The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
December 200
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Roger
Scruton * &
Thomas Munro **
AESTHETICS (cont'd)
The development of Western aesthetics
The contributions of the ancient Greeks
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
Medieval aesthetics
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
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
The origins of modern aesthetics
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
Francis Hutcheson was perhaps the first to place the problem of aesthetic judgment among the central questions of epistemology: How can we know that something is beautiful? What guides our judgment and what validates it? His answer was decidedly Empiricist in tone: aesthetic judgments are perceptual and take their authority from a sense that is common to all who make them. In An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson explained: “The origin of our perceptions of beauty and harmony is justly called a ‘sense’ because it involves no intellectual element, no reflection on principles and causes.”
The significance of Baumgarten’s work
Such a statement would have been vigorously repudiated by Hutcheson’s contemporary Alexander Baumgarten, who, in his aforementioned Reflections on Poetry, introduced the term aesthetic in its distinctively modern sense. Baumgarten was a pupil of Christian Wolff, the Rationalist philosopher who had created the orthodox philosophy of the German Enlightenment by building the metaphysical ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz into a system. He was thus heir to a tradition that dismissed the senses and the imagination as incapable of providing a genuine cognition of their objects and standing always to be corrected (and replaced) by rational reflection. Baumgarten, however, argued that poetry is surely cognitive: it provides insight into the world of a kind that could be conveyed in no other way. At the same time, poetic insights are perceptual (“aesthetic”) and hence imbued with the distinctive character of sensory and imaginative experience. According to Baumgarten, the ideas conveyed by poetry are “clear and confused,” as opposed to the “clear and distinct” ideas of reason in the sense that they had been described by Descartes and the 17th-century Rationalists. Baumgarten held that the aesthetic value of a poem resides in the relative preponderance of clarity over confusion. Accordingly, his theory of the value of art was ultimately cognitive.
It was some decades before Baumgarten’s coinage became philosophical currency. But there is no doubt that his treatise, for all its pedantry and outmoded philosophical method, deserves its reputation as the founding work of modern aesthetics.
Major concerns of 18th-century aesthetics
The development of aesthetics between the work of Baumgarten and that of Immanuel Kant, who had been influenced by Baumgarten’s writings, was complex and diverse, drawing inspiration from virtually every realm of human inquiry. Yet, throughout this period certain topics repeatedly received focal attention in discussions pertaining to aesthetic questions.
One such topic was the faculty of taste, the analysis of which remained the common point among German, French, and English writers. Taste was seen either as a sense (Hutcheson), as a peculiar kind of emotionally inspired discrimination (Hume), or as a part of refined good manners (Voltaire). In an important essay entitled “Of the Standard of Taste” (in Four Dissertations, 1757), Hume, following Voltaire in the Encyclopédie, raised the question of the basis of aesthetic judgment and argued that “it is natural for us to seek a standard of taste; a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.” But where is this standard of taste to be found? Hume recommends an ideal of the man of taste, whose discriminations are unclouded by an emotional distemper and informed by a “delicacy of imagination... requisite to convey a sensibility of... finer emotions.” For, Hume argues, there is a great resemblance between “mental” and “bodily” taste - between the taste exercised in aesthetic discrimination and that exercised in the appreciation of food and drink, which can equally be deformed by some abnormal condition of the subject. Hume proceeded to lay down various procedures for the education of taste and for the proper conduct of critical judgment. His discussion, notwithstanding its skeptical undercurrent, has proved lastingly influential on the English schools of criticism, as well as on the preferred Anglo-Saxon approach to the questions of aesthetics.
A second major concern of 18th-century writers was the role of
imagination.
The concept of imitation, introduced into the discussion of art by Plato and Aristotle, was fundamental to the 18th-century philosophy of art. Imitation is a vague term, frequently used to cover both representation and expression in the modern sense. The thesis that imitation is the common and distinguishing feature of the arts was put forward by James Harris in Three Treatises (1744) and subsequently made famous by Charles Batteux in a book entitled Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (1746; “The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle”). This diffuse and ill-argued work contains the first modern attempt to give a systematic theory of art and aesthetic judgment that will show the unity of the phenomena and their common importance. “The laws of taste,” Batteux argued, “have nothing but the imitation of beautiful nature as their object”; from which it follows that the arts, which are addressed to taste, must imitate nature. The distinction between the fine and useful arts (recast by Collingwood as the distinction between art and craft) stems from Batteux.
