also argues that “precisely on account of its form, art is limited to a specific content,” not capable of “bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit” as well as religion, let alone philosophy, do.30Although Hegel does state that “it is precisely the freedom of production and configurations that we enjoy in the beauty of art,” which sounds Kantian, he locates the freedom of art precisely in its placing “itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy,” that is, in the realm of ideas.31In Hegel's view, that art should in general “have the purpose of awakening agreeable sentiments through lively representations is something indeterminate, and agreeable sentiment, … something trivial,” while Kant's specific theory that “[t]he beautiful induces a free play of the powers of imagination,” which “in the beautiful are not subjected to an abstract rule but appear to be operating freely” reduces aesthetic experience to something that “the artist has produced contingently and as a matter of luck, … as if were not in fact that which is true.”32 He also claims, though not against Kant, that the theory that the aim of art “is supposed to consist in awakening and vivifying our slumbering feelings, inclinations, and passions of every kind” provides “only the empty form of every possible kind of content and worth.”33 He thus rejects the emotional impact of aesthetic experience as well as the theory of free play, confining the aim of art to that self knowledge of the Spirit that is also the aim of religion and philosophy. But art and, for that matter, religion, which is a halfway house between art and philosophy, are not as good at this task as pure philosophy, so for us in a philosophical age, “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.”34 Hegel's cognitivism guarantees the obsolescence of art. Schopenhauer, who published his major statement on aesthetics in the third book of The World as Will and Representation, about the same time that Hegel began lecturing on aesthetics, actually uses a cognitivist account of aesthetic experience as a tool to liberate us from the emotions; this does not guarantee the obsolescence of art and aesthetic experience, but it does guarantee its triviality, since art offers us merely a short lived respite from the pain of emotions, and only a transformation of our moral outlook can offer us enduring remission. Schopenhauer makes no mention of Kant's theory of play at all. Instead, he transforms Kant's notion of disinterested pleasure into a theory of liberation from emotion through a purely cognitive relation to objects. The heart of Schopenhauer's aesthetics is expressed in his famous claim that in aesthetic experience we achieve relief from the pain of particularized desire by the perception of “Platonic ideas,” the essences of things, which are entirely removed from particularized will even though they are “objectifications” of it.35 Schopenhauer's Platonic ideas are pure objects of knowledge, not objects for play like Kant's aesthetic ideas, and our knowledge of them through art frees us from all emotion rather than arousing any. Yet even for that person most gifted at aesthetic experience, namely, the artist who leads the way in grasping Platonic Ideas for the rest of us to follow, the very fact that he is driven to produce art, as Schopenhauer puts it that “he himself bears the cost of producing” his art, means that he is still at the level of “the will objectifying itself and remaining in constant suffering”; thus, art does not “deliver” him or anyone else “from life for forever, but only for a few moments.”36 Schopenhauer's version of cognitivism condemns aesthetic experience to futility rather than art to obsolescence. In spite of these gloomy consequences, the theories of first Hegel and then Schopenhauer enjoyed great influence throughout the nineteenth century. Only gradually did philosophers and other aestheticians work their way out of their grip. One important figure in this story would be Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who published a monumental Aesthetics in eight volumes from 1846 to 1857.37 In this text, in spite of working within a Hegelian framework, he both recognized the justice of Kant's notion of free play as a description of the subjective side of aesthetic experience and also introduced the conception of empathy as the projection of our emotional response into works of art that was then taken up by his son Robert and others from Theodor Lipps to Vernon Lee around the turn of the twentieth century.38 But I will say a few words here about Dilthey and Santayana as more obvious aesthetic pluralists rather than monists. In his essay on “The Imagination of the Poet,” first published in 1887, Dilthey, as already noted, rejects what he considers the Hegelian view that the content of poetry, and by implication that of the other arts, is metaphysical truth, and instead argues that it is “lived experience,” a concept that combines both the experience and the understanding of human emotions, the “to and fro of life at its fullest, of perception enlivened and saturated by feeling.”39 His idea is that in art the full range of human feelings is both felt and understood, not by its subsumption under abstract concepts as in science, but by