Still another characteristic of 18th-century aesthetics was the concern with the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Burke’s famous work, On the Sublime and Beautiful, has already been discussed. Its influence was felt throughout late 18th-century aesthetics. For example, it inspired one of Kant’s first publications, an essay on the sublime. Treatises on beauty were common, one of the most famous being The Analysis of Beauty (1753) by the painter William Hogarth, which introduces the theory that beauty is achieved through the “serpentine line.”
The view that art is expression emerged during the 1700s. Rousseau put forth the theory of the arts as forms of emotional expression in an essay dealing with the origin of languages. This theory, regarded as providing the best possible explanation of the power of music, was widely adopted. Treatises on musical expression proliferated during the late 18th century. One illustrative example of such writings is James Beattie’s Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind (1776), in which the author rejects the view of music as a representational (imitative) art form and argues that expression is the true source of musical excellence. Another example is provided by Denis Diderot in his didactic novel Le Neveu de Rameau (1761–74; Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works). The theory of expression was inherited by the German Romantics, especially by Schelling, Schiller, and Herder. It was, furthermore, developed in a novel direction by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in his Scienza nuova (1725–44; New Science). Vico integrated art into a comprehensive theory of the development and decline of civilization. According to him, the cyclical movement of culture is achieved partly by a process of successive expression, through language and art, of the “myths” that give insight into surrounding social conditions.
Kant, Schiller, and Hegel
As previously noted, Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft introduced the first full account of aesthetic experience as a distinct exercise of rational mentality. The principal ingredients of Kant’s work are the following: the antinomy of taste, the emphasis on the free play of the imagination, the theory of aesthetic experience as both free from concepts and disinterested, the view that the central object of aesthetic interest is not art but nature, and the description of the moral and spiritual significance of aesthetic experience, which opens to us a transcendental point of view of the world of nature and enables us to see the world as purposive, but without purpose. In that perception, observes Kant, lies the deepest intimation of our nature and of our ultimate relation to a “supersensible” realm.
Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, inspired by Kant, develops further the theory of the disinterested character of the aesthetic. Schiller argues that through this disinterested quality aesthetic experience becomes the true vehicle of moral and political education, providing man both with the self-identity that is his fulfillment and with the institutions that enable him to flourish: “What is man before beauty cajoles from him a delight in things for their own sake, or the serenity of form tempers the savagery of life? A monotonous round of ends, a constant vacillation of judgment; self-seeking, and yet without a self; lawless, yet without freedom; a slave, and yet to no rule.”
Schiller’s Briefe exerted a profound influence on Hegel’s philosophy in general and on his Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik in particular. In discussions of remarkable range and imaginative power, Hegel introduces the distinctively modern conception of art as a request for self-realization, an evolving discovery of forms that give sensuous embodiment to the spirit by articulating in concrete form its inner tensions and resolutions. For Hegel, the arts are arranged in both historical and intellectual sequence, from architecture (in which Geist [“spirit”] is only half articulate and given purely symbolic expression), through sculpture and painting, to music and thence to poetry, which is the true art of the Romantics. Finally, all art is destined to be superseded by philosophy, in which the spirit achieves final articulation as Idea. The stages of art were identified by Hegel with various stages of historical development. In each art form a particular Zeitgeist (i.e., spirit of the time) finds expression, and the necessary transition from one art form to its successor is part of a larger historical transformation in which all civilization is engaged.
The incidental discussions of Hegel’s Vorlesungen introduce most of the themes of contemporary philosophy of art, though in the peculiar language of Hegelian Idealism. Nineteenth-century Idealist aesthetics can reasonably be described as a series of footnotes to Hegel, who was, however, less original than he pretended. Many of the individual thoughts and theories in his lectures on aesthetics were taken from the contemporary literature of German Romanticism (in particular, the writings of Herder, Jean Paul [pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter] and Novalis) and from the works of German critics and art historians (notably G.E. Lessing and Johann Winckelmann) who had forged the link between modern conceptions of art and the art of antiquity. The influence of Hegel was, therefore, the influence of German Romanticism as a whole, and it is not surprising that the few who escaped it lost their audience in doing so.