being placed in an intelligible context of relations, “when it is brought into an inner relation with other lived experience and its meaning is grasped thereby.”40 But further, Dilthey also emphasizes that there is a strong element of enjoyment of the sheer play of forms and contents in the experience of art, of the enjoyment of the feeling of life for its own sake rather than for the sake of generalizable knowledge. Thus, Dilthey argues that along with comprehending and communicating our emotions, enjoying the play of the full range of our mental powers, including our emotional as well as cognitive capacities, is also central to our experience of art. When the poetic “will controls [the] elementary and formative processes” of ordinary perception, cognition, and feeling “with intense energy and with a consciousness of its goal, a fundamental distinction arises which differentiates the play of our representations from logical thought,” and the “formative processes of the artistic imagination are produced by the play of feelings.”41 Dilthey offers a picture of the experience of artistic creation and its transmission to an audience that equally emphasizes the experience of emotions, the comprehension of emotions, and the play of the imagination with them, and thereby resurrects the two poles of Kant's aesthetic theory while adding the element of emotional impact that had been repressed by Kant and following him in this regard Hegel and Schopenhauer. Santayana, though thirty years younger than Dilthey, published his landmark Sense of Beauty early, thus around the same time that Dilthey was doing his main work in aesthetics. Santayana's book is perhaps best remembered for its definition of beauty as “pleasure objectified,” which we might regard as his generalization of the contemporary idea of empathy as well as his revival of the eighteenth century idea that beauty has the same ontological status as secondary qualities.42 But more important, in my view, is Santayana's following statement that “[a]ll human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty,” and his ensuing catalogue of the sources of pleasure in art under the very general headings of the “materials of beauty,” “form,” and “expression,” all of which can enter “that web of things which our intelligence is always busily spinning,” and which, whenever it is joined by “the golden thread of pleasure,” “lends to the visible world that mysterious and subtle charm which we call beauty.”43 This statement already suggests the active nature of aesthetic experience for Santayana, thus putting his view into the free play tradition. The materials of beauty include materials in the literal sense, like marble and gold, and color (for “[f]orm cannot be the form of nothing”), but also include “the passion of love” and “social instincts”: emotions that we objectify and communicate in art.44 In its most general sense, form “is found where sensible elements, by themselves indifferent, are so united as to please in combination,” but what is most important is that for Santayana, once again heir to the eighteenth rather than his own century, “[t]he synthesis … which constitutes form is an activity of the mind … and is an insight into the relation of sensible elements separately perceived.”45 Santayana clearly believes that the activity of synthesis is intrinsically pleasurable, which puts him in the free play tradition, but at the same time, like Dilthey, he also believes that knowledge in general also consists in giving “subjective form” to “an indeterminate material,” so there is no sharp line between the objects of free play and the objects of knowledge—“the human consciousness is not a perfectly clear mirror, with distinct boundaries and clear cut images”—and Santayana's aesthetics therefore combines the free play and cognitivist approaches with his previous recognition that emotions are part of the material of art.46 The last point is emphasized in Santayana's concluding discussion of expression, which is his term for what eighteenth century theorists called association, in which he states that “[t]he expression of physical pleasure, of passion, or even of pain, may constitute beauty and please the beholder,” that is, constitute beauty because they please the beholder.47 Thus, as he says at the outset, for Santayana all functions of the human mind may potentially enter into aesthetic experience, and he sees no reason to restrict what we might find to please in a way that can be objectified. IV. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Both drawing on eighteenth century resources, Dilthey and Santayana showed the way past the monistic cognitivism of Hegel and Schopenhauer even more confidently than had someone like Vischer. Yet, although there were honorable exceptions, whom I would love to discuss here, many of the most prominent figures in twentieth century aesthetics, even from very different ideological camps, remained in the grip of such cognitivism, and then, as I suggested, under the impact of Wittgenstein, the permissible subject matter itself of aesthetics was very much narrowed on yet further grounds. Nevertheless, in the later phases of Wittgensteinian aesthetics as well as in our own post Wittgensteinian era, there are some powerful examples of pluralistic rather than monistic approaches to aesthetics. I wish I had space here to discuss the work of my own teacher Stanley Cavell or of my friend Alexander Nehamas as illustrations of this claim, but, let us say for the sake of objectivity, I will take the case of Wollheim, whom I had the good fortune to meet on a few occasions but whose views I know only through his published work. One way of understanding Wollheim's work is to think of him as having adapted Wittgenstein's concept of a “form of life” to the case of art, and as having transformed Wittgenstein's idea of “seeing as” into the idea of “seeing in” that was central to his analysis of the experience of visual art.48 But he also suggested a layered theory of the experience of art that has the form of the threefold synthesis of approaches that I am recounting but also obviously advocating. Like many British aestheticians from the first half of the twentieth century whom I have not been able to discuss here, above all Samuel Alexander, in his first and most general book in aesthetics, Art and Its Objects, Wollheim argued against Croce's “Ideal” theory of art that it neglected the materiality of the work of art, although he also argued that the work of art cannot be reduced to its physical medium.49 Second, he stressed that “when we look at a painting or listen to a piece of music, our perception rests upon projection and responsiveness to form, processes which we may believe to be in operation from the beginnings of consciousness.”50 Here he recognizes at least half of Kant's initial analysis of aesthetic experience, the form with which imagination and understanding play, although he does not say immediately that what we do with such form is play with it. Third, he adds feeling into the mix when he states that “[a]rt rests on the fact that deep feelings pattern themselves in a coherent way all over our life and behavior,” and his use of the term ‘life’ here makes it clear that, like Dilthey, he holds that an aim of art is not just cognition but also the experience of emotions.51 Most of Wollheim's work after Art and Its Objects concerned the emotions in life and art, and his final work, On the Emotions, drew equally on art and psychology to explore their nature.52 Finally, in spite of not having mentioned free play in his initial discussion of form, Wollheim makes the concept of freedom central to his account of the interpretation of art: From the spectator's point it is … required that he should be able to structure or interpret the work of art in more ways than one. The freedom in perception and understanding that this allows him is one of the recognized values that art possesses. But this freedom is acceptable only if it is not gained at the expense of the artist… . [W]e need to realize that, at any rate over a great deal of art, the artist is characteristically operating at the intersection of more than one intention. It would therefore be quite alien to his purposes if there were rules in art that could be unambiguously correlated with a “meaning”: whether this meaning is envisaged as an inner state or a message.53 Here Wollheim employs Kant's model of the free play of imagination in the artistic genius that calls forth a play among the mental powers of an audience that must also be free and therefore cannot simply be the reception of a determinate message or meaning from the artist. He also states that the free play in both artist and audience involves both perception and understanding, thus that it not only involves the perception of form, but also the interpretation of meaning as long as that is not unambiguous and restrictive of freedom. So here are the two elements of Kant's synthesis. But in having claimed that it is deep feelings that are patterned in art, Wollheim has also added to his conception of art the element of emotional impact that such thinkers as Du Bos and Kames emphasized, but that Kant rejected. So in spite of the influence of Wittgenstein, which for so many others drastically narrowed the scope of aesthetic theory, Wollheim can be seen as having carried on the project of expanding rather than contracting Kant's synthesis. This has obviously been only a sketch of what is a much longer narrative. Even in my longer narrative, I have left any lessons for contemporary aesthetics largely implicit. But if I were to add a moral to my story here, it would be that I see no reason to adopt a restrictive account of the sources of aesthetic pleasure for the sake of other theoretical objectives we might formulate. Kant was willing, at least in his initial analysis of beauty, to severely restrict the proper elements of aesthetic objects in order to secure the universal validity of taste, but Kames recognized that allowing a plurality, indeed open ended plurality, of elements of criticism made unanimity in taste less likely and was willing to live with that result. On this point I think we should follow Kames and not Kant. Many recent writers have sought a definition of art that would draw a sharp line between art and nonart, at the conceptual if not the visible level, but Santayana was not concerned that we might not be able to draw a sharp line between the beauty that we can find in art and the beauty that we can find elsewhere, and this nonreductive