Post-Hegelian aesthetics
Little of 19th-century aesthetics after Hegel has proved of lasting interest. Perhaps the most important exception is the controversial literature surrounding Richard Wagner, particularly the attack on the expressive theory of music launched by Wagner’s critic Eduard Hanslick in his Vom musikalisch-Schönen (1854; On the Beautiful in Music). With this work modern musical aesthetics was born, and all the assumptions made by Batteux and Hegel concerning the unity (or unity in diversity) of the arts were thrown in doubt.
The most impressive work on aesthetics of the late 1800s was George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896), which shows a welcome move away from the 19th-century obsession with art toward more fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind. Santayana argues against Kant’s theory of the disinterested and universal quality of aesthetic interest, and defends the view that pleasure is the central aesthetic category, beauty being “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” All human functions and experiences may contribute to the sense of beauty, which has two broad categories of object: form and expression. In his theory of expression Santayana again takes up the problem raised by the theory of the association of ideas, and argues that in aesthetic pleasure the associative process achieves a kind of fusion between the response aroused and the object which arouses it, and that this is the fundamental experience of expression.
Expressionism
After Kant and Hegel, the most important influence on modern aesthetics has been Croce. His oft-cited Estetica come scienza dell’ espressione e linguistica generale (1902; Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistics, or Aesthetic) presents, in a rather novel idiom, some of the important insights underlying the theories of his predecessors. In this work, Croce distinguishes concept from intuition: the latter is a kind of acquaintance with the individuality of an object, while the former is an instrument of classification. Art is to be understood first as expression and second as intuition. The distinction between representation and expression is ultimately identical with that between concept and intuition. The peculiarities of aesthetic interest are really peculiarities of intuition: this is what explains the problem of form and content, and what gives the meaning of the idea that the object of aesthetic interest is interesting for its own sake and not as a means to an end.
Croce conceived his expressionism as providing the philosophical justification for the artistic revolutions of the 19th century and, in particular, for the Impressionist style of painting, in which representation gives way to the attempt to convey experience directly onto the canvas. His extreme view of the autonomy of art led him to dismiss all attempts to describe art as a form of representation or to establish direct connections between the content of art and the content of scientific theories. Croce’s disciple R.G. Collingwood (Principles of Art, 1938) was similarly dismissive of representation and similarly concerned with presenting a theory of art that would justify the revolutionary practice of his contemporaries (in this case, the post-Symbolist poetry of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ). As pointed out earlier, Collingwood distinguishes craft, which is a means to an end, from art, which is an end in itself. But since art is also, for Collingwood, expression, expression too must be an end in itself. It cannot be construed as the giving of form to independently identifiable states of mind. The feeling must reside in the form itself and be obtainable exclusively in that form. If it were otherwise, art would be simply another kind of craft - the craft of giving expression to preexisting and independently identifiable states of mind. Therefore, like Croce, Collingwood opposes expression in art to description: expression gives us the particularity and not the generality of states of mind.
Collingwood sets his aesthetics within the context of a theory of the imagination, in which he shows the influence of the British Empiricists as well as of the Idealist metaphysicians who had influenced Croce. A similar attempt to unite the theory of art with a philosophy of the imagination had been made by the French philosopher Alain in his Système des beaux-arts (1920, revised 1926; “System of the Fine Arts”), a work that is distinguished by its detailed attention to dress, fashion, manners, and the useful arts, and by its idea of the artist as artisan d’abord. Along with John Dewey’s Art As Experience (1934), in which aesthetic experience is presented as integral to the organic completion of human nature, these works provide the culminating expression of a now defunct view of the subject as central to the understanding not of art alone but of the human condition as well.
Marxist aesthetics
Many attempts have been made to develop a specifically Marxist
aesthetics, one that would incorporate the Marxian theory of history and class
consciousness and the critique of bourgeois ideology, so as to generate
principles of analysis and evaluation and show the place of art in the theory
and practice of revolution. William
Morris in
The aesthetic theories of the Russian Revolution owe something to Plekhanov; something to the school of Formalist criticism, typified by the proto-Structuralist M. Bakhtin; and something to the anti-aesthetic propaganda of the Russian Constructivists, who believed in an art expressive of man’s dominion over raw materials - an art that would be destructive of all existing patterns of subordination. The official approach of the Soviets to art, however, was typified, first, by the persecution of all those who expressed adherence to those theories, and, second, by the adoption under Stalin of Socialist Realism (the view that art is dedicated to the “realistic” representation of proletarian values and proletarian life) as the sole legitimate basis for artistic practice.
Subsequent Marxist thinking about art was largely influenced by two major central European thinkers: Walter Benjamin and György Lukács. Both were exponents of Marxist humanism who saw the important contribution of Marxian theory to aesthetics in the analysis of the condition of labour and in the critique of the alienated and “reified” consciousness of man under capitalism. Benjamin’s collection of essays Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936; The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) attempts to describe the changed experience of art in the modern world and sees the rise of Fascism and mass society as the culmination of a process of debasement, whereby art ceases to be a means of instruction and becomes instead a mere gratification, a matter of taste alone. “Communism responds by politicizing art” - that is, by making art into the instrument by which the false consciousness of the mass man is to be overthrown.
Lukács developed a multifaceted approach to literary criticism in which the historical condition of society and the reality of class consciousness are singled out as the ideological agenda of works of literature and the major source of their appeal. This position is set forth in such works as Die Theorie des Romans (1920; The Theory of the Novel ). Neither Lukács nor Benjamin produced a coherent aesthetics as defined in this article, although each was immensely influential on the practice of modern literary criticism whether Marxist or not in its ultimate inspiration.
Roger Scruton
Eastern aesthetics
The disparagement of the sensory realm as mere illusion (“the veil of
Maya”), characteristic of much Indian religion, went hand in hand with a
philosophy of embodiment (karma), which gave a distinctive role to art both as
an instrument of worship and as an earthly delight. The legends of the great god
The theory of rasa is attributed to Bharata, a sage-priest who may have lived about AD 500. It was developed by the rhetorician and philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. AD 1000), who applied it to all varieties of theatre and poetry. The principal human feelings, according to Bharata, are delight, laughter, sorrow, anger, fear, disgust, heroism, and astonishment, all of which may be recast in contemplative form as the various rasas: erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, terrible, odious, marvellous, and quietistic. These rasas comprise the components of aesthetic experience. The power to taste rasa is a reward for merit in some previous existence.
Confucius (551–479 BC) emphasized the role of aesthetic enjoyment in moral and political education, and, like his near contemporary Plato, was suspicious of the power of art to awaken frenzied and distracted feelings. Music must be stately and dignified, contributing to the inner harmony that is the foundation of good behaviour, and all art is at its noblest when incorporated into the rituals and traditions that enforce the stability and order of social life.
Lao-tzu, the legendary founder of Taoism, was even more puritanical. He condemned all art as a blinding of the eye, a deafening of the ear, and a cloying of the palate. Later Taoists were more lenient, however, encouraging a freer, more intuitive approach both to works of art and to nature. The philosophy of beauty presented in their works and in the writings of the Ch’an (Zen) Buddhists who succeeded them is seldom articulate, being confined to epigrams and short commentaries that remain opaque to the uninitiated.
The same epigrammatic style and the same fervent puritanism can be discerned in the writings of Mao Tse-tung, who initiated in the Cultural Revolution the most successful war against beauty that has been waged in modern history.
The practice of literary commentary and aesthetic discussion was
extensively developed in
The domination of aesthetic scruples over Japanese life has, as its culminating instance, the tea ceremony - a marvel of constrained social ballet - to the study of which whole lives have been devoted. Associated with this triumph of manners is an art of mood and evocation, in which significance is found in the small, concentrated gesture, the sudden revelation of transcendent meaning in what is most ordinary and unassuming. In the late 18th century Motoori Norinaga, a leading literary scholar, summed up the essence of Japanese art and literature as the expression of a touching intimation of transience, which he captured in the famous phrase mono no aware, meaning roughly “the sensitivity to the sadness of things.” Other aesthetic qualities emphasized by classical scholars and critics are en (“charming”), okashi (“amusing”), and sabi (having the beauty of old, faded, worn, or lovely things). In all such aesthetic categories, we can sense the resonance of the Taoist and Buddhist ideas of renunciation.
Thomas Munro
Roger Scruton
*
Roger Scruton, Professor of Philosophy, Boston
University, 1992–95. Professor of Aesthetics,
**
Thomas Munro, Curator of Education,
End
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
December 200
3