approach I also think we should follow. We do not need philosophy to tell us what is art or what is in good taste, because history will eventually tell us that. We can use philosophy to suggest that there are many ways in which art might please us, and therefore many ways in which we might make it. Perhaps I have gone too far. Perhaps I should say that even if we do want or need to make a demarcation between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic, and on that basis in turn between art and nonart, we should not regard the three elements, to borrow Kames's term, to which I have drawn attention, as a mere cluster, any one or more of which might suffice to make experience aesthetic and objects intended to produce such experience art; perhaps we should take one lesson from Kant, namely, that an element of free play in both the production and the reception may be a necessary although not sufficient condition for the aesthetic and for art. In some cases, free play might even be enough; in any case, I am not suggesting that every successful work of art needs to exploit all three dimensions of aesthetic experience I have identified, or that a work is more successful the more of them it exploits—Kant, following Hume, surely established that aesthetics permits of no a priori rules like that. But we should not learn from Kant to exclude emotional impact from aesthetic experience, for that might just as well be combined with free play as cognition may be, and both cognition and emotional impact as well as either might be combined with free play in the variety of our aesthetic experience.54 1. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), p. 226. 2. Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” in Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed. E. M. Wilkinson (Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 108. 3. Dieter Henrich, Versuch über Kunst und Leben: Subjektivität—Weltverstehen—Kunst [Essay on Art and Life: Subjectivity—Understanding the World—Art] (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001), pp. 63–64. 4. Irving H. Guyer, statement of July 14, 2011 (unpublished). 5. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes [Philosophical Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry], ed. Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), §§CXV–CXVII, pp. 84–86. The last quote is actually Baumgarten's definition of “general poetics,” but since his aesthetics is based almost entirely on the case of poetry, I do not demure from using it as another version of his definition of aesthetics itself. 6. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik, ed. Dagmar Mirbach, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007), vol. I, §1, pp. 10–11. 7. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet,” trans. Louis Agosta and Rudolf A. Makkreel, in Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume 5: Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 138; and George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896; reprinted New York: Dover, 1955), p. 7. 8. “Then this will be true of a tragedian, if indeed he is an imitator. He is by nature third from the kind and the truth, as are all other imitators”; Plato, Republic, Book X, 597d, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 1202. Aristotle, Poetics 9, 1451b4–7, trans. Ingram Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 2323. 9. See the well known passage in The Moralists, III.ii, in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), vol. II, pp. 102–103. See also Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, II.iii; likewise in Characteristicks, vol. I, pp. 55–56. 10. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, vol. II, pp. 107–108. 11. Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von den Absichten der natürlichen Dinge [Rational Thoughts on the Purposes of Natural Things], 2nd ed. (Frankfurt and Leipiz: Renger, 1726). 12. Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt, und der Seele des Menschen [Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man], new ed. (Halle: Renger, 1751), §404; and Christian Wolff, Psychologia empirica [Empirical Psychology], new ed. (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger, 1738), §511, §544. 13. Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt, und der Seele des Menschen, §404; and Christian Wolff, Anfangsgründe der Baukunst [Foundations of Architecture], in Anfangsgründe aller mathematischen Wissenschaften [Foundations of All Mathematical Sciences], new ed., 4 vols. (Frankfurt, Leipiz, and Halle: Renger, 1750–1757). 14. Abbé Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, with an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Theatrical Entertainments of the Ancients, trans. Thomas Nugent, 3 vols. (London: John Nourse, 1748). 15. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. I, chap. III, p. 21. 16. Du Bos, Critical Reflections, vol. I, chap. V, pp. 39–40, and chap. IX, p. 56. 17. Joseph Addison, “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), Number 412, Monday, June 23, 1712, vol. III, p. 540. 18. Addison, “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” pp. 541, 543. 19. Addison, “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” pp. 540–541. 20. Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae, §XXV, p. 24. 21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000), §9, 5:219; p. 104 and §16, 5:229; p. 114. 22. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §49, 5:314; p. 192. 23. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §51, 5:320; p. 197. 24. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §13, 5:223; p. 108 and §28, 5:262–264; pp. 145–147; for the charge that Kant's account of the sublime is excessively moralized, see Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 84. 25. See Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 6th ed., ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), Original Introduction, vol. I, p. 19. 26. Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. I, p. 21; this is the title of chapter I. 27. Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. I, chap. VIII, p. 197. 28. Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. I, chap. II, p. 32. 29. See Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. I, chap. II, pp. 66–77. 30. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. W. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. I, Introduction, pp. 7 and 9. 31. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, Introduction, pp. 5, 7. 32. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik. In Sommer 1826, Mitschrift Friedrich Carl Hermann Victor von Kehler [Philosophy of Art or Aesthetics. In Summer 1826, Transcription by Friedrich Carl Hermann Victor von Kehler], ed. Annemarie Gethmann Siefert and Bernadette Collenberg Plotnikov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), p. 5, pp. 17–18. 33. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, pp. 46–47. 34. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, Introduction, p. 11. 35. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (Indian Springs, CO: The Falcon's Wing, 1958), vol. I, §§34 and 36, pp. 178–179 and 184–185. 36. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, Third Book, §52, p. 267. 37. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Ästhetik oder die Wissenschaft des Schönen [Aesthetics or the Science of the Beautiful], three parts in eight volumes (Reutlingen, Leipzig, and Stuttgart: Carl Mäcken, 1846–1857). 38. Robert Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form (1873), in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1994), pp. 89–123. Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst; Erster Teil: Grundlegung der Ästhetik [Aesthetics; Psychology of the Beautiful and of Art; Part One: The Foundation of Aesthetics] (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1903). Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 1913, reprinted 2011). 39. It might be argued that while Baumgarten presented a poetics in the guise of a general aesthetics, Dilthey presented a general aesthetics in the guise of a poetics. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet,” trans. Louis Agosta and Rudolf A. Makkreel, in Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume 5: Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 59. All quotations from Dilthey will be from this volume. 40. Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet,” p. 59. 41. Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet,” pp. 74, 77. 42. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part I, §11, p. 33. 43. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §12, p. 35. 44. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part II, §13, p. 37; §14, p. 40; and §18, p. 49. 45. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §19, p. 53 and §23, p. 62. 46. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part III, §34, p. 86 and Part IV, §48, p. 119. 47. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, Part IV, §50, p. 124. 48. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics, 2nd ed. with six supplementary essays (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 104; and Painting as an Art (Princeton University Press, 1987), chap. 2. 49. See Samuel Alexander, “Art and the Material”: The Adamson Lecture for 1925 (Manchester University Press, 1925), and Beauty and Other Forms of Value (London: Macmillan, 1933), Part I, chaps. II and IV. Perhaps the most important of the responses to Croce was Samuel Alexander, in Art and the Material (Manchester University Press, 1925) and Beauty and Other Forms of Value (London: Macmillan, 1933). 50. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, p. 101. 51. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, p. 112. 52. Richard Wollheim, On the Emotions (Yale University Press, 1999), based on Ernst Cassirer lectures at Yale in 1991. 53. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, p. 139. 54. This essay is a revised version of the 2012 American Society for Aesthetics presidential address. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - Monism and Pluralism in the History of Aesthetics
JO - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12002
DA - 2013-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/monism-and-pluralism-in-the-history-of-aesthetics-R5fEnjlG8s
SP - 133
EP - 143
VL - 71